6 Megapixels and ISO 204,800

Let's start with a question: Of all the images you take, how many of them do you print? If you're like me, the answer is a very low percentage. Ok, of those images you print, how big do they go? A5? A4? A3? Bigger than A3? 

So, we have just found out that most likely, you print your a few images generally around A4 with the odd A3. 

Now, thinking about the pictures you don't print. How many of these do you display on the web or on a screen/TV, be it HD or otherwise? I'd bet it's a much higher number.

So why do you want 21.1Megapixels? Or even 10Megapixels? If a full HD screen is around 2Megapixels and computer monitors don't do much above 2.3Megapixels (and that's assuming you've got a really high res screen as in 1920x1200) and most post generally work at 1.9Megapixels or less. 

Well, I know you can't choose what you're going to do with your images before you shoot them, but if the bulk of them are going to be on the web/screen then why do we seem to want more and more megapixels? Why do the manufacturers keep giving us more and more? 

How good would it be to have a 6 Megapixel full-frame camera with ISO 51,200 or ISO 102,400 or even ISO 204,800 producing super clean images with no noise because of the larger pixels and advanced noise processing now available? If you could take all the features we have on a camera today and put it on a camera with that sort of resolution, it won't win the resolution race but it would be an incredibly popular camera with the vast majority of photographers. 

Just think back to the EOS 10D. Each time a new camera comes out we tend to re-base what we consider the ideal resolution, but back around the EOS 10D 6 Megapixels was considered enough for most use. And if you combine it with images that show no noise at all until you reach frankly ridiculous ISO levels, you'd be able to interpolate to bigger sizes for the odd occasion when you might need it to print an A3 or bigger with no hassle at all. And the flip side to that coin is that you don't go around shooting 22MB files and cluttering up hard disk drives all over the shop with data that you quite simply don't need. 

What do you think? Are we barking up the wrong tree or should we be campaigning for this kind of camera? You know, one with a full-frame 6 Megapixel sensor, gapless microlenses, DIGIC 4 processor, ISO 204,800 as a standard rather than expansion, full HD movie (with exposure and frame control!), Live View, 10fps and the AF system from a fixed EOS-1D Mark III? 

Would you buy it? Let us know your thoughts...and answers to the questions at the top!

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Are your high ISO RAW images soft with DPP

There's been some people saying that Canon RAW images taken at higher ISO settings are too soft straight from Canon's Digital Photo Professional software. In the latest versions of DPP Canon made some changes in the preferences and the noise reduction processing. If you simply downloaded the updaters from Canon's software center at http://software.canon-europe.com then you might benefit a quick check of your DPP preferences.

First, here's an image in DPP and checking the NR/Lens/ALO tab you can see the luminance and chrominance noise reduction sliders are set to 1 and 4 respectively. The reason is that the later versions of DPP automatically set these sliders based on the ISO setting, the camera model and maybe the shutter speed, in-camera noise reduction settings etc.

As the ISO increases, and this image is only ISO 200 on an EOS 50D, then the sliders will be preset automatically to increased values.

However remember that as this is a RAW image, so you can change this setting. If you don't want as much chrominance or luminance noise reduction then move the slider to a lower number.

	blab:
	'there are many ways to skin the noise reduction cat'

The problems seem to come at the extremes of ISO. People with EOS 5D Mark II and EOS 50D shooting at ISO 12,800 and beyond then you often see these sliders move pretty much all the way to the end points and a lot of noise reduction is done. The downside is that it can make the resulting images a bit soft and lacking detail for some tastes.

In Digital Photo Professional the preferences allows you to override all this automatic selection of noise reduction parameters. Choose the 'Set as defaults entry and set your levels, even no noise reduction if that suits.

The key here is the 'Default noise reduction settings' section. If you just have been adding the updaters to older versions of DPP then your stored preferences won't have an entry and so you get the default 'Apply camera settings' and then DPP chooses the settings for you as a starting point. If you like you can choose your own settings to be applied to all your images, and you can still change it in DPP NR/ALO/Lens tab for each image.

If you regularly shoot High ISO, or do so for a specific job and employ a noise reduction workflow in your post production then you may want to set DPP to not apply any noise reduction by default - or only a very little bit.

Any thoughts and comments or even suggested settings would be welcomed in the comments. You can even mention third party software for noise reduction if you like... we dare you!!

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