I’ve just been updating the slides for the last week of the Photography Classes and I thought I’d share. Last night’s class covered digital images and the whole mega-pixel-mega-shmixel thing: does a larger image mean more detail?
Well no. Having a higher resolution sensor gives the opportunity to capture more detail but only:
- If the sensor sites are independent of each other
- Your lens can resolve an image to the precision of the size of each sensor site
- There is detail in the image you are trying to resolve.
And then you have to ask yourself if you need that much detail. Does it help tell your story? Is it, in fact, distracting?
Anyway, with some data we generated on the course last week, an interesting comparison is now available:
So there are a number of variables at work here: the sensor resolution, the lens (and settings) and even the crop – these are all 300×300 100% crops but the variation in size of sensor makes the crop different in each case. And I would expect the phone in particular to do a little better in brighter lighting.
But the trend is clear and the point is just that putting a 13MP sensor on my phone doesn’t make it a great camera.
I particular in this case compare these to the 12MP of the D700:
This last example has least actual resolution of any of the examples here but much more actual detail compared to the smaller sensors and the crappier lenses.
But also remember that having a great camera doesn’t automatically make you a great photographer.