Canon’s Testing a 75MP+ Pro DSLR

Started Jul 21, 2013 | Discussions thread
Press Correspondent
Veteran MemberPosts: 3,345Gear list
Re: Interesting concept
In reply to jayrandomer, Jul 25, 2013

Press Correspondent wrote:

jayrandomer wrote:

t.c. marino wrote:

Canonero wrote:

Please!!! DON´T tell that WE don´t need 75Mp, OK?

"we dont need 22mp" is the battle cry here on this forum,and 36mp is over rated

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Sure, some people say 21 MP is good enough for what they want to do and honestly, looking at most of my photos 12 MP is probably enough, too. 36 MP would be fun, though. 75 MP would probably be even more fun. 750 MP too much, at least for now.

There are four general classes of people I've noticed on this forum:

1) Canon shooters (generally landscape) who want 36MP and are openly jealous of the large MP Nikon offerings.

2) Canon shooters (generally not landscape) who see are getting the images they want from 21 or fewer MPs and see no need for more.

3) Canon shooters who secretly want 36 MP but are so anti-Nikon that they claim that 36MP is for some reason a bad thing.

4) Nikon (almost always Nikon) shooters who think that everyone else here is from camp 3). I'd guess the number was closer about 1% of the users fall in to that camp.

I'm wondering the sort of pathology that requires you mention this (and nothing apropos to the actual discussion) multiple times in a forum for a camera you don't own, presumably gloating over an accomplishment that someone else made (unless you are an engineer for Nikon or Sony, in which case good job).

There is an emerging trend in photography that I call Virtual Reality. Traditional photography is centered around the meaning of the image as a whole, be it a portrait or landscape. As you drill down to smaller details, you notice that at some point they become irrelevant to the meaning of the whole image. For example, gunk in skin pores on a portrait or a bug on a leaf on a landscape of a thousand trees. I define Image Domain as a full set of details relevant to the meaning of the whole image. By observation, one can conclude that relevant details are limited by 12 to 20 mp depending on the subject (e.g. portrait vs. landscape).

In turn, the Virtual Reality application is not limited by the meaning of the whole image, but is also concerned with small details on their own merit. Common VR applications include surveilance, forensics, medical miaging, extreme cropping, pixel peeping, and detailed wall-size prints to make you feel as if you are actually there. VR is enabled by the high resolution trend and we will see more and more of it. If this is your goal, then 75 mp would be great, but anything more than 20 mp does not add any value to the the image observed as a whole, as it used to be the case in traditional photography.

Please note that Image Domain has nothing to do with the print size, but only with the meaning of what is pictured. If you care for more details on the Image Domain concept, search this forum for these keywords.

Are you saying that the ability to perceive detail on the scale of an image is limited, presumably some part of the human visual chain, to around 20 MP?  Clearly there must be some limit to the ability to perceive detail on such a scale, but I'm wondering where you get the 20 MP number from.  I have no compelling evidence to support either a larger or smaller number, but I'm just interested in where it comes from.

It seems like something that could be tested academically, much the way human perception of color has been, is that where the number comes from?  If not, it does seem like a pretty interesting summer project for the right kind of graduate student.

And yes, 75 MP would be fun from the perspective of the virtual reality concept you speak of.  That's part of the fun of huge panoramas, for instance.

Image Domain does relate to the human vision resolution limit, but is not the same. "Meaning" is the keyword here. For example, on a landscape of a 1,000 trees, would a bug on a single distant leaf be meaningful to the image as a whole? Probably not. However, one could argue that it might, if not for the vision limitations. So perhaps there is some relation here. However, on a portrait, you don't want to see the gunk in skin pores regardless of any limitations. So altimately the concepts are different.

20 mp comes from observation. Just look at a number of images flipping them between full and 100% and you would see that 12 mp resolves portraits fine, but lacks still relevant details on landscapes, 16 mp is better and sufficient in most cases, and 20 mp is always slightly excessive. A higher resolution adds nothing to the whole image, but is useful when the whole image is not the composition goal, such as for cropping birds, etc.

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