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| Paddys Markets Lumix LX100 13Mpx |
Photokina this year brought a virtual tsunami of new products, some with ultra high pixel counts, one with an ultra zoom lens.
Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Lumix and Sony each showed one or more product lines tempting potential buyers to move up market to something bigger, supposedly better and certainly more expensive.
So great has been the allocation of R&D resources to these new high value products and systems that development of decent cameras in a lower price bracket has slowed or in some cases possibly stopped altogether.
The lure of these new full frame and medium format cameras is the hope that users will be able to make better pictures with these products than they could with smaller sensor cameras at a lower price point.
Note that the camera companies very carefully do not actually claim that you will make better pictures with their latest product(s). They know perfectly well that good photos are made in front of (the subject) and behind (the user) the camera, not so much in the camera.
They tempt enthusiast photographers with more pixels, faster frame rates, better numbers for dynamic range, high ISO noise and color reproduction. They aim to profit from the common malady suffered by enthusiast photographers known as G.A.S. (gear acquisition syndrome).
Reviewers, many of whom are given cameras on loan to review play up to this. They say ….”camera A makes really good pictures but camera B with a larger sensor (more pixels, whatever) makes even better pictures because it has more dynamic range (less high ISO noise, whatever)”
The implication is you should buy camera B which by the way is more expensive, larger and heavier and delivers a greater profit margin to those who make and sell it.
My thesis in this post is that you might like to think twice about buying camera B if camera A will do the job which you require of it.
May I digress briefly with a transport analogy:
If I want to drive four people across the city (Sydney, as it happens) a very suitable vehicle is my little Honda Jazz. It does the job with no problems whatever at a modest cost.
Would a seven seat SUV be “better” for this job ? Of course not. It’s overkill.
What about a bus that can take 50 people ? No ? Even more ridiculous overkill.
There are in fact thousands of seven seater SUVs running around town transporting one or two persons at a time. This makes no sense but there it is.
The camera market is like the car market in some ways.
For the great majority of tasks which most photographers require their cameras to perform almost any modestly priced mid range model will do the job just fine.
Most photographic assignments do not need a dynamic range of 15 stops or invisible luminance noise at ISO 12800 or 50 million pixels on the sensor.
For challenging assignments mid price cameras can do the job perfectly well with a little ingenuity.
Extremely high subject brightness range can be tamed by exposure bracketing then in-camera or post capture processing. Extremely low light levels can be managed with image stabiliser capability or simply a tripod, or resting the camera on a wall or similar. Even 8-10Mpx files can be used to make very large prints with appropriate image editing.
How many pixels is enough ?
What is the resolution of the monitor screen you are now using ? Mine is 1920x1080 dots. That is 2, yes, 2, megapixels. Pictures and text look very sharp and clear on this monitor.
Our household TV screen has the same resolution although it is much larger, 102x58 cm. Photos displayed on this screen look sharp and clear provided they were technically good in the first place.
So you need 2 Mpx for sharp pictures. Any more is a bonus. A sensor with 8 Mpx can do a fine job, 16 Mpx is more than enough even for huge prints.
What size sensor is big enough ?
I have made excellent A2+ sized prints from cameras with the tiny so-called ½.3inch sensor.There is no fixed standard for this sensor size but most of them are around 4.5x6.2mm for a diagonal of about 7.7mm. But I have also seen too many mushy, grainy results from cameras with this sensor size.
For reliably pleasing results in a range of conditions including low light I have found the so-called “one inch” sensor which is actually 8.8x13.2mm for a diagonal of 15.9mm does a good job.
Current 16 and 20Mpx versions of the Micro Four Thirds sensor (17.3x13mm, diagonal 21.6mm) can deliver excellent results in any conditions with appropriate lens selection and usage practices.
The only intractable issue with small sensors which is locked into the characteristics of optics is depth of focus. This means that achieving out of focus backgrounds is more difficult with small sensors than larger sensors. So if you want backgrounds out of focus, the bigger sensor is better.
Conversely of course if you want everything from foreground to background in focus, the smaller sensor is better. The photo at the top of this post was shot at f1.7 on a sensor with effective diameter about 19.2mm (the LX100 uses a cropped M43 sensor).
Summary
Buying a bigger camera in the expectation of better pictures is an exercise in futility for most enthusiast photographers. Be careful what you wish for.