Is 22Mpx Really Enough?!!!

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#1
I think I probably heard a thousand times in our forum ... "22Mpx is more than enough ... how much more do you need?" ... Whenever this question pop-up at me, I always wonder ... if there is ever a living Ansel Adam or Richard Avedon hearing this .... what will be their responds?

Back in the old film days, these two Grant Masters used 8x10 films to create the absolute best images (both in terms of IQ & creativity) in the field of Landscape (Ansel Adam) and Fashion & Portrait (Richard Avedon) respectively ... and I am sure their works will always remain in the books and museums for generations to come!

If one converts a 8x10 film with a modern scanner ... say with 4000dpi ... a single 8x10 film will look like (4000 ppi)(8 in)(4000 ppi)(10 in) = 1280 Mpixels or 1.28Gb !!!!

So ... my question is ... is our current DSLR technology still coming a long way behind, in the eyes of the Grant Masters? Or ... if you are a Grant Master, will you be happy with 22Mpx or even with the Hasselblad H4D-200MS of 200Mpx, if you are leaving a legacy of works behind? :o
 
#2
I think there's a trade off for everything. For example take records & CD's. Those old analog records sounded great and when CD's first entered the scene I thought they sounded crappy. As time went on and as tech progressed, CD's sounded better. In regards to film & digital, it's kind of the same thing. Digital was very convenient at first as you didn't have to worry about taking bad pics, you just deleted them. You didn't have to run and get them developed after 24 exposures. Digital is getting better and better all the time.
 
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#3
I think that is a lot more dpi than most would could consider necessary but I am not certain since I do not convert to print my shots. I know 600dpi is considered a high quality copy for business printing on sales brochures.
 
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#4
CanonFanBoy said:
I think I probably heard a thousand times in our forum ... "22Mpx is more than enough ... how much more do you need?" ... Whenever this question pop-up at me, I always wonder ... if there is ever a living Ansel Adam or Richard Avedon hearing this .... what will be their responds?

Back in the old film days, these two Grant Masters used 8x10 films to create the absolute best images (both in terms of IQ & creativity) in the field of Landscape (Ansel Adam) and Fashion & Portrait (Richard Avedon) respectively ... and I am sure their works will always remain in the books and museums for generations to come!

If one converts a 8x10 film with a modern scanner ... say with 4000dpi ... a single 8x10 film will look like (4000 ppi)(8 in)(4000 ppi)(10 in) = 1280 Mpixels or 1.28Gb !!!!

So ... my question is ... is our current DSLR technology still coming a long way behind, in the eyes of the Grant Masters? Or ... if you are a Grant Master, will you be happy with 22Mpx or even with the Hasselblad H4D-200MS of 200Mpx, if you are leaving a legacy of works behind? :o
Click to expand...

Large format will always be king in Real Pro landscape work. 4x5 or 8x10

Medium format is a good second and 35mm just doesn't have the same IQ as the LF or MF. I think 22mp is a good number for 35mm digital.

If Ansel Adams were to shoot digital, he would probably be shooting a Phase one Back adapted to Large format bellows, lenses, Along with his filters. The best he could get.
 
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#5
Have a look at some actual Adams prints.

First, of course, they're marvelous -- absolutely fantastic works of art.

But, second...you can get at least comparable and often better sharpness and image quality with today's high-end DSLRs.

Heresy, I know -- to suggest that puny 135 format might be better than Ansel Adams's legendary 8x10 view camera. But today's lenses are far superior to the ones he had access to, and digital sensors are far superior to his film emulsions.

So, yeah. When I can make prints with my 22 megapickle 5DIII that are technically (though not, to be certain, artistically) superior to what Adams did, I've got plenty of resolution.

More would be absolutely loverly, of course -- especially since I do some fine art giclée reproduction work. Hell, I'd drool over an 8x10 camera with the pixel density of a digicam, the dynamic range of a Nikon, and the rendering quality of a Canon.

But that doesn't mean that what I have isn't already enough.

Cheers,

b&
 
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#6
TrumpetPower! said:
Have a look at some actual Adams prints.

First, of course, they're marvelous -- absolutely fantastic works of art.

But, second...you can get at least comparable and often better sharpness and image quality with today's high-end DSLRs.

Heresy, I know -- to suggest that puny 135 format might be better than Ansel Adams's legendary 8x10 view camera. But today's lenses are far superior to the ones he had access to, and digital sensors are far superior to his film emulsions.

