Nikon D800, 36 Megapixels and Blur

Quotes from Nikon's D800 Tech Guide:

"While its high pixel count of 36 megapixels gives the D800/ D800E resolution unrivalled by previous digital SLR cameras, a side effect is that bokeh and blur are made that much more obvious."

"At the high resolutions offered by the D800/D800E, even the slightest camera motion can result in blur. "

http://www.nikonusa.com/en_US/o/Y6wr...alGuide_En.pdf

I read the Tech Guide for Nikon's D800, and did a word count, the word Blur appears 19 times. After reading it I came away with the impression it was telling everyone more about how to keep their pictures from being blurry than they were promoting a new high resolution 36 megapixel sensor. Maybe were seeing the end of the megapixel race.

I get the impression from the guide that to much resolution could be a bad thing for everyday general photography, making it much more difficult to get sharp crisp pictures. They start off the first part of the guide with "Use A Tripod". Sure that is good advice, but do you start off a sales pitch by telling your customers they will need a tripod.

Maybe they are simply trying to manage expectations...

I know we beat the DLA issue pretty hard a while back but the DLA if this 36 megapixel sensor will be around 5.8

I read a while ago people talking about the D3X's 24MP, and that it was really hard to hand-hold it for anything less than 1/500th without pixels blurring together.
Maybe nikon's already anticipating the reactions to the 36mp and jumping the gun a bit?

Had canon written that, i'm sure there would have been a few more "just use our brand new $3000 10-stop-IS lenses" lines instead of crapping on about tripods (which they don't sell).

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Originally Posted by Dr Croubie

Had canon written that, i'm sure there would have been a few more "just use our brand new $3000 10-stop-IS lenses" lines instead of crapping on about tripods (which they don't sell).

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But they do sell tripods: http://shop.usa.canon.com/webapp/wcs...0051_271651_-1, and monopods, too! [:p]

The rules for hand-holding lenses was always based on the object in the shot not appearing blurred when printed FULL FRAME. Almost nobody every blew up 35 mm negatives to anything approaching what we do every time we zoom in past the pixel-level detail on our shots. To not have motion blur on something 4 microns across (instead of 20 mm) you'd have to have a shutter time 5,000 times faster to have the same effective blur vs. size! Honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't been more of an issue to-date. The only thing saving the discussion until now is the fact that most lenses have a point spread function that spans multiple pixels. However, the best lenses can be sharp enough to resolve down to the pixel level now.

Dr. C you made my morning - yea I have a boring life - LOL, loved it.

ChadS I am thinking has the point - we have to evaluate the image capture as a system. Lens, Sensor, and the sensor holding device - mechanical or human. Humans are analog animals living in a digital world that is far and fast outpacing the analogs ability to keep up. Fairly soon I suspect we will be getting to the point where earth rotation becomes a factor (stop it, I know motion is relative it is meant as a joke).

As most know I am a pixel density proponent and want to see the quality of the uber small sensors improve so I can get more flexibility from my lens inventory. (just increased with the 17-55 2.8) The debate point is: will the small sensor signal/noise ratio improve faster than the light gathering/holding/signal capability of the larger pixel? With greater pixel density, I don't have to carry as big a lens inventory (or lens itself) into the field for the same photograph. My 85 1.2 with a small sensor buys a lot of ISO sensitivity mated to say (I know I am sinning) Pentax Q (or some other uber small sensor that could be mounted in a better platform), compared to 400mm f4 5dII. Same effective focal length, dramatically different volume in the camera bag, IQ...oops - but coming?

ChadS point on camera motion blur would still be an issue.

As soon as I stop traveling and get a life, I will do the frankencanon surgery and post some pix just for the grins.

It was one of my thoughts when reading the tech manual, that with this many pixels a 36mp sensor should be able to resolve a line 1.5x finer than a 24mp sensor. Perhaps my math is off, but the cameras ability to resolve is much finer. At some point a camera that resolves to such a level would require an exceptional amount of stability to reach it's full potential. Maybe we have reached this point with MP counts and as we get higher we will have to use tripods to take advantage. ChadS thoughts seemed to be along these lines as well.

But, the tech manual really didn't read this way. My take on the tech manual was that now because the camera can resolve to this finer detail that the higher resolution is going to make your hand held shots blurrier than they would already appear. That because it has a substantial amount of points, pixels or lines of resolution that the additional pixels will exaggerate the blur that you would see in your normal pictures. More lines of resolution, the more blur. Would this be the case? That the normal quality of our hand held pictures if the pixel count and resolution gets higher that they will now be worse because we have an increased pixel count to some insane number?

