Petavoxel broke out his Olympus FE-26 12-megapixel camera and took a picture of the beautiful snow, and found the resulting image.. Well, it’s crap, just plain crap.  He took it upon himself to deal what might be the best blow against the ‘megapixel wars’ underway amongst low-end point-and-shoot camera providers, complete with some detailed math and optical physics.

So, is Olympus just the crappiest manufacturer ever? Well, I will concede that the lens on this camera seems to be particularly poor. Look at that crazy color fringing!

But when it comes to the smudgy lack of detail, the problem is the same as with every other compact camera today—too many pixels.

The FE-26 is a “12 megapixel” model (actually it’s more like 11.8 Mp) using a 1/2.33″ sensor. This means each pixel is about 1.5 microns wide. When pixels are that small, the random difference in photon counts between adjacent pixels can add quite a bit of noise to the image. To solve this, the camera’s processor chip applies a noise-suppressing algorithm, which unfortunately smears out all the fine detail and texture in the scene.

Admittedly, different camera companies can be more or less clever about their noise-reduction processing. This one looks especially bad, but it nicely illustrates the kinds of artifacts that can result.

But what’s clear is that the surplus megapixels of this camera are certainly not delivering additional image detail. And as you increase the ISO or stop down the lens, quality will only get worse.

As I discussed last time, 1.5 micron pixels are always going to struggle with diffraction blur. The theoretical minimum size for a light spot focused by an f/3.7 lens is 5 microns. Stopping down the lens makes the diffraction blur larger.

Read the full story, and more examples, at his blog.

via The Great Megapixel Swindle: An Example « Petavoxel.