photojohn, continuation of discussion on MTBR

[Ultra Magnus]

Hey there.. On MTBR you stated that you weren't sold on the 8 megapixel thing, and I was curious why. I have no opinion other than it more resolution than lower megapixels, and all the sales guys in the stores tell you that more pixels is better. Please educate a newby to real digital photography.

Ps. Are you a professional photographer? That camera you got would be hard to justify for an amateur hobbyist photographer..

[Sebastian]

Well, PJ hasn't responded yet, so I'll chime in with some info.

Basically, the smaller the pixels, the less light hits them, the harder they have to work, increasing the amount of noise. There is also chromatic berration, due to how poor digital lenses are at differing focal lengths. This is a great example of diminishing returns. It gets to a point where increases in megapixel count start degrading the image instead of improving it. Are the 8mp cameras worth it? Absolutely not, you will get much better results out of a 6mp slr with a good lens, and pay only a little bit more.

As for those guys at the electronics stores, they are nothing but punks that get all their info from the sales reps, who don't know jack to begin with. It's amazing how few knowledgeable people work in electronics stores, at least around here.

Get a good 4 or five megapixel P&S digital, or a 6mp DSLR, that's the most bang for your buck. I would personally recommend the Sony F717 or the Canon G3, both excellent performers. I owned the 717 for a while and can honestly say I was very impressed by it. That camera was the reason I switched entirely to digital.

Good luck and don't buy the marketing BS.

[Ultra Magnus]

My wife and I spent our tax refund on a sony 828. We are totally happy with the images it produces and the rest of its features. The other camera I would've considerd is the Cannon 6.2mp dslr. It wasn't at the store when we bought ours, but I was it on tech TV for a review. We were turned onto the sony because a friend here at work as a 717 and I played with it a bit and liked it a lot. When we started looking around we found that sony was coming out with the 828 and waited until it hit the stores. Those are some good points that I would've never thought of. One feature we really like is being able to pivot the lens. Most of our pictures are of the kids, and to get down to their level is a pain sometimes, especially if you have to lay down in the grass to do it, but being able to rotate the lens and just hold the camera down is real nice for us. Whenever I figgure out how to shrink the size of a picture maybe I'll post one. We don't have software for that right now. I guess photoshop is where it's at?

I work in the OE bicycle industry and you don't have to tell me about marketing BS. What do you think sells $4000 bikes anyway? We have our own marketing department too, so I see how it works from the inside.

[darkman]

As Sebastion allready stated, there's a lot more than "more is better." More may ultimately have more native (you'll see why I use this term in a second) resolution. Yet, more also has the problem of leakage. The smaller and more tightly packed the transistors that make the sensor, the greater the standby current produced by thermal means is; this is the physics of these. Raising the ISO is equivelant to raising the voltage, which means raising the power, and thus heat (which goes exponential). Therefore, at it's lowest ISO it may outperform a same size sensor with less pixels at it's lowest iso. Increasing the ISO will, however, increase the noise disproportionally on the sensor with more pixels. Therefore, the sensor with more is only better at low iso.

The other part of the equation is sensor size. Most these new 8Mp sensors are what they call a 2/3" size (this is a large sensor for a digicam). Or about 8.8 x 6.6 mm. A sensor on most dslrs is 24x16mm. The dslr sensor is ~8x bigger!. A full frame, canon 1ds, kodak 14n, is ~16x bigger. Now think about this qualitively. In order to print you need to magnify from the native sensor size. The 2/3" sensor needs to be magnified 8 times (!) before it even gets to the size of the one on most dslrs. Now multiply this out to making an 8x10 print. You can see why a larger sensor clearly can outperform a smaller one even with "less" natvie resolution.

The other part of the problem is the lens. Consider a field of view (e.g. the camera with the small sensor and the one with the big sensor are set to take the same composition). Lets now say while we were taking a picture a small plane flies across the horizon. Being the end picture will be the same, this plane (and everything else) will have to be proportionally smaller on the smaller sensor compared to the larger one. To make the detail in this plane appear on the sensor (ignore pixels for now), the camera with the smaller sensor would need a BETTER lens! How else would it be able to make everything smaller with the same detail? As you can see, smaller sensors need better lenses than bigger sensors. How good of a lens do you think they are putting on these digicams?

As you can see, there is a lot more to this than "more is better" the salesman is telling you. I cringe everytime I hear this.

