I’m with you… what good does increased MP do if when you view the image at 100% it’s all noisy and the focus looks soft because of that? In reality, most people don’t print larger than 4×6 on average. Thats 1200×1800 pixels when printed at 300 PPI (what is considered “print quality, though you can get great prints at much lower PPI settings). That’s 2.16 megapixels folks.

Most of what makes today’s cameras “better” is the image processing and much improved lag times.. not more megapixels.

If you are still looking for a camera, consider the A570IS. The image stabilization is extremely useful in low-light circumstances. It lets you use a lower ISO rating more often, thus avoiding the worst cause of noise in small-sensor digicams.

Thanks for writing, and sorry for the delay in this reply. The image I show is just a very small crop from a full resolution image. I agree that it doesn’t prove anything, since perhaps I overexposed the whole image. On your suggestion I have added the full frame shot from that day (reduced for size). Having said that, the question of whether or not one can tell dynamic range from a single image from a camera is actually a complicated one.

In any scene will sufficient tonal range, the camera will basically try to map the darkest scene tone to black, and the lightest to some color with a nearly full saturation of at least one of the additive primaries. I’m being approximate here, but my point is that in a complex scene the camera will generally give you an image that pretty much uses the full range of the digital image format it’s using. The question of dynamic range is really asking what does the full range of the digital image correspond to in actual optical brightness in the original scene? Or put another way, how many bits of resolvable information is each pixel capable of measuring? (This is a function of both well depth and noise.) This can’t really be known without having a “master” picture of the scene that day taken with some calibrated imager of sufficient dynamic range. For example, you don’t really know without having been there that the sky was not an incredibly bright thin midday overcast, and not the late afternoon clear that it really was.

So, I guess I’m not really proving anything scientifically with my single picture, even when I show the full frame. The only value, if any, is really qualitative and vague: I can tell you it was a late afternoon, and we all know from experience that a late afternoon shot on a cloudless day with a brick building should result in a sky that is not overexposed with a digital camera of any reasonable dynamic range.

So, your comment is very appreciated, and brings up an interesting point. Does anybody know if there is a review site that actually scientifically measures the dynamic range of the digital cameras they test using calibrated equipment? This is such an important figure of merit for a camera, and yet I can’t find anybody who measures it.

I have one comment about the photo you showed. It *is* a great example of pixel bleeding and a blown-out sky — but I think maybe it’s not totally fair to that particular camera. It actually is not showing the extremes of dynamic range (there are very few shadows/darks/blacks in the shot) — it’s only showing one end of the extreme, the highlights. I’m guessing that the camera was set to a matrix metering mode (ESP in Olympus cameras) and pointed at the roof. Had you used a center-weighted average, or spot metering, and pointed the camera at the sky, you would’ve gotten a very different result.(Although… if you used spot/cntr-weighted-avg metering and pointed the camera at the roof, you could’ve ended up with this shot as well.)

I’m not in any way sticking up for this camera, and I really appreciate your engineer’s explanation of why cameras with small sensors/high megapixel counts have the issues they do. And my experience with the small-sensor Olympus cameras is certainly consistent with yours. I just think there are some photographic choices that were made with this shot that perhaps have exacerbated its dynamic range problems.

Sorry for the late reply. I’m afraid I’ll have to weasel a bit on this answer, since not every company uses the same CCD technology, and thus pixel size isn’t the only variable. (In fact, at the risk of this comment stream turning into a Fuji commercial–I swear I don’t have anything to do with them–I should mention that Fuji has developed a CCD which uses dual pixel types with different sensitivities, which overcomes a lot of the dynamic range limitations of small pixels. This may have filtered down into their lower-end cameras by now.)

Having made that disclaimer, in my research on cameras prompted by my disappointement in the otherwise great Olympus, I estimate that a good guideline for the minimum ratio of CCD size to pixel count is
,
where is the size of the CCD (as given in the technical specs) and is the number of pixels in millions. Note that it’s actually the ratio of the length squared to the pixel count (which is proportional to the area of a single pixel). For example, the Olympus I purchased has a ratio of about 0.016, which is probably why I’m not happy with it…

By the way, thanks for providing me with a good excuse to use the LaTeX plugin!

But at the same time for photography enthusiast who needs wide angle and more optical zoom, such expensive and super zoom cameras can solve their problem.

The answer of your concerns about adding more pixels is that now the companies are also increasing the CCD sensor size from standard 1/2.5

A similar kind of issue was raised some 5~6 years ago about increasing the hard disk capacity. People at that time also raise the same point that adding more sector/disk to increase the HDD capacity would result in more bad sectors since the size of HDD cylinder was kept same but the time showed that such problems were solved.

Check both cameras here

http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/review/2007/01/31/Fujifilm-FinePix-S9600/p1

http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/review/2007/12/21/Olympus-SP-560UZ/p1

To save _your_ money, dude. If the size
of the sensor is increased, then the size of
lenses and its focal length has to be
increased. Can you imagine what would be
lens size, weight, and cost of a camera
with 27-500mm focus length equivalent with
a sensor, say, twice bigger?

> The counterintuitive upshot is that you can
> actually get a better quality image from
> a $200 low-end camera than from the
> higher-end $400 model from the same brand.

Nothing counterintuitive. If you are not going
to use zoom more than 3x, stay away from
ultra-zooms. You pay extra $$ not for image
quality, but for ability to have a pocket
telephoto. If you are going to use zoom
in the range 5-18x, you have to be prepared
to have somewhat worse image quality. How much
worse? Can you tollerate it? How important for
you to make shots at high zoom? This is
the trade-off worth considering.