Pixels Pixels Pixels
Don’t you find it annoying when shopping catalogs try and explain what digital technology really is?
They have little boxes with ‘helpful hints’ and ’special facts’. Yet you’d learn more in a product manual. One of my pet peeves is the way digital camera resolution is marketed. The more megapixels the better is the adage and so many people believe it.
Yes I was once one of those people until I researched the subject more. That’s why I’m annoyed. That many will be fooled by the marketing lingo and wont have the opprtunity to find out the real facts. I was reading Dan’s Data where I found a link to an interesting article on Nasa’s Spirit Rover.
The photo’s of mars the world saw were made with a “palm sized, nine ounce” device with a resolution of 1-megapixel! Even I was surprised.
Yet it produced breathtaking IMAX quality images. Because the sensors on this CCD are around four times larger then the size found on a compact cameras CCD.
There’s also the quality of the optics used and the chip which processes the data to create the image. Interesting to note that much of the research that went into CCD technology was funded by NASA
Remember like the writer of the article says:
Spend your money on the lens, not the pixels.