Mike

[Photo-John]

It's ok - your camera is fine. Don't get worried. It's just that in digital cameras, pixel count is no longer the whole story. There are pixels, and there are pixels. The bottom line is that bigger pixels are better pixels. That doesn't mean you have a bad camera. It just means that, to some extent, the 8 megapixel sensor in your Sony is over-hyped. It's still a good camera, though. I just sent a loaner 828 back to Sony and I enjoyed using it. It feels great, has great features, and the shutter-lag is very minimal. It will serve you well. But just be aware that any of the current digital SLRs will have better image quality - even though some have less pixels. Does that mean you can't take great pictures with your camera or that your camera's image quality is no good? Absolutely not. Enjoy what you have, learn to get the most out of it, and when it's time, step up to a full-blown, changeable lens digital SLR.

[photo101]

BTW, what bike do you have Photojohn? I had a Ritchey p-20 hardtail that was a graduation gift from my parents. Needless to say I do not ride as often as I should.

[ThoughtfulPirate]

He was on an ellsworth dare when I saw his picture in Mountain Biking magazine I think.

[Photo-John]

Today I rode my singlespeed. Ride whatcha got!

[Ultra Magnus]

Alright, I see what you mean. I went and check out a few different camera's in our price range and see the imager difference. When it's time to buy another camera I'll have a better understanding of what to look for. A question I have for you is, what is ISO? Our owners manual tells us how to adjust it, but I can't figgure out why you'd want to. I've played with it, but I can't tell a difference in the pictures. I understand shutter speed the best. That's pretty easy. I don't have a total grasp of aperature setting yet, and don't understand much esle. Thanks

[another view]

Alright, I see what you mean. I went and check out a few different camera's in our price range and see the imager difference. When it's time to buy another camera I'll have a better understanding of what to look for. A question I have for you is, what is ISO? Our owners manual tells us how to adjust it, but I can't figgure out why you'd want to. I've played with it, but I can't tell a difference in the pictures. I understand shutter speed the best. That's pretty easy. I don't have a total grasp of aperature setting yet, and don't understand much esle. Thanks

ISO is actually a crossover term from film. On a digital camera, it's basically turning up the gain on the sensor. All films have an ISO rating like 100, 400 or whatever depending on how light sensitive it is. Exposure is basically an equation - if you change one of the three values of aperture, shutter speed or ISO, then you need to change another to keep the exposure accurate. In low light, you might have to use a shutter speed that's too slow to get a good hand-held image, but if you turn up the ISO (making it more sensitive to light) you can use a faster shutter speed. Generally, set the ISO to the lowest that you can given the circumstances because higher ISO's will cause "noise" in the image which looks a little like grain with film.

[Ultra Magnus]

I understand now. So, this being a sports photo forum, if I were taking action shots outside in bright daylight, what ISO setting would you reccomend, using a shutter speed around 1/500 or faster?

[another view]

You'll probably be OK with ISO 100 in bright sun. There's something called the "Sunny 16" rule which basically says that if your aperture is f16, then your shutter speed is the inverse of the ISO. All this means is that ISO100, f16 will be 1/125 sec shutter speed in bright sun. If there are clouds you can lose a couple stops (or more) but in bright sun you'll be fine. Since you want 1/500 shutter speed with ISO100, your aperture would be (or at least close) f8.

Here's how I got that - 1/500 lets in two stops less light than 1/125. To compensate for that, I added two stops back to the aperture setting - f16 > f11 > f8. The sunny 16 rule is very handy to get an idea of what your settings might be, but the meter in your camera is more accurate. I use sunny 16 for situations just like this - to decide how to set up the camera, what film to use, etc. Use the camera's meter when you're shooting though.

[Ultra Magnus]

Thanks.. I'm not man enough yet to tackle full manual controls. I've played with it, and man does it take pics fast when it's not trying to auto adjust everything. I'm starting out with some of the semi auto controls, shutter speed priority in this case. I'll still let it set the aperature and focus, but on my camera (don't know anything about other camers) the ISO is set on the menu and I don't think changes, and stays where I set it on the menu. Sorry if I sound like a newby, but I am! Thanks...

[another view]

Sounds like a good plan. ISO is something most people don't usually adjust much, maybe if you need faster shutter speeds you'd adjust it up but most of the time it would be the shutter and/or aperture that you would adjust. Shutter priority automatic would be a good choice for moving subjects, and I usually use aperture priority for general shooting.