My other thought is more of the marketing conspiracy theory type. By putting data out that tells photographers how to be better photographers, they increase the sill level of their customer which in turn increases the quality of the pictures they get out of the camera. Then Nikon takes credit for their better pictures and claims it is because of the camera......very ingenious....educate your customer to increase your quality.

@HDNitehawk You are correct that at a certain point increasing the MP just increases the resolution of blur. With the kit lens that came with my T2i the 18 MP APS-C sensor I have is already at that limit. The blur does not have to be optical - it can be motion as well.

I think it's important to keep in mind that the 36 MP camera is basically the same pixel density as the 7D (T2i, T3i, etc.) but those cameras are used much more often in sports or fast-moving objects. I think the reason Nikon is making a point of this is that FF users aren't used to seeing motion blur at the pixel level - but really it's only about 50% worse than a 22 MP image.

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Originally Posted by HDNitehawk

...I came away with the impression it was telling everyone more about how to keep their pictures from being blurry than they were promoting a new high resolution 36 megapixel sensor.

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Normally I expect a so-called "Technical Guide" to be yet another marketing puff piece that only exaggerates all the benefits of the product. Isn't it refreshing when a company actually includes technical guidance, such as describing circumstances where the new product may not be any more superior to the old one? Next thing you know they might start reducing their bald-faced lies content to less than 50%. :D

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Originally Posted by HDNitehawk

Maybe were seeing the end of the megapixel race.

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People have been saying that since 8 MP came out, and I don't believe that 36 MP is the end. If it is the end, I'm pretty disappointed, because I could really take advantage of at least 200 MP.

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Originally Posted by HDNitehawk

I get the impression from the guide that to much resolution could be a bad thing for everyday general photography,

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I don't. What gives you that impression? At the very worst, the increased pixel count will only result in the *same* resolution as before -- it can never be worse.

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Originally Posted by Daniel Browning

I don't. What gives you that impression? At the very worst, the increased pixel count will only result in the *same* resolution as before -- it can never be worse.

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At a certain point the noise issue will bite you at too high a resolution and too low light level. True, you can always integrate the signal over several pixels but the net result of that is a higher noise floor vs. having one large pixel capturing the same number of photons. I'm certain that for bright light conditions it should be possible to reach ~100 MP given the sharpness of the best lenses and improvements to sensors that we know how to do. However, I fear for low-light conditions.

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Originally Posted by Daniel Browning

I don't. What gives you that impression? At the very worst, the increased pixel count will only result in the *same* resolution as before -- it can never be worse.

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I wouldn't think it would, and I think you would be correct. I would think that at some point in the MP and sensor war that a persons pictures resolution wouldn't improve by more MP, instead what they were able to achieve would be limited by there skills and ability.

Why I thought the article was saying it would is the following quote:

"While its high pixel count of 36 megapixels gives the D800/ D800E resolution unrivalled by previous digital SLR cameras, a side effect is that bokeh and blur are made that much more obvious."

Why would blur be much more obvious, unless the comparison is drawn against the D700 that the D800 is replacing, and the D700 is very bad in this area. I doubt that is the case, not that I would know.

Well, I have learned something today. After reading this thread earlier today I started wondering if I would see much difference due to pixel size when using the 100-400 on a 5Dii and comparing shots to the 70-200 IS ii on a 7D which has slightly smaller pixels than the D800. Everything was tripod mounted for this testing. I maxed out the zoom on the 70-200 and set the 100-400 to closely match the framing. On shorter distance to subject shots the 7D combo had nice clean images. Once I went out to long shots, over a 100 yards, I started to notice a decline in the shots from the 7D when looking at the images with 100% view. There was an increase in noise. The 5D combo just kept going. I can only assume that I hit the limit of what the 200 mm focal length was able to deliver to a smaller pixel in comparison to what the 320 mm focal length delivered to the larger pixel on the 5D. I realize that using two different focal lengths introduced another variable into the comparison, but I must admit that one reason I use the 7D is for the ability to have a high pixel density on a cropped sensor to allow more pixels on a small target for cropping in post processing. The other is for action shots at distances less than where it started to have issues. I also put the 70-200 on the 5D afterwards as a reality check and did not have the same issue. In real world shooting it isn't a problem for me given the required subject distance to encounter this issue.


Just thought I'd pass on the info.

