The File Size arms race

Lensflare

Lensflare

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Simon Everett
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Has anyone else noticed how the camera manufacturers have chased each other up the ladder in a bid to have the biggest file size production?
Nikon D800 series
Canon 3DmkXXXVZQPLXXX ?
Fuji GFX with 8056MP or file size bites or something or other....

You save your wages for months, win a lottery ticket and proudly march off into Camer Megaworld and buy the dream machne of your choice. One that creates super quality pictures of mega proportions. Then you come to share you pictures, having taken great care to shoot them to the very best of your ability and created a finished image of 95MB jpeg, which when opened will create a print 100m x 130m at 300dpi.....only when you go to put it on a photography enthusiasts website....it has to be 3 pixels x 5 pixels and no more than 0.5kb ......

Is it me?
 
It's a free world! Well it's not, actually, because we're all crowded onto one little planet. But the main principle that people seem to hold, certainly as consumers, I tend to think, is that if you can afford it, you have a right to have it. This is what would seem to drive the current capitalist model.

So I see people with, say, a Nikon D810, who use it just to reel off snapshots of little if any at all photographic merit. Well that's their privilege. But the same camera can produce pictures of definition comparable with, shall we say medium format film, and that can be a benefit. Forget social media! Make a big fat print!

Horses for courses. Want to post on Farcebook? Use your phone.

No, it's not just you, Simon.
 
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Just post a 100% crop to show how good it is :)
 
Yes, it's you.

It's always you.

Do you know how much the hosting would cost if the owners allowed you to upload your mahoosive image?

No you don't and neither do I.

But I bet it's more than you're paying to subscribe to this "photography enthusiast's website"

Sheesh.
 
anger.jpg

:)
It's just an observation.
 
I can remember the days when a 320MB hard drive was massive and very very expensive, my point being that we had tiny file sizes and most of our photography was done with film.

Because I'm disabled all my media (Films, music, e books etc) is on NAS drives today as are the back ups of my laptop/photographs, the point here being that nowadays my laptop has a 500GB SSD drive, and my NAS drives total over 26TB, yes not GB but TB and I know with file sizes increasing all the time that I will need to upgrade my main 12 TB NAS to 16 TB in the next 5 years!

The upside of course is more data equals less or no compression of files and more detail/better resolution, but imagine if you can what its going to be like when someone comes out with a gigapixel sensor!!
 
GreenNinja67 said:
Yes, it's you.

It's always you.

Do you know how much the hosting would cost if the owners allowed you to upload your mahoosive image?

No you don't and neither do I.

But I bet it's more than you're paying to subscribe to this "photography enthusiast's website"

Sheesh.
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B..bu..but it's the internet. It's free isn't it....everything on the internet is free.......

My point, which seems to have been lost on you, is that while the camera makers are forever making devices to create ever bigger images....the viewer is using devices that need less. So your huge file production in camera is reduced to a postage stamp by the time anyone gets to see it...so why do we need 56MB images when all you look at is a maximum of 500kb ? It is YOU, the consumer, who is paying to throw away all the intervening information.
 
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My preferred end product is a decent sized print - up to A3+ (possibly bigger, IF I ever take a shot I feel is worth it!) so 6000 pixels on the long edge is nice to have (A3+ is 19" x 13") and a few spare pixels allow some cropping. At a "normal" 2:3 ratio, that's 6000 x 4000 pixels, so 24MP.
Completely take the point that for many people, Instagram or farceberk is the biggest their photos get see so even 1 MP is probably enough!
 
kendo1 said:
Just post a 100% crop to show how good it is :)
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Depends on the media I guess. I had a 6Mp image taken on my Canon 300D displayed on a 7 story high video display board in Manchester after coming runner up in a photo competition. They used my image to advertise the exhibition
(edit corrected 10Mp to 6Mp...)

display.jpg
 
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But yes, increased files sizes, increased resolution, increased requirements on the computer to store/process them.
 
I had a 300D, I think they're 6mp. I have some framed A3 prints from it that look ok. They're only A3 though, not 7 story.
 
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Its called marketing. Creating a constant stream of new and "better" items to get you to part with your money. (Funny, no one happened to mention that news agencies usually limit file sizes to 2mb in the interests of handling the data.)
 
Its just part of the larger consumer race to have bigger and better.
Besides if you have the cash to buy a big camera that pushes out big files even though you cant use it to its full potential when sharing images online its not really an issue, its the enjoyment of owning that particular product.

Its no different to buying a car with a 3L engine when a 1L can do the exact same (within the confinds of the highway code)

Or have a 4K TV when full HD will suffice especially if all you do is watch normal tv channels.

You chose to own these products readily knowing the limitations in which they can be used until the third party on the other side changes the way we can use them which usually has a cost factor attributed to it.
 
