Who needs more pixels?

[Fido]

Nothing said here makes a case for changing my present gear. It's capable of producing photos of a very high quality. Just as my golf clubs are good enough for me to win The Open with them.

The main constraint is the user!

 

[eneville]

These days the vast majority of my photos are displayed only on computer or TV screens. I occasionally print a 6x4 or at most, a 7x5.

I now use a 6mp Nikon D40 and a 13.5mp Nikon Coolpix. And I'm happy with both.

But.

I see the Nikon D3100 14.5mp at £261 on Amazon, and the D3200 24.2mp at £338 ( both body only - I have two zooms to go with them.

I'd get about £85 for my D40 body.

So old scrooge here is asking himself if it's worth the effort and extra cost of upping the pixels on the DSLR. I know the benefits of giving more scope for cropping, but are there any other features likely to make a significant difference to my enjoyment of photography. I don't do anything serious these days just landscapes and interesting town and village scenes, and family stuff.

I bought a D60 in 2008, thought it was the bees knees. After rattling off about 16000 shutter actuations and some envy of those with the D90 I started to look around (plus I thought there was a life changing event just around the corner that would require much use of a camera, sadly didn't happen though).

The pricing for the D90 looked a bit steep when the D7000 (it's replacement) was not too much more, so, I lashed out and bought it, the D7000 that is. Was about £650 for the body from digitalrev.com, a bit cheaper than the amazon price.

It is such a better camera (but I would say that as I own and love it).

Now the D7100 is out but it's a lot more expensive and doesn't offer a huge amount more, I think it's got a later revision of the processor and more megapixels.

The build is much better, and I think I bought it at just about the right time, the price dropped because the D7100 was just about to come out and I think retailers wanted to shift the stock before its usurped. The fact its not the latest doesn't affect the picture quality, there are lots of people still using the D90, you can see from flickr's upload graphs:

http://www.flickr.com/cameras/nikon

I know someone using the D70, which is what the D90 replaced, so quite a few generations ago, but they have it attached to a telescope, so that shows how confident they are about the image reproduction.

I'd advise the D7000 though, just because I know how much more of a solid camera it feels like in comparison to the D60.

---

Nothing said here makes a case for changing my present gear. It's capable of producing photos of a very high quality. Just as my golf clubs are good enough for me to win The Open with them.

The main constraint is the user!

I'd say lens and sensor are the main constraint. I had a Nikon Coolpix 775 camera for a long time, throughout my ownership of it people were banging on about what their cameras could do, those little thin things <1cm thick with very little in them, I scoffed I did and stuck with my Coolpix and didn't get a camera phone, why did I need one, the Coolpix was a reasonable camera given its early day.

There are certain things that are easier with a compact camera than a SLR, such as close ups. I forget the reason by a compact camera has optics arranged slightly differently to a SLR and the smaller sensor and nearer lens makes it easier to focus to close things.

To achieve the same with a SLR you'll need a macro lens which is very expensive.

What you can do, is get cheap extension tubes, but then you need things like a tripod and longer exposures, compacts just do this better, sadly as its a pain to have to know and use two different bits of equipment.

 

[tarbyonline]

I recently moved from 16mp to 20mp. The difference? I can take less photos per memory card. However the larger size is handy for cropping a part of the image into a "new" image, particularly if the image wasn't taken very level for example,e.

Sensor image quality will always win over the number of megapixels it can produce which is why compacts tend to produce more noisy and less detailed images (due to the tiny sensor) than a larger sensor camera such as a cropped sensor SLR (and a couple of the higher end bridge models) or full frame SLR.

Unfortunately the marketing departments know (want) most consumers see megapixels as a measure of quality and so there is a race on to boast more and more megapixels whereas IMHO manufacturers should concentrate on image quality first (though how do you measure quality subjectively?). It wouldn't be the first time when buying a camera I have opted for the often cheaper (but lower mp count) camera instead of a newer model simply because I was unimpressed with the quality of the images produced from the newer model.

As a purely personal example, my dad used to think his Nikon bridge camera was amazing (with its silly X zoom) until I gave him my Sony a37 (entry level SLR (technically SLT) for those unfamiliar with the Sony model lines). Not only does he think the Sony is a night and day improvement (with an entry level second hand tamron lens from eBay), but even with a smaller zoom range (even taking into account the crop factor of the sensor) he can take the same subject at distance with higher quality and sharpness on the Sony than on the Fuji (albeit with having to crop the image).

However, unless you are going to print an image the size of a wall (and if you can afford the equipment to do so you can afford a full frame camera surely) you don't need 20mp plus sized images anyway! Personally I usually shrink my images once I have made any adjustments anyway.

Going back to the original post, you would probably notice more improvement by investing in better lenses than a newer body. At the end of the day the sensor can only interpret the image in front of it and the better the lens the better that image. However whether the investment would be worth it is another matter entirely.

Regarding the City and Guilds course I am currently considering enrolling on the level 2 digital image capture (I'm guessing this is a modern equivalent of the old SLR course) and digital image manipulation (Photoshop) with a view to progressing to the level 3 digital image capture. Not sure I would have the time tho to compile a portfolio of the quality I would aspire to!