We were all conditioned to want more pixels for a good decade or more of our lives, and for a time it worked. At some point, however, the allure faded for me.

I liked my 6-MP APS-C DSLR (a Konica-Minolta 7D). That was a special camera, made by a remarkable team of experienced engineers and a company with a vast wealth of knowledge. The files are still beautiful, and I have prints from them (made by Paul Butzi) that are in the 16x20-inch ballpark that continue to look fine to me (although people in the know—like Oren—would see the telltales of uprezzing). And of course Ctein offered a demonstration "big print" in 2012 to show the kind of resolution a good printer could get out of a 12-MP Micro 4/3 sensor. That print continues to look fine to me too.

Puzzlers, taken with the 6-MP K-M 7D in 2005. Photo by MJ.



I sometimes idly wonder what a six-megapixel APS-C sensor made using today's technologies would look like. I just checked (using B&H's search panel headed "Still Image Resolution") and, apart from some inexpensive novelty-type products such as Canon's IVY CLIQ, which is described as a "Hybrid Digital Camera/ZINK Printer," 10 megapixels is apparently about the lowest number of pixels you can buy now in a serious camera.

Do you remember Tommy Brown? You can see the size of his prints from the first picture at that link. Some of his prints were made with his current camera, a Sony that has 42MP. But some of the prints were made from 12-MP files. You could tell the difference if you looked, but all the prints looked fine and nothing called attention to itself with insufficient quality (except the prints made from 35mm B&W film, which were enlarged too much. Film can't keep up with digital). All the 12-MP prints were from older cameras, too, so presumably other things were different aside from just the number of pixels.

Naturally, we all have different standards and preferences, and I know the standards and preferences of many other people will differ from my own. I'm sure there are people out there who would really like to investigate the new GFX 100. And there might even be a few people who would like more pixels than that. We all have different points of sufficiency. (a term I wrote about here. The footnotes of that 2009 post are interesting given recent developments, aren't they? That was before the Leica 50mm Apo-Summicron-M came out. But what I reported in the footnote was something I was told by a Leica rep.)

Ctein wrote a column about the number of pixels we might theoretically need before we reach a point where we can't discern any more improvement. You can get a lot just from the title if you don't want to go read it: it was called "Why 80 Megapixels Just Won't Be Enough..."

Where I fall

This surprises me, but it's been nine years since I personally concluded, while trying out a Pentax K-5 that was introduced in September 2010, that I had discovered where the point of sufficiency was for me when it came to pixels. The K-5 seemed to have enough. After that (although I'm still occasionally susceptible to insecurity), my desire for more began to subside. The K-5 was a 16-MP camera. It's been almost ten years and I haven't appreciably changed my mind since then, surprisingly. I've owned several 24-MP cameras and one with 36 MP, and I've used a variety of others with higher-than-16-MP resolution. But I've never been really convinced it's anything I really personally need. Sixteen is sort of my baseline number now, and has been for quite a long time. I was surprised to find out just how long a time.

Beautiful 19th-century "survivor" in Saylesville,

Wisconsin. Taken with a Pentax K-5.



Again, that's just my idiosyncratic personal judgement—I understand you might feel differently, and if you do I won't argue with you for a second. We all have those different standards and preferences I mentioned. Everybody gets to say for themselves. There's no right or wrong answer. There's nothing at all wrong about wanting or needing 24 or 36 or 37 or 42 or 50 or 100 MP...or more. Well, maybe there's one thing that could be wrong with it—that would be if someone is merely reacting uncritically to marketing assumptions, and not actually deciding for themselves using their own eyes and their own visual taste.

But no one around here would do that. :-)

Mike

P.S. I never could post-process that Saylesville Hall image. I tried it again and I still can't do it. Good thing for me it's not that great a picture.



Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Amazon.com • Amazon UK • Amazon Canada

Amazon Germany • B&H Photo • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

Featured Comments from:

Carlos Quijana: "Agree. I was happy with my Nikon D100 (6 MP) and then with the D700 (12 MP). 16 MP is fine. More pixels haven't improved my photos, I have to say."

