I am afraid that the people who posted responses at the url
understand the issue better than whoever wrote the news item. There
is no doubt that in small sensor cams the wall has been hit as far as
noise is concerned. I think Canon believes that they are able to
salvage the image better in the noise reduction algorithm in the on
board processor better than post processing. That is the reason, in
my opinion, that raw is being dropped as an option in small cameras.
As Phil Askey at dpreview.com has pointed out a couple of times the
image quality of small sensors peaked with the 7MP 1/1.8" sensor.
After that more and more detail is being smeared by noise reduction
so that high megapixel digicams are showing noise at the at the base
ISO. One wonders whether the cameras next year with the 12MP Toshiba
sensor will be usable at all.
Fuji seems to be a special case, but their engineering is dealing
with the same physics. The advantage of their sensor is that the
photosensitive site for each hexagonal pixel is larger than the area
on a square pixel. So it gathers more photons and the noise floor is
lower. Plus they have kept their pixel count down to a reasonable
number as well as making different choices with their on-chip noise
processor.
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On Nov 30, 2006, at 6:19 AM, Garth Wood wrote:
> I wasn't aware of this decision when Canon released the Powershot G7:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/vvpyg
>
> Sounds like we're getting close to some theoretical limit with imaging
> chips. Mebbe?
>
>
> Garth
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