"native resolution" of photos from digital cameras ?

Posted Dec 22, 2014 20:48 UTC (Mon) by lmartelli (subscriber, #11755)
Parent article: High-DPI displays and Linux

"Photos from digital cameras can be displayed at something resembling their native resolution"

Pardon me, but what is the "native resolution" of photos from digital cameras supposed to be ? Resolution, by definition, measures pixels or dots by a unit of distance. But photos from a digital camera have to physical dimensions, so they can't have a native resolution. Unless you are thinking of the resolution of the sensor, but since they are usually less than a centimeters, their resolution is much higher than even the highest-dpi display that I know of.

"native resolution" of photos from digital cameras ?

Posted Dec 23, 2014 19:16 UTC (Tue) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] (3 responses)

"Resolution, by definition, measures pixels or dots by a unit of distance."

It's also commonly used for total size in pixels. (E.g., "the resolution of my laptop's monitor is 1280x800").

So "native resolution" here means "full size in pixels".

Rail against loose use of language if you want, but I think that sort of usage is too common to exclude it as a definition of "resolution". And in this case there's no ambiguity (since as you point out a digital photo has no inherent physical dimensions).

"native resolution" of photos from digital cameras ?

Posted Dec 23, 2014 19:29 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

given that the most pixels you can get on a screen is ~8MP (for a 4k screen), you still aren't going to be showing your digital pictures at 1-1 zoom for most modern cameras

"native resolution" of photos from digital cameras ?

Posted May 19, 2015 20:36 UTC (Tue) by sethml (guest, #8471) [Link]

My 5K retina iMac shows 14.7MP. My Nikon D300 shoots 12.3MP. It's pretty cool seeing *all* the pixels at once. My more modern Nikon D750 shots 24.3MP, so I don't get to see all of them, but seeing more than half is still pretty awesome.

The world really needs >4K display support better standardized/supported so you don't have to buy Apple's hardware to get it...

"native resolution" of photos from digital cameras ?

Posted Dec 23, 2014 21:11 UTC (Tue) by rleigh (guest, #14622) [Link]

This is, strictly speaking, not correct. Like many terms (SI unit prefixes...), resolution is used largely incorrectly in the domain of computing and without understanding of what it really means. It's a term which has been taken and used out of context. Resolution is a physical measure of the smallest object an imaging system can *resolve*. If two small objects next to each other are not distinguishable as separate objects (they are one blob), then the system has not *resolved* them. In the case of microscopy and cameras, the resolution (resolving power) is defined by the optics of the system (lens numerical aperture, plus any further diffraction and aberation). This is *independent* of the detector (CCD/PMT/film), but the detector will have to sample at least at twice the bandwidth to satisfy Nyquist-Shannon sampling criterea, so for a correctly set up system your detector will be sampling at twice the optical resolution in x and y. [For cheap cameras with massive CCD sizes, the optics are so poor you end up sampling pointlessly at many times the Nyquist limit; turn on 2x2 or higher binning to get smaller, less noisy and higher quality images. Compare with an SLR with better optics and a smaller [pixel] size but higher quality CCD!]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution
http://www.svi.nl/NyquistRate

Resolution is not, and never has been, a *size* measure as used by CCDs and monitors. I know it's common practice in computing, but it's wrong nonetheless. You can measure the well/dot pitch (i.e. distance between pixels), which would be better, but strictly speaking that's not really a measure of resolution either (in this context) since it's a property of an optical system and not of the detector/emitter of a light signal such as a CCD or monitor.

Regards,
Roger