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I’ve long been a partial adherent to David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I’m not nearly process oriented enough to do the entire system, but I do try to offload my tasks out of my head into a list form and keep things up to date. Since I’m joining the team behind Wunderlist, I started using it as my personal task keeper. It doesn’t enforce a strict GTD approach, but it is lightweight, fast, and syncs between devices on different operating systems.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter—hint, these mailings will be a big part of my online writing from now on—you know that I’ve started a huge transition from Portland to Berlin to take a job working in software again. Today was Day 1 of working with an incredible team at 6Wunderkinder on Wunderlist as a cross-platform developer. That’s right. After over a decade of freelancing, I’m going back to salary work. I’m more than excited to be joining forces with longtime friend Chad Fowler and thrilled to get to work with new friends that are awesome at what they do, and do it with a serious emphasis not only on code, but on design as well.

More to come later this week in the newsletter.

Late last year, I gave a small talk at TEDxBeaconStreet discussing what I see as the essential challenge of photography: reducing what’s happening in four dimensions into a two dimensional frame that you can then hand off to somebody else. I hope you enjoy it.

Mike Clark and I were chatting on Twitter about noise and sensor resolution and I made the quip that “More pixels are almost always better”, at least when you’re north of 20 megapixels. Now, Twitter is a horrible place to say something like that—especially for someone like me who has long been in the bigger pixels are always better camp—so I quickly restated it as:

Or maybe a better way to think of it is that bigger pixels are better than smaller until you have ~1.5-2x the smaller ones.

Again, a quip forced into Twitter length and not really accurate, so let me unpack it a bit more here.

The truism that, all things being equal, bigger pixels in a camera sensor are less noisy than smaller pixels on a pixel-by-pixel basis is still absolutely in effect. But now that we’re moving into the realm of 24 and 36 megapixel sensors, there are other factors at play that are changing the game and reducing the effectiveness of that rule-of-thumb.

One of these factors is oversampling. When you take 24 megapixels and process them down to a finished image—whether that’s sized for your HDTV or a large print, the little bits of noise variation between pixels gets smoothed down more than when you start out with half the data—much in the same way that oversampling audio makes for better recordings. To be sure, there’s got to be an upper limit to where this benefit is, but evidently we’re not there yet.

Another factor is that the noise that is there is of a better subjective quality than ever before. Each generation of sensors seems produce noise that’s more and more like grain. This kind of noise is visually more appealing is the sort that helps acuity. It also seems to respond better to downsampling than the older, blocky noise of past sensors.

And finally, there are all the other factors that go into making a modern sensor that are continually improving all the time. Firmware, back-illumination, and a thousand other details that are part of the secret sauce of making amazing sensors. These are all exerting themselves in interesting ways that make relying on a single axis of judging a sensor—such as pixel size—problematic. And, they are most obvious on cameras that are twice the resolution as the ones that were state of the art not long ago.

So yes, big pixels are great. They always have been and always will be. But you know what’s better? Big sensors stuffed with pixels that are big enough to constrain noise, but are small enough and packed in tightly enough to bring the advantages of higher resolution, oversampling, and probably a few other factors that don’t reduce themselves down to a simple comparison statement to bear. Oh, and make ’em state of the art pixels.