Winner of the Megapixel Race

A megapickle, the term sometimes used (and perhaps coined?)
by Michael Reichmann

John Strohbeen, who owns Ohm Speakers, which still has exclusive rights to the wonderful Walsh loudspeaker driver, wrote in a recent blog post: "One of the marks of the serious 'phile'—be it audiophile, bibliophile or other committed enthusiast—is that we squabble about things most outside the community have rarely heard about, let alone care about."

On February 6th, Canon Inc. announced the new Canon 5DS and 5DS R, which feature 51-megapixel full-frame sensors, for 5792 x 8688 pixel resolution, the biggest images yet from a traditional full-frame or less DSLR. (Dpreview already has its First Look posted. Like the Sony A900, however, which was the first camera to achieve 24 MP, it appears the new Canons are optimized for high-res shooting and not great at high ISOs.) With these cameras, Canon has reclaimed the lead from Nikon in the megapixel race.

...Or has an upstart interloper done an unexpected end-around on the twin giants of the camera biz? Olympus's modest E-M5 Mark II has a multi-shot high-resolution photo mode for unmoving subjects. The camera takes eight separate exposures, shifting the sensor a minute amount between exposures, then merges the data for a moiré-free image claimed to have resolution equivalent to a 40-megapixel capture.

That's more than the Nikon D810, and Imaging-Resource has already done a direct comparison between the two—in which the Olympus comes out looking, if anything, slightly the better of the two.

Then again, we've had superlarge high res multi-shot options available before now, in the form of merged panos. You might remember this 64-megapixel shot of mine, made from five Pentax K-20 exposures:

I'm looking forward to the first E-M5 Mk. II vs. Canon 5DS R shootout, coming soon to a geek—er, gear—site near you. (Hint: not this one.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, is it really true that cameraphiles squabble about megapickles? That's starting to seem a whiff '00s to me. It was indeed something we cared a whole lot about for a while, but (while acknowledging that some people really do need bigger pictures), seems like the race has gotten a bit less important for a lot of us lately. Remember a post I wrote five years ago about The Point of Sufficiency?

The megapixel wars ended for me in 2010, with 24 MP. Big and beyoo-tee-ful enough for Yr. Hmbl. Ed., seen here with a Ctein-made Sony A900 print. But then, I like small prints best.

The lesson of the point of sufficiency is that more is always better—until it isn't any more. The market decides. Whether the market as a whole reached that point when the D800 came out or whether that point is still far in the future, I can't guess.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Bryan Willman: "Don't confuse sufficiency with being most competitive at the moment. Sometimes, staying ahead of the Joneses actually does matter. Yes, for many things, saturation occurs and then development on those aspects of a device will tend to slow down or stop. But in a world where photographers in general, and landscape photographers in particular, are struggling to stand out enough to sell anything, bigger, brighter, clearer, sharper may well still matter. That doesn't go away until it is literally impossible for anybody to tell the difference between one print and the next, regardless of size. It's never about what, say, Mike or Bryan think is plenty good enough, it's about what has enough advantage to sell."

Bruce McL: "I am more familiar with the terms that the computer industry is using: going beyond 'good enough,' and then 'overserving the market.'

"On thing seems clear to me: these cameras, and in fact most cameras from the major manufacturers, are made for people who already own a camera. As you state, there is even room for debate as to how many of these experienced people can really make use of the extra resolution.

"Again, the term I am familiar with is, 'ignoring the bottom end of the market, leaving room for new entrants.' These terms are used in Disruption Theory, which gets a lot of attention in tech circles these days.

"The new entrants, of course, are smart phones and tablets. The camera companies should be very worried, but Disruption Theory predicts that they won’t take the threat seriously until too late. I think a tablet with a good 12 MP sensor and decent lossless semi-RAW processing will keep most people from ever buying a separate camera. I’d say that tablet is about two years away.

"We are in a golden age of cameras now, but in a few years, there simply won’t be enough people buying cameras for camera makers to support all of the models they offer now—as you suggested on the demise of the Olympus XZ-2.

"Oh, and I agree that arguing about megapixels is old fashioned. These days it may be easier to provoke an argument over what lens gives the best bokeh."

SV: "As a pro photog, the 5DIII was pretty much all the megapixels I feel like I'd ever need. But, the appeal of the D810 and the Sony FF is the dynamic range, which at least by DxOMark's measurement, is 3–4 stops better. This makes it all the more disappointing that the new 5DS, that will come out >3 years after the 5DIII, will have no improvement in DR. This new camera feels like a souped-up race car—it goes really fast at the expense of everything else."

