gdanmitchell
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Peter Figen wrote:
It's not so much the hard drive size or cost but often multi-layered files from 100mp+ cameras can add up quickly when you might have a hundred layers or more, or when you're focus stacking 300 images together. No matter how fast your new computer is, it's going to slow down when you're working on a 25 gb .psb file. They take a long time to open and an even longer time to save and you've got to save early and often.
To be sure, I think that the performance of current camera is excellent and if the MP resolution, etc of cameras advanced no more at all we would continue to able to photographs of outstanding technical and aesthetic quality. So my point isn't that we "need" higher resolution or anything else.
In fact, few (almost no one really) are handicapped by the resolution of modern digital camera sensors. (There are other improvements that could make more important differences, at least to some photographers — for example, things like global shutters.)
What I'm acknowledging is that despite the logic of the position that "we already have enough," it is likely that we'll continue to get more anyway. To some extent is an issue of human nature. For example, virtually no one has a need for a car that goes 90mph or faster, but the least capable version of the last car I bought supposedly has a top speed over 150mph. Some people won't buy that model because some other one has a higher top speed!
So as long as capability can be increased without performance costs compared to the previous generation of a thing, that performance is likely to continue to be improved, almost regardless of the value of the improvement in objective terms.
Regarding the huge file size and computer speed issue, it is true that processing a gigantic file takes longer than processing a smaller one. But it is also true that, given the vast improvements to storage and processors, the file size at which that becomes an issue is way bigger than it was before.
My academic field was electronic music. The first time I was able to use a computer to actually make music was during a workshop at a university that had a Department of Defense funded artificial intelligence lab. (It also was one of the very small number of nodes on the "DARPA-net," the predecessor of the internet, which is another story...) If I recall, the entire multi-million dollar center used washing-machine-sized 5 MEGAbyte hard drives. A facility like this one was the only kind which, in that early 1970s era had sufficient computer and storage power to make computer-generated audio... and then we were only allowed to compile sound files in the middle of the night (between midnight and 6:00 AM) because each process required essentially the entire capacity of the whole center for several minutes!
I'm trying to imagine how the conversation would have gone if someone had said that someday we'd have orders of magnitude more computing and storage capacity in the hands of every person's handheld phone, most of going largely unused. ;-)
The case of focus-stacking 300 images is an interesting one, for more reasons that I'll enumerate here. But one is that, even though that pushes computer capacity (and patience) today, it wasn't long ago that such a thing was unimaginable. And back then there were people telling us that the kind of computing and storage capacity to do such a thing was such an edge case that no one would ever actually need that kind of power. And they were wrong.
So, what I'm saying is that whether you or I believe that we "need" things like 800MP sensors for our photography (I'm betting the both of us would agree that we don't), as performance capabilities continue to improve and costs per unit of performance continue to decline, capabilities that we can't fathom today will become normal and cost-effective going forward.
Admittedly, this digression is pretty far removed from actually making photographs. :-)
YMMV.
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