Thinking about 24MP again for a moment, Sony has admittedly improved their sensors; the last16MP was a very good one, If I remember correctly they reduced the space between the sensels without actually reducing the sensel size by much to get most of the gain in MP count (I don’t know if this is a fact or not, but it sounds good), I thought that sensel crosstalk was one of the limiting factors of doing this but Sony has seemingly fixed that problem as well.
Whether this translates into an impact on lens resolution as much as previously thought remains too be seen but as far as file sizes go 24MP is still 24MP and is going to be a bigger file than a 16MP one with extra processing power needed to keep response times down etc. and therefore increased power consumption.
But the thing that I’m concerned about is, the more you have the more you loose; the question is what size file do you need to downsize too before posting on the web before it starts to degrade noticeably? If I compare my 6MP camera against my 12MP camera to get the same appearance quality wise I need to actually post a larger file from the 12MP camera just to avoid obvious degradation in comparison to the smaller MP camera when photographing the same subject, and there doesn’t appear too be much if any gain ‘on screen’ in actual detail from the larger file either, the larger MP camera needs to have a larger web file to avoid obvious artefacts, there doesn’t seem to be any way of working around that that I’ve seen so far.
Seeing as how a lot of the purpose of using a digital camera is based around web use I don’t readily see how 24MP is going to be such a great benefit, except for those who crop a lot or need large files (landscapers might like large files perhaps) or for Alamy; and/or do prints at a huge size maybe. I guess one could always shoot at one of the lesser resolutions in the menu list, but that seems to be a little weird when you could just as easily keep using your existing smaller MP camera and avoid the expense of a new camera, the only advantages of the new one is it’s ‘new’ and also has some additional desirable? features.
But possibly that’s the intent, you now have to choose the MP size to suit the occasion more than you did before, as proposed in those shoddy Sony user demo videos that David has highlighted in his column.
And that’s another thing, how much confidence can you have in Sony’s ability to produce a camera that functions as claimed and is reliable if Sony can’t even produce an accurate video showing how to use it?
Greg
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