The True Cost of 36mps'

[AprilForever]

I'd love a good 36 mp in my 7D mkII! Taking bird pictures, I usually crop most images...

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

It somewhat reminds me "640K ought to be enough for anybody" (never mind whether that sentence was so or not in 1981). The issue today as I see it is that the same MP topic was heavily discussed when cameras crossed 10MP. Are we now any closer to the "truth" at let's say 20MP? Is all this valid only for now or also good enough tomorrow?

Technology advances, Get used to it. When I bought my first computer, a Mac SE in 1987, I paid a substantial premium for the huge, massive, never-to-be-filled 20 MB hard drive option (instead of the stock dual floppies). 20 years later, and that formerly massive HDD wouldn't even hold a single RAW image from my 5DII. (As a side note and testament to the longevity of some products, last time I checked that very computer was still running an old spectrophotometer in a lab I used to work in...).

Our company bought our first CADD system in the 1970's Computervision which we used to draft wiring diagrams rather than pen and ink on Mylar. We paid a ton of money for a microcomputer, and a 25mb hard drive. The hard drive was exactly the same size as a washing machine. Within a couple of years, we upgraded the hard drive to 50MB at half the size.

Big bucks were invested, but the system paid for itself very quickly, since a wiring diagram could be duplicated and changed quickly rather than redrafting from scratch, or making a photocopy and erasing the area to be changed, which resulted in a lower quality of drawing.

I bought my first computer with a hard drive, a IBM XT compatible in about 1985. It had a 32mb RLL hard drive which was full in about 3 years, so I bought a Seagate 85mb SCSI drive to replace it, it cost a lot, but I don't remember the price.

I can still remember in about 1993 when my neighbor bought a 1GB drive for about $1,000 and announced proudly that it was the last hard drive he would ever need to buy. We all know how that went.

I was just reading about memristor (resistive ram) memory technology that is predicted to start hitting the market in 2 years, which has the potential to far outperform current memory. It may also take care of the next 20 years of Moore's law. Computer technology is indeed progressing much faster than Digital Camera file size, it has the advantage of there being much more profit, so there are huge investments in R&D.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/10/7/hp---hynix-plan-resistive-ram-intro-in-summer-of-2013.aspx

 

[Gothmoth]

When I bought my first computer, a Mac SE in 1987.....
.....
Our company bought our first CADD system in the 1970's Computervision which we used to draft wiring diagrams rather than pen and ink on Mylar

hell you guys are old...

but even when you look only 15 years back it´s clear that today HDD space is cheap.
when i got my first PC, 15 years ago, purchasing a HDD was a big deal.
today i don´t even do a price comparison anymore... 5 or 8 euros more or less who cares.

 

[dgsphto]

A $500 PC with an after market graphics card upgrade will easily handle all the processing and more!!

$120 buys you 4Tb of storage or 2Tb with backup.

Watch a few youtube videos and you can build yourself a 3 times better speced and better quality computer rig with 4Tb to 8Tb storage for ~$700 to $800 including the OS.

Image processing software costs what it does and AFAIK Adobe does not give you a discount on the software if one only uses a low MP camera! So there's no reason why that should be a factor.

 

[Stateowned]

the computer doesnt really matter any more.. i was running 2 high graphics games, serveral browsers, itunes.. lightroom, messenger and last but not least adobe cs3..

i tried to merge 7 raw files into HDR with all that open and it took only 3.5GB of the pc.. and the i7 cleared most of the work fairly quickly..

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

A $500 PC with an after market graphics card upgrade will easily handle all the processing and more!!

$120 buys you 4Tb of storage or 2Tb with backup.

Watch a few youtube videos and you can build yourself a 3 times better speced and better quality computer rig with 4Tb to 8Tb storage for ~$700 to $800 including the OS.

Image processing software costs what it does and AFAIK Adobe does not give you a discount on the software if one only uses a low MP camera! So there's no reason why that should be a factor.

