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Okay, I haven’t been on here in forever, because I’ve been so busy. I have a totally different type of question this time. I’ve been running several game cameras to catch some thieves on our farm. I’m having trouble with the resolution I think. The camera has 4 settings, low: 1.4mp, med: 2mp, and high: 4mp. Then there’s enhanced: 10mp. What I don’t get, is why the 4mp is better than the 10mp. Unless it’s a marketing scheme to say 10 mp when the sensor is only the size for 4mp. Maybe it’s just throwing in tons of random pixels? Here’s some folks I’ve caught on the two different settings…
Car: 10 mp
Truck: 4 mphttps://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxGlj8erF2VydFRpdjJXLUw3OTg/view?usp=drivesdk
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxGlj8erF2VyY3FpTHZPY01TWGM/view?usp=drivesdk
Both of the pictures you linked to above are 2688×1512 = 4.06 Megapixels.
I’m not sure what they’re doing there, but it’s entirely possible that they’re just upscaling the photos to 10 MP. Is your camera something like this one? https://www.amazon.com/Moultrie-M-990i-Camera-Mossy-Treestand/dp/B00SSGUHVA/
To quote from it’s specifications:
- Crystal clear 10.0 Megapixel photo resolution
🙂 🙂
I would suggest doing some test shots on a static subject at different resolutions, then compare them. It could be that the 4 MP shots look better because they’re down-scaled from a cheapie 10 MP sensor.
I’m pretty sure the reason they’re the same size is they got re-sized to go onto Drive. That particular camera is this guy: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Moultrie-D-900i-10MP-No-Glow-IR-HD-Video-with-Sound-Color-View-Screen/46542939
I’ll have to run a few tests and see what the difference is exactly.Notice that the truck’s license plate is very easily read-able, while the 10 MP car photo is just barely discernable. The 2 photos should be about the same, all else being equal…. The car is slightly further away, but the license plate is seemingly about the same size.
I do notice though, that the car photo seems to be taken in lower light, which could definitely affect the IQ, coming as it does from such a small sensor.
Yeah @buddingphotographer, Reading the license plate is the important thing here, so that’s why I was asking. It seemed like there was a lot of extra pixels in the car’s plate that makes it difficult to read. I’ll try to run a test next time I get ahold of the cameras.
I found this on a Moultrie review website….
Megapixel Ratings:
In the past, many people get confused with the megapixel rating trail camera manufacturers advertise. Companies inflate the mpxl rating to attract eyes to their products. They do this through interpolation, which digitally adds megapixels to a photo without actually improving the picture.
The best way to judge picture quality is to look at actual pictures. You will notice this the most when you zoom in on a full-size image that a camera has taken. The details of the photo will appear hazy or even digitized. This is normal, and to be expected.”
Very interesting! Something that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that the exposure settings are identical between the two pictures except for the shutter speed. Car = 1/115. Truck = 1/630.
Interesting point, @JamesStaddon. That seems to confirm my theory that it was quite a bit darker on the the day that the photo of the car was taken.
@thefarmhand, it looks like you’re going to be better off sticking with 4 MP, which is likely the native resolution of the sensor. Your computer can do a much better job at interpolation than the dinky little processor in the camera, so you’ll get better results by choosing fewer megapixels. 🙂On a side note, trail-camera manufacturers aren’t the only ones who “cheat” with interpolation and big numbers. If you ever see a cheapo camcorder “on sale” with 700x DIGITAL ZOOM, you’re seeing the same sort of funny business. 700x digital zoom is absolutely worthless for any serious video work. Digital zoom on the whole is a waste of time*. Like I said above, your computer can do a whole lot better of a job with it’s high-powered processors, than a little camera processor can ever dream of doing!
*There are rare cases when a camera manufacturer actually zooms on the sensor.
Let’s say you’re shooting FHD video (1920×1080): you’re only using ~2 MP out of your camera’s 18 MP sensor. (It is actually recording the video at 18 MP and downscaling it to 2 MP) You can effectively gain a lot of “zoom” by only recording video from the actual pixels of the center 2 MP of the sensor. Instead of downscaling, you just basically crop the video, which basically gives you a crop factor just like a DSLR would have.
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