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Olympus: 12 megapixels is enough for most folks

By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com
Mar 10, 2009

Olympus has declared an end to the megapixel race.

"Twelve megapixels is, I think, enough for covering most applications most customers need," said Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging's SLR planning department, in an interview last week at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) tradeshow. "We have no intention to compete in the megapixel wars for E-System, Olympus' line of dSLR cameras," he said.

Instead, the company will focus on other characteristics such as dynamic range, color reproduction, and a better ISO range for low-light shooting, he said.

Increasing the number of megapixels on shooters is an easy selling point for camera makers, in part because it's a simple concept for people to understand. Even though having more image resolution can enable larger prints and enlargement of subject matter through cropping, adding megapixels comes with some drawbacks.

For one thing, smaller pixels can mean more noisy speckles at the pixel level and can reduce the dynamic range, so brighter areas wash out and darker areas become swaths of black. For another, images take more room on memory cards, hard drives and Web servers, and digicams need more powerful image processors to handle them. And yesteryear's snappers already had plenty of pixels for making 8 x 10-inch prints, a size few people exceed.


Akira Watanabe, leader of Olympus' SLR planning department (Credit: Olympus)

Camera and sensor makers have been steadily improving digital cameras to compensate for the drawbacks, though. The space on the sensor that's devoted to electronics rather than light gathering has been reduced. Other improvements have come with the tiny micro lenses that help each sensor's pixel to gather more light, and with the color filters which determine whether a pixel records red, green or blue.

Some still need more megapixels
Olympus' view is focused chiefly on mainstream photographers. Studio and commercial photographers taking pictures for magazines certainly have a need for more megapixels, Watanabe said.

"We don't think 20 megapixels is necessary for everybody. If a customer wants more than 20 megapixels, he should look to the full-frame models," Watanabe said.

The sensors in Olympus' SLRs, an element of the Four Thirds camera system also used by Panasonic, are smaller than those in mainstream dSLRs from market leaders Canon and Nikon and much smaller than those in full-frame cameras. Those employ sensors the size of a frame of 35mm film, 36 x 24mm.

The 12-megapixel view isn't a new one at Olympus.

"I personally believed, before starting the E-System, that 12 was enough," Watanabe said. "We interviewed many professional photographers, people in studios, about how many they needed in the future. Before we started, the system, we had a rough idea we'd be at a plateau at 12 megapixels. We gradually increased the pixel count, with the newer Olympus dSLRs now reaching that level."

Autofocus future
Watanabe had another bold projection: Autofocus will change dramatically in dSLRs.

Today's dSLRs use a "phase detect" autofocus subsystem in which some light is diverted from the viewfinder to sensors in the bottom of the camera. These sensors enable the rapid autofocus that helps make dSLRs much more responsive than point-and-shoots, which use a "contrast detect" method that analyzes the data from the image sensor itself.

Watanabe, though, believes image sensor-based autofocus will outperform phase-detect systems in the future. That's important not just for compact shooters, but also for dSLRs that today often have an awkward problem with composing a shot using the camera's LCD. When the sensor is in use to run the display, the phase detect autofocus subsystem can't be used. That means Live View on dSLRs today is typically a frustratingly slow process.

"In terms of speed, phase detect is faster. But imager autofocus will exceed phase detect," Watanabe said.

Speed isn't, of course, the only factor. "In terms of accuracy, imager-based autofocus is much more advantageous. It focuses directly on the surface itself", the exact location where the image will eventually be recorded. "Phase detect focuses not on the real surface but on a virtual surface", the focusing subsystem reached via a moving mirror.

Imager-based autofocus doesn't require the full use of the image sensor area, so it doesn't directly increase power consumption concerns, he said. In Olympus's new midrange E-30 dSLR, for example, autofocus uses only a few points on the sensor when autofocusing in Live View mode.


Tags: DSLR, Sensor, Camera, Pixel, Nikon Corp.

 

 

    Talkback
ferdiei says...
at last, somebody is putting SENSE to the megapixel war...

Mar 11, 2009 00:01
 
 
drone1212 says...
Hmmm... is this going to end up being as famous as the following quote?

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates, 1981 (although he recently denied it)

Mar 21, 2009 19:16
 
 
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