Digital Trends

The first 12-megapixel camera I ever used was the Canon EOS 5D which cost a cool $3,500 USD. That D-SLR uses a full-frame CMOS sensor, one of the two currently available. Because the imager is the size of a frame of 35mm film, there’s no digital factor impacting interchangeable lenses so your favorite 28mm is still a 28, not 42mm. The pictures delivered by this pro-grade D-SLR are amazing, magical as some of my confreres in the imaging press reported. With that larger-size chip, the pixels are much bigger, so there’s very little digital noise. Now, just a few years later, Sony has introduced a $399 USD 12MP CCD point-and-shoot digicam. Realize this is a totally different camera than the 5D and about the only thing they have in common is the gross number of pixels. The Sony chip is much smaller so the pixels are crammed together making noise the inevitable result. Still it is a 12-megapixel camera and--with 10MPs so commonplace-- DigitalTrends.com just had to give it a test drive. This is what we discovered.