So, yeah. When I can make prints with my 22 megapickle 5DIII that are technically (though not, to be certain, artistically) superior to what Adams did, I've got plenty of resolution.

More would be absolutely loverly, of course -- especially since I do some fine art giclée reproduction work. Hell, I'd drool over an 8x10 camera with the pixel density of a digicam, the dynamic range of a Nikon, and the rendering quality of a Canon.

But that doesn't mean that what I have isn't already enough.

Cheers,

b&
Click to expand...

Not quite sure about that. I know that more MP always enables final product to have higher resolution. The old fallacy about lens outresolving sensors, or vice versa is just plain lame. Ansel Adams used small apertures, and quite frankly I've ALWAYS HEARD that medium/large format lenses are much more superior to 35mm. Even if they are 70-80 years old in technology, large format film has a TON of detail.

This being said, 22MP should be enough. Depends on your printing needs. I have the D800 and am nowhere near maxing out its potential. 36MP vs. 22MP is mostly noticeable on print sizes 24 X 36" as well as in cropping. Comparing my former 5d2 images to the D800 does not yield much, if any, differences in visible resolution.
 
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#7
2n10 said:
I think that is a lot more dpi than most would could consider necessary but I am not certain since I do not convert to print my shots. I know 600dpi is considered a high quality copy for business printing on sales brochures.
Click to expand...

And at 600 dpi you would get : 600x8x600x10 =28.8 Mpx.


Personally having just upgraded from a 15Mpx to a 22Mpx camera, I have noticed that lightroom has slowed down on opening the files. I can't imagine being happy with much bigger files on my computer. And I have a reasonable computer, a 4 core i7 at 3.4 Ghz with 16GB of ram .

Also, most of my images end up at 1400x768 = 1.075 Mpx to fit the projector at the photo club anyway.

So yes I would say 22 Mpx is enough for most applications.
 
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#8
Why is it that so many people act as though Ansel Adams is the standard that all photography should be judged by?

Yes, he made many great images, but that was 70-80 years ago. There is nothing wrong with trying to emulate an artist from the 1930s and 40s, but you do yourself an injustice if you don't progress beyond that. So much has happened in the photographic world since.

Do yourself a favor. Go to a library and take a look at what has been happening in the past half century. You are cheating yourselves if you don't know anything about Frank, Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, Shore, Friedlander, Meyerowitz, Gowin, Eggleston, Winogrand, Uelsmann, Christianberry. After you've spent some time with these masters, start exploring what some contemporary photographers are doing.

Ansel Adams was great, but really, who wants to live in the past? (And, frankly, Edward Weston was better)
 
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#9
CanonFanBoy said:
"22Mpx is more than enough ... how much more do you need?" ... Whenever this question pop-up at me, I always wonder ... if there is ever a living Ansel Adam or Richard Avedon hearing this .... what will be their responds?
Click to expand...

Ansel Adams and old landscape pros used larger formats...THAT is the key difference.
How many pixels is enough in a *35mm* small sensor format is the *real* question. And yes, it has been answered 2000 times here on the forums for "fanboys" (great screen name :P btw).
Fanboys won't rest till 35mm sensor crams 5000000BizillionKazillion pixels and then come back with the same old, trite, boring question.... "Why can't we have more pixels?". *Yawn* :)
 
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#10
22MP is plenty for me. But I might enjoy the added cropping potential from a 36MP or more raw image ;-). As long as the added MPixels do not cause too much noise; or noise that cannot be easily corrected.

But then again, I am no grant master. If I was, I'd be living large with free grant money!

Sorry...could not help myself.

Thanks and kind regards,
Jason Simmons
 
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#12
unfocused said:
Why is it that so many people act as though Ansel Adams is the standard that all photography should be judged by?

Yes, he made many great images, but that was 70-80 years ago. There is nothing wrong with trying to emulate an artist from the 1930s and 40s, but you do yourself an injustice if you don't progress beyond that. So much has happened in the photographic world since.

Do yourself a favor. Go to a library and take a look at what has been happening in the past half century. You are cheating yourselves if you don't know anything about Frank, Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, Shore, Friedlander, Meyerowitz, Gowin, Eggleston, Winogrand, Uelsmann, Christianberry. After you've spent some time with these masters, start exploring what some contemporary photographers are doing.

