Bigger sensor

[32BT]

I guess you guys haven't been told that size doesn't matter.

Apparently it wasn't relevant to them...

[Ivophoto]

I guess you guys haven't been told that size doesn't matter.

Yes, it was told by someone with a tiny frame to fill.

[Telecaster]

I don't buy the "normal viewing distance" argument. Galleries don't have velvet ropes preventing you from getting closer. Details often draw you into thee image.

When I visit art museums I enjoy getting up close to paintings when possible and studying brush & paint application techniques. But this is a very different thing to ogling the details of a photo. Hardly anyone is, for example, gonna dock van Gogh for using a palette knife or his fingers to "crudely" apply paint or for his use of thick impasto. But many folks look at photographs differently, and there can be an IMO excessive fixation on fine detail that gets in the way of appreciating photos as whole things.

At my (imaginary) gallery show I would prevent you from getting "too close." 

-Dave-

[Ray]

In my view, the main advantage of a larger sensor with with more pixels is the flexibility of being able to crop the image whilst still retaining sufficient resolution for an A3 or A2 size print. A cropped image also tends to have better resolution at the edges and corners.

A 50mm lens on a 36mp full frame is far more useful than the same lens on a 16mp cropped format with similar pixel quality and pixel size.