the theoretical limit of resolution AKA the Dawes limit shoes that two points cannot be shown seperately by a lens if they are not a certain distance appart based on the diameter of the lens.
according to these calculations a 114mm diameter lens will resove one arcsecond points, just barely & it scales linearly (57mm pwns over 2", 228mm gets you 0.5 arcseconds, etc. my little nikon P&S has a 17.4mm F/4.9, so it is 3.55mm across - about half as wide as your eyeball - and can get 32" resolution).
the scale of the image on the focal plane (on the chip) is the focal length divided by a radian (yielding arcseconds per mm)
my little nikon give 0.00008436mm per arcsecond on the chip )or about 3.3 degrees per mm of chip width.
if you know the chip size or the pixel size you can see pretty easy if you're overpixeled or not
my nikon P&S is carrying too many pixels if the pixels are smaller than 32*0.00008346 mm (about 0.0027mm - im just doing this math for the 1st time here...
27 microns OMFG thats HUGE! i used to works with a camera called an ST6 about 10 years ago that had 24mm pixels & people would say zOMG BIG PIXELS!!!1) i dont know how big the chip is so i dont know if its OK or not...
...i've found the n00bs working at camera stores dont generally have access to this info (pixel size or chip size)
an i cant find it on teh nikon's website:mad:
lol i think this is my 1st wall of text evar
