First it was all those Best Buy/Circuit City/whatever adds touting PCs for $1,200, but when you read the fine print it turned out to be a $3,000 computer with $1,800 in rebates. Then AMD decided to up the ante by labelling processor that ran at, say 2.25 ghz, as XP 2800+ processors. Now Fuji has decided to screw with the definition of a megapixel.
Flipping through the August 2003 issue of Wired, there is a blurb touting the Fujifilm Finepix F700 as a 6 megapixel camera. The reality, however, is that the F700 has a 3 megapixel Super CCD which Fuji touts in the fine print as offering “6.2 million effective pixels to capture images with quality approaching that of film.” Here’s how Fuji described the technology back in January,
With three million photodiode pairs in three million photosites on the entire sensor, the camera’s LSI algorithms then calculate the intermediary values, giving a file output of six million pixels***. With six million photodiodes and a six million output file, resolution will improve beyond current 3G Super CCD technology, however Fujifilm is keen to stress that it is not a ‘true’ six million pixel CCD.
Yes the pictures are likely superior to a 3 megapixel CCD that doesn’t have the extra photodiodes, but a 6 megapixel camera it is not.
Sources:
Fujifilm Finepix F700 – SuperCCD SR. DPReview.Com, Feb 19, 2003.
Fujifilm announce SuperCCD SR. DPReview.Com, January 22, 2003.