I still have an old Vivitar P&S camera that only shoots in 5 mp. looking back, it's a pointless camera even when it was new. The pictures were bad quality, the camera is built poorly, and it only held 9 photos on a good day but it was a great camera for its day when it was new. I still like to shoot in film but in today's world its more convenient and cost effective to shoot in digital. That's why I own and shoot with a Cannon 50D (don't hate Nikon). I will admit I did get caught up in the pixel race thinking the more the better and at one point that was true however is that still the case today? I bought the camera new back when it was still one of "the" cameras to own and its still a great camera today and I find I still get great professional shots with it. Back then 12 mp was the thing to have and when I was hunting down prospective photography schools they all told me I needed a camera that shoots in 10 mp or better. Imagine my surprise when I found this bad boy.
The new DP1, DP2
This is the soon to be new DP1.
Ok lets look at this for a second.
1) It's a point and shoot. Who cares right; but think about this as well.
2) This is a P&S with 46 mega pixels
Yeah you heard that right
46 FRICKIN MEGA PIXELS!
Really?
Ok who would be using this? In a perfect world professionals, but lets face it everyone wants a professional camera. See the problem with that many pixels is that's a big photo. I mean really big! Who really needs a photo that big unless you have a build-board on the moon advertising for passing UFO'S to "Eat at Joe's"?
Isn't it time to stop with all this megapixel nonsense and start making cameras that are actually practical? there is a reason they never made negatives the size of a room. No one needs a photo that huge unless you are working for NASA.
Now just think of the sheer computing power a computer is going to need just to make this thing usable. My computer has no problem uploading and managing my photos from the 50D and I don't have the best of computers, but I do know I sure do have a problem with uploading photos to the internet. Many times I cant upload images because there is a size limit. It's usually no more than 3 megs That's a big problem sometimes when the photo itself is larger than that and especially when the limit is in the kilobyte range as it commonly is. I have to take the image into editing software to shrink it and take out pixels to make it fit entirely defeating the purpose of my 12 mp camera in the first place. Why take a photo of that quality when I cant use it? Many times I'll have 3 or 4 different saves for the same photo on my hard drive only because they are all different sizes and qualities all taking up space
Now onto the other problem.
I take photos all the time and I know a lot of people who aren't professional do the same. That in itself takes a lot of space. With large photos comes large files and with this camera you almost need to buy your own super computer just to keep all the files unless you go back to having paper copies again. (remember the days when a photo album was actually a book you kept in your closet?)
I don't have a problem with this actual camera. I think it's great we have gotten to a point where something like this is possible but "Is it needed?"
