I read people saying this every so often, and I don’t understand - what causes so much fear of “huge” files?
I have a liking for cameras with lots of pixels, and I shoot what I consider to be a lot of images (thousands in one shoot, often), but I’ve never struck a problem. I shoot RAW, I copy the files to the computer, I bring up Adobe Bridge, I work through the files, tagging the ones I think are worth processing, and then I run those through PhotoShop, one by one. It never takes long to load an image, even a 60Mpixel one.
Are people processing every single image? I can imagine that taking a while. I might wonder why - I rarely find myself wanting to process more than a small subset of the images I shoot.
As far as I’ve seen, processing time seems to be linear with the number of pixels, or maybe a bit faster. It’s not like doubling the pixel count means quadrupling the processing time - that could rapidly get tedious!
And the disk space occupied by RAW files and PSDs is linear by pixel count, too - double the pixels means double the size for uncompressed files. Disk space is getting cheaper all the time. I remember the excitement of buying my first 1GB hard drive (cost me close to a thousand dollars at the time) - that was a while back. I remember getting an 8MB CF card with my first digital camera (the first Canon Ixus). Now I use 5TB hard drives as backup media, and the memory cards for my camera are over 100GB.
I think it’s possible to overstate the impact of going for higher resolution cameras.