I have recently bought a couple of Dell outlet PC's that were high end models, but computing power is such that even sub $500 models will do just fine.

http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?brandId=2202&c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh

For $520-$560, you can get a powerful machine with 1TB HDD, and i7 processor.

http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/SecondaryInventorySearch.aspx?rn=3201&SC=&c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh

 

[Edwin Herdman]

The cost came the reply. The cost of having to get an amazingly specced computer to manage files of that size. Enormous EHD's to store the files on. The increased time in processing as she tries to eliminate the extra 'details' that the subject does not want to see in a pic - and lastly - the cost in getting LR or Aperture 4 and CS6 to have software that can work with these files.

Lucky for everybody that these are just linear, and not exponential, extra costs. If your D800 shooter sticks with their current computer, the files will take at most around 3X as long to process - could be a deal breaker, perhaps.

For hard drives and media there's even less of a problem. Yes, to get the same number of shots as a 12mp Nikon you'll need 3X as many media cards, but on the other hand dealing with multiple hard drives isn't such a big deal for most people - unless you have tens to hundreds of thousands of images, the new multi-terabyte drives are fine for now.

Image processing software costs what it does and AFAIK Adobe does not give you a discount on the software if one only uses a low MP camera! So there's no reason why that should be a factor.

Indeed. Free, for Canon DPP or ViewNX2, and third-party software like Registax, GIMP, and Ifranview, is a pretty good price. GIMP is surprisingly powerful and is about to be even more competitive for most photographers with Adobe when the GEGL stuff gets finished up (rendering will all be done on the GPU, which is where Adobe has been moving the last few years).

And whatever it costs on Dell, you can do even better buying the parts yourself.

My father was a railroad engineer for 40 years and lost 2 fingers. But at least he never had to deal wit a problem like 36MP images. Lucky guy.

But we are men and will get through this.

This is the truest thing I have read all week. +rep for that.

 

[spaceheat]

I think, as far as the publishing industry is concerned, that they will soon be hitting a plateau of what they will be demanding in terms of resolution and file size. The demand for increased MP (circa 2008) was mostly driven by surveys with photo agencies. I assume that they wanted the extra file size so that designers could more freely crop photos for their layouts.

I think that soon, you will see these same agencies start to push back as far as file sizes are concerned. Most archive everything that was shot... (Monica Lewinsky rule). When you are asking these businesses to completely redo their servers every 3 years, to store data that will most likely be down-sampled when it goes to print or publish anyways, I can't help but think that a more conservative approach would be to just say "no thanks, what we have works just fine."

 

[EELinneman]

Local disk storage will diminish in importance over time as storage moves to a more resilient cloud model. There is a reason that Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon are all investing tons of money in that direction. The one question that I have yet to see a pattern will be long-term archival of the data in your pictures. Rotating magnetic media is inefficient and needs maintenance. So, 36 megapixels will not be a pressing issue down the road.

As far as RAM goes, it has a price cycle that drops quickly in price as manufacturing is ramped up followed by a price rise as the demand and supply for that type of RAM declines. Go price current memory vs something used say 3 years ago such as 800MHz.

I would love the increased pixels as long as the noise is reduced and we get a wider dynamic range. For me, these are a higher priority.

 

[niccyboy]

Local disk storage will diminish in importance over time as storage moves to a more resilient cloud model. There is a reason that Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon are all investing tons of money in that direction. The one question that I have yet to see a pattern will be long-term archival of the data in your pictures. Rotating magnetic media is inefficient and needs maintenance. So, 36 megapixels will not be a pressing issue down the road.

As far as RAM goes, it has a price cycle that drops quickly in price as manufacturing is ramped up followed by a price rise as the demand and supply for that type of RAM declines. Go price current memory vs something used say 3 years ago such as 800MHz.

I would love the increased pixels as long as the noise is reduced and we get a wider dynamic range. For me, these are a higher priority.

I'm not sure this is a big argument FOR higher MP.... 500 images at 36mp, would be around 15gb... to back this up to a CLOUD would require a 15gb upload. While i have no doubt in 5 years that would be nothing, but in the next 12 months, when we are perhaps seeing these cameras? (I definitely agree about that in the future though)

I have a heap of firewire Externals that are brilliant so I'm all for the higher MP, especially for cropping. They are a bit more than the cheap drives you see, but are lightening fast with a firewire CF reader. Worth the extra money.

MP aside, i hope the autofocus system is amazing on the new bodies, i know a lot of upset 5dmk2 owners over the focus.

My Mk2s have always been OK focus wise, but not where a 'pro' body should be.