torger said:
I would prefer more MP for my landscape work.
But lately I'm kind of starting to change my mind about this. I'm afraid that corner sharpness for a ~40 megapixel DSLR will suffer a bit too much for landscape work. When I shift my 7D to the "full-frame" corner of a TS-E 24mm II I can see how that lens will look in the corner for a 45 megapixel full-frame camera (without shift). It is not that sharp, and then the TS-E 24mm II is the best 24mm lens out there, concerning corner performance. So is it worthwhile making that high megapixel DSLRs? Well, center sharpness will be good, so in much photography I guess it would work out.
But for landscape work where corner sharpness is important, it may be that you really have to go to medium format to get 40+ megapixels resolved with good quality.
It shall be interesting to see how the D800 will perform in landscape photography with the Nikon lens lineup.
more MP will show how much better the center is compared to the sides. but you're still resolving more detail even at the edges than with a 22MP sensor. The center will off course be even more optically outstanding than it was before. So yes, your gains are not even, but you gain detail overall across the entire frame with the higher MP sensor regardless.
IMO in the case of landscapes this difference in detail from the side to the center will not be perceptually noticed even if you can measure it with algorithms and software.
What you want to compare, and what I think justifies the use of higher MP sensors in landscape, are the results of the same region of a 22MP image vs a 36MP image when printed at the same size. There you'll see an improvement in larger prints, and you'll have smoother graduations from color to color. Obviously for web sharing, where things are resized to tiny sizes, the extra MP matters little.
Ultimately, I don't see a downside. You can crop, downscale, and tweak images to match the results of smaller sensors, but you can't up scale without creating a lot more data that just wasn't recorded even using modern scalers like Genuine Fractals software. So IMO 36MP or more is a full win for landscape artists and definitively something canon feels to have abandoned, or at least postponed.
I already saw a very wide crop of a D800 file that looked stunning and couldn't have been captured by a pano+stich because of the motion in the scene. 36MP and higher MP sensor are going to open a whole new avenue of very extreme HxW ratio photography and that is very exciting indeed.
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