Crude Technologies

Have a look at the reviews for various image sharpening tools, and how they struggle to deal with the problems that arise when an "edge" (such as the line between a watch's black hands and the watch's white face) falls in the center of a pixel.

Most of us can certainly see the difference between RGB(255,255,255) and RGB(255,255,254). Those differences cause "banding". Look at The Luminous Landscape's excellent review of Kodak's monochrome professional camera (the 760m, if I recall). 12-bit color is better than 8-bit, but it's not enough. Neither is 16-bit color.

There's a difference between "precision" and equations. An equation can define the number "pi", but no amount of decmial precision can define it accurately.

JPEGs look blocky because their cosine formulae cannot capture the rich subtleties of the real world. Fractal images formats are somewhat better, because the equations they use to compress data can represent more of the chaos detail inherent in reality.

DPReview uses photographs of a watch face to illustrate advances in photographic sensors. Look closely, and the loss of information due to "precision" is always apparent. Find a real watch face, and study the edge of one of the hands. Examine with a magnifying glass the shadow that slender hand casts on the face. No matter how closely you look, you will not see pixels, or banding, or differences in shades of color. Put the same scene under ever increasing powers of magnification, and you will unveil ever richer amounts of detail.

This is not to say that computers will never capture and render reality. Far from it. Ray Kurzweil writes, in his book "The Singularity is Near", that computers may become smarter than humans, and in fact may completely model and emulate the human mind, in the next 30 years.

But virtual reality won't be achieved through precision. It will be reached by understanding and interpreting the "rules" of how reality appears to our mind through our senses, and modelling that ever more closely.

You can recognize a friend from a single line describing her profile drawn by a sketch artist. MIT has demonstrated we can recognize age, gender, mood, and even individuals, if we are shown only 13 points on that individual's body in motion as they walk (dots at the shoulders, elbows, hands, hips, knees, and feet, and one more for the head).

The endeavour to capture and convey reality with an imperfect abstract sounds to me like "art". I hope this art is Nikon's goal, not some quixotic quest for megapixel precision.

** Originally posted at DPReview.com at 7:37 PM, Sunday, October 16, 2005 (GMT-5)