GH: "As someone who rarely prints over 13x19, I've been on the fast track away from 'image quality' over the last few years. I've gone from FF sensors to APS-C to Micro 4/3, and, now, a Sony RX100III. Honestly, unless I'm shooting something that requires shallow depth of field, which is essentially never, I struggle to tell the difference between my A900 and Zeiss 24–70mm and this dinky little RX100III...outside of the fact that the RX100III might actually be a little sharper in the corners. I sure don't miss lugging those big cameras around, now that small cameras are good enough."

kirk tuck: "It's funny that this comes up today. I got a call from an ad agency and they wanted me to photograph an animal. About the size of a bread box. A bread box with feathers and lots and lots of detail. But they actually asked me what camera I would be shooting the image with if I got awarded the project. I asked them why. They told me that they were planning to use said image for trade show graphics, that they'd tried a number of stock images but none were high enough resolution. I offered to do a test shot for them so they could see how the files blow up. I put together a still life with colored pencils, yarn, a pin cushion full of pins, thread, fresh oregano stems with leaves, glass jars full of paint brushes, a few watches and some fossils. I used a fast Broncolor strobe to light the setup. I set the camera to ISO 64, used my best macro lens at ƒ/11, put the whole camera shebang on a Gitzo 5 Series Studex, locked the mirror up and triggered the camera. The files out of the camera were great. I saved the uncompressed 14-bit raw files to 16-bit TIFFs and sent them to the client. Each file was a bit over 200 megabytes. They will be able to drag the files into Photoshop and appraise them to their heart's content.

"I am one of three bidders on the projects. Could I do the job with other cameras? I think so. But I'm sure the client has already decided that the file size is critical. Was it worth it to add the D810 to my shooting inventory? When one job will pay back the investment, then yes. It makes sense. Sufficiency? For my art work, you bet. Competition? For a three bid advertising agency job, give me every advantage."

Gordon Lewis: "Having visited the Philadelphia Auto Show this past week, cameras such as the Nikon D810 and Canon 5DS strike me as being a lot like the 'muscle cars' of an automaker's lineup. They may be exciting in the abstract and a lot of fun to use, but in practical terms they are pricey, costly to maintain, and highly impractical for the average buyer. They serve mainly as a way for the manufacturer either to brag or avoid being shaded by its competitors. This is not to say that they are useless, only that very few people have a real need for them."

Mike adds, in reply to kirk and Gordon: I loved my D800 (now the D810), which I owned for half a year before selling on. The only problem I had with it is that I just didn't need it. Although I absolutely understand kirk's point. My current much smaller Fuji is "more my speed."

Ironic in that, pace Gordon's astute points, I tend to like small, "go-karty" cars with 4-cylinder engines and manual transmissions. I have no particular interest in muscle cars.

...Although I did enjoy driving the V8 Audi S5, which I considered a German Mustang GT. Aside from being ruined by numb steering, it was a fun car despite being musclebound. Whoops, are we getting off topic?

Elliot James: "Having only found your blog a few months ago, and enjoying it very much, even with off topic subjects (to a point to be sure), I am mystified as to who Ctein is. I have seen the name (name?) but don't know who it is or what he does. How about a bio of sorts?

Oh, I read somewhere that he is writing a book with John Sanford. Now, I know who he is, and his real name. But who is Ctein?

Mike replies: We're totally mystified as well. I'm half convinced he's an alien, actually—and the only reason we don't know that is because he doesn't want us to know.

Ctein (it's pronounced "kuh-TINE")

Ctein replies to Elliot: If I am a mystery, I am the most Googleable mystery on the planet! Seriously, dude, The Big G is your friend.

David: "Economists (God bless 'em) have an explanation for this—it's called declining marginal utility. Getting that first palace on the French Riviera is really great; but if you've already got five such palaces, getting another one is not really that useful to you. How many pairs of designer underpants do you need? How many can you wear at once? Getting my Oly E-M5 was a major advance over my ancient 4MP Canon; I don't really know what I would have to buy to get a similar amount of improvement over the Oly. As others have noted, 15MP or so is enough for almost all purposes.

"Unlike Kirk Tuck, I doubt anyone will offer me money to produce mega megapixel images. That said, the prospect of having 40MP at your disposal to take images of scenes like the one below (mosque, Isfahan) is attractive."

Comments

[Moose]

"... Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.
Sufficiency resides inside of each of us, and we can call it forward. It is a consciousness, an attention, an intentional choosing of the way we think about our circumstances .... Sufficiency is an act of generating, distinguishing, making known to ourselves the power and presence of our existing resources, and our inner resources. Sufficiency is a context we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough.
When we live in the context of sufficiency, we find a natural freedom and integrity. We engage in life from a sense of our own wholeness rather than a desperate longing to be complete...."
- The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist, Chapter 4

Seems to me to apply here, as well. Why, then do I want an E-M5 Mark II? \;~)

[Colin Work]

Cameraphiles will squabble about anything - generally it goes brand X introduces feature Y and immediately the owners of brand Z will prove that Y isn't important. Until of course brand Z introduces their version of Y which of course is better than brand X.

