Is the Megapixel Race Still On?

January 10, 2007, 10:17 PM by Scott M. Fulton, III

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: We went into this CES week believing the race to build digital cameras with more and more megapixels was finally wearing down. Lo and behold, Sharon Fisher talks with a key analyst in this space who says there's actually no stopping the rapid rise of megapixels. Sharon?

Sharon Fisher, Senior CES Analyst, BetaNews: The megapixel race in the digital camera market is sort of like the quest for the biggest TV – in the same way that you wonder why anyone needs a 108" TV, you wonder why anyone needs 12 megapixels.

And the answer is, you really don't. According to Lyra's Steve Hoffenberg, six megapixels is all most consumers need for all practical purposes.

Steve Hoffenberg, Director of Consumer Imaging Research, Lyra: The drive to go beyond [6 mp] is really marketing specsmanship and competitive issues and not really by user demand.

Sharon Fisher: Hoffenberg expects a quarter to a third of the digital camera marketplace to settle out at around 6 megapixels or so. On the other hand, he thinks the rest of the market will just keep on going. We're up to 12 megapixels now, but that's just on the consumer level; there's professional digital cameras out there that support 20 and 30 megapixels, so there's no technical limit. But unless you're a pro or you like blowing your pictures up really big, you probably don't need more than 10 megapixels, he said.

In fact, some of the early adopters - those people who are on their second and third digital camera by now - are starting to get picky about factors other than resolution, Hoffenberg said. And manufacturers are starting to respond to that, so you're getting features such as zoom lens beyond the standard 3X; he expects zooms up to 5X in the consumer market, because that's a feature easy for the consumer to understand. Casio has one at the show with a 7X zoom.

Other new features include larger LCD screens on the back of the camera. They started out at 1.7 or 1.8 inches on a side, and now they're up to 2 or 3 inches. And that has a much bigger effect than you might think because it doubles the area. That's probably going to top out at 3 1/2 inches, though, Hoffenberg said, because beyond that, you're going to have trouble fitting it into a pocket – unless you make like an iPhone and have a touch interface right on the screen.

There's also a whole range of image stabilization, anti-shake, anti-blur features, which not only help people with shaky hands but let you take pictures in darker areas without a flash. And there's a number of cameras being announced at CES with those, including the Kodak EasyShare.

Then for the person who's been sticking to his 35 mm camera all these years, Leica is announcing a digital camera, and the really neat feature about that, aside from its really beautiful retro styling and its 10+ megapixel resolution, is the fact that you can use all the M-series of lens that are out there for Leicas.

Beyond that, what you're going to see is a lot more fragmentation of the market as vendors start looking to niches, such as the design, the color, special software, MP3 players built in, and so on, Hoffenberg told me.

But the megapixel race will go on, and there's sales statistics to bear this out. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, the 6-7 megapixel category grew the fastest in 2006 at 120% growth.

Meghan Henning, CEA Spokesperson: In 2007 we expect the 8+ megapixel category to grow the fastest, but it's a much smaller share of the total compared to the 6-7 category. Through 2010 we expect the 6-7 category to be the largest in terms of unit sales.

Sharon Fisher: Other new features that the CEA sees as differentiation points for digital cameras are design features such as style and color; wireless support for e-mailing and printing photos; more ways to organize, share, and display photos; new ways to manipulate and edit photos; support for features such as GPS to geo-tag photos and plot them on a map; and waterproof/underwater cameras, Henning said.

Scott Fulton: Okay, Sharon, from folks elsewhere in the industry, I've heard that the days of megapixels governing the digital camera race are over, that we're moving past megapixels and into features as distinguishing factors.
But here's Hoffenberg, whom I like and respect, saying no, we could go on forever with megapixels.

Sharon Fisher: Well, not exactly. He's saying both: that the megapixel war isn't ending, and that as people are becoming more sophisticated in the digital camera world, they're looking for features beyond resolution.

Scott Fulton: Well, for consumers, there comes a point where regardless of whether you can afford the memory or the hard drive space, it's more difficult working with a mega-huge picture.

Sharon Fisher: Right. It means things like you can blow it up bigger.

Scott Fulton: And the fact that it has more resolution does not mean the picture is necessarily clearer because there's a threshold after which, it doesn't really matter any more.

Sharon Fisher: That's why he's saying that 6-10 megapixels is really enough for the average consumer.

Scott Fulton: And yet we may get 30 anyway before too long. We'll need a mega-megapixel-filter to help scale things down for us. Thanks once again to our expert racing analyst, Sharon Fisher.