Comment by PStamatiou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PStamatiou | Hacker News Reader

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Go troll somewhere else.

"Which is Better: a 10MP camera dialed down to 3MP, or a 3MP camera?

Easy: when set to the same resolution, a higher-resolution camera set to a lower resolution always looks better than a camera with that native resolution.

This is because digital cameras cheat and use Bayer Interpolation. They don't really have that many color pixels on their CCDs. CCDs are actually black-and-white and use colored stripes to see color. Bayer Interpolation spreads the data around to fill in each pixel as if it could could see color. Because of this the images of all digital cameras at their native resolutions are more blurred than they could be.

If you halve the size of the image, the pixel-to-pixel sharpness will increase because there is now enough data for each and every pixel. See my Bayer Interpolation page for examples.

Therefore it's always better to use a higher resolution camera set down to a lower resolution than a camera with only that much resolution."

I still wouldn't shoot in anything but RAW, because that's like throwing away the negative. Not that this means I would dismiss anything else someone says who doesn't shoot in RAW, but that'd be my number #1 tip for them: get a good workflow set up and keep the negatives. Not even a 5D can guess as nicely as you can adjust the sliders.

Which is Better: a 10MP camera dialed down to 3MP, or a 3MP camera?

Depends on the lens. 10MP vs 3MP is one thing, 10MP vs 1000MP another... at some point you're just blowing up a fixed amount of signal, and with most lenses that point comes much earlier than one would think.

But even then, doing things like straightening or color adjustments before scaling it down looks better than doing it afterwards. That's what the camera does when you shoot in JPEG, but once that's done, it's done, no going back.

Would you buy CD, transcode it to MP3, and then throw the CD away? Maybe not all photos are that important, but sometimes you only find out where a particular one falls after some time passed.

Exactly, resample in Lightroom after post-processing, not early in the process.

except the sensor isn't a CCD, and your argument is complete nonsense. Of course a 5D mkIII is a better camera, of course it will produce better results, but my point was that if you're going to down sample, why not save yourself a boat load of cash and just use a Rebel. I guarantee you'd never see or know the difference. It's not until you make a large print that the difference would be apparent, and since you've stupidly downsampled you've lost that advantage.

You might want to read this, it will help you understand how sensors work.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-sensors.ht...

Actually, faster focusing, better lenses (and thus better bokeh) do make a difference.

I recently compared a Nikon D3200, D5200, D7100 and a D700, all using the same (or close to same) lower megapixels count of around 10. The higher end cameras made a huge difference in quality. The lower end also could not support higher end flashes.

I own a proofing company with thousands of users, and ran a print lab for years. You don't need more than 200PPI for larger prints and thus can save a lot.

In fact, considering most people order prints 11x14 and smaller, having the larger megapixels actually hurt quality because the printers (Fuji, Durst, etc.) downsample the files and you lose sharpness if you send them the large file (which most photographers do).

For my wedding shooting, I never need a larger file than 12 megapixels as that's large enough for a 30x40 at 300 dpi. I prefer to save the hard drive space.

of course better cameras make better photos, that was never in question, and the 5D mkIII is one of the best out there.

My point was that shooting that wonderful camera in 5mp mode is stupid.

"The higher end cameras made a huge difference in quality" - even when you down-sampled them to 5mp? And I think you're being ridiculous when you say "huge". There will be more intra-shot difference in quality than between any two modern DSLRs. The light will make far more difference to whatever it is you think is quality.

For weddings of course you don't need much. That was my point really.

You do realize right that you can put those same better lenses on the entry level canon right?

You, and everyone else, it seems, misunderstood. My point was that down-sampling to 5mp a canon 5dMkIII's images is a waste of that camera, and any entry level DSLR will produce indistinguishable images at that down-sampled level.

Also the standard for lab work is 300PPI, not 200, so I am not sure if I lend very much credibility to your comment.

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