What I find amusing is that the only way to show the superiority of these new super sensors is to post ridiculously small crops of the image - in the last week I've seen so many bits of images that the interweb is beginning to look like a jigsaw puzzle.

[Hasi]

I'd rather look at a small inspired photograph that a huge piece of pornography.

[Jack]

I reached the point-of-sufficiency with Leica's choice of the same resolution across three different camera models of the S.
Sure, I would like bragging rights, but given that I have sold seven foot wide prints with that resolution, I apparently have enough to get the job done.

[Chuck Albertson]

Well, I'm glad that's settled. It's sort of like the megaton-yield race the Russkies and the Yanks had with their nukes during the Cold War -- if one had gone off over your town, it wouldn't have made *that* much difference what the yield was. 50 kilotons was "good enough" for most purposes.

[Imre Karafiath]

I don't care about megapickles once we get beyond ten or twelve. That's plenty for a 12 x 18 inch print. Frame rate, autofocus speed and accuracy, raw frame buffer, and a real good viewfinder - that's what I care about.

[Trecento]

Mike,
I'm pretty much there on sufficiency. I've got 16 megapickles, with only the faintest whiff of metaphysical doubt. The next generation of sensor that I'll buy will probably have 20-24, and that will be the end of it. I'm pretty sure. I think.

Every day I look at a 16x20 I bought to hang over my bed, and I ask myself, "do I really want to print that big?" I look at my grandfather's 11x14's in the hall, and I think, " that's probably about right."

More than megapickles, I hope for a day when a fast 35mm-e prime costs much less than $800-ish dollars for Fuji or Sony cameras. Really, the final frontier (for me) is bokeh, or at least the ability to decrease the local contrast in the background, when I'm focused on something people sized at the 5-8 foot range. (At a moderate-wide angle of view.)

[ctein]

Dear Mike,

I'm of the opinion that horsepower races are really a good thing so long as *we* don't take them seriously (see previous columns on obsession and fetishization).

Printers would be nowhere so good today as they are were it not for horsepower races. 20 years ago I projected that digital printers would have little problem reaching and exceeding the quality of an Ektacolor print, but I was doubtful over how fast they would progress beyond that. For the simple reason that 99.99% of the world's photographic needs were (and are) entirely satisfied by Ektacolor-quality prints. We had excellent real-world data on that.

Would it really be worth a printer manufacturer's while to develop an even better printer whose improvements would only truly matter to an insignificant fraction of the photographic world? That wasn't at all obvious to me.

Instead, printer quality blew past that benchmark and didn't slow down until we hit technical limits way, way beyond that. Now we're seeing improvements again that are starting to encroach upon dye transfer ranges and gamuts (not quite yet, but closing in on it). And color accuracy long ago passed anything that could ever be done in the darkroom.

That's entirely due to a horsepower race. We have all benefited from that.

Similarly, when affordable cameras reached the medium-format quality level, which was some years ago, was there really a need to push further? Oh yes, there's the miniscule fraction of photographers in the world who want view camera quality. That's why God invented Phase 1. But for the rest of us, were it not for these “pointless” horsepower races, we wouldn't be seeing the steady improvements in camera image quality that we have.