[Ultra Magnus]

thanks.. I played with the ISO settings last night and found that it has an automatic ISO setting, which it has been on, and all the pics that were on it were taken at ISO 64. I even speed the shutter speed up to like 1/500 or faster (I played with a lot of settings last night, can't remember exactly) and it still stayed at ISO 64. So, to play around I set it to ISO 800 (the highest I could set it to) and talk about noise. I can see what you were all referring to. It's hard to explain, but it looked like it had a real bad glare to it.

How do you guys record what settings pics were taken at after you download them off of your camera? On our camera, when the pics are still on it, you can press the little display button and it'll show you what all the settings were set to for that picture, but once we put them on the computer, they are lost. It's hard to use that information for future reference after that.

[Sebastian]

thanks.. I played with the ISO settings last night and found that it has an automatic ISO setting, which it has been on, and all the pics that were on it were taken at ISO 64. I even speed the shutter speed up to like 1/500 or faster (I played with a lot of settings last night, can't remember exactly) and it still stayed at ISO 64. So, to play around I set it to ISO 800 (the highest I could set it to) and talk about noise. I can see what you were all referring to. It's hard to explain, but it looked like it had a real bad glare to it.

How do you guys record what settings pics were taken at after you download them off of your camera? On our camera, when the pics are still on it, you can press the little display button and it'll show you what all the settings were set to for that picture, but once we put them on the computer, they are lost. It's hard to use that information for future reference after that.

Any software that browses the images will show you all the setting for that partcular shot. It's always recorded in the file.

[Photo-John]

Keep it at 64, if you can. I used that camera a bit and it definitely looks best at 64. Wirth some cameras the ISO settings are better than others. But with most compacts it's worth the effort to keep the ISO as low as possible. However, if you want to get a shot, and it's a little dark, be aware that you can increase the ISO and also increase your shutter speed. It's a useful tool as long as you're aware that your sacrificing some image quality to get the shot.

[another view]

How do you guys record what settings pics were taken at after you download them off of your camera? On our camera, when the pics are still on it, you can press the little display button and it'll show you what all the settings were set to for that picture, but once we put them on the computer, they are lost. It's hard to use that information for future reference after that.

Just make sure you're downloading the images (whether directly from the camera or a card reader) through the viewer program that came with the camera. Another way that it can be done is to drag and drop to a file, but if you do that you will lose the shooting data.

Best/fastest way is to put the card into a USB2.0 or Firewire card reader and go through the supplied program. Downloading from the camera is just fine but slower.

[Sebastian]

Just make sure you're downloading the images (whether directly from the camera or a card reader) through the viewer program that came with the camera. Another way that it can be done is to drag and drop to a file, but if you do that you will lose the shooting data.

Best/fastest way is to put the card into a USB2.0 or Firewire card reader and go through the supplied program. Downloading from the camera is just fine but slower.

Steve,

I don't think you'll lose the shooting data when dragging the files over. Actually, I know you won't. The data is written into the file header, anything that reads that file's EXIF data will be able to display the shooting info.

[Ultra Magnus]

Is that for all pic fomats or just RAW files? I finished reading the very lengthy review of the f828 on digital photo review website, and the reviewer mentioned that the header contained that information on the raw files. He didn't however mention that it ONLY did that for raw files. I haven't been able to look up any of that information on our computer. I bet our software sucks. We still use the kodak easy share program to organize our pics, although we download them manually through windows.

[Photo-John]

The EXIF standard was created for JPEG files. It should be in all JPEG files, as long as the camera-maker made the camera so that it would save the information. Attached you'll see a screenshot I just made of a shareware JPEG browsing program I use called, Exif. You can see that it's showing me EXIF data for my 828 images.

[photo101]

Now why cant they inbed that information onto 35mm film...would be very helpful.

[Ultra Magnus]

I found it. The Kodak software my wife uses to organize her albums displays that infromation. thanks! For a while, I'd take a bunch of the same image with differnt setting, see what I did and all, then load them on to the comptuer and be lost as to which pic was shot with which setting.

[Sebastian]

Now why cant they inbed that information onto 35mm film...would be very helpful.

They do. The fancy back for the F5 can be set to burn exposure and copyright info into the blank space between frames.

[photo101]

Which doesnt help me with my n80. hehe oh well