Making the most out of your megapixels

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As I said in an earlier post...

... if the pixels in the chip get too small then diffraction limiting comes into play. An image is made up (in optical terms) of a series of very small discs whose size is related to the diameter of the lens. Making pixels smaller than the "Airy disc" size will have NO effect on image sharpness or quality.

If you want to improve image quality, buy a bigger lens. There is NO way round that. There are helpful articles on Wikipedia, one of them says (in part)

"... which for a typical settings on a camera on a sunny day is about [focal ratio] 16. For visible light, the wavelength is about 450 nanometer. We find that x is about 0.01 mm. A consequence of this for a digital camera would be that making pixels of the image sensor any smaller than this would not actually increase [image] resolution."

See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disc

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited

for details

Posted by: bportlock   Posted on: 02/21/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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