Friday, August 26, 2011

More does not necessarily mean better

Sony has just announced its new generation of APS-C cameras (Sony A77 - the flagship). The main part - brand new sensor that has 24 MPix. That's quite a handful. Well, probably it would be better to put it like this - that's quite a disk-full. I think that for my personal purposes 16 MP sensor (20-25 MB per RAW file) is just enough.

So, here you have it - in my opinion, for my photography 24 MPix is too many, 8 MPix too many to be precise.

Of course, beside the improvement of pixel count and sensor technology, new introductions have other interesting things. It would stand to reason that when other manufacturers including Pentax will show their new models they will have better metering, faster AF, etc. All of this will be available for a proper price, but if I would want a better AF (I still find AF of K-5 to be sub-optimal) I'd have to adopt this sensor with all its mega-pixels.

Suddenly Ricoh's modular systems looks quite brilliant. You want better algorithms - you get a new body. You want some special lens - you get this special lens module. Modular! Flexible!

Well, one can only dream and wish so much...

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I have to agree. It's not necessary. It's like sports cars: the technology allows us to build a 1200HP car that can reach 430km/h - but it's as wide as a Hummer and at this speed will empty the fuel tank in 12 minutes. Not to mention the fact that there are about 5 roads in the entire world that this car can reach this speed.

In camera: yes, you get 24MP but you will pay for it in noise, worse dynamic range, unnecessarily large files and also - you will actually see 24MP only if you use high-end optics.

Boris Liberman said...

eMonk, sir :-),

After introduction of this marvelous sensor that my K-5 has I wouldn't be drawing any immediate conclusions as to characteristics of this new sensor. We can always wait patiently until cameras come out, reviews start to appear and people start to publish their pictures. We may be genuinely surprised.

It seems though that anyone who was saying that mega-pixel wars are over, were not quite right...

Unknown said...

these new sensors are back lit sensors and have great range and noise control...