@jrw. Just wondering what ISO, speed and fstop were you using?

Also as the focus distance is increased lots of other things come into play. Always double check your equipment and setup.

Have you swapped lens on the bodies, to see if anything changes?
Have both lenses been calibrated for the respective bodies?

Tony

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Originally Posted by ChadS

At a certain point the noise issue will bite you at too high a resolution and too low light level. True, you can always integrate the signal over several pixels but the net result of that is a higher noise floor vs. having one large pixel capturing the same number of photons. I'm certain that for bright light conditions it should be possible to reach ~100 MP given the sharpness of the best lenses and improvements to sensors that we know how to do. However, I fear for low-light conditions.

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There seems to be a lot of confusion about this topic. As Daniel said, image quality will only be higher or the same, not lower, with more MP. Noise will not be worse just because there are more pixels. The only downside of more MP is that it takes up more data.

How would distance from the camera effect IQ - more specifically signal to noise ratios.

There might be something about the angle of the photons hitting the sensor but oof that is way down the list of IQ issues.

Is this not more of a lens issue?

@JRW The image circle created by the lens on the camera is showing the same image - you're just seeing less on the crop. So the fact that the IQ on the 7D failed before the 5DII just tells you that your lens is not capable of making a 5 micron detail on the sensor size at that focal length - hence the discussion about having the same "resolution" even though you have more megapixels.

@Jon I'm not confused at all. In terms of SNR a single large-area sensor will maintain a higher SNR than the integration of a bunch of itty-bitty pixels. The reason has to do with amplifier noise and dark noise. In the absence of any photons striking the pixels but with the amplifiers turned on, there will be a background signal that appears due simply to shifting electron energy states accumulating on the various capacitors, etc. This is referred to as dark noise. With a single pixel you've got a single amplifier chain and a single source of dark noise. If you have 100 pixels you're going to have 100 separate dark noise sources. The signals from these 100 pixels will not all be the same - it's a random process. Therefore, they're not correlated and when I add them all together there is a greater noise floor from the ensemble than on the single pixel. (it all goes back to the math theorem that says that a^2 + B^2 >= |A+B|^2).

I'm not suggesting that the new Nikon is at this limit yet. I clearly stated that I think 100 MP is fine with current technology. However, the 1Dx is almost certain to have much better low-light performance even after downsampling the Nikon's image to match the total number of pixels.

@ Raid - AV mode, ISO 100, f5.6 on both lenses, CR2 output, variable cloudiness all shots at 1/500s or faster. Same tripod used, mounting plates attached to tripod ring on lens, camera tethered and focus confirmed for every shot. All lenses are focus calibrated to each of my bodies just wanted to have remote release and ability to confirm focus on a bigger screen. To be more specific the OOF regions became grainier. The in-focus area started to show spots of different colours across uniformly coloured objects (cars) as well as smooth lines becoming rough and jagged (license plates, body panel edges, and printed signs throughout the parking lot). Just to be clear, these were parked cars and the 5D combo did not exhibit the same behaviour on the same targets. The 7D only showed these at greater distances. With closer targets there were no issues. The overall amount was not terribly great, but I was specifically looking for such issues at the 100% zoom level to see if it does exist and I found it.

70-200 was put on the 5D afterwards to see if problem was with lens. No problem there, just with the 7D. Does not rule out possibility of 7D having some other issue. Don't have other 7D bodies to confirm or deny. Post processing is able to clean up the shots with no difficulty, just wondering what is going on. A question without an answer is something that seizes my focus until solved.

Perhaps someone who is more familiar with the equations of optics wouldn't mind stepping in?

What I saw isn't making me want to sell my 7D. It will continue to function the same as it always has, and results when using it may improve the more I understand what it is capable of doing.


EDIT: I see someone with more specific knowledge replied while I was pecking away at the keyboard.

@ Raid - AV mode, ISO 100, f5.6 on both lenses, CR2 output, variable cloudiness all shots at 1/500s or faster. Same tripod used, mounting plates attached to tripod ring on lens, camera tethered and focus confirmed for every shot. All lenses are focus calibrated to each of my bodies just wanted to have remote release and ability to confirm focus on a bigger screen. To be more specific the OOF regions became grainier. The in-focus area started to show spots of different colours across uniformly coloured objects (cars) as well as smooth lines becoming rough and jagged (license plates, body panel edges, and printed signs throughout the parking lot). Just to be clear, these were parked cars and the 5D combo did not exhibit the same behaviour on the same targets. The 7D only showed these at greater distances. With closer targets there were no issues. The overall amount was not terribly great, but I was specifically looking for such issues at the 100% zoom level to see if it does exist and I found it.

