Six million pixels are enough
This week’s Economist has a report about the new Nikon D40 – a 6 megapixel digital SLR camera which undercuts its rivals by several hundred dollars. Their main point in the article subtitled Nikon’s new camera favours quality over quantity is that they think Nikon has recognized that chasing an ever-increasing number of pixels on the image sensor is not the way to go. Thank goodness – I have recently bought a Canon Ixus 60 (which you can deduce has 6 megapixels) and noticed it is becoming quite difficult to find a decent compact camera which doesn’t offer 8-10 megapixels and correspondingly low sensitivity / high noise CCD image sensors.