[Craig @ Mar 27th 2007 10:43AM]

Smaller sensors + more megapixels = crappier pictures. It's just physics...at least the physics of CMOS and CCDs. I'm much rather have 3MP in a larger sensor.

[Johan S @ Mar 27th 2007 2:18PM]

I dont see why people are not happy with this .. why is everyone complaining without seeing the picture quality. It is the sensor that matters the most .. not the lens. In any scene, there are literally trillions of photons hitting a sensor. The job of the lens is to focus the scene and send as much light onto the sensor. Efficiently refracting all the light of a given surface area down to the sensor without having the sensor located a far away .. that's a problem. However, even in a crappy camera phone, enough light is reaching the sensor ..the sensors either lack the dynamic range or the sensitivity to capture the scene.

Think about it this way, in a camera obscura the "lens" hole is the size of a pinhead, and the scene formed on the projected surface is exretemly dim .. however the scene is represented clearly (the smaller the hole the clearer the image) ..and an extremely sensitive photo surface can capture it. The reason we don't have pinhole cameras is precisely because we don't have sensitive enough sensor or photo surfaces.

[Dan @ Jun 7th 2007 6:43AM]

No sorry thats not the physics at all.

Better fabrication process = better sensors = better images, photodiodes need to be made more identical to all the others on the same sensor, the more identical they are, the less noise they produce, as they'll produce more identical results, smaller photodiodes need to be even more indentical to maintain same noise levels of larger sensors, which is harder to do, as CPU tech increases and uses smaller fabrication processes, so will CMOS sensors, they can be smaller, or higher resolution or both (ie: smaller photodiodes), CMOS is the same process used for CPUs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_pixel_sensor