Re: 6 megapixels best format for your woodworking pictures?

Andrew Erickson wrote:
In article <K4%cj.1251$6%.588@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Leon" <removespamlcb11211@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"J. Clarke" <jclarke.usenet@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:fl1scs0252d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
GarageWoodworks wrote:
If you had enough MegaPixels you could take a full shot picture
of


My Panasonic non-SLR type digital camera has a Leitz lens which
fills the sensor with the same field that a 400 would on a 35mm.
Canon has a similar model. Further, it is capable of quite close
focus with that lens.


While I am sure you are happy with your results and yours having a
good brand lens, I would be willing to bet that the lens on your
camera is much slower, has a much higher number F-Stop on the
low/wide open end than the 35mm camera lens your are compairing to.
This will result in the need for longer exposure times for proper
exposure and can distort the recording.

While J. Clarke didn't specify the exact camera model he has, most
or
all of the Panasonic big-zoom cameras have pretty fast lenses, some
models being constant f2.8 across the zoom range and others ranging
to
f2.8 at the wide end to f3.8 or so at the telephoto end.

There's another little issue. A 400mm f/2.8 lens for an SLR costs
$6500 and weighs 12 pounds. Lot of factors go into deciding whether I
use the SLR, the Panasonic, or the Coolpix 990 for a given shot. All
have their uses and their limitations.

Slower on the other hand has two meanings in digital camera
comparisons. One is the aperture of the lens, while the other is what
in shooting firearms would be called the "lock time"--in that area the
Panasonic is indeed slower than the SLR--there are things you can do
to improve the situation but it's still there and for action
photography it means more missed shots. On the other hand most
woodworking pictures are more akin to studio photography so that's not
an issue. But that is another area in which the Panasonic has a
limitation--there's no way to connect an off-axis flash to it. Not a
big problem--it will trigger a peanut slave just fine (which the
Coolpix 990 won't for some reason)--but still less convenient than
being able to plug in a PC cable. For woodworking photography I'd
recommend the FZ50 over the FZ8 or 18 for that reason.

If I wasn't up to my ass in alligators right now I'd do some
comparison shots between the FZ7 and the 30D.

Many similar camera models other brands aren't quite so fast, but
still at least as fast as low-end 35mm lenses with equivalent fields
of view.

I definitely agree that more megapixels on tiny sensors don't
generally improve actual image quality, though. It's quickly
getting
to the point where diffraction effects are the limiting factor on
image resolution even at fairly wide apertures, so having more and
more pixels can't even capture more detail (but does result in more
noise and larger files to deal with). It's also worth observing
that
the linear resolution of an image increases with with the square of
the number of pixels, so the width or height increase when going
from, say, 6 megapixels to 10 megapixels is only a factor of about
1.3.

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)


.

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