CAMERA MEGAPIXELS ARE NOT IMPORTANT

By SUJITSTARK

                                                                                                                                     

 Phone cameras were advanced enough to produce good photographs — the only detail I concerned myself with, when determining whether a camera was good or not, was the almighty megapixel.  I was under the impression that the more megapixels, the better quality photograph – meaning, if I knew at the time there would ever exist a 41 MP phone I probably would have blown a gasket. This isn’t to say more megapixels aren’t better in some ways (which we’ll touch upon), albeit, for the everyday amateur (such as myself), it’s a bit difficult to justify a couple hundred-dollar price difference based solely on the knowledge of a megapixel count. So, today, we’re going to get into some details about megapixels, and why they may not really make all the difference when it comes to a great photograph.

To get technical, a megapixel is one million pixels. Those tiny little colored dots that make up a photo? Those are pixels, and one million of them make up a megapixel. Then why wouldn’t more of them make a better photo? More detail, right? Well, there are a couple different reasons why that logic might not always work out, and we’ll first tap into one of them now.

Your Sensor Size Matters

Every digital camera is equipped with an image sensor, and there is a widely accepted analogy to explain the importance of the size of one: The Water Bucket Analogy. Image sensors have pixel “buckets” on them, which collect the information the camera “sees” when taking the picture. And if we perceive the pixels as buckets, it can be more easily understood.

A camera image sensor

Say you have a set of blue buckets laid out 20 x 20 on a field. Whenever it rains (a picture is taken), the buckets collect water (photons). If we expand the size of the field (the sensor), we’re able to collect more water by placing more buckets on it, and if we shrink the field, we’ll be collecting less water, or less information to work with.

Applying the analogy to a side-by-side comparison between a point and shoot and DSLR is our ah-ha moment. A 12MP point and shoot and a 12MP DSLR will produce different, noticeable results, due to the DSLR having a much larger sensor, in effect giving it the ability to collect a lot more information – the DSLR has a much larger “field” to fit more buckets on. Essentially, the smaller the sensor, the less the ability it has to collect photons, hindering its ability to produce very detailed images. But there’s a caveat to this logic, which we will now be talking about.

How Big Is The Image

 This is perhaps the best explanation I could find, referencing why the actual size of the physical picture is vital when it comes to determining how many megapixels you need for a print. Again, I did not come up with the following math problems 

With that being said, there is a relatively simple math equation you can apply when figuring out what size photograph is adequate in regards to MP count.

 to determine the physical size of our print, such as 4 x 6, 8 x 10, etc. Then multiply the width by 300, and the height for 300, which will give us the size in terms of pixels. Therefore, an 8 x 10 print would be 2,400 x 3,000 pixels.

Then she says we must multiply the width (in pixels) by the height (in pixels). So for that 8 x 10 inch print, it would be 2400 x 3000, which equals 7.2 million pixels.

Finally, divide your answer in the second step by one million, which will give us 7.2. Therefore, 7.2MP is the ideal amount for an 8 x 10 photograph. 

  

It would be hard to distinguish the difference between an image printed 8 x 10, shot with the iPhone 8 MP (left – above) and Canon XTi 10.1 MP (right – above).

In short, if you have a phone camera with 8 megapixels and you wanted to print off a picture taken from that phone in an 8 x 10 format, there should be no problems whatsoever with your detail. Although, I would not recommend blowing that same picture up to fit a poster frame of 24 x 36. This would be the moment you would want to use a camera with a higher pixel count and large image sensor. The same applies to pictures and social media. Pictures uploaded to Facebook are not large in size, due to the restriction of the medium, so, naturally, a high pixel count, or sensor size is not necessarily required for a good quality photo. This is one of the many reasons the megapixel debate still goes on to this day – depending on who is using the camera, and what they’re using it for, determines the true relevance of the question.

Conclusion

As you can tell, there’s a pretty good reason why there is constant debate on whether megapixel count is really something worth paying attention to. As for me, I would agree with the general consensus’s thinking that 16MP is a good range to be in. But, really, when it’s all said and done, I’d say there is a lot of other camera specs more worthy of your time than the almighty megapixel.

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