Olympus: 12 Megapixels Are Enough

Yes and 1 GB for a HD is unimaginable.

Technology will just continue to improve and anyone that says "This is too fast" "That's too many pixels" is just being short sighted.

Think Bladerunner where they expand the picuture. More megapixels I say.

The problem is a practical use for those pictures. Yes, movies have promised magic zoom and magic focus for years (being able to zoom in and focus seemingly even the most minute details of a picture), but only police investigators ever use it anyway.

However, the other 99% of people who take pictures and upload them to the web don't need anywhere near 12megapixels. What do most people do with a 5mb+ image, they either leave it as is (forcing their friends and family to download a ridiculously sized email), or shrink it down. Very few outside the professional photography business even have the capability of printing something with that dense of a resolution. 1200 DPI for a 4"x6" picture means about 28,800 pixels. Even a 3'x5' poster doesn't need 12 megapixels.

For me, more pixels do not make my photo look better specially after 10 megapixel. It is the dynamic range, color saturation, white balance, right balance, and the sharpness of the images whick make the photo look good and professional. Unless I am going to crop a small face out of a large picture, there is no need for me to take 20 megapixel w/ 50 MB in size picture (unless if I want to make a wall size poster...which never happen on me before).

My numbers are a little misleading, mega-pixels don't translate 1:1 to DPI, but still your average printed photo isn't anywhere near as dense as a 12 megapixel image.

Please give me a camrea which can take a no noise, well exposed, sharp, and well saturated 10 megapixel picture at ISO 1200! Not a camera only takes 20 megapixel pictures which are full of noise and under exposured at ISO 400.

The problem isn't that there are "too many pixels". The problem is that the pixels look like crap because they cut corners with other aspects of the camera to push the almighty "megapixel" number even higher. I'd rather have fewer "good pixels" than more "ugly pixels".

So technology isn't really improving at all since you can't tell the difference between 2mp and 12mp on a 1680x1050 screen (unless you zoom in, for which you should have used optical zoom anyway), but you certainly can tell the difference between cheap and expensive optics, and good quality sensors vs cheap stuff.

good and brave move by olympus.
i want to compare this to F1 regulations that prevents further development of engines to focus on other aspects.
12megapixels, for me, is quite a lot since i don't print.
i'm saving up for a nikon d40, with 6MP resolution yet with very low pixel density, add to that, it is cheap and lightweight.

I love my Canon 20D no need for more than 12 MP I am happy with 8.1.

I want a camera that takes noise free pictures in low light and at ISO 1600. The other thing I would love is a carmera that can take many frames per second (preferably with a selectable drive rate).

The 5D looks awsome but I would always be using it at a lower resolution (I have no use for over 20 MP). The largest I ever print is 13"x19" and even the 5 MP from my old Sony F707 looked great at that size on a canon i9900 printer (4800x1200 DPI 8 inks).

I disagree. This isn't for professionals, its for Average Joe. Average Joe takes pictures at a few events, and possibly uses an image editor to correct some red eye. He prints out a few images from his laser printer.

He doesn't do any complex image editing, he isn't going to be printing posters, and He doesn't need 12 megapixels.

1920x1200 is ~2.3 megapixels, 2560x1600 is ~4.1 megapixels, and you only see those on resolutions on the highest end monitors. Regular people don't even have the capabilities to edit, or properly view 12 megapixel images.

Maybe in the future, when monitors with 3840x2400 are the norm Average Joe will need more than 12 megapixels, but until then, if you want more than 12, you'll have to buy a professional model.



That was an analog image. Digital imagery is lossy at this point in time.

I disagree. This isn't for professionals, its for Average Joe. Average Joe takes pictures at a few events, and possibly uses an image editor to correct some red eye. He prints out a few images from his laser printer.

He doesn't do any complex image editing, he isn't going to be printing posters, and He doesn't need 12 megapixels.

1920x1200 is ~2.3 megapixels, 2560x1600 is ~4.1 megapixels, and you only see those on resolutions on the highest end monitors. Regular people don't even have the capabilities to edit, or properly view 12 megapixel images.

Maybe in the future, when monitors with 3840x2400 are the norm Average Joe will need more than 12 megapixels, but until then, if you want more than 12, you'll have to buy a professional model.



That was an analog image. Digital imagery is lossy at this point in time.

I'm pretty satisfied with my 6mp Nikon D50. I could only imagine working with 12mp. For the casual user, who needs 8000 pixel wide images?

A mega pixel rating is nowhere near the first thing on my list when buying a cam.

It's not like we're going to need higher megapixel photos. Our eyesight, if anything, is getting worse.

12MP is way more that what average people will ever need. Just take a look at sites like Facebook - the pictures are not of top quality, and it gets downsized anyway.

Personally, I've been living fine with a 5MP Canon and 2MP LG Shine camera. Anything beyond 8 is just ridiculous - increasing size rapidly while offering no tangible benefits.

Old news, Nikon did this last year with the D90, D300 and D3 which are all 12MP cameras that take ISO 3200 images and make them look like ISO 100 images.

I remember reading test in several camera magazines and blogs that looked at how much useful resolution can be extracted from Canon's top of the line fixed-focal L series lenses. The conclusion received was 12Meg at most.

However there is one other aspect that also needs to be considered. Many will point out (not without controversy) that the above analysis is fine for taking shots of black/white line resolution diagrams but real world is a different. If you look at a award worthy photographs you will notice how artistically blur is used to put the subject in perspective. How a camera/lense captures blur varies greatly within the same resolution specs. Digital renders blur very harshly compared to film and the only way to improve it is to come up with better software algorithms or, as many would suggest, keep upping to megapixel count to around 40Meg for full frame.

