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Originally Posted by Jeff Ulmer
What most people fail to realise is that the MP count is simply what can be stored, it does not factor in the quality of both the lens and the person taking the picture, both of which are far more critical.
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It also does not speak to colour quality, dynamic range, noise, sharpness -- and a host of other things that are harder to measure and harder to market.
I recently transitioned from being a full time printer / part time photographer to the other way around. I had the following amusing conversation with someone while we were looking at two 16x20 prints, one of them hers and one of them mine.
HER: Wow, yours looks really good. Is that from your new camera?
ME: Yes.
HER: It must be like 12 megapixels or something?
ME: No, only six.
HER: ONLY SIX?? Why would you buy a new camera that's only six megapixels? Even my camera is eight!
ME: But my six megapixel camera made a better picture than your eight megapixel camera.
HER: No, higher megapixels is always better. You should have bought at least an eight megapixel camera.
Suddenly, the proof in front of her was meaningless -- the numbers came into play, and apparently they never lie.
Of course, I've had the same experience with non-digital -- I've been told that my cameras of choice are inferior despite the visible quality of the prints in the analog realm. Of course, I'm one of those guys who goes out and tries stuff and then buys what he likes best, rather than a guy who reads a lot of magazines and finds out what the coolest whiz-bang stuff is and buys that. It led me to buy a Pentax 67, which was ideal for my shooting needs, when everyone and their brother insisted that I should have a Hasselblad or a Mamiya. It had come down to the Pentax 67 and the Mamiya 7 as my final two choices; after an hour with a Mamiya RZ I knew that I would never buy one.
So, yeah, I hate the "arms race" numbers game among manufacturers and the marketing that enforces the importance of those numbers in the minds of the average consumer. And I really can't stand the "internet educated" people who know it all and yet have no actual experience with the cameras or their results, who'll go on and on about how thing X is superior to thing Y without having ever used X or Y or compared the results from the two. But those same people existed pre-digital; the booming internet has simply coincided with the growth of digital.