4 ms·

A load of old pixel shift. Why I just don't care for high-res modes

35 points by Tomte 3y ago

prpl 3y ago
48MP sensors will be the spot on APS-C and larger especially. High resolution when you need it, drop to 12. otherwise
jeffbee 3y ago
Yeah I don't know what they are going on about. They sort of dismiss the Olympus implementation at the beginning, by mentioning it's useful and one of the best. The only universal truth in this article is that the author doesn't want to shoot static scenes.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  I think their point is quite clear: very few things are actually static enough for the feature to work properly.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  Having tried this feature on my own Olympus camera, I'm not enamored with it either. It's only really good for a pretty narrow selection of "static" scenes. Light breeze comes through as you take a landscape shot? Welp, I guess that tree branch is going to look like a glitch in the matrix. It's at its best indoors on a tripod. Architecture and still lifes are where the Olympus implementation really shines.
ryukoposting 3y ago
I just bought an OM-D EM-5 MKII used from a local shop - the first digital camera of my adult life (I've been shooting film as a hobby for years). It has this feature. I used it a couple times and abandoned it, for the same reasons the author lays out. The folks running the shop are obviously huge camera geeks, and they were really psyched about that feature. To their credit, it's damn impressive that a camera that small, and a sensor that small, can produce a true 40MP image where every pixel actually captures a geometrically unique location on the focal plane. As a key selling point over an E-M10 though? Nah. It's a marvel of engineering, but extremely limited in its practical value - a hallmark of "features for nerds." Sadly, in today's consumer landscape you kinda have to satisfy the spec sheet gawkers if you're going to sell a product. That's another reason features like this exist. 16MP on a sensor of that quality can still be blown up to enormous sizes without it looking crunchy. The real reason to spring for an E-M5 is the weather sealing and bigger viewfinder.
- cesaref 3y ago
  I think these 4/3rds camera were dismissed by armchair photographers in the early years because of the sensor size, and I think these pixel shift type features were added so that they could add a higher resolution mode to the headline features of the camera, to compete with higher resolution sensors. However, as you have probably found, 16mp is actually a very useful size - a good compromise between image size and resolution. I actually shoot a 16mp camera (Fuji X1) most of the time, even though I have much higher resolution cameras to hand.
  - klodolph 3y ago
    Yeah. Armchair photographers fighting over cameras by looking at the specs and comparing photographs under a microscope. There’s a tradeoff here between making a small, portable, inexpensive camera that you want to carry with you, and making a bigger, clunky, expensive camera that takes high-quality pictures. Armchair photographers looking at the specs will always pick the bigger, more expensive equipment. I know some people that bought into the 4/3 system, and I personally bought into larger systems. At the time, maybe that made sense for me. But if the camera is smaller, you actually bring the damn camera with you and get a shot. The 4/3 is a beautiful compromise where the shots are probably going to be noticeably better than your phone, and you’re going to bring the camera a lot more often than the APS-C or full-frame cameras. The resolution differences are on a square-root scale when you count megapixels. 24 MP has 22% better resolution than 16 MP — √(24/16). There’s a whole complicated story here involving aperture size, optical resolution, sensor efficiency and all sorts of other factors, which means that in the end, you don’t sacrifice as much image quality as you expect when switching to a smaller camera.
    - jeffbee 3y ago
      It's a funny thing about the small bodies. My Olympus is too small to handle. I use both the optional grips to make it a decent size.
      - semi-extrinsic 3y ago
cesaref 3y ago
From my perspective, I agree that it's not a feature that I look for in a camera, but i'm a street and portrait photographer, so the sorts of things I shoot aren't the sorts of things that I have either the time for, or that i'm limited by resolution with a single frame. If, however, I was a photographer shooting still life in a studio, for example, product photography for a high end jewellery company, then this is exactly the sort of technology that will work, and will give a resolution boost that may be useful. With a tethered camera, and possibly spending hours getting the light and reflections just right, the extra time to get the shot is of no consequence. Older digital photographers in that market will have used medium format scanning backs, so it's pretty clear that they have patience and that ultimate image quality may trump convenience. The comments about beyer sensors is interesting, and may be something that the casual photographer doesn't realise. Camera sensors have a patter of red/green/blue filters over each site on the sensor, so if the resolution of your camera is 16mp, you'll have 16 million sensor sites, but each will only give you the level of 1 channel (red, green or blue) and the camera will interpolate the colour resolution across the image. By shifting the sensor across exactly the width and height of 1 pixel site, the camera can capture the correct colour information at the same resolution as the output image, and hence give better colour rendition. As someone who normally photographs people, and often converts to B&W, this lack of colour resolution isn't important to me, but there are other people where this might be a significant concern.
- monkellipse 3y ago
  Professional product photographer here, primarily jewelry. Can confirm, pixel shift is a thing of pure beauty in this application, at least on the Hasselblad medium format system our studio used for years. Was a pain to wait for 16 captures to fire off, we certainly didn’t use it every day, but for high end work it gave beautiful tones and pixel resolution. I’ve never tried such a thing on landscapes, I can see the reasons to avoid it in that case for sure!
omoikane 3y ago
I would have expected pixel shift to be more useful in studio settings, e.g. product photos, macro photos, etc. This article doesn't seem to mention those.
ricardobeat 3y ago
These are not exactly the type of shots that would benefit from increased resolution. I don’t know what happened to the Sony images but they look soft even for a standard shot, don’t think they are representative of what the technology can do either. The Panasonic one has a lot more detail.
keane 3y ago
Canceling out the Bayer pattern to get full color is clever but I’m more excited for the release of Sigma’s full frame Foveon camera with their X3 sensor that doesn’t use the Bayer method. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor
- agos 3y ago
  is there some tangible news that it's coming?
  - Wistar 3y ago
    “In [a Feb 2024] interview with PetaPixel, Sigma’s CEO Kazuto Yamaki explains that it hasn’t moved past stage two of three in the sensor’s development — a stage it has remained in since 2022.” https://petapixel.com/2024/02/22/sigmas-full-frame-foveon-camera-is-still-at-least-a-few-years-away/ https://petapixel.com/2024/02/22/sigmas-full-frame-foveon-ca...
- shrx 3y ago
  I borrowed a Sigma DP1 which has this X3 sensor a long time ago. The colors are unbelievably good even today when viewed on a 4K OLED TV. However it was not without its problems, the photo quality degraded very quickly once you increased the sensitivity above the base ISO, and the autofocus was quite slow. Still, it was worth it for the amazing photos it produced.
mikewarot 3y ago
Back when I was deciding on my first DSLR, I deliberately chose the Nikon D40, at 6 megapixels, over the new D40x, which had 10 megapixels. I did this because I wanted the larger pixels, and thus better low light performance, of the former. I wore the shutter out on that camera, it was awesome.
mackman 3y ago
In general images are often limited by depth of field, camera movement, subject movement or lens resolving power. Some of these can be improved upon with better software. I have been working on software to do this myself as for fun. For the rest of this, though, there are other techniques that will work better than pixel shift.