Martin D: "Your 16MB sound right for me too, especially since my final prints are fairly small and in B&W. Noise characteristics to me are much more important than absolute resolution."

Clay Olmstead: "If you're like me, and almost all of your pictures are seen on digital screens, the answer is purely mathematical: HDTV is 1920 x 1080 pixels; to avoid sampling error, you need to get above the Nyquist limit, so you want to have at least two times that many pixels in each direction; call that 2.5 just to have some margin of error. That makes a sensor that's 4800 x 2700, or 12.96 MP. Any more than that is just for cropping."

Paul Judice: "I've worked in retouching for fashion brands since photographers shot film. My world was very concerned about the new digital cameras having enough resolution to make a store window display image, since those can be six or seven feet in height. For years I did a lot of test strips at final size to assess the damage, but since the 20 megapixel barrier was cracked, I've rarely heard any concerns."

Dogman: "I like to relate how I decided digital photography could replace film photography for me. It was a photo I made in 2008 with an 8MP Canon DSLR that I cropped in half and printed (the best half) 8x11.5 inches. It looked really good framed and hanging on the wall. Later I printed it 13x19 inches and it still looks good on the wall. Today I'm using 16MP and 24MP cameras and I'm totally happy with the results."

Thom Hogan: "Back in 2005 I wrote on my website that 24 MP was about where the crop sensor pixel push would end. That was based upon a whole bunch of calculations and assumptions (e.g. diffraction, and how print technologies might make low-level acuity pass through to visibility).

"In essence, I was trying to do the sort of calculation that the audio market had done (e.g. 'how much can we actually hear?'). In retrospect and practice, I'd say the mark really was more around 20MP. Both 16 MP and 24 MP crop sensor are basically the one standard of deviation mark on either side, so I'm fine with anyone picking one of those.

"With full frame (and certainly medium format), things change a little bit. You either gain cropping flexibility or maximum print size capability from those formats at the same pixel densities (basically where we are with the Z7 with 45MP). Most people really don't need either of those, frankly.

"That said, I've long cautioned about what's going to happen with 'prints': they'll go digital. And they'll be on 8K or higher flat screens. 8K is 7680x4320, or 33MP. It's that 'or higher' part that will start to dictate just how good today's images look 50 years from now."

Ger Lawlor: "Lens first, processing second and sensor third—matching the lens with the sensor is critical.

"Just for fun, I recently repaired my Sony NEX-C3 (new screen for a few dollars). Using the same lenses it is definitely sharper per pixel than my A6000. At the other end of the spectrum, a client commissioned a 25-foot by 8-foot photograph last week and I also supplied four other images almost as large for a commercial job recently. (Showroom fit-outs.) Canon 5D MkIV, 85mm ƒ/1.8 at ƒ/8, ISO 100 bolted down, and an unsharpened stitch of 12 images processed very carefully is giving excellent results at 2–3 foot viewing distance. But it is also astonishing how well a 24-MP image upscales if done right. The biggest issue when doing crazy upscaling is sharpening artifacts, lens issues, and noise. Naturally, at this scale it often isn't any more than 96dpi native, but still, not bad."

Alex Buisse: "It is far from the norm, but I have had a few clients request I do not shoot for them with my Nikon D4, as 16 MP was simply not high enough resolution for their needs, and the 36 MP of the D810 was the absolute minimum they would consider. For my personal shooting, though, I feel that 24 MP is more than enough for most uses."

Mike replies: I heard the same thing about the original Canon EOS 1D (4 MP). A few clients were balking at the low resolution. You might recall that for a while Canon intended to split between "fast" (responsive) but low-resolution cameras, and slower but high-resolution cameras. The original 1D was complemented by the 1Ds in 2002, which had 11 MP and was the equivalent then of the GFX 100 now...bleeding edge! The 1D Mark II (2004) doubled the 1D's pixel count.

Then again, back in the '80s I remember a pro telling me that he had to shoot 8x10 film for high-end watch catalogs even though the shots were going to be reproduced no more than three inches wide, and most considerably smaller than that. He tried to sell the client on medium format for efficiency's sake but they wouldn't go for it. They wanted "the best" and were willing to pay for it.