T Rittenhouse wrote: > Let me warn you, the print from a Canon D30 Mike Johnson sent into > the Challenge, the one that made me ask if I should use such prints > to rate the printers, was so good it made my eyes blink.
Let that be a lesson to the pixel counters; there's a lot more to image quality than just the number of pixels a camera records. People who think the Foveon (or the Philips or the Fuji or whatever) won't equal 35mm film because it doesn't capture enough pixels are missing this. Of course those who say it'll be *better* are probably missing it too. The proof or lack thereof will be in the prints. I'm really curious about these particular new sensors but the one I'm most interested in is actually the oldest: the Philips. A full-frame chip gives you more than the advantage of being able to use wide angle lenses. It gives you the full resolution of your lenses. Consider two CCDs, both producing 6 megapixels, but one being full-frame and the other being smaller. A 35mm frame has a diagonal dimension of 43mm. If you use a CCD with a diagonal of, say, 28mm, you gat a "focal length multiplier" factor of about 1.5 with the smaller chip. Now say your lens has a resolution of a nice round figure like 50 lpm. That works out to 1400 lines across the frame of the small sensor. A full-frame sensor, however, with *the same lens* would get 2100 lines across the full frame. In other words, the smaller CCD not only multiplies your focal length by 1.5, it *divides* the effective resolution of your lens by 1.5. The pixel giveth and the pixel taketh away. This assumes all things being equal, of course, and all other things are never equal. There are plenty of other ways to screw up a chip, so rather than predict great things from the Philips CCD, I'm going to sit back and wait to see how things shake out. Like I said, I'm really curious to see images from this latest batch of sensors. -- Mark Roberts www.robertstech.com - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
