Tech Reviews

Digital camera manufacturers have begun releasing 8-megapixel models which is great news for anyone who's interested in buying a camera that isn't 8 megapixels. Let's look at the bigger picture to understand why.

Much like the human eye, a digital camera sees an image because light is reflected onto a checkerboard-like sensor inside. Each square of the checkerboard is a pixel, and each pixel can record only one color. Until recently, consumer digital cameras have been limited to the neighborhood of three megapixels, meaning that the camera's largest-file-size images could be blown-up to about 8x10, or the size of a sheet of A4 paper, before distorting.

Of course, few consumers print the photos they take any larger than 8x10. In fact, as photo processing businesses will tell you, fewer people are printing their photos today at all, opting instead to view them through a home PC and share them through e-mail or online albums. Such photos are cumbersome if larger than a couple hundred kilobytes. (And let's be honest: Aunt Sally back home likely doesn't care if the photos you send her contain "noise" in the shadows.

Yet manufacturers, driven to make ever-clearer images, develop sensors with an ever-increasing number of megapixels. Photographers at Apple Daily, for example, capture their images using 11-megapixel Canon EOS 1DS digitals and the photos that go to page are several megabytes in size. (By contrast, none of the photos accompanying this review is larger than 200 kilobytes.) The new 8-megapixel cameras are the current cutting edge technology being marketed to "prosumers" -- a category of gadget freak the industry has created by jamming more professional technology into consumer cameras as that technology becomes less expensive.

And so, for Joe Photobug, a new line of 8-megapixel cameras is good news because it means lower prices -- and hopefully a watershed of improved functionality -- on the lesser-megapixel cameras he's more likely to buy. This includes a now wide variety of cameras with 5 megapixel sensors, an amount that is rapidly gaining acceptance as the "good enough" standard among shutterbugs. More than one of the professional photographers queried for this review cited 5 megapixels as a ceiling for non-professional use. A camera with a greater number, they said, is a tool few consumers would use to its full potential.

Having said that -- and being an unrepentant gadget freak -- the new 8 megapixels are really cool. Canon in particular is pulling focus with their PowerShot Pro1, not so much for the fact that it contains an 8-megapixel sensor as for its lens. The cream of Canon's canon of lenses is their L-series -- easily identifiable by the red ring that encircles them. Never before have they dubbed a digital camera lens as member of the L fellowship before the Pro1. It's been given this distinction because it contains both ultra-low dispersion and fluorite lens elements, meaning it exceeds glass in its ability to capture an image without distortion.

Perhaps more noticeably, it's been outfitted with a 28-200mm, 7x zoom lens -- a considerably broader range of zoom than found on most digital camera lenses. Despite this range, you can still add wide-angle or telephoto lens attachments, increasing its range to 300mm. Cool.

Here again, one of the great things about the Pro1 is that it is already pushing down prices on another excellent Canon, the 5-megapixel PowerShot G5. A quick inquiry with the same pros mentioned above shows that the G5 is finding a niche as an all-purpose carry-around or for situations that don't require a full outfit of equipment. It's effectively the same camera as the popular G3, except with a larger sensor and a few minor tweaks. (However, like the G3, the G5 still annoyingly casts a shadow in the lower right-hand corner of photos when the flash is used due to its close proximity to the lens barrel. The barrel can also still be seen through the viewfinder. Get your finger out of the picture, Canon!

Both the G5 and Pro1 are better cameras for the hardware that drives them. The DIGIC makes the cameras faster than their contemporaries, delivers excellent color rendering and does so more quietly than most digitals -- none of the high-pitched whine that signals a photographer on the prowl.

The DIGIC is an excellent example of how camera manufacturers can improve their products without needlessly increasing sensor size. The price-performance ratio of digital cameras is rapidly approaching its ceiling -- and for Joe Photobug, it may have passed.

We should hope that, rather than push the envelope with bigger image sensors, manufacturers might begin to address shortcomings that have gotten short shrift due to consumers' lust for ever-greater megapixels. Camera makers would do well to start focusing more on the computer hardware driving their device, as Canon has with its DIGIC processor. While this may only indirectly improve image quality, it could mean vast improvements in things like battery life and how quickly your pictures are written to the memory card.

One last word on image size: If your concern in shopping for a new camera is how big you'll be able to enlarge your shots, there is another, far-more cost effective solution: interpolation. Interpolation is an algorithmic method for enlarging an image based on the image's existing digital information by essentially creating new pixels whose colors are based on their nearest neighbors.

Remember the golden rule: You can't create detail you didn't capture.

Such software fixes can be found on the Web, usually for free. Check out http://www.interpolatethis.com. The folks at Fuji even tried passing off their bi-cubic interpolation algorithm as actual pixelage in their 4700Z, which was released as a 4.3-megapixel camera but contained only a 2.4-megapixel sensor. Tisk, tisk, Fuji. It just goes to show; it's not the size of the sensor that matters, but the magic you create with it.