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Rochester @ night August 20, 2007

Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a comment

Last night I went down to the Ford St Bridge area to get mugged with Joe.  We also took a few photos of the city.  Dinner wasn’t sitting well with me and that’s all we wound up doing unfortunately.  I decided to finally take a first stab at taking a panorama of Rochester and it came out ok but I don’t really like that particular vantage point for a pano after reviewing the stitched image.  I think somewhere on the north side of the city would be much better and of course I’d like to wait for some better weather.  A cloudless sky can be a little boring.

This image is stitched from five separate photos in PT Assembler.  I expect to put up more as I visit more cities.  I intend to take a pano of every city I visit just for fun.

Click here to see the big panorma (5000×2134, just over a megabyte)

Add more pixels, please.

Posted by tcbp in : Rants & Raves , 2 comments

More pixels make the camera better, right?

I’m getting dismayed by the fact that marketing has seem to overrun good common sense at the camera companies these days. Perfectly good cameras like the G9 are coming out with 12 megapixels now and that’s just stupid. That camera, in particular that sensor, shouldn’t need more than 6mp, in fact it would make the camera better.

It’s even worse because for if a moment it seems like the megapixel race might be over, they start doing the ISO thing.  But now it seems they’re going to do both as the same time, a guaranteed recipe for disaster. 12.1 megapixel and 1600 ISO in a 1/1.7 sensor; now unless I’m mistaken (and I may be, I had to wake up way too early today) that’s a pixel pitch of at best 1.9 microns. That’s pushing it too far.  Sensitivity, efficiency and dynamic range for a sensor like this are all going to suffer. The noise is going to be high! Noise reduction might make it look better but it smooths out the details and what are you left with? A camera that is probably equivalent to 6 megapixels of useful image data on a good day. One could do the calculations by making some assumptions and figure it out, but it doesn’t matter.

I’d like to see manufacturers start focusing on better lenses and larger sensors. Move to lower resolution, there’s no practical need for sensors like this in these cameras. More resolution can be better, but it isn’t always.