[Dan @ May 21st 2007 8:33AM]

Sounds good on paper, but who the hell needs 12 megapixels in a small digital compact? Nobody, that's who. This will be sold to stupid people who think having the highest megapixel is the most important thing in the world. I look forward to seeing a garbled demo picture at 6400 ISO.

[KorruptioN @ May 21st 2007 8:40AM]

A picture *of* noise, Dan.

[Mark Rejhon @ May 23rd 2007 1:05AM]

Actually, the extra pixels are useful even for lower-resolution images because the 12 megapixels are for primary color components, which translates to about 4 megapixels of RGB pixels. (Due to bayesian matrix, this won't be an exact equivalent though). That would make for really sharp 2048x1536 photos.

As an example, downsample a digital photo to half its size -- notice how it often becomes sharper as it gets downsampled, because of better sharpness-to-pixel efficiency?

That's what I'll use the extra pixels for -- the luxury of shooting really sharp 4 megapixel images.