Thanks, John, I got that from the outset. O.K., now what do we do with this? IOW, here do we go with this is a practical sense?
Look for ways to read out sensors with lots of pixels in such a way that the user has a choice between slow readout/write times and highest quality, or fast shooting with binning.
There could be cameras with small sensors and tiny pixel pitches that take DSLR lenses. I have no doubt that a 500mm f/4L could take full advantage of a pixel pitch of 2 microns, and a small-sensor like that in the FZ50, with more money invested in high-ISO read noise be greatly superior to using TCs on current DSLRs. TCs are made to magnify the focused depth well, but trash the bokeh.
What pictures in what industry or purpose would that Panasonic Camera then trounce the 1DII. This question is asked not as a confrontation. I believe that there must be a zone where the Z50 excels. But where is it in practical terms?
I did not compare the two cameras to suggest that the FZ50 "trounces" the 1DmkII in some practical way, in normal use. My point was that, as much as the 1DmkII is lauded for it's photon capturing ability, it does so by the brute force of sensor size, and not because of pixel size or efficiency. The FZ50, which is one of the cameras that makes people talk about how bad it is to cram pixels into a sensor, actually outperforms the 1DmkII at the square mm level in some ways, excluding read noise at high ISOs (the FZ50 has no high-ISO readout optimizations). The full-well photon capture of the two cameras, measured by square mm, instead of by the pixel, is almost exactly the same for both cameras. That's at ISO 50 for the Canon, and ISO 100 for the Panasonic. At ISO 100 (50 is missing some DR on the 1DmkII), the FZ50 collects 51% more photons at RAW saturation, per unit of area, and the read noise is smaller too (60%), when adjusted for spatial resolution. IOW, if you could find a way to replace the 1DmkII sensor with a bunch of FZ50 sensors, you would have *less* noise at ISO 100, and 4x the linear resolution.
A lot of people seem to that putting more and smaller pixels onto a given sensor size automatically and intrinsically decreases DR, and increases noise, but this is not necessarily true, and certainly isn't true in the range of DSLR pixel pitches.
It's a rut of false reasoning caused by the fact that smaller pixels have more noise at 100% view, and almost no one has seen a huge sensor with 2u pixels, to compare printed images at the same size, or monitor images with the same magnification of a unit of sensor area. That's why I decided to compare crops from DSLRs against crops or full frames of small-sensor cameras with the same focal length lens. Here are two examples (my biggest pixels, 7.4u from the 10D, and 3.4u from the Sony F707, and 1.97u from the FZ50):
10D on the left, F707 on the right. Same true focal length, same subject distance, same f-stop, same shutter speed, same ISO:
10D on the top, FZ50 on the bottom, same everything again, ISO is 1600 this time. Upper right and lower left are 100% pixel view; upper left is 10D upsampled to match subject size; lower right is FZ50 binned 3x3 (after demosaicing) to approximate 10D 100% magnification:
After doing this test, I found that not only is the FZ50 not optimized for ISO 1600, it is *unoptimized*; better FZ50 results would have been had at ISO 100 pushed 4 stops.