jhapeman wrote:
Second, the higher pixel count makes even slight misses much more noticeable due to the different circle of confusion. Finally, the tiny pixels are just more prone to showing diffraction issues with that combination. Overall not a deal breaker, but worth noting. On a related note, and for the same reasons, tiny softening from heat distortion is more readily apparent if you pixel peep.
Thanks for sharing your detailed experience with the new camera.
I want to comment on the above since some people get confused about these issues.
The “circle of confusion” and diffraction are exactly the same on any full frame camera, regardless of the sensor resolution. These are optical quality’s that are produced by lenses, not by sensor.
What is different is that if you look at a crop of a given pixel dimension (say 800x800 pixels) from the higher resolution camera you are simply looking more closely at a smaller portion of the overall image. In fact, if you made equal size prints of images from a 30MP camera and a 60MP camera… there would be exactly the same amount of diffraction blur.
(In these cases, the potential image detail advantage always goes to the higher resolution sensor, since it has the potential to get slightly more detail when shooting at its diffraction-limited aperture… and will be just as good at smaller apertures.)
Bottom line: It isn’t that there’s a softness issue from diffraction or a larger “circle of confusion” — it is just that you are looking more closely at a smaller section of the image area.
And, of course, none of this is to say that everyone needs the highest MP sensor. In fact, there’s a strong argument that most don’t. And there are performance trade—offs when opting for higher resolution sensors.
Jun 26, 2026 at 10:20 AM
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