35 points by Tomte 3y ago

prpl 3y ago

48MP sensors will be the spot on APS-C and larger especially. High resolution when you need it, drop to 12. otherwise

Yeah I don't know what they are going on about. They sort of dismiss the Olympus implementation at the beginning, by mentioning it's useful and one of the best. The only universal truth in this article is that the author doesn't want to shoot static scenes.

SiempreViernes 3y ago
I think their point is quite clear: very few things are actually static enough for the feature to work properly.
ryukoposting 3y ago
Having tried this feature on my own Olympus camera, I'm not enamored with it either. It's only really good for a pretty narrow selection of "static" scenes. Light breeze comes through as you take a landscape shot? Welp, I guess that tree branch is going to look like a glitch in the matrix. It's at its best indoors on a tripod. Architecture and still lifes are where the Olympus implementation really shines.

ryukoposting 3y ago

I just bought an OM-D EM-5 MKII used from a local shop - the first digital camera of my adult life (I've been shooting film as a hobby for years). It has this feature. I used it a couple times and abandoned it, for the same reasons the author lays out. The folks running the shop are obviously huge camera geeks, and they were really psyched about that feature. To their credit, it's damn impressive that a camera that small, and a sensor that small, can produce a true 40MP image where every pixel actually captures a geometrically unique location on the focal plane. As a key selling point over an E-M10 though? Nah. It's a marvel of engineering, but extremely limited in its practical value - a hallmark of "features for nerds." Sadly, in today's consumer landscape you kinda have to satisfy the spec sheet gawkers if you're going to sell a product. That's another reason features like this exist. 16MP on a sensor of that quality can still be blown up to enormous sizes without it looking crunchy. The real reason to spring for an E-M5 is the weather sealing and bigger viewfinder.

