Re: Warning of major NHS IT overspend

[Brian Gladman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

Brian Beesley wrote:

[snip]
> The manufacturers of digital compact cameras are rapidly running into this 
> dilemma. They are now trying to get up to 8 Mpels out of a very small sensor, 
> about 1/25th of the area of a 35mm frame; every one of these cameras has 
> serious problems with imaging noise, forcing them to reduce the sensitivity 
> or use aggressive noise filtering which has other serious effects on the 
> image quality. If you really must buy a digital compact I'd strongly suggest

[snip]
High end digital compact cameras do not have such small sensors. The one 
I use has a 16mm square sensor with 8 Mpixels.  This works out at about 
1/3 the area of a 35mm frame and provides a resolution of about 170 
pixels/mm.

I suspect that this is a significantly higher than the resolution of the 
(mostly zoom) lenses that are typically fitted on such cameras.  Hence I 
suspect you are right to suggest that we don't need more than about 5 
Mpixels unless we can offer much better lenses.

   Brian Gladman