How many megs?

[giellaleafapmu]

I am late and I have checked a bit quickly through the answers, i hope I am not going to rewrite something which was already said. Ming Thein somewhere has a piece on a "reasonable" camera. his point there was that we really don't need that much but probably a "reasonable" camera simply wouldn't sell to anyone. Usually, I find Thein to be just funny to read with too little about technique and too
fewer pictures to be really useful to improve anything in my photography but this may be an instance in which he has a perfect answer to your question. We usually don't need much, unless we are in some very specialized area such as certain product photography but we
buy features mostly to feel secure and in this respect I do think that feeling secure, especially on assignment, plays a big factor in taking better pictures. It definitively did for me. When we had to "nail it" within two boxes of 4x5" and one of Polaroids (as you have understood I am in product photography) sometimes it was scaring just to try something different, now we know that we won't fail
for being short of light, or resolution or whatever and that's a huge incentive to try new things and ultimately taking better pictures.

GLF

 

[JPSuisse]

I think to really answer this question you have to be somebody who is printing a lot and I am not.

But for my 2 cents, my D100 was perfectly sufficient. I think that was like 6MP. My M8 is almost as good as film. And with 35mm film, the overall experience is just so much different that you don't think about MPs anymore.

One other practical consideration is that the M8 seems to me an optimal size/quality ratio when doing postprocessing and archiving. I've got a Macpro with 10.6.8 and 48GB of RAM. Nonetheless, the M8 files are really a nice mix of size/quality for convenient postprocessing.

I am not an accountant, so I am not interested to talk about depreciation or lifetime, etc. (And I don't think it was the intent of the OP to discuss this.) All things being equal, I would still use my D100 some, if it hadn't of developed the "hot pixel" syndrome. But alas, it's no longer available.