Pinhole Lens quality?

[kam213]

Hi
I does anyone know how much and how a pinhole lens degrades the picture quality and resolution of a camera thats about 410 000 pixels

thanks.

[scaramouche]

Greetings --

Strictly speaking, there is no way to answer this question with the supplied information. You would need to know the size of the pinhole, distance from the sensor, size of the individual photosites on the sensor and size of the final display surface on which the digital image will be represented. Since with digital images the actual image is just a set of numbers, to answer questions about resolution you always need to consider how large a surface is used to represent the final display that is encountered by the eye. An image from your camera acquired with even a fairly large pinhole would probably appear sharp if appropriately printed onto a space the size of a small postage stamp.

Hope this helps.

Richard LS

[ajaynejr]

Pinhole lenses are still used nowadays because they are inexpensive. Their typical maximum aperture is in the f/11 to f/16 range which usually limits the camera to use in bright sunlight. Some have just one glass element. For a 1/2" or so sensor the aperture itself looks like a pinhole.

I do believe that a typical "pinhole lens" willresolve more detail than an 0.5 megapixel sensor can near the middle of the picture. There will be noticeable bowing of straight lines and also noticeablechromatic aberrationnear the edges of the picture.

The aperture cannot be made larger without having lens aberrations degrade the picture noticeably.

A true pinhole camera has no lens. The diameter of the pinhole more or less equals the size of one pixel.An actual pinholeis not practical for today's digital cameras with their tiny sensors since the nature of light is such that the minute size of the hole needed introduces additional blurriness (I forget the scientific term, is it diffraction?) and also the very high equivalent f-stop number requires impractically long exposure time.