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The Physics Teacher -- May 2008 -- Volume 46, Issue 5, pp. 304

Megapixels and Human Recognition of Resolution

Steve Kreis

Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

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This paper tries to demonstrate that it is not reasonable to judge the quality of pictures that a camera can produce just by the number of pixels that the sensor has. It does so by trying to relate the number of pixels in a picture to the resolution that the eye can see at various distances away from prints of different size.

© 2008 American Association of Physics Teachers

KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

physics education, teacher training, image resolution, cameras, eye, photography, digital instrumentation

PACS

  • 01.40.J-

    Teacher training

  • 42.66.Lc

    Vision: light detection, adaptation, and discrimination

  • 42.79.-e

    Optical elements, devices, and systems

History
Online Apr 2008

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

0031-921X (print)  

Publisher

$abstract.society.value is a Member of CrossRef American Association of Physics Teachers

ARTICLE DATA

Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.2909752

  1. William K. Hartmann and Chris Impey, Astronomy 5th ed. (Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, CA, 1994), p. 43. Serway and Beichner use Rayleigh's criterion to get 1 min of arc as the resolution of the human eye—Raymond A. Serway and Robert J. Beichner, Physics for Scientists and Engineers 5th ed. (Saunders College Publishing, Fort Worth, TX, 2000), p. 1223.
  2. Conversation with Norman Sanders of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York City.
  3. This is roughly the Rayleigh criterion. See, e.g., David Halliday and Robert Resnick, Fundamentals of Physics 2nd ed. (Wiley, New York, 1986), p. 813, example 4.
  4. Russell Hart, “How digital changed the flight plan of the world's best air-to-air photographer,” American PHOTO On Campus 9, 18 (Sept. 2005).
  5. See http://www.hdtvinfoport.com.



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