And, while it's not your particular style, most photographers liked the ability to be able to crop their negatives when they print, sometimes very substantially. Two or even three times the number of pixels that you actually “need” allow you to do that without visibly diminishing quality.

~~~~

Dear Hasi,

Personally, I'll put in a strong vote for inspired pornography.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com
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[Tom]

Hey! A photography post!

I want pixels. Lots of them. 12 or so was enough but I'll take more. I've oodles of cores, ridiculous amounts of memory and big fast SSDs. I can take the beating of more pixels. Give them to me. I'll attach a loupe to every photo I print if need be.

[Karel Kravik]

There are ideas and technological advancements (the claimed modified printer which leaves some question marks) that seem to make use of the high resolutions:

http://blog.mingthein.com/2014/02/27/introducing-the-ultraprint/ and

http://blog.mingthein.com/2014/10/30/ultraprints-vs-normal-prints-visualising-the-difference/

At the same time, some guys at Lula forums are already discussing Hyperprints: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=87946.0 :-)

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I've had enough megapixels for a while. But a friend who shoots professionally makes a lot of trade show displays -- like, 4x6 feet, and people can walk right up to them. He needs more megapixels (and has been working with a Sony a7r to augment his other gear lately; since he's a Canon shooter mostly, this new Canon may well find its way into his studio).

[sneye]

I have always been an advocate for sufficiency, but learned that some people just don't acknowledge the existence of this concept. What we call "a photographer" might consist of many personalities: artist, scientist, tech geek, collector, operator, business person, record maker etc. By definition some of those can never get enough.

[Ed]

I make textures and to keep them highres in close-up situations I need at least 4096 x 4096 textures. If I have halve a photo for the texture that gets difficult with a 16 Mp EM-5......now the EM-5 MkII could be a winner for me, just for making stills of wall's, roofs, rust, windowpains and the rest of the world (for examples of textures see CGTEXTURES.com).

Greets, Ed

Who still believes photography is dead.

[Hugh]

I print big - always did, even with film.

If the 50DsR saves me from buying a medium format digital, it will be an absolute bargain.

Only need to sell a few 24"x36" prints to pay it back. They are possible with the 5D3, but technique has to be perfect.

[Richard K]

Re your comment: "Ironic in that, pace Gordon's astute points, I tend to like small, "go-karty" cars with 4-cylinder engines and manual transmissions. I have no particular interest in muscle cars.".

Ironically the best version of the new Mustang might be the 4-cylinder!

[Godfrey]

Like others, 12 to 24 MPixels is the sweet spot for me. 12 is already more than adequate, 24 nets luxurious excess for cropping and highly detailed subjects.

Responsiveness is the thing I look for most now, in a modest-sized and reasonably lightweight package.

[Paul Bass]

Many years ago, during the dawn of digital photography, I had a co-worker who thought the term was "mega-pencil". Oddly appropriate, no? Still cracks me up...

[Jim Witkowski]

Twins of different mothers or an immortal? I'm just sayin':

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/.a/6a00df351e888f883401b7c74a6db4970b-popup
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/.a/6a00df351e888f883401b7c74bcacd970b-popup

[Patrick Dodds]

An animal the size of a breadbox - Kirk's got me guessing now: a chicken? Could be, but for the head and neck - a headless chicken perhaps? Small dog? Perhaps not with legs. A rabbit? A cat? Again, the legs take it over the breadbox limit - maybe folded / sitting down. A carp? A large tortoise? Whatever it is, I like the breadbox comparison and from now on I'm going to use the analogy whenever someone asks how big of an animal it is that I am talking about - mostly happens with dogs of course, but YMMV.

[Patrick Dodds]

Whoops - overlooked the feathers part. Scrap the others, my guess is chicken.

[Rubén Osuna]

I have a simple question.

There exist a digital print technology for superhigh resolution prints? I mean, A4 (8x12 inches) size, 24MP into it.

[ctein]

Dear Elliott,

If I am a mystery, I am the most Googleable mystery on the planet!

Seriously, dude, The Big G is your friend.

~~~~

Dear Ruben,

The simple answer: your typical good printer today can handle the resolution produced by a 50 megapixel camera in an 8" x 12" print. The best can double that (at least–– it's been a couple of years since I've tested printers, so they might even be better than that).

There is a complex answer, and I wrote many columns covering it. You don't need to know all that.

This is entirely different from the question of whether you, personally, NEED prints that sharp.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com
======================================

[John]

I've been a Canon shooter since about 2005, most recently with the 5DII. I do a lot of landscape photography and I like having lots of megapickles at my disposal. Maybe I'm afflicted with megapicklemania. However, it is not just the number but the quality of pickles that matters. I experienced a bad case of sensor envy with the releases of the Nikon D800 series of cameras, largely due to the alleged superior dynamic range and high iso performance. Unfortunately, the available information suggests these characteristics may not be improved in this new high resolution sensor Canon. So, when I think about upgrading I also think about another 50 megapickle camera - the Pentax 645Z. Granted that would also mean laying down some money for new glass.

In reading the other comments I didn't see much concern about hardware needed to process the files from these high-res sensors. Seems that was an issue for some early adopters of Nikon's 800s. I don't know anyone who owns a 50 mp camera but I would think the files would require substantial computing horsepower.

[Eliott James]

Eliott responds to Ctein

Well, I admit I should have Googled you before asking. You're right. Plenty of info out there including on your site some of the most beautiful color prints I've ever seen. Remarkable work.

[ctein]

Dear Eliott,

Well, thank you kindly, sir!

Flattery *will* get you anywhere.

(and, for all you knew, "Ctein" was just a handle I used here on TOP, instead of it being my full and public legal name)

pax / Ctein