Canon has a DSLR that is 50.6 megapixels. Yes...you read that right. 50.6 megapixels.
The Canon 5DS and 5DSR.
It is absolutely wonderful for portraits, industrial photography, advertising and promotions and everything where you require attention to detail.
But, is it good enough to be the absolute best?
You would think that “Why not? If a good picture equals to the number of pixels, then the more the better”.
Yes and No.
You see the first bottleneck with that much number of pixels is that there is just way more data than usual. This means that if you take that camera for a shoot, you would have to allocate more than at least double the amount of time required for a normal other full frame camera shoots.; just to first copy/read and write the files. This involves investment in better memory cards and card readers, faster ones. Then comes the actual processing power required by the computer to process and edit these massive files.
Granted that today’s computers are exponentially faster and powerful than what they used to be but they still remain to be a considerable investment to make.
So, unless you have a load of money to throw away, investing in such a camera to be your primary device would just have a domino effect of upgrades in all your workflow gear.
The second bottleneck would be details. Literally too much details.
Consider this. You take a wonderful portrait of a model. This camera is so powerful that it would be able to reproduce all the nooks and crannies in her skin, literally every single thing. Now what does this mean? Master skills of retouching. For a photographer this means 2 things. First, colour correction and adjustments and then, the retouching. I mean you would literally be working to decrease the amount of details present in the picture to make it look normal. Forget everything you learnt about creating a better picture. You would have to learn to change an almost perfect and amazingly details portrait into a normal looking one. Almost kind of like making it believable for the mud bloods.
Finally, the actual issue would be the very sensitivity of the sensor itself. There is a control in every DSLR that modifies how much the sensor reacts to the light that comes in; the ISO number.
The more sensitive you make it, since it is reacting so much to the available light, the more noise it creates. Imagine a brightly lit room. Now imagine that there is more light, a lot more and it keeps increasing every second. Now what happens if this amount of light is more than what your eyes can perceive? Yes. Everything becomes white.
Now apply this concept on this camera, where the sensor is your eye. The problem would be especially be amplified during low light photography. Let’s say you are requested at a club house to take some shots during their Friday night party. There is not enough light in the party floor so you decide to crank up the ISO. Of course, there are other ways to increase the light, opening up the lens aperture to let in more light or decreasing the shutter speed to…you guessed it, let more light in.
So, remember the situation with more and more light? Yeah. When you increase the sensitivity of the sensor, the little amount of light available gets absorbed by more and more of the pixels than necessary and as a result you get; NOISE. A hell of a lot of NOISE.
This issue is so prevalent in this camera that CANON had to actually reduce the levels of ISO available on this CAMERA.
So..yeah. It is a wonderful camera. I would grab it without a second thought if I had a chance. But if I have a choice to take 5D Mark III or 5D Mark IV over 5DS as my only camera, I would definitely pick the 5D Mark IV/III.
Very good sometimes ends up just as too good