Old 02-08-10, 12:34 PM
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ItsJustMe
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Originally Posted by AdamDZ
The size of a sensor has nothing to do with how many pixels it can capture. It will capture as many as it's designed for, but the sensitivity and quality may suffer and noise increase.
Noise is a direct result of the size of each pixel on the sensor. This is because obviously when you reduce the size of the pixel, you reduce the number of photons that it's catching during the exposure, but actually increasing its sensitivity to thermal noise, which is caused by the camera's and the sensor's own heat. Therefore you get a lower signal-to-noise ratio.

You get small pixels by trying to cram a lot of megapixels into a sensor the size of a pencil eraser. So yeah, the size of the sensor doesn't mean it can't capture a lot of pixels, it just means that a smaller sensor WILL HAVE MORE NOISE. This is physics and there's really nothing you can do about it unless you're willing to cool the sensor in liquid nitrogen or something.

Some manufacturers reduce noise through software, but that just blurs the pictures to where they would have been better off just using a smaller sensor to start with.

My DSLR has a 15 megapixel sensor and I think even that might be overkill - not because of the noise, but because a 15 megapixel image requires high grade lenses to really push that kind of quality. If you're shooting 14 megapixels and you don't have a $500+ lens on the front of the sensor, you're probably just wasting storage space.

It's all about marketing though. If your competitor sells a 13 megapixel camera, you need to sell a 14 megapixel camera. If you make a 10 megapixel camera that actually takes better photographs than the 13 megapixel camera, you'll still lose in the marketplace.

What do you do with 14 megapixels anyway? The only use I know is to "zoom" after the fact by cropping down - that is, unless you're printing photos at 5 by 7 feet.
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