Friday, February 20, 2004

The megapixel myth - a pixel too far? is an interesting thesis by Fazal Majid. "The problem with megapixels as a measure of camera performance is that not all pixels are born equal. No amount of pixels will compensate for a fuzzy lens, but even with a perfect lens, there are two factors that make the difference: noise and interpolation " The author points out how most digital cameras use Bayer interpolation, resulting in a loss of sharpness. "Thus, a '6 megapixel sensor' has in reality only 1.5-2 million true color pixels." In my experience, this is definitely true. When I go to sharpen (actually Photoshop's USM filter) my digital camera images, they often degrade instead of looking better; and yet my scanned film images improve with application of USM. 7:00:01 AM

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