70-200 was put on the 5D afterwards to see if problem was with lens. No problem there, just with the 7D. Does not rule out possibility of 7D having some other issue. Don't have other 7D bodies to confirm or deny. Post processing is able to clean up the shots with no difficulty, just wondering what is going on. A question without an answer is something that seizes my focus until solved.

Perhaps someone who is more familiar with the equations of optics wouldn't mind stepping in?

What I saw isn't making me want to sell my 7D. It will continue to function the same as it always has, and results when using it may improve the more I understand what it is capable of doing.

@jrw Gawd I hope you're not referring to me!

By all means, don't sell your 7D - well, unless you want to give it away to me! Think of it this way, the lens is the lens and it knows nothing about the sensor behind it (assuming the image is in-focus on both). There's really nothing the body brings to the image - which is why the camera manufacturers had to work so hard to differentiate pro-level film cameras from entry-level bodies (autodrive, better light sealing, etc.) Fundamentally, a film camera body is an empty box... In the digital world you can think of most of the body as an empty box and the sensor is the film.

The pixels just take whatever light comes through the lens and dices it up into little squares. It just so happens that the 7D has smaller pixels and so chops the light in the center part of the image into smaller pieces. The 5D2's squares are larger but they cover more of the image circle (but not all, of course).

The pixels know nothing about the lens just like the lens knows nothing about the pixels. If I were to put a $10 lens on my camera I'd expect the details to be blurred all over heck. I'm still dicing the blur really, really small on the 7D but all I'm really doing is discretizing the blur from the lens. I could double the megapixels on my sensor and wouldn't record any more information - just a larger file.

The difference between the 7D and the 5D2 using your 70-200 and your 100-400 is right on the brink of the ability of those two lenses to resolve features. A more valid test would be to tripod mount the lens, then swap bodies for the same exact shot lens-to-lens. You'll see that if you zoom in on the 7D you'll get equal or greater detail on the 7D than on the 5D2. At some point the blur of the lens may make the two equal.

This is why Bryan commented that birders may not want to upgrade to the 1Dx. Most of them have really good glass that can resolve really small features on the sensor. So a higher density sensor like the 7D, 1D4, etc. will allow you to "crop zoom" the bird and still get more details. The rather large pixels on the 1Dx will not allow as much "digital magnification."

I just had to try some way to test all of the theorizing that was going on. Much prefer looking at something instead of risking brain strain wrapping my head around concepts and trying to visualize the end results. Understood that resolution of a smaller pixel size would expose lens flaws or resolution capability. Just didn't expect the 100-400 on the 5D to do better than the 70-200 f2.8 IS II on the 7D because I know the 100-400 does not match the resolution of the 70-200 over their shared range. What I didn't check beforehand is that the area of the 7D pixels is around half of the 5D pixels. 70-200 may be better, but not by a factor of 2.

Also looking back at the photos I realized that where I saw off colours in solid colours they were all dark. In lighter areas of the same shots that was no longer present. Dark means less signal reducing SNR values. Design tradeoffs indeed.


@ChadS I must remind you that I said I WON'T be getting rid of my 7D, unless someone will offer me $2000? The resolution for cropping matters to me sometimes as well as use at sports events. Now I'll have a better idea of what the lens and body combos will be able to do. At the end of the day, I have learned something about my tools which I can only hope will improve my usage of them.

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Originally Posted by jrw

At the end of the day, I have learned something about my tools which I can only hope will improve my usage of them.

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Which is why I read this site every day. Glad I may have helped in a small way.

I am just getting around to reading the manual....this line stood out to me:

"With the D800/D800E, you will notice that photos seem to have
less depth of fi eld than pictures shot with other cameras under
the same conditions, and that focus consequently requires more
attention."


This makes sense to me if they crop the image, but I am not sure I follow for an uncropped image. Sorry if this was already covered.

@Brant; it is almost as if Nikon wrote this guide for people who were upgrading from a crop camera to Full Frame. If you were coming from a crop body you might notice these things. The camera the D800 replaces, the D700, is a full frame camera so in that way it doesn’t make sense. So using a D800 somehow the DOF is going to be narrower than other similar FF bodies?

Of course it says “seem” to have less DOF. If they are trying to say that the high pixel count is going to exaggerate blur then I could see this statement would work. But I just don’t see how this should be, you would think that blur wouldn’t be worse than you would already have out of a D700. It should be at least the same.

