Kenneth Waller wrote: >So from your experience Mark, what has 24MP done for your photography?
Several things. First of all, the 24MP has given me more options, like making a panoramic shot by cropping from a single frame rather than stitching multiple frames together (I usually don't shoot that way deliberately but sometimes, like one shot from GFM last year, I "see" the pano composition later when I get home -- I'm still pissed off that I brought the K-5 on that hike rather than the A850). I can also shoot stitched panos with three or even two shots, which makes stitching much faster and easier. The full-frame part lets me get better prints at a given size - often even when using non-megadollar glass. That goes contrary to popular wisdom, number crunching and pixel peeping: You'll read that high-megapixel full-frame cameras are much more demanding of glass and show the weaknesses of less-than-stellar lenses. Which is true. But it's usually seen making measurements or peeping at 100% magnification in Photoshop. But when making a print of any given size (let's say 12 x 18) the image from a full-frame camera requires significantly less magnification. An APS-C image gets magnified about 19:1 to make that size print. Full-frame gets magnified 12.7:1 so using the same lens on both, even if it's not a top-dollar lens, I can get a better print from full-frame. Sure, when your print size gets *really* big, and what you see on the print gets closer to what you see on your monitor at 1:1 you'll need megabuck glass on your full-frame. But apparently that is much bigger than the 13 x 19 that's my usual max. (Never say never, though: I have access to some big wide-format printers at school...) Making prints is a whole different game than pixel peeping. I expect Pentax will use a variant of the Sony 24MP sensor that's in the D600, which is fine by me. But a 36MP sensor intrigues me not for the additional (potential) resolution; I've been reading about its superior tonality in B&W (which I'm leaning toward more these days). A side effect of the Bayer pattern sensor, I expect - when you throw out your color information you probably need a little extra spatial data to make up for what you threw away in color data (similar to the way large-scale contrast can make lenses appear sharper in color than they "really" are in B&W tests). -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
