7D & Lens Pictures [CR3]

What if they are using a new type of image sensor, the 18MP 1.6 crop could be quite usable even in low light. See US patent USP 20090008735.

MATH GURUS…

who can figure out what an 18 MP APS-C would be in FF??? Maybe that’s a 1Ds4 clue?

Your statement that all lenses profit from higher sensor resolution makes no sense to me. The issue isn’t the lens or the sensor alone but the combination of the two. If a given lens (say, a cheap zoom) isn’t all that sharp, then increasing the resolution of the sensor beyond the level needed to get all the detail the lens is capable of providing does not make the picture better, it just makes the lens’s lack of sharpness more obvious in a 100% crop.

As for noise, there is a definite relationship between the color accuracy of an individual sensor site (which is the opposite of the noise level, basically) and the size of that site. The smaller the site (that is, the more MP crammed into a sensor of a given size), the less accurate its color reception, and hence the more noise in the image. This can be quite noticeable in images even without resorting to 100% crops, especially in low-light situations.