Thoughts on Gigapixel

According to rumors (yes, I subscribe to a Sony camera rumors site), Sony is going to announce a "new kind of" full frame camera later this month. I'm curious to see what it is, because I had been planning to upgrade to the A7R V whenever it was announced, to replace my A7R III, which I've been quite happy with but which isn't really that high resolution anymore. The A7R III still fetches a meaningful amount on camera gear resale sites, which would offset the cost of a new camera, and I would like to have the best photo quality available for pictures of our son when he is born. I decided to skip the A7R IV because it seemed to be only an incremental resolution boost, and I don't really need the latest and greatest all the time, but if this "new kind of" full frame camera is really something great, I might spring for it.

On the other hand, I encountered a blog post about software from a company called Topaz Labs that has used machine learning to build software called Gigapixel AI that generates upscaled images that are better (more detailed, sharper) than just scaling in Lightroom or Photoshop. They also have an AI based noise reduction application that I found worked very well for the same reasons. I downloaded the free trials for both and tried them on our wedding photos. We had wanted very high quality wedding photos and even rented a 50 megapixel medium format camera for our photographer to use, but he backed out of using it at the last minute and used his dinky 16 megapixel APS-C camera instead. The "edited" photos that came back were junk, but we had paid for the raw files, and I was able to improve them somewhat in Lightroom myself. I always regretted that they were so low-resolution though, and set Denoise AI and Gigapixel AI to work on them.

The results were great. I did find that I needed to process them for noise reduction first, or the Gigapixel AI software would create strange patterns based on the noise in the originals, but the noise reduction software itself was a marked improvement over the originals, and although Gigapixel couldn't make a sharp photo out of photos that weren't sharp in the first place, it did a GREAT job of upscaling the sharp photos to the point where I would be very comfortable buying a very large print of the photo, way beyond what 16 megapixels would typically allow. Gigapixel was also able to take full advantage of my graphics card to perform the work, which still took about six minutes per file (I imagine it would be much slower on CPU alone), so I was very impressed. The noise reduction software was on sale, so I bought it outright. The Gigapixel software costs $100 if I remember correctly, so I didn't spring for it yet (I'm still on a 30 day trial), but I will probably buy it when it goes on sale.

All of that is a long way of saying that I'm now thinking twice about the necessity of upgrading my camera just for higher resolution. The A7R III has 42 megapixels, which is good enough for a 16x24 print, and with Gigapixel I think I could comfortably print twice as large in each dimension with the A7R III, or maybe larger if the original photo was crisp and clean. Maybe that's all I really need? Or maybe I could wait a while longer to upgrade once more and be done upgrading for years and years? We will see what the new camera is all about, but Gigapixel is a game changer, and I imagine Adobe will follow with their own version too in time. Cameras aren't going to be all about resolution going forward. The next thing I'd like to see is electronic global shutter, so that we can get rid of mechanical shutters (with their noise and vibration) and have better video, and maybe the new Sony camera will have 8K video recording, which I think is the maximum appreciable video resolution (though there is an AI video upscaling solution too - it just costs more). But once I have 8K recording, global shutter, and maybe 96 megapixels or so, I don't think I will need to upgrade again. It will all be about the computation after that, and I'm happy doing that in post-production, not in-camera. Don't tell Sony that though, or they might never sell me a camera I can call my last.