I don't want 10 gazillion megapixels

richard plumb

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My next camera is likely to be a Canon 7D or maybe a 5DII (I tend towards the 7D but I need to try out a 5D first)

But I don't need 18 or 24 megapixels. I'll just end up with massive files that are unwieldy. I tend to only print at 6x4 for albums and 10x8ish for framed stuff.

I've read about things like sRAW that in theory can use groups of pixels to act like 'big' pixels, reducing noise overall. So in theory instead of 24mp you have a 12 or even 6mp image

Does this work in real life? Can you do this in an external editor if the camera doesn't support it directly? Do any of you resize your edited images to make them easier to handle (presumably you keep the originals somewhere safe)?
 
Seems like Nikon is a better bet for you now, I've got the opposite problem so would prefer Canon as I could do with having the extra megapixels. In your position I'd be asking myself more whether you need a new camera at all then. Maybe spend the money on glass instead.
 
My next camera is likely to be a Canon 7D or maybe a 5DII (I tend towards the 7D but I need to try out a 5D first)

But I don't need 18 or 24 megapixels. I'll just end up with massive files that are unwieldy. I tend to only print at 6x4 for albums and 10x8ish for framed stuff.

I've read about things like sRAW that in theory can use groups of pixels to act like 'big' pixels, reducing noise overall. So in theory instead of 24mp you have a 12 or even 6mp image

Does this work in real life? Can you do this in an external editor if the camera doesn't support it directly? Do any of you resize your edited images to make them easier to handle (presumably you keep the originals somewhere safe)?

RAW doesn't bother me. Disk space is too cheap to worry about it. Why would I worry about spending £100 on storage after spending a huge amount on the camera kit? :rotfl:

I keep my RAW files on my PC with a DVD backup. They are edited, then saved as jpeg and then some are made smaller for the web.

As part of the editing, I've recently started to use Picasa to tag my images (IPTC). I will then send them to others and get them to use Picasa so that they can search the images on their own PC off-line.
 
My next camera is likely to be a Canon 7D or maybe a 5DII (I tend towards the 7D but I need to try out a 5D first)

But I don't need 18 or 24 megapixels. I'll just end up with massive files that are unwieldy. I tend to only print at 6x4 for albums and 10x8ish for framed stuff.

I've read about things like sRAW that in theory can use groups of pixels to act like 'big' pixels, reducing noise overall. So in theory instead of 24mp you have a 12 or even 6mp image

Does this work in real life? Can you do this in an external editor if the camera doesn't support it directly? Do any of you resize your edited images to make them easier to handle (presumably you keep the originals somewhere safe)?

I wouldn't hesitate to use sRAW if you know you only want to print 6x4s. That way you get the best of both worlds with file size and noise.

I quite like the idea of sRAW, although I don't really use it on my 40D having only 10MP anyway so storage isn't a big problem unless you're talking about Tiff files?
 
With hard drive storage now being in the region of 20GB per £ I think you ahve to seriously consider whether file size is an issue. Noise on cameras (particularly the models you are looking at) only really becomes an issue at very high ISO. By all means use sRAW in those situations, but in most others I'm not sure there's much point. If you want to save small JPGs from the RAW files to sending to others, all well and good, but if you do take a stunning shot that you decide later on you want to get blown up to a decent size canvas you'll regret being stuck at 6MP. You can always downsample later on if you want to. Upsampling opportunities are highly limited.
 

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