It seems to me that increases in sensor resolution pass through various phases:
1) Can out resolve the shooting ability of most photographers 2) Can out resolve the shooting abilty of a good photographer taking care to get a sharp photo. 3) Can out resolve the nyquist frequency of the best lenses. At which point anti-aliasing filters provide no benefit, and with current image processing techniques we no longer gain any benefit from higher resolution. But what if we could increase sensor resolution several times past that, to three, or even ten times the imaging capability of the best lenses? What could we do then? Apart from filling up memory cards and hard drives faster than I could even imagine in my worst manic jag? first of all, we'd probably want the sensor resolution to be all the color sites that go into a pixel to fit within the nyquist rate, rather than just the raw pixel sites, so we don't get bitten by some pathologic example of trying to photograph an image of a bayer filter or something. We could also try going from the trichromat bayer filter to one that has a finer resolution of color sensitivity, or even one that has both "rods and cones", a site without a color filter that gives raw luminance and no chroma information. Then there are the possibilities in image processing. Would we be better able to process away a lot more noise? Would we be able to characterise the edge blur of a lens, and better correct for it, bringing after the fact resolution up beyond the theoretic ideal? At a certain point, lightfield work would become feasible. A lytro that had the final resolution that matches current SLRs, would be interesting. But what could be even more interesting would be if such calcuations could correct for any aberrations and imperfections in the lenses. I think that we're several Moore cycles away in both sensor technology and computational horsepower to make such things feasible, but they're fun to think about. -- Larry Colen [email protected] http://red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
