Fuji are so close to delivering the 'digital rangefinder' many here would love: just put the S100FS sensor in a typical compact body with higher quality, less ambitious lens covering, say 25-100mm.
The camera will be very interesting, but then again I was expecting more from the P5000. The P5100 was a slight improvement, but still short.
A little point and shoot doesn't even need a to be an APS-C sensor. It could be 4/3rds. The Fuji chip in the S100 like Mark mentioned is another option. It's such a shame that Fuji won't sell their chips out to the other manufacturers like Sony. I think they will in the future
Back to this camera, the 13MP chip is actually quite nice for what it is. The W300 (Sony) has been the best Sony for a few years. They really did make some good stuff before they went soft. The R1 comes to mind.
In the P&S area the compeition is between Canon and Sony. Hopefully soon, some of the others like Samsung, Panasonic and Olympus will show release some 'true-enthusiast-photographer' cameras to compete with the DP1, Ricoh GX/GR etc. I know they can do it!
Jman13 wrote:
Now if someone would actually put FEWER pixels in one of these. I like my G9 a lot, but I wish it were a 6MP camera instead of 12.
13.5 MP on a tiny sensor at ISO6400? That'll be complete mush.
I keep seeing people ask for fewer pixels, a sentiment that seems to me to be based on something of a misconception. People think that since smaller pixels are individually noisier, therefore the picture is noisier. That's isn't necessarily the case. That line of thinking leads you towards the ultimate camera: six pixels. Pixels so clean you could eat off them. ISO 10,000,000. Saves so much disc space. 500 frames per second. Ten million bit for crazy latitude (oops! there goes all that saved disc space). The ultimate camera.
The reality is different: a 1Ds3 has better high iso performance than a 1D3 when you look at actual pictures. The 1Ds3 pixels may be visibly noisier at 100% on your monitor, but there are so many more of them, so the noise of a pixel is less significant in the overall scheme. At 100% your monitor is showing the 1Ds3 file in far more detail than the 1D3 file. That's why the noise looks worse. Print both to the same size, and you find that you have been deceived by simple arithmetic: the 'noisier' file printed a cleaner print.
There are two main factors which affect how good a photo looks at some high iso: the generation of technology in the sensor, and the size of the sensor itself. Bigger photo-sites won't help because there will be fewer of them. Area taken up by the boundaries of micro-lenses may cause some loss, but judging by the 1Ds3 and 1D3, it's not a huge factor at 6 µm. Picture noise holds up much better than pixel noise as you increase the density.
So would a 6 megapixel show less per picture noise? Perhaps not by very much. Lots of noisier pixels can match fewer less noisy pixels for high iso, but they certainly will screw the latter in a detail contest.
Forget 6 megapixels, I'm with the fellas baying for a 12 megapixel APS-C pocket camera. Sensor size really does make a difference to light gathering.
Well, that's true if the sensor is actually using all the pixels, even with noise. The thing is, due to noise from the tiny sensor, the 12MP image on my G9 has a bit less detail than the 8MP image on my 30D. I'd like to see a balance between resolution and noise, such that at low ISOs, the sensor is actually resolving all the detail it can. Yes, I've reduced my G9 files at ISO 800 to 6 MP files, and they look quite good. I'm pleased with the camera overall, but so many of those pixels are wasted to noise because of the insane pixel density that they'd be better off halving the resolution in my opinion.
Jman13 wrote:
Well, that's true if the sensor is actually using all the pixels, even with noise. The thing is, due to noise from the tiny sensor, the 12MP image on my G9 has a bit less detail than the 8MP image on my 30D. I'd like to see a balance between resolution and noise, such that at low ISOs, the sensor is actually resolving all the detail it can. Yes, I've reduced my G9 files at ISO 800 to 6 MP files, and they look quite good. I'm pleased with the camera overall, but so many of those pixels are wasted to noise because of the insane pixel density that they'd be better off halving the resolution in my opinion. ...Show more →
I think you're still not thinking clearly about this. Pixels are not wasted to noise. Even when the signal to noise ratio is so high that noise dwarfs the signal of an individual pixel, statistically, the signal is still there, on the macroscopic scale. That's why looking at 100% onscreen magnification is so misleading. You could have a 200 megapixel file with disgusting noise, and find that it makes a better print than a 12 megapixel file with barely perceptible noise. Whether your sensor 'is actually resolving all the detail it can' is of purely academic interest when considering the dirty compromise of capturing usable image data at high ISOs.