Nod said:
My preferred end product is a decent sized print - up to A3+ (possibly bigger, IF I ever take a shot I feel is worth it!) so 6000 pixels on the long edge is nice to have (A3+ is 19" x 13") and a few spare pixels allow some cropping. At a "normal" 2:3 ratio, that's 6000 x 4000 pixels, so 24MP.
Completely take the point that for many people, Instagram or farceberk is the biggest their photos get see so even 1 MP is probably enough!
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One good thing about high mp counts plus nice lenses too is that you don't have to fill the frame to get a nice useable end picture. Instead you can crop and maybe crop heavily. I often take pictures intending to crop and maybe to 100% and whilst the end result may not be a gallery quality A3 print it'll be good enough to fill the screen or even for a large print to put on the wall at hone. That wasn't as possible with the 3.1 or even 6mp quality digital cameras of not so long ago.
 
Its because manufacturers know some thing that sells their products - numbers. Tell someone that your product has more of anything than a competitor and many people will be persuaded to buy yours, not theirs.

Dave
 
woof woof said:
I had a 300D, I think they're 6mp. I have some framed A3 prints from it that look ok. They're only A3 though, not 7 story.
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There you go - even better (although I don't think the resolution on the video advertising board was even that good).
 
woof woof said:
One good thing about high mp counts plus nice lenses too is that you don't have to fill the frame to get a nice useable end picture. Instead you can crop and maybe crop heavily. I often take pictures intending to crop and maybe to 100% and whilst the end result may not be a gallery quality A3 print it'll be good enough to fill the screen or even for a large print to put on the wall at hone. That wasn't as possible with the 3.1 or even 6mp quality digital cameras of not so long ago.
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Now compare digital to film and we're not even near to the resolution film gives. We used to have drum scanners at my last company to scan film correctly and the file sizes were huge
 
Lensflare said:
B..bu..but it's the internet. It's free isn't it....everything on the internet is free.......

My point, which seems to have been lost on you, is that while the camera makers are forever making devices to create ever bigger images....the viewer is using devices that need less. So your huge file production in camera is reduced to a postage stamp by the time anyone gets to see it...so why do we need 56MB images when all you look at is a maximum of 500kb ? It is YOU, the consumer, who is paying to throw away all the intervening information.
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I got your point Simon, my post was a tongue in cheek one. It must have been lost on you as I forgot the all important emoticon to denote humour.

:banana:

There, that's better.
 
Byker28i said:
Now compare digital to film and we're not even near to the resolution film gives. We used to have drum scanners at my last company to scan film correctly and the file sizes were huge
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Dunno about that, all I can say is that even MFT gives me better results than I ever got from 35mm. Maybe it's a combination of things including the camera, the lens and that I'm not relying on the crappy processing Jessops or the chemist in the high street did back then. Actually it was poor results that drove me to drop film and go digital.

At the time I assumed they'd cut costs to compete with digital but whatever the reason if the print quality I was getting back hadn't fallen off a cliff I might not have gone digital. That was my experience, others may have better experiences with film.
 
Camera enthusiasts, ie us lot, have always been obsessed with sharpness. And nothing seems to have changed, even though we passed the point of relevance a long time ago.
 
At a guess, resolution now outstrips what most lenses are capable of.
 
Nod said:
At a guess, resolution now outstrips what most lenses are capable of.
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Not true. The best lenses these days can more than keep up - check out the detail you can get from pixel-shift with cameras like the new Sony A7Riii that effectively double the resolution to over 80mp. Scroll down a bit here https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-a7r-mark-iii-review/6

Not sure how useful that feature is in practical terms, but it shows what a good lens can do.
 
From that DPR article/review, " the a7R III offers multi-shot mode that uses the image stabilization system to move the sensor by one pixel between each of four exposures. This means that every pixel position is captured by a red, a blue and two green pixels, making it possible to render the scene in full color without undergoing the demosaicing step normally required." Not sure how much I actually believe that that's really possible. Even mounted on a solid tripod, I would think that the setup would move fractionally between each exposure, negating any single pixel shift the IBIS does. I can see that stacking several images will give better colour accuracy (for the reason given in the article) but not that it can be achieved in the way they say it is.

However, I was wrong about lens resolution (although I did qualify my guess with MOST!) so I might be about the pixel shift thing too!
 
HoppyUK said:
Not true. The best lenses these days can more than keep up - check out the detail you can get from pixel-shift with cameras like the new Sony A7Riii that effectively double the resolution to over 80mp. Scroll down a bit here https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-a7r-mark-iii-review/6

Not sure how useful that feature is in practical terms, but it shows what a good lens can do.
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A perfect lens can project ~ 60MP on a FF sensor at f/5.6 (the aperture used in that example). In reality the camera is using pixel shift to more nearly record the max sensor resolution of 42MP. But there are also other benefits to oversampling even if the actual recorded resolution isn't increased.

