Notice digital photography is finding its practical ceiling at ~50MP?

[matthew1]

The megapixel wars are over. This is something I've felt was on its way after owning a 39MP D800 for almost 9 years. I've shot a handful of pro gigs with it, not nearly full-time level mind you. But I've also put at least 100k shots through it and rarely wished for yet more resolution.

Before that was a 12MP D80 and before that I owned a 6MP D70. Those were crying for more resolution. But the D800 at 39MP worked out to a 7xxx by 5xxx pixels frame, and that generally satisfied any application I threw at it (landscape, street, wedding).

I couldn't be happier. The storage and processor requirements of moving around that much data I was never a fan of, especially given I'm a laptop user.

Also, this gives breathing room for much more important features like eye detection auto focusing. That's worth -15MP to me.

My buddy just bought a $4k Canon pro DSLR that's right around 50MP, I forget the name of the model, and it's down around 5MP from his prior Canon pro body from 4 years ago. Yes, down.

The law of diminishing returns is upon us with camera MP. Run for the hills. Seek a Civil Defense fallout shelter and await further instructions.

Not to say edge cases don't exist that will forever need more resolution... architecture, astronomy for instance.

[volvolugnut]

Years ago I did engineering work for a small manufacturer of large, semi trailer mounted engines, pumps, and other equipment. Often assembly workers would make changes and the official designs were also changed on the fly. We liked to get final assembly photos of as many areas as possible. We often used these photos to document the changes on the drawings and determine if other changes could be made in some areas. When we needed details in an area without a close up photo, we would enlarge a distant photo to see more.
In this application, we always needed more resolution, especially since we only had 10K pixel cameras at the time.

volvolugnut