Megapixels Maxed Out? Are the Megapixel Wars Over for Digicams?

In a surprising reversal of the megapixel digicam wars, Canon introduced a new PowerShot G compact digicam last week with fewer pixels than its predecessor, the Canon PowerShot G10 announced 11 months ago. The $499 Canon PowerShot G11 is a 10-Mpixel compact camera while the G10’s sensor sported 14.7 Mpixels. Why? What do you get in exchange for those missing Mpixels? Good things, that’s what you get. Paired with Canon’s integrated Digic 4 image processor, you get as much as two stops of superior signal/noise. Those 15-Mpixel consumer-grade sensors are known for noise, no matter who makes them.

You also get something called iContrast, an automatic processing technology that prevents the camera from blowing image highlights while retaining shadow detail. To me, this feature suggests that you can tell the camera to automatically optimize its ability to “shoot to the right” (get the maximum exposure you can while shooting for the widest possible dynamic range).

There’s also a “low-light” mode that kicks the ISO up to 12,800 while reducing image resolution to 2.5 Mpixels, again for noise reduction. Essentially, the camera doubles up pixels in both the X and Y directions to increase the effective size of the photon buckets by averaging four adjacent pixels to get one low-noise, high-sensitivity pixel. (For you picky readers out there, I think I already know this is an oversimplification but it’s close enough for my purposes here.)

For us Strobists, there’s another exciting feature: flash sync speed to 1/2000 of a second. That means you can use external flash in daylight and still restrict the amount of exposure contributed by bright sun. It’s a big deal for off-camera strobe shooters because the results of such creative light control are often quite stunning.

Finally, Canon G-series lovers get something they’ve been clamoring to get: a swivel, fold-out LCD on back of the camera, which also sports an optical viewfinder.

To me, this new generation G-series camera marks the end (at least a temporary end) to the insanity of a megapixel war that championed ever-increasing pixel counts at the expense of ever-increasing image noise. This situation is conceptually quite similar to the gigahertz processor wars that championed ever-increasing clock rate while ignoring the ever-increasing power consumption and heat generation. That war had to come to a stop and it did. Instead, we now have multicore processors in the same way that the Canon G11 can quadruple up on sensor pixels to increase sensitivity at the expense of still more megapixels. It’s also similar to the situation that enterprise IT shops are now in, short-stroking high-RPM disk drives to trade off storage capacity for faster access times.

These are all examples of a more intelligent use of technology to reach real performance goals rather than simply riding a trend line. It’s all good, right?