Image Quality versus Megapixels

With Photokina safely behind us, it's time to evaluate where the industry is going. We really have seemed to hit a line in the megapixel wars, with no magical increases in megapixels. The Nikon D2xs is probably about as big as an APS sized sensor is likely to get at 12.4 megapixels, while Canon's 1Ds Mark II tops out at 16.7 megapixels on a 35mm frame-sized sensor.

Realistically, anything more than these numbers and issues like diffraction take away from image quality.

Not too surprisingly, Fujifilm is going in a totally different direction--their proposed S5pro, the successor to the S3pro, remains with a 6 megapixel imager that has 12 megapixels of sensors. Fujifilm did not up their megapixel counts as many had hoped.

Why? Fujifilm claims that it has chosen to focus on image quality as paramount--low noise images with lots of dynamic range.

Is Fujifilm right? Well,I'd say it's safe to say that Fujifilm is betting the company on it.