Tech companies love to wave big numbers and fancy sounding words around in their ads, and camera manufacturers are no exception. Although it isn’t as bad as it was a few years ago, “megapixels” is normally their go-to buzzword. But what is a megapixel and does more really mean better? Let’s find out.
What Are Megapixels?
On every digital camera sensor, there are tiny little “photosites”. Each of these is a sensor for a single pixel. When light hits a photosite, it determines what color that pixel should be in the resulting photo. Obviously you need lots of photosites to get a high resolution image; one million photosites will give you one million pixels—or one megapixel—in the final image.
This means a 20MP photo was taken with a camera that had a sensor with twenty million photosites.Megapixels and Sensor Size
The sensors in digital cameras come in different sizes. The sensor inside your smartphone is smaller than the sensor inside a crop sensor camera and the sensor inside a crop sensor camera is smaller again than the sensor inside a full-frame DSLR.
All three of these cameras, however, can have a 12MP sensor. What changes is the size of the photosites on the sensor. On a smartphone camera, they’re tiny, while on a full-frame camera, they’ll be much much larger. This affects the overall image quality.
The Pros and Cons of High Megapixels
The size of the photosites is very important for image quality and low light performance. While the technology has come a long way over the last few years, and it’s now possible to cram more photosites than ever onto a sensor, there are pros and cons to it.
The more megapixels a sensor has, the bigger the image it can create. This is really useful for fashion and studio photographers who want every single detail, such as the subject’s eyelashes, as clearly as…
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