tsdevine
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 p.3 #4 · R5 - 400 MEGAPIXELS Vs Sony A1 pixel shift | |
I don't disagree that there probably is limited commercial interest in this at this point, but back on the technology itself, I think maybe Canon is a little behind. I forget which manufacturer implemented this first, I want to say Pentax, but there are solutions that address movement (within some level of reasonableness) within the shots. Sony has implemented something similar within the past 6 months. Maybe others have as well. If Canon invests more I would imagine they might provide a solution that keeps in it some RAW form, maybe a linear DNG. The technology to address movement will probably improve over time as well. I imagine Canon will refine their solution if the market demands it, maybe not if there isn't enough interest.
Realistically if there is absolutely no application for this whatsoever in any possible way, it won't get much attention from the manufacturers. And I don't think anyone is saying everything should run out and shoot pixel shift like crazy.
We'll see where it goes....if anywhere....
gdanmitchell wrote:
A question.
When you say "massively more detailed," were you looking at the entire image, sized so that it fit your screen? Or were you zooming in at some higher resolution that displayed only a portion of the image? If the latter, how big would the full image have been at that resolution if you had a monitor are enough to show the whole thing?
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This is partly what I'm trying to get at. While we cannot deny the potential for a 400MP image to contain greater detail than a 50MP image — if all goes well — an important question, again, is whether that potential meaningful in real-world photography, especially given its limitations. My thinking is that it may be on extremely rare occasion, but in the vast majority of cases it is not.
As to my own history with supplying images to clients for extremely large reproductions, I have a few stories.
One of my photographs, a panoramic image of a redwood forest scene that I created years ago by stitching images from a 12MP full frame camera, has been used in several very large installations. The first was in a San Francisco architectural firm's building, where they printed a 18'-wide version of the image (something like 4' tall) for installing in a hallway.
I have a large format printer, and initially I thought I could make the print for them, but various practical things made that, well, impractical. Then I looked around for a service where I could supply a file, have them make the print and take care of mounting and shipping. None of the services I knew of could do it. Eventually I ended up licensing the firm to use a copy of a file that I transmitted to them to have a service they found make a single version of the image.
I also licensed a different crop of the same image for another use, this time a 31' x 11' (yes, that's feet) version to cover a large wall in a retail establishment near a national park. Clearly, there was no way that I was going to produce that myself, and I definitely had no connections to a service that could do what they wanted. So again I licensed them to make one reproduction and sent them a very large file.
Some reading this might be thinking, "Well there you go! You just admitted that you DID sell/license an image that only worked because it was super-high resolution!" Well, yes. But I have written that there are "edge cases" where such a thing might be useful, but they are extremely rare. That's precisely what my story demonstrates.
So, if you are working in a market where you clients will regularly be licensing extremely large reproductions, then you might benefit from super-high resolution images to the extent that things like pixel shifting and (more likely) stitching are worth pursuing on a regular basis. But for looking at photographs on your computer screen? Making a print to hang in your home? Pretty darned unlikely! :-)
(Also, if this is part of your regular work, there's a pretty good chance that you are working with a format large than full-frame already.)
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Two of those categories (food and art reproduction) are usually done with entirely static subjects, so there are a few (again) edge cases where that might be useful — though I still don't think many folks around here are doing that sort of work in situations where clients would care whether the image came from a 100MP miniMF system or a 400MP pixel-shifted image. Art reproduction at the very high end? Maybe. Food photography? I'm not coming up with many examples of where the advantage would be meaningful.
Product photography is a possibility in some cases. (There are a few FM folks who do such things, though their work with miniMF and FF seems to be pretty fine already.) These would, of course, need to be photographs of a product that isn't moving.
Macro photography? Maybe with some subjects — jewelry, circuit boards, etc. — that don't move. But again, what is the output use case where that resolution would be meaningful?
Once again: I'm not questioning the fact that a pixel shifted image could measure better in some ways than a image produced by other means — just whether that difference is actually meaningful in real world output.
YMMV.
Dan...Show more →
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