[Xperia Z1 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] danw_oz:
I think you missed the point here, and taken this comment out of context. We are talking about 4k vs 1080p playback on a 1080p screen, nothing to do with zooming, that they will not look different. Agreed zooming/cropping surely an advantage same goes for still shots, especially when you don't have optical zooms, or need that additional reach. Yeah on a computer for sure, on a small SD Card I do believe there is any point playing this on a phone. Probably best to re-sample the image to the zoom level you want, again I would not be doing this on a phone.

You select 8MP, it takes shots at 8MP not 20MP then downsizing them, it uses less pixels on the sensor. I don't have any 8MP shots that look any better than the 20MP shots taken.

I think you missed the point on this one. And maybe you should read about image resizing algorithms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling This does not remove noise, it will compress the image by binning pixels based on the resize algorithm, the image will also require sharpening after the fact because you have lost details out of the image, the result will still look good because the image is smaller so it will not be as easy to notice defects in the photo for sure, but you could say the same for a 800px picture, not perceived noise in that. If you want to easily reduce noise in your shot, open it in photoshop and save it as a jpg with quality slider at say 5, if the noise if not reduced enough for you open the same file up again and do it again until you are happy with the result.

You only got this right once, it will reduce the appearance of noise, but without sharpening after the down sizing your result will look washed out.

How is one 2MP photo going to look better than another taken on the same device? Sorry I completely disagree with you, 2MP is 2MP not a pixel more, it is impossible for a down sampled photo to look better when you have had to use image resizing and sharpening algorithms to get to the 2MP image, vs an image taken at a native 2MP

You saying all of this is like saying jpg image is better than a tiff image. a lossless format vs a lossy format. Every time you open a jpg and save it again even at quality 12 (the highest) will loose details every single time you do this (the key is you are loosing details not pixels) still the same number of pixels they have just been smoothed out by the image processing algorithm.

---------- Post added at 07:43 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:01 AM ----------

Spot on!! Each image sensor has a theoretical max ideal MP rating for it's size, and 99% of manufacturers were too busy in a MP race, and making people believe that you need more MP. You may have noticed that Canon have reduced almost all of the MP ratings of their point and shoots now, has benefit for them because they don't need so powerful processors to process the images and run the required noise reduction.

This theoretical max ideal MP rating is based primarily on the ability to reduce heat build up, less heat less noise. Around the time of my Canon G3 point and shoot 4MP was the ideal number for image vs noise quality for that sized sensor, and other cameras that were pushing pixels were too noisy for my liking.

Reducing the MP capture of your camera will reduce the heat build up in the sensor, creating images with less noise, and therefore also allowing your sensor to cool faster.

4k is only really any benefit if you want to watch on a 4k device, or if you want to crop the image, same goes for photo's more mega pixels really give you benefit to take good crops and still retain quality acceptable for most printing requirements