But a better question is how many pixels do you need? A human w/ 20/20 vision can see about 300dpi/ppi max from 12". A human w/ perfect vision can see about 2x as much, so ~ 300dpi/ppi from 24" (actually a bit more). And every time you double the distance you halve the dpi/ppi resolvable. There's zero point to having more dpi/ppi unless the image is going to be viewed magnified (from shorter distances).

Interestingly, increasing the recorded resolution increases the DOF in an image... is that a good thing?

Another significant thing that increased MP's does is make clients happy. I hear/get requests for images that can be printed *very* large at 300dpi, or for 50MP files, and even things like 50MB files (minimums)... and there's no way you're going to convince them that they are wrong/confused.
 
We can bandy about with all the technical stuff, and 'prove' that more pixels is pointless, but nobody is listening - pixels sell cameras.

The flipside of that is, more pixels don't do any harm (except to your wallet) and give us a warm glow :D
 
By a Sony a7SII, same MP count as an iPhone :)
 
Lensflare said:
Has anyone else noticed how the camera manufacturers have chased each other up the ladder in a bid to have the biggest file size production?
Nikon D800 series
Canon 3DmkXXXVZQPLXXX ?
Fuji GFX with 8056MP or file size bites or something or other....

You save your wages for months, win a lottery ticket and proudly march off into Camer Megaworld and buy the dream machne of your choice. One that creates super quality pictures of mega proportions. Then you come to share you pictures, having taken great care to shoot them to the very best of your ability and created a finished image of 95MB jpeg, which when opened will create a print 100m x 130m at 300dpi.....only when you go to put it on a photography enthusiasts website....it has to be 3 pixels x 5 pixels and no more than 0.5kb ......

Is it me?
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It’s you. As I’m sure you know photography forums are far from the only place finished photos are displayed
 
I would think that for most of us, dynamic range and noise-handling are far more important than sheer megapixel counts?
 
droj said:
I would think that for most of us, dynamic range and noise-handling are far more important than sheer megapixel counts?
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Well obviously, I want that, need that, as well. How else can I justify the next pointless upgrade?
 
Man maths! Want = need = have! :D
 
There aren't many camera's that won't give a sharp image, viewing size and distance obviously has a big influence on how sharp an image will look. The majority of people probably pint A4, A3+, my 15mp camera will give a sharp image at those sizes, even when cropped 50% for A4 (not sure about A3 as I haven't tried).
But as has been stated above mp sell camera's. That's not to say I wouldn't have a camera with a large mp count if I could afford it, but I would be more interested in noise handling and dynamic range.
 
Nostromo said:
but I would be more interested in noise handling and dynamic range.
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Not as sexy though to Joe Public, but it is odd that the pro cameras have gone down that route when most enthusiasts/pros would probably agree with you.
Few years ago motorcycles got bigger and more powerful engines each year despite the fact they were evil handling things, but between traffic lights hp/torque wars were waged.
Happened in hi-fi too more Watts despite them distorting all over the place, British low powered amps could be driven to ridiculous noise levels but didnt have massive output or shiny buttons, guess who won.
Funny old world
Matt
 
So, my dissection of the 'pixels arms race' wasn't far off then......the motorbike analogy works perfectly for me. Mines bigger than yours, therefore I have to be a 'more committed' or 'better' biker than you. How many miles you done this year? Well, what does that matter? Mines bigger, the fact it sits in the garage has no bearing on the subject ! :banana: Bigger pixel cameras - = better photographers, of course! My friend has a bigger one than you....
 
I think more pixels allow us to use our fixed lenses instead of zooms. ie it allows reasonable cropping without losing so much quality as to make the picture no good. This is extremely handy with macro as there are no macro zoom lenses, at least not acceptable ones. The same applies to telephoto.
I would always find a use for 60 or even 100MP, though processing would be a problem today.
If you can't use the extra pixels then don't buy the camera that has them, but I would hope that people do buy them because that will keep the price down :)
 
It's no different really, to buying a car that'll do 180mph, knowing full well you'll never do anything remotely near that speed.
 
Bollygum said:
If you can't use the extra pixels then don't buy the camera that has them...
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If only that were possible. Camera manufacturers aren't like car makers, they don't offer the same body with different 'engine' options.
 
As has been said, more pixels can be used for cropping/zooming but manufactures could be more creative with them like Fuji with the X10 where 2 pixels can be “combined” to give greater dynamic range or less noise etc producing a 6MP file from a 12MP sensor.
 
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