cesaref 3y ago
I think these 4/3rds camera were dismissed by armchair photographers in the early years because of the sensor size, and I think these pixel shift type features were added so that they could add a higher resolution mode to the headline features of the camera, to compete with higher resolution sensors. However, as you have probably found, 16mp is actually a very useful size - a good compromise between image size and resolution. I actually shoot a 16mp camera (Fuji X1) most of the time, even though I have much higher resolution cameras to hand.
- klodolph 3y ago
  Yeah. Armchair photographers fighting over cameras by looking at the specs and comparing photographs under a microscope. There’s a tradeoff here between making a small, portable, inexpensive camera that you want to carry with you, and making a bigger, clunky, expensive camera that takes high-quality pictures. Armchair photographers looking at the specs will always pick the bigger, more expensive equipment. I know some people that bought into the 4/3 system, and I personally bought into larger systems. At the time, maybe that made sense for me. But if the camera is smaller, you actually bring the damn camera with you and get a shot. The 4/3 is a beautiful compromise where the shots are probably going to be noticeably better than your phone, and you’re going to bring the camera a lot more often than the APS-C or full-frame cameras. The resolution differences are on a square-root scale when you count megapixels. 24 MP has 22% better resolution than 16 MP — √(24/16). There’s a whole complicated story here involving aperture size, optical resolution, sensor efficiency and all sorts of other factors, which means that in the end, you don’t sacrifice as much image quality as you expect when switching to a smaller camera.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    It's a funny thing about the small bodies. My Olympus is too small to handle. I use both the optional grips to make it a decent size.
    - semi-extrinsic 3y ago

cesaref 3y ago

From my perspective, I agree that it's not a feature that I look for in a camera, but i'm a street and portrait photographer, so the sorts of things I shoot aren't the sorts of things that I have either the time for, or that i'm limited by resolution with a single frame. If, however, I was a photographer shooting still life in a studio, for example, product photography for a high end jewellery company, then this is exactly the sort of technology that will work, and will give a resolution boost that may be useful. With a tethered camera, and possibly spending hours getting the light and reflections just right, the extra time to get the shot is of no consequence. Older digital photographers in that market will have used medium format scanning backs, so it's pretty clear that they have patience and that ultimate image quality may trump convenience. The comments about beyer sensors is interesting, and may be something that the casual photographer doesn't realise. Camera sensors have a patter of red/green/blue filters over each site on the sensor, so if the resolution of your camera is 16mp, you'll have 16 million sensor sites, but each will only give you the level of 1 channel (red, green or blue) and the camera will interpolate the colour resolution across the image. By shifting the sensor across exactly the width and height of 1 pixel site, the camera can capture the correct colour information at the same resolution as the output image, and hence give better colour rendition. As someone who normally photographs people, and often converts to B&W, this lack of colour resolution isn't important to me, but there are other people where this might be a significant concern.

monkellipse 3y ago
Professional product photographer here, primarily jewelry. Can confirm, pixel shift is a thing of pure beauty in this application, at least on the Hasselblad medium format system our studio used for years. Was a pain to wait for 16 captures to fire off, we certainly didn’t use it every day, but for high end work it gave beautiful tones and pixel resolution. I’ve never tried such a thing on landscapes, I can see the reasons to avoid it in that case for sure!

omoikane 3y ago

I would have expected pixel shift to be more useful in studio settings, e.g. product photos, macro photos, etc. This article doesn't seem to mention those.

ricardobeat 3y ago

These are not exactly the type of shots that would benefit from increased resolution. I don’t know what happened to the Sony images but they look soft even for a standard shot, don’t think they are representative of what the technology can do either. The Panasonic one has a lot more detail.

keane 3y ago

Canceling out the Bayer pattern to get full color is clever but I’m more excited for the release of Sigma’s full frame Foveon camera with their X3 sensor that doesn’t use the Bayer method. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor

agos 3y ago
is there some tangible news that it's coming?
- Wistar 3y ago
  “In [a Feb 2024] interview with PetaPixel, Sigma’s CEO Kazuto Yamaki explains that it hasn’t moved past stage two of three in the sensor’s development — a stage it has remained in since 2022.” https://petapixel.com/2024/02/22/sigmas-full-frame-foveon-camera-is-still-at-least-a-few-years-away/ https://petapixel.com/2024/02/22/sigmas-full-frame-foveon-ca...
shrx 3y ago
I borrowed a Sigma DP1 which has this X3 sensor a long time ago. The colors are unbelievably good even today when viewed on a 4K OLED TV. However it was not without its problems, the photo quality degraded very quickly once you increased the sensitivity above the base ISO, and the autofocus was quite slow. Still, it was worth it for the amazing photos it produced.

mikewarot 3y ago

Back when I was deciding on my first DSLR, I deliberately chose the Nikon D40, at 6 megapixels, over the new D40x, which had 10 megapixels. I did this because I wanted the larger pixels, and thus better low light performance, of the former. I wore the shutter out on that camera, it was awesome.

mackman 3y ago

In general images are often limited by depth of field, camera movement, subject movement or lens resolving power. Some of these can be improved upon with better software. I have been working on software to do this myself as for fun. For the rest of this, though, there are other techniques that will work better than pixel shift.