Here's a quote from a very interesting page about these issues:
"The above DSLR/digicam comparison outlines the extremes of what may be possible with current or near-term technology, if digicam pixel densities were scaled up to full-frame sensors. The fact that a digicam's performance is in the same ballpark as the best DSLR's when referred to fixed spatial scale, suggests that the problems with noise in digicams are not due to their ever smaller pixels, but rather it is due to their small sensors."
The article is here: http://theory.uchicago.edu/~ejm/pix/20d/tests/noise/noise-p3.html#bitdepth
One interesting point in the linked page is that the appropriate metric of signal to noise ratio per square meter of sensor is about the same on the 1D3 and 1Ds3. Since the s has a larger sensor, it is less noisy per image.
brainiac wrote:
I keep seeing people ask for fewer pixels, a sentiment that seems to me to be based on something of a misconception. People think that since smaller pixels are individually noisier, therefore the picture is noisier. That's isn't necessarily the case. That line of thinking leads you towards the ultimate camera: six pixels. Pixels so clean you could eat off them. ISO 10,000,000. Saves so much disc space. 500 frames per second. Ten million bit for crazy latitude (oops! there goes all that saved disc space). The ultimate camera.
The reality is different: a 1Ds3 has better high iso performance than a 1D3 when you look at actual pictures. The 1Ds3 pixels may be visibly noisier at 100% on your monitor, but there are so many more of them, so the noise of a pixel is less significant in the overall scheme. At 100% your monitor is showing the 1Ds3 file in far more detail than the 1D3 file. That's why the noise looks worse. Print both to the same size, and you find that you have been deceived by simple arithmetic: the 'noisier' file printed a cleaner print.
There are two main factors which affect how good a photo looks at some high iso: the generation of technology in the sensor, and the size of the sensor itself. Bigger photo-sites won't help because there will be fewer of them. Area taken up by the boundaries of micro-lenses may cause some loss, but judging by the 1Ds3 and 1D3, it's not a huge factor at 6 µm. Picture noise holds up much better than pixel noise as you increase the density.
So would a 6 megapixel show less per picture noise? Perhaps not by very much. Lots of noisier pixels can match fewer less noisy pixels for high iso, but they certainly will screw the latter in a detail contest.
Forget 6 megapixels, I'm with the fellas baying for a 12 megapixel APS-C pocket camera. Sensor size really does make a difference to light gathering....Show more →
Excellent post. Every digital camera owner should read this.
I'll agree with most of what Braniac is saying, but I do wonder how many 1/1.7 lenses can actually fully resolve 13.5 MP? I know it's a lot easier to synthesize high quality lenses at that size, but the pixel pitch is getting pretty tiny. Oversampling the lens to a degree is good, (improved spatial frequency, etc) but too much is definitely unnecessary.
Daniel Heineck wrote:
I'll agree with most of what Braniac is saying, but I do wonder how many 1/1.7 lenses can actually fully resolve 13.5 MP? I know it's a lot easier to synthesize high quality lenses at that size, but the pixel pitch is getting pretty tiny. Oversampling the lens to a degree is good, (improved spatial frequency, etc) but too much is definitely unnecessary.
I agree - lenses certainly have to keep up with the ever shrinking pixel. Maybe they'll spoil us one day and make a compact with a prime (!!) lens.
And, with these minute pixels, at what point does diffraction begin to degrade the image?
I think one of the 4/3rds sensors would be an excellent compromise; I have always maintained that larger sensors are the way to go, and the E-420 sensor does make quite clean files—certainly good enough for a quality P&S.
I sold the DP1, and kept the E-420: larger, but way more flexible. It's all a compromise.