I'm going to pick megapixels numbers that make this easier to visualize. Lets say we had a 1MP camera, and the new camera was 4MP (twice as wide and high). The sensor is the same size (full frame), just more dense.

When light reaches your sensor, everything is a blurred circle, even the things in focus. It's just that the in focus blurred circles are less than a pixel wide. Things that were at the edge of being in focus on the 1MP sensor, ie: the radius was very nearly a full pixel wide, are now 2 pixel wide dots on the 4MP sensor, cleary not in perfect focus.

The "seem" to have less DoF is because it is the same DoF, just you can now more clearly see the limits of the DoF, and because we won't view the images at 1:1, but as say, an 8x10, so all the extra pixels will just smooshed into the same space as always, and we won't notice a difference.

@David, I think the key word is “seem”. You wouldn’t get an increased area blurred, as the area that was oof is still oof. You would only increase the area that is in focus, which may give you the “seem” effect Nikon mentions. A sharper in focus area gives you a more noticeable distinction between oof areas in focus areas. Would this not be correct under your premise?

We should keep in mind that if Nikon is comparing the D800 to the D700, the D800 has 3x the pixel count.

I think they mean 1:1 viewing would mean an apparent decrease in DoF. Since we usually normalize (all the online/app calculators do, e.g. an 8x10" print viewed at 30"), there's no objective difference with resolution.

Since the 5D II is the first full frame digital camera I have owned, I wouldn’t know if this topic has come up before in this way, decreased DOF and more Blur. But it seems to me that when the 5D went from a 12.8mp to a 5D II 21mp it would have been a topic of conversation. Especially if David’s description is accurate in what happens.

Yep...it does seem that they are very paranoid about pixel peepers looking at a 36 MP image. And I am sure it is warranted. I've read comments about noise and different cameras not being sharp, etc and you look into it, someone is looking at an image at 100%...But, if that is what they meant by the statement, I wish they would have make it clear by saying "less depth of field when viewed at 100%"...or something simliar.

Brant maybe they should have said it like this:

“The D800 is very sharp compared to the old low mp cameras Nikon has made in the past, as a past Nikon user one will now have to practice focus techniques as the new D800 is actually able to produce sharp images with a defined dof. Since one was not able to achieve this level of sharpness in the past it will be an entirely new experience, having images that the bokeh is actually discernable from the in focus areas”

Ok it’s a Nikon flame, I am still waiting on Canon’s response to this new 36mp camera :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by HDNitehawk

Ok it’s a Nikon flame, I am still waiting on Canon’s response to this new 36mp camera :rolleyes:

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Yep...but it made me laugh.....:cool:

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Originally Posted by ChadS

At a certain point the noise issue will bite you at too high a resolution and too low light level.

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Theoretically, that's true -- and it's a good point to bring up. However, in practice, DSLR manufacturers have had a very hard time bringing the low light advantage to market for big pixels (D3S was one exception). As of right now, most of the 2-micron pixels (e.g. digicam) have 3 times less read noise than most of the 6-micron pixels (DSLR), giving the same noise floor after integration. But even if they fix whatever that problem is in the next generation, the difference is only going to affect people who shoot very high ISO (which is a large percentage of online forum users, but a very low percentage of photographers overall). The majority of photographers are already limited by photon shot noise only -- which so far has remained the same for a huge variety of pixel sizes, thanks to microlenses. (Not counting the effects of OLPF, sharpening, and subjective perception -- all of which favor smaller pixels as it pertains to noise if and when they come into play.)

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Originally Posted by HDNitehawk

Why would blur be much more obvious[?]

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It wouldn't -- unless you assume (as Nikon apparently did for this article) that the viewing conditions are such that low-resolutions (less than 36 MP) cannot take full advantage of the display. If they had instead assumed all their users were only displaying uncropped images on HD projectors and 4x6 prints, then the PDF would have been a lot smaller. :)

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Originally Posted by jrw

[...]I started wondering if I would see much difference due to pixel size when using the 100-400 on a 5Dii and comparing shots to the 70-200 IS ii on a 7D which has slightly smaller pixels than the D800.

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The way your test is setup mixes the effect of sensor+lens size with pixel size. For example, if you had tried the 20D+70mm vs 5D2+112mm, you would find the 5D2 far superior, even though the pixel size is the same. That is because of the benefits of sensor size (especially if f-number is kept constant).