@LABlueBike @VladS @Digitizer @Harry et al, Just came across this link from a post in August on this forum that goes more into the value of pixel shift with charts, some math and better explanations than I managed! But came to many of the same conclusions I did. Summed up below.
and more:
The OP’s post, @Dean.G Nikon Z8 "NEFX" - Pixel Shift & NLP
Important TLDR Summary from the Ed Dozier article about the Z8:
- " The pixel-shift feature, taking 8-shots [makes 45MP - ***see my added footnote!] and combining them into a single shot, resulted in a 26.2 percent increase in resolution. While this may seem underwhelming, it is in fact quite good."
- “The smoothing of color noise may be a bigger factor than resolution improvements. The Nikon Bayer sensor is also called ‘RGGB’, referring to neighboring pixel color sequences. The pixel-shifting operation changes this into something more like Sigma’s Foveon sensor, that stacks all of the color information under a single pixel. The 8-shot and 32-shot sequences add more color-noise smoothing, compared to the 4-shot and 16-shot sequences.”
- " the resolution change using 16 combined shots [makes 180MP - *again, footnote!] was about a 90 percent increase! "
***Interestingly, the Nikon Z8 implementation outputs a standard 45MP file with 8-shots while the S1R does 187MP. The Z8 requires 16-shots to output a similar 180MP sized file. This means the 16-shot gaining 90% on the Z8 could be similar to the S1R 8-shot implementation… I have no way of testing this myself or exploring how the RGGB and color noise affects may be similar or different but it would be worth exploring.
I think I inadvertently stumbled into a crazy value on the S1R - doing all this IN CAMERA is crazy useful and, importantly, very fast. Got it “used” with 125 clicks for way under standard resale prices. I feel very lucky.