Back when digital cameras first came out, it wasn’t obvious to consumers whether a $400 Canon camera was better than a $200 Kodak one. In response to this, camera companies came up with the idea of megapixels: buy a camera with more megapixels and you’ll always be taking better images!
It actually wasn’t all that disingenuous back in the late 1990s and early 2000s for digicam manufacturers to be pulling the megapixel card out. Let’s face it: if one camera can only capture images at a 640 x 480 images, and another can do it at 1024 x 768, the higher resolution wins: there’s a lot of information going missing in the smaller resolution.
The problem is that, now, the megapixel myth is totally absurd. We’ve got more megapixels than we know what to do with. Anything over 8 megapixels for non-commercial photographers is total overkill.
Worse: as companies keep on trying to boost megapixels, they do so at the expense, not benefit, or image quality. Camera sensors can only be so big. Cram more pixels on there and you actually make them physically smaller, which means they can’t absorb as much light. The signal-to-noise ratio goes through the roof.
Keeping all this in mind, what’s Panasonic got in store for 2012? Why, only bumping the megapixels of their consumer point-and-shoots to the absurd 20MP range.
Jeez, guys. I give up. If the computer manufacturing world can move beyond GHz as the sole denoting factor of a computer’s quality, why the heck can’t the digital camera world just get over megapixels already?
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