Why shoot with a high resolution camera?

[xpatUSA]

Forget the graphs and charts and just do some heads up comparing with the kind of pictures you like to take. Take your oldest camera body with fewer pixels and do some comparison shooting with your newest camera (assuming you've upgraded at some point).

Always willing to oblige ;-)

I don't have a "newest camera" unless you count my second Sigma SD10, but it can take pixel-binned shots, 9.12um pitch or 18.24um pitch, a ratio similar to D800 vs D700, right?:





Each image down-sampled by Lanczos to 756px wide with no other post-processing.

LO res first.

Ted

[BernardLanguillier]

Well I've dropped the amount of pixels I shoot, gone from 21mp to 18mp, not much I know. But honestly all this talk about more or less pixels making this or that difference, it's the sort of thing that could disappear yourself up your backside. No doubt if I'd gone for a D4 my photography would of suffered even more.

Most of us were happy with 12mp DSLRs, 14 inch color TVs, wired irons and laptops weighting 1.5 kg.

Now progress marches ahead and redefines what can be done. We can of course decide that the value of progress is not worth the cost for one's own needs, but most of the time there is some objective value even when we decide to pass.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Ray]

I'll offer 3 very simple reasons for having more megapixels.

(1) Useful for very large prints. You will see more detail close up.

(2) Effectively improves the resolution of all one's lenses by at least some degree, depending on the inherent quality of the lenses, of course. The higher the quality of the lens, the more pronounced the improvement will be.

(3) Provides the flexibility to create one's own cropped format, thus effectively getting a longer reach with any lens.

One of the advantages of the D800E that appeals to me, is that it performs like a cropped-format D7000 when used in DX mode, and also provides a faster frame rate because of the smaller file sizes used. I thus get the sense that I have two cameras for the price of one.

It's interesting that Nikon have now done something similar with their recently announced 24mp D7100. They've introduced another 1.3x cropped format within the wider DX viewfinder which allows one to see what's outside the smaller format, as in a rangefinder camera.

The additional cropped format provides a 15.4mp image with an effective focal length of 2x the 35mm equivalent, and again a faster frame rate as a result of the reduced file size.

Looks like I'll be carrying two cameras again. The D7100 seems a worthy upgrade to the D7000, and its lack of an AA filter seems very sensible.