Originally posted by rrstuff 5 megapixels maybe enough if you view the picture from far away, but sometimes you want to be able to see fine detail:
For example, what are the people doing in this landscape:
You may have missed it, but there are people standing on the rocks, towards the right. It's very obvious on a large print, but at 5 megapixels, they would be just a few pixels across.
I've seen this in the new review of the 40 mp option in the Olympus OMD-E-M5II on DPR. They show you the detail of some chimney or the like in a far distance that is much better to see then on the regular 16mp image.
But who really cares? If we wanted an image of that thing, we probably would have taken the image of it. Maybe this is good to see extraterrestial life on earth in those extra pixels?
Originally posted by Nicolas06 On a 12"x12" print from a 5MP camera, you get 3.3MP actual resolution
On a 12"x12" print, you need a theoretically perfect 12MP 3600x3600 shoot to fully exploit 300dpi resolution. The standard for "perfect images". Counting the reframing to square format, that need a 20MP sensor. Counting we don't have real pixels and we may want to have some margin from reframing, 50MP sound reasonable if your target is just a perfect 12"x12" print.
If you want to expose in a galery and use a format that is not that small, you'll find the 50MP easily justified.
That being said, I'am with you that if you don't take photo of very fine contrasty texture (text being an example) and your clients don't stare too much from near distance to your photos, you will likely be enough with 150-200dpi on a 12"x12" print, meaning a 16-24MP camera is going to let you reframe and still get enough resolution.
On larger prints, if you admit that people will not stare in the very front from 20-30cm, you can admit far lower resolution like 50dpi and still get quite pleasing results... So your 16-24MP body is likely to be able to get you very far anyway. No big issue even with 30"x40" if you don't crop.
I was refurring to use 5 mp on that print, so that would come from an almost 8 mp 3-2 ratio sensor. That is already 189 dpi in print, wich is more then enough (starting from great image quality made in studio at iso100 with K-01).
NOTE, the following link may have NSFW content (I´m not sure how that goes in US, but this is Facebookproof work)
https://www.fotofabriek.nl/preview/?id=79B6B47E9D6AEE06948D3A1169F4A13C Originally posted by Clavius How nice would it be if Pentax would surprise us with an FF DSLR that uses the super sensitive 12MP Sony sensor that is also used in the A7s? 12 very good megapixels, and still room to crop to the 5mp that are mentioned in the opening post. (Most cameras labelled as "pro" do tend to lean towards lower MP's. 1Dx, D4) It could have blazing fast processing.
I have a lot of large prints on acrylic glass. The largest is 2,2x1,8 meters. The details are amazing, it's like pixel peeping an entire picture all at once. They amaze me and anybody that visits my house. I'm really very fond of them. STILL my 16mp K-5 is enough for that. My 36mp camera gave me a lot of headroom in a lot of areas, but the extra MP's didn't add anything. So, the galleries that some people are referring must be printing some really wicked dimensions to be requiring even more MP's!
I have made a print from K-01 at max of 150cm, so that is just 76 DPI in print and that is one fine print. Ofcourse one can get it better, but in printing one can do great things. I made a print at 46 inches at PhotoKina that looks great, one of the images in the book and the people at Epson told me that printing twice the size would be no problem.
Maybe I wouldn´t mind having just 12 mp, but in general anything at or below 24 mp would work fine.