Northam Saint said:
pugh-the-special-one said:
I think a lot of people get to caught up with this pixel thing, it's the quality of the sensor, and the lens that really make all the difference, I have always had a interest in photgraphy, right from an early age, and this is my opinion, but why would anyone want to print anything above A4, I have heard many people using this as a argument to defend higher and higher pixels, but everyone i know using this argument have never printed higher than A4 in their life! what I want is a max 12 to 15 million pixel camera, with a sensor the size of a 35mm film, at an affordable price. For me it's a case of the camera manufactures now realise they can seduce a lot of buyers with pixels that quite frankly you dont need.
Jamie.
To back this up. I have a Sony A230, cheap entry to DSLR model, and only 10.2 million pixels which shots in RAW & JPEG. I have a shot I took which I am interested in printing off bigger than A4. A friend of mine has a business that does just this. He examined the photo in RAW, and said he could get it to 2 Meters squared with out any loss of definition. So for an ordinary bod like me that will do just fine. With a bit of tweaking no doubt it would go larger.
To me it's all in the way the picture was taken.
Please don't get me wrong and enjoy your new camera.
It's not quite so straightforward in my case as I'm a pro and have been for the best part of 40 years.... I have a 24inch HP Designjet Pro printer. So printing to 24 inches is no problem. To get your 10.2 megs worth of data to 2 metres squared you have to interpolate - there is no way around that, whatever image editing program you use. You could certainly get an acceptable result, but it would not compare with a sensor actually producing the equivalent amount of data. However, as you rightly point out. The quality of the lens becomes paramount and pro lenses are not cheap (I should know as I have a bagful!).
As your friend implied, you will get a better result from a RAW file. But it won't increase the amount of data available - it will enable you to get the best out of what you have captured though...
Incidentally, Nokia have just announced a 41 megapixel camera phone!
Nikonos
PS The attached image "touchdown" was taken on a D700 - it is cropped from the full-frame. A3 prints are quite acceptable, but more than that and the fine detail is lost. This is when the extra resolution of a D800 would have been useful....