Ansel Adams was great, but really, who wants to live in the past? (And, frankly, Edward Weston was better)
Click to expand...

haha I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way! :D
 
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#13
I think you are making an incorrect generalization regarding "megapixels" in a scanned film slide. You might indeed be able to scan an 8x10 image at 4000dpi, but don't forget that film grain is going to be the limiting factor in terms of resolution when you push a scan that far, not your DPI. If you make an 8x10 drum scan at 4000dpi, you won't really be gaining resolution...you'll just be putting more pixels to each grain (especially for older photos like those from Ansel Adams...newer film like Velvia 50 4x5 slides actually have pretty good grain characteristics, although a 4000dpi scan is still going to be overkill). In general, when it comes to current 4x5 slid film landscape photographers, most don't scan much higher than 2800dpi (and at 8-bit rather than 16-bit color at that), and then only if they intend to print immensely large...300dpi to 900dpi are more common targets for 4x5 film users. A 2800dpi scan of a 4x5" or 1400dpi scan of 8x10" slide film is still 157mp.

One also has to determine the merits of the tradeoffs. A 1.3 gigapixel digital photo in 16-bit TIFF format is a 60 GIGABYTE image file. Not 60 megabytes, 60 GIGABYTES (and at 8-bit it would still be 30 gigs). In terms of a compressed TIFF file, the size on disk will be smaller, but if you wish to load that file into a tool like Photoshop, you are going to need an unholy amount of physical RAM to do so, on top of some immense swap disks as well. If you start working with layers, your working TIFF could quickly become 120, 240, 480 GIGS. At the moment, there really isn't a personal computer or even a high powered workstation on the planet that could handle that. You would have half a dozen bottlenecks, from bus bandwidth, to memory throughput to disk throughput (even assuming SATA-3 SSD), to video processing throughput, even CPU power. (Generally speaking, 4000dpi scans are for smaller formats, such as 35mm film scans, which result in digital images around 20-22mp...which is just middle-ground these days for DSLRs.)

On the flip side, an 8-bit TIFF of a 1400dpi 8x10 scan would be 3.8gigs. Still a scary-large image from an in-memory editing standpoint, bit less than 1/16th the size of a gigapixel image, and one rich with sharp detail at a pixel level, rather than detail where pixels are sub-grain size, having a rather soft and granular appearance at 100% (meaning your wasting a lot of computing power crunching pixels you don't actually need.) From a print standpoint, a 1400dpi scan would let you NATIVELY print over 90x70" @ 150ppi, so it is still way overkill in the general sense (if you are a specialist who prints 90x75, well you'd be set!) You could get away with a 900dpi scan at 8-bit, which would be a 65mp image, 1.6gb in-memory size, and capable of being printed at a native size of 60x40" @ 150ppi or 30x24" @ 300ppi. More than enough for pretty much ANY work one could think of.

The one benefit I can think of for an ungodly high DPI drum scan like 2800dpi would be for cropping. Out of a 627mp image, you could probably make a dozen separate "photos" from different areas of a single "shot", much like one of my favorite 4x5 landscape photographers demonstrates here:

http://www.widerange.org/gallery/resolution/
 
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#16
Well. The answers have covered the topic, but I will add my two cents as well! And I will end with a new question, so please help me out by lending your thoughts.

First, for point of reference, I am a photographer, I use a powershot s95, a 5D mark III, Leica M9, a hasselblad V system with film and 50mp digital back, and a 4x5 film camera, with an Imacon 949 scanner. So from point and shoot, all the way to just about the best scanner money can buy, I have played with and used them all.

Pixels and resolution are not only about enlarging to huge sizes, though that is an issue. Print a series of 40x60 images, and you'll feel that you'd prefer to have more than 22mp. I am working on a print that large at the moment, I shot it with a canon 1Ds mkIII and I have no choice but to upres it. When you look closely at it, it looks like it has been up-resed. Step back 5-10 feet, it looks good.

Pixels are not the only thing that give resolution. Lens quality and technique are huge in this regard. I can tell a massive difference in a 8x10 print from my canon 5d3 compared to the same size print from a scan from my 4x5.
The detail visible in that print is dense and rich, looks like a different medium.

The same is true for Adams' prints. I went to a gallery in California and saw Adams prints, large and small, and was super impressed by the detail. He was a master.

