SD1 Merrill to sd Quattro - What have we lost?

Gesture wrote:

Maybe, all sensors are already great across the board. But MP size is among my last criteria for a sensor.

Well said.

I want per pixel acuity, whatever the max resolution; dynamic range; freedom from geometrical distortion; and superb color fidelity and discrimination, understanding that output is a combination of sensor plus processing. For me, high ISO and shadow noise are much less important. I have always laughed on DPReview when the comments are "it is look sharper when it's downsampled." Really.

Then the laugh is on you, I'm sorry to say.

Down-sampling sharpens an image, sometimes even introducing moiré where there was none in the original.

Bart van der Wolf published a Paper on it and, elsewhere, he has written that some images actually need a little Gaussian smoothing prior to downsizing.

http://kronometric.org/phot/iq/Down%20sampling%20methods.htm