I generally post articles when I have something very useful to say, which is why my posts have been so sporadic. There are a myriad of sources for photography industry news and I always feel I am doing my readers a disservice by parroting every new equipment release or software upgrade here.

This time, though, a piece of “news” hit my screen that I had to share, and I hope that by reading it here you will receive the whole story and not just 1/3 of it as some people did when they got the information from digg, reddit, or similar.

We’re talking about megapixels, and we’re talking about marketing, and we’re talking about lies. Lies perpetrated by the manufacturers of point-and-shoot cameras with tiny little CCD sensors who keep increasing the megapixel count and marketing it like it’s the end-all be-all of imaging performance.

Not so! Read on…

This issue surfaced when a nameless blogger (literally, I have no idea who this person is) posted an article (you might call it a “diatribe”) about the “suicidal march” of point-and-shoot cameras toward more and more megapixels (spurned by the Consumer Electronics Conference, or CES, which was earlier this month in Las Vegas), and the results of cramming lots of pixels into a small area. You can read that article here.

In order to understand some of the background, though, you’ll want to read his or her other article about optical diffraction and Airy disks which is very interesting, and then read his or her follow-up article where he (or she) addresses some of the anonymous Internet’s criticisms.

Now, I know it’s a gamble to spread anonymously written blog posts around as though they’re primary sources and laud the nameless, faceless author for their courage in uncovering what seems to be a pervasive scam, but to be honest I was blown away by the apparent truth of the whole thing.