I was just shooting a landscape project this week with my hasselblad. To maximize resolution, I used a tripod and cable release of course, but even used the mirror lockup switch, and then let my camera sit untouched on the tripod before I carefully pressed the release by cable, even when the shutter speed was not slow. An absolutely still camera greatly increases resolution.

So, is 22mp enough? Yes, absolutely, for normal use, and even a normal to large range of printing. Now that you have 22mp, focus on getting the best out of the pixels. Use good lenses, use good technique.

But! Here is the question that I have been wrestling with: is more than 22 or 24 mp too much for a 35mm sensor? Canon is probably developing a 39 or 50 mp camera, presumably with a 35mm sized sensor. The size of the pixels (pixel pitch) is very important. I think my hasselblad's 50mp are the same size individually as my Canon's 22. So that means, roughly speaking, if canon goes to 39 or 50 mp, the pixels will be many times smaller. This would make low light/noise performance suffer I think. But maybe it will cause other issues as well. Or will it? Perhaps the developers have some new tricks up their sleeves.

Until now, I thhought 20-25mp is perfect for 35mm format. Any more and quality suffers. But maybe that sweet spot for packing pixels on the chip, with about 6 micron sized pixels, is not the plateau I expected it to be. Can a 50mp canon be good? Will it be as good as my hasselblad? Better?
 
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#17
I think that it is worth remembering that the 22MP number is slightly misleading. The Bayer colour filter array and matching anti-aliasing filter mean that the useful colour resolution is around 6MP, with the difference made up by software interpolation when converting from RAW.

Moving to a higher resolution with in-camera downscaling (or a Foveon-like design) would allow you to keep the same 22MP output but with much better pixel level sharpness and colour, while still not stressing the lenses resolving power any more.

Daniel Flather said:
22mp is lots for me. My 2008 iMac, with 4gb ram, would agree too. If I browse a folder that contains 300 or more RAW files with DPP, I get an insufficient memory error.
Click to expand...

I think that is probably DPP wierdness. I am using a similar vintage Apple laptop and routinely process much larger folders of 5DII/III images without problem (Lightroom). It is still usable even with very large (300MB TIFF) panoramas processed using PS.
 
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#18
So ... my question is ... is our current DSLR technology still coming a long way behind, in the eyes of the Grant Masters? Or ... if you are a Grant Master, will you be happy with 22Mpx or even with the Hasselblad H4D-200MS of 200Mpx, if you are leaving a legacy of works behind? :o
Click to expand...

Just an FYI canonfanboy, the term is Grand Master, not Grant.

Interesting topic, it will be fun to see how these dslr's evolve over the next decade. I'm sure canon has a larger than 35mm sensor "in the works" and 10 years from now 100mp cameras will be common.
 
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#20
This is what I like about Canon Rumors. You people out there have so much knowledge and if someone says something technically incorrect it can corrected immediately.
My personal experience is moving from 15MP up to 22MP.
Initially I thought I wasn't seeing much difference in resolution and was wondering was it all an illusion that higher MP was better. What I am learning as time go by is that full frame can give certain really nice aspects to the photo like in terms of depth of field. I can't recreate it on the APS-C sensor. When I go back and forth between the two cameras I start to notice the subtly better resolution.
I may be like alot of people in that you are always looking for more resolution, hoping the small guy way in the distance could actually be zoomed into and be recognised. You hope that a higher MP camera would provide you with this. There is possibly a diminishing return element in so as far as how good can it get.
File size is an issue with 22MP. Unless you upgrade your PC everything slows down. The uploading to PC, the processing and saving all takes longer. Storage becomes a more serious issue. 1 or 2TB Hard drives don't seem to big any more. In fairness to Nikon the D800 seems to be quite impressive but I think I would start to find that file size a little troublesome to deal with. You'd have to upgrade your PC and storage with it.
When the Canon 5d Mark IV comes out and its 48MP will I be tempted. No doubt the dream of greater resolution will tempt me but I will have to consider all the surrounding costs as well.
Master the 5D Mark III first I guess and see can I reach it's limits (like I did with the 500D/Rebel (something something) - which is still a great camera) .
Keep up these great conversations. You lose me at times with the details technical specs of sensors and lens but it's very interesting
Kind Regards
Fergal

If you are bored you can skim through my Flickr Page. It's not brilliant but I think I am improving slightly
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fergalocallaghan/
 
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