Call it more of a marketing stunt — and Olympus is good at that. Fact is that the 40MP high-resolution mode of the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II seems to be a lot of fun to shoot with. If you’re care about maximum detail in landscape photography, this is a worthwhile alternative to a medium format high-resolution sensor that costs many times more. It’s the first time a consumer camera offers this mode. Here’s a tutorial how to mimic it with any camera, freeing any sensor from its inherent pixel count.
First off, DP Review explains the E-M5 Mark II’s multi-shot Hi Res mode in detail. If you want to mimic the technique, you’ll need a reasonably good camera, a reasonably steady hand (no tripod!) and Adobe Photoshop, to almost quadruple (!) a camera’s inherent resolution without softening really fine aliased details.
Photographer Ian Norman took the time to write an in-depth primer on superresolution that’s both a shooting technique and a post-processing method: Practical Superresolution Tutorial is a how-to guide that can keep you busy for many weekends to come.
Superresolution, says Norman, is actually a trick to maximize the amount of detail one can create with a sensor. It’s the future, says Norman. Resolution of a camera will no longer be determined by a sensor’s pixel count:
Whether it’s using sensor shifting, color filter array shifting, vectorized polygonal interpolation, some combination of these methods or others, superresolution will likely be implemented on every kind of camera from smartphones to DSLRs and compact system cameras. We’ll start seeing plenty of cameras that will be able to output images with more resolution than their sensor’s pixel count would otherwise indicate.
The main problem remains motion blur from moving subjects/objects. Faster processing performances will be an answer. And Norman voices the major caveat that often gets forgotten amongst our gear lust and resolution hunger:
Resolution, however is a single variable in the success of your image and in my opinion it’s a really low priority one. Lighting, composition and technique are all significantly more valuable to the success of a photograph than its pixel count. Just keep in mind that some extra detail on a roof almost 500 meters away doesn’t make your image a better photograph and in pretty much every contemporary medium on which you’ll display your photos short of extremely large prints, no one will notice the difference between a 12MP photo and a 100MP photo. Unless they look really really closely.
As always, one’s right camera is one’s right means to a right end. Shooting landscapes? You have every right to throw money into the camera you dream of. But try some superresolution stacks first. I myself am completely happy with my main, light-hungry 16MP camera. The other day I shot my son wakeboarding. Nice detail, even zoomed in.
Here is Norman’s video manual:
Must add that panoramas (GigaPan) would have the advantage of handling scenes with motion in them. As a welcome plus, superresolution elegantly circumvents lens diffraction, the physical limit of any lens. Even if you can resolve all the things on the sensor side, not every lens can.