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The End of the Megapixel Race
Introduction
The Photo Marketing Association's annual show, PMA, is a highly anticipated event where manufacturers show off their latest and greatest for the coming year. It is also the place to see what directions manufacturers are taking with their marketing. At the last two PMA events, megapixels and zoom have received less emphasis from the manufacturers, and new features are becoming more of the focal point in their marketing campaigns. In this article I am going to take a look at some of the offerings from the last year and some of the new innovations manufacturers have been pushing. If there's one thing anybody in marketing will understand, it's that the general consumer is not a rocket scientist. Most consumers don't want to learn everything about a product to understand what makes one better than the next, and at most desire quick tips. An example would be what numbers to look for in a camera's specifications or what features are most desirable. In the past it has been the same, even with film cameras. In those days, some of the most marketed features were auto focus points and frames per second. Other than name recognition, most consumers base their purchasing decisions on a couple of factors, mostly involving those that can be easily measured. When consumer digital cameras hit the market, manufacturers looked for that magical feature which could determine the worth of one camera versus another. Once the megapixel barrier was breached, it was only a matter of time before the megapixel rating would become the star of the digital camera marketing world. Even now, many consumers associate more megapixels with higher quality. Some manufacturers have even touted digital features to further confuse the consumers. Features such as a digital zoom, acting as a multiplier of the true optical zoom to produce a big number for "total zoom," or interpolated (up-scaled) resolution - which while bringing lower quality, still carried the illusion of being higher quality because of the higher numbers.  The problem with digitizing certain features was that consumers quickly learned that the results were not what they expected. A customer purchasing a digital camcorder solely on the premise that it had a 200X digital zoom would soon come to realize that while you could zoom in 200X, all you were really doing was cropping and up-scaling the existing zoom. The result would be a couple of blocky pixels shaking around on the screen. The same is true with interpolated resolution. Some manufactures such as Fuji offer 12 megapixel cameras which actually use a six megapixel sensor and interpolate the image to achieve the final, advertised resolution. As a result, the final image doesn't look as good as it would at the native 6 megapixels without the interpolation. But it has 12 megapixels; it has to be good, right? And the product packaging is so damn pretty! Over the last couple of years, as the megapixel race has started to slow down, consumers have started getting smarter (some of them at least), realizing that a camera with less megapixels could actually be better than the competitor's higher megapixel product. Some consumers have started looking beyond megapixels for other features that they can use to help judge a camera's worth. Some highly sought-after features include higher zoom (optical), a larger LCD, more frames per second, less shutter lag, and smaller camera bodies. To lay a bit more foundation, I recommend reading our 3-part Beyond Megapixels series from back in 2004. Much of what Joe Marney wrote then still holds true today.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Moving Beyond Megapixels Page 3: The Future of Photography? / Closing Thoughts 
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