600 DPI is 360,000 dots per square inch. So an 8" x 10" picture is 28,800,000 pixels. That's 28.8 megapixels. So anyone who wants to print a nice framed portrait for e.g. to place over mantle can do so... but they'll have pixelation or will have to use 300 DPI or less. Anything less than about 400 DPI is visible, at least to me. And if you digital zoom at all (e.g. just 2x), square that zoom factor when calculating the required megapixels.

An 8x10 is about the largest picture size I'd care about and expect out of a personal digital camera. Poster-size, you really have to use a professional camera to get a decent image for both detail and overall quality (usually at a higher distance).

I want more pixels!!! I want to be able to take a picture of a crowd of 50,000,000 adoring fans of Obama and be able to then zoom in and identify each and every last one of them. I figure that would require at least 76800 pixes each or 3,840,000,000,000 pixels, and i will also need Olympus' promised improvements of detail! Basically, I need 1 pixel for every dollar Obama plans to put my children into debt for over his first four years of playing President.

with a 10MP camera you can print a 20x25 cm photo, who does that? no one really. mos people only share images and in most cases the optics and color reproduction are more important.

The more pixels the more noice if you don't increase the image chip... and they have not been bigger, if you don't count those professional cameras. So if everything else keeps the same (as it has many years) more pixels does not make better pictures.

I only just now graduated from a 3.2mp Canon S1IS to a Nikon D90 with 12.3mp. I'd like to shoot and archive in RAW format and really don't think I'd want to be handling even larger file sizes. Sure hard drives are cheap but processing time/transfer time etc. becomes a factor.

With the exception of some air show shots I never found a desire for more pixels with my old Canon. The big advantage with the new camera is the superior sensor and light gathering ability. This is the point of Watanabe's comment.

My 22" monitor is about as large as the largest framed picture in my living room. It can't see any pixelation on my monitor unless I look really close, even though it's only 1.8Mp. So 2Mp is fine for anything except ridiculously big pictures or very professional printing.

Finally someone stops with the marketing BS. Even a 6 megapixel camera is overkill for 90% of consumers. Cramming a huge number of pixels into a tiny sensor degrades image quality significantly.

Good. Olympus was one of the many camera companies that tried to cram too many megapixels onto too-small sensors, degrading quality.

The higher the pixel count, the more critical (-and expensive!) the optics becomes. I have seen some 23 MP cameras hobbled by run-of-the-mill lenses.

I am interested in the D90 myself, but mainly for the onboard chromatic aberration reduction and the Active D-lighting hoping that will increase the dynamic range some.

It is good that somebody like Olympus actually made a public stand on what looks like an MP race.

NOISE! People it's the NOISE that kills photos! A 3MP camera with low noise (i.e. Canon d30 - not the 30d) takes wonderful photos! If you want a new metric, sell high Signal to Noise (SNR) ratios!

We have a 6Mpix cam (The Nikon D40).
But after editing some quality gets lost.
With a 6Mpix camera we can make flawless edited photo's upto 14" (or about 8 by 11").

Anything larger (eg a flawless 17" photo) will need RAW editing, or the unedited 4MB Jpeg.

We've decided to go for 10Mpix. Many professional camera's only support upto 6Mpix.
the 10Mpix is good enough for extreme HD editing,good enough to display about 18" frames blameless photo's, or 32" frames with slightly rougher print, for eg: Livingroom portraits.

Another thought may be that SLR camera's are for amateurs and semi professionals.
Not for the leek who wants to make some holiday pictures with the family.

I haven't read ALL the comments but what I really miss in my 7Mpix Panasonic DMC-FZ8 camera isn't more pixels. It's sole bad point is shooting in lesser-light enviroments. Here I don't mean total dark or nightshots, but shots under artificial lighting (normal lightbulbs). It's either using flash (which mostly ruins the "mood" of the picture) or having visible artifacts. Sure, using advanced settings, a tripod etc will result in a better picture even without flash, but no point in using tripod when you have a "moving target" (eg. - people).

So I'm all with Olympus on this aspect, consumer cameras and those for semi-advanced users like me should improve in other aspects which bring true picture quality, and which can't be compensated with just stuffing more and more pixels..

Now I HAVE read all the comments, and most of them agree on one thing - it's about time to clean up those artifacts (noise) from the picture, and have them nice, clean and sharp even at high-ISO (low-light) values.

When they get that solved, they can start increasing pixels again, but only if they're keeping that noise-free looks on those higher resolutions as well..

I'm glad I'm not the only one having issues with this aspect of digital photos

TeraMedia you are wrong, printed dot is not a pixel! One RGB pixel is interpreted by many dots in some mathematical order called raster. Since prints are subtractive lite you have to print with complementary color tu RGB and that's CMY. RGB is scalable with light intensity (since its additive light), so you can have more intensities of same basic color (i.e. 256 levels of R, G, B) but with prints you can only change the size of the dot, or the the density of dots on square inch (or better on pixel) to achieve more levels of the same basic color.
So DPI is NOT equal Pixels per inch.

I'd never owned a camera before I got my at&t tilt with 3MP camera. I've taken soo many photos. Some turn out really nice, others not so much (when it's dark). Either way, it's better than what I had, which was nothing. I think Olympus is taking a step in the better direction, but I believe the average consumer will still use the megapixel metric system since that's what's crammed down their throat.