Nikon D800 Announced - 36 Megapixel DSLR

According to Popular Photograhy, Nikon has announced that it will begin shipping the 36.3 megapixel D800 in March, 2012.

It will run about $3000. So are the megapixels worth it?

At the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium, we are digitizing Herbarium specimens that average 11.5 x 16" using the 21 megapixel Canon EOS 5D Mark II. At 21 megapixels, the Canon produces images that are 3722 x 5616 pixels. Using a simple formula, we can determine that the image will be about 52 x 78" when viewed on screen. That's about 4.5 magnification of the actual specimen.

So, the new 36.3 megapixel Nikon D800 will produce an image that is 4912 x 7360 pixels - which will result in an onscreen image that is 68 x 102" inches. That's about 6.3 times magnification of the actual specimen.

More magnification equals more detail. Here is a detail taken from an Epson Scanner, re-sized to simulate a 21 megapixel image and a 36 megapixel image. Click the image to enlarge and compare the difference in detail.

21 megapixel

36 megapixel

Considering that the Canon EOS 5d Mark II currently goes for $2,250, I would say that $3000 is not too much more to pay for significantly more detail. I have no brand loyalty to either Canon or Nikon, but our imaging lab has over $3000 of Canon lenses - so I am not jumping ship to Nikon just yet. I am sure Canon will come up with a counter strike in the megapixel war soon.

And yes, you guessed it. That's the Solenaceae Holotype, Cestrum acutifolium Alain.

Global Plants Initiative - JSTOR

As part of the Global Plants Initiative, The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium is submitting high resolution scans of type specimens to JSTOR.


These scans are made with Epson 10000 scanners and create images that are about 200MB a piece. In addition to sending these images to Jstor, we are keeping copies of them ourselves. We currently have about 80,000 images stored on our servers. That takes up about 15 TB of space.

I am considering converting these TIFF images to DNG. I estimate that it would allow me to recover about 7.5 TB of server space. I have to look to see if others have converted TIFFs to DNG to see if this is a wise course.

 (Wise or not, I will probably do it because I need the space and the TIFFs are already being stored by Jstor)