How Many Megapixels Do You Need For a Good Picture?

Hello guys,

If you've been paying attention to the camera or smartphone market in the last several years, you'll know that camera megapixels are a big talking point in marketing and I guess I wanted to explain about our megapixels.

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Are megapixels really that important?

Obviously, they're not but what makes a lower megapixel count camera maybe better than even a higher megapixel type camera if you have a smartphone for example that has the same number of megapixels as a DSLR, why would you ever get the DSLR? What are the advantages? That's really the main point I'm going to expound on in this article.

As I just mentioned, megapixels are not the whole story. In fact in some cases, having more megapixels can actually make image quality worse. Megapixels is just the resolution of the image but you also have to look at the quality of the image itself and the quality of the image specifically in regards to low light and noise throughout the image really comes down to the size of the individual pixels on the sensor.

Pixel Size

You can imagine that if you have two equally sized sensors, one has a lot of megapixels and one has fewer, the one with a lot of megapixels is going to have smaller individual pixels so it will be able to take a higher resolution image but the sensor with fewer megapixels is going to have larger individual pixels on the sensor for each pixel.

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[Pixel size]}

A larger area for each pixel to capture light means better image quality and it can be more sensitive without having a lot of noise on the pixel so that's why if you see a lot of small sensor cameras for phones, they typically have a lot of noise if you go anywhere above the lowest ISO and if it doesn't, then it means that there is probably a lot of noise reduction processing going on.

There are a lot of different size sensors you can get, there's APS-C, Full-Frame and camera phones are very small, you can go up to even medium format which are very expensive but they have much larger individual pixels and those are very professional.

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[Sensor sizes techhive.com]}

You can imagine even if you have a 20 megapixel cell phone camera with a tiny little sensor and they're all packed in and then a 20 megapixel DSLR with a full-frame sensor which is much larger, the performance on the DSLR is generally going to be much better.

Processor

There are other things that affect the performance besides just the sensor size such as the processor used to process out some noise and process the image in camera so if you have a modern DSLR, that's going to be able to process the image at a higher quality and reduce the noise much better than a cell phone.

That's also because you have a lot more room in the DSLR to put all that extra technology and this is also the same explanation for why you might see a medium format camera that costs ten thousand dollars and it shoots about 50 megapixels and then you look at something like the Canon 5d X which shoots around 50 megapixels, you try to compare both of them because they have the same number of megapixels and they're both really high-end cameras, what's so much better for the medium format that's ten thousand dollars? Well it's going to have much larger pixels and you're going to have much less noise even at higher ISOs.

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[More room to accommodate extra technological components as opposed to cell phones.]}

This is the reason why top-tier professional photographers are going to be using medium format. Cell phone cameras have come a long way and in fact, you might be able to get better performance out of a modern cell phone camera than you would get on a really old first generation digital DSLR and that's because the cell phone processing power has evolved so much over the years.

Summary

However, in general, a similar aged sensor on a camera is never going to be able to perform up to the standard as a modern DSLR just because of the size, it's an inherent limitation.
Anyway, that's pretty much all there is in a nutshell and if you guys ever wondered about this, hopefully I satisfied your curiosity. If you enjoyed this article, be sure to destroy that upvote button share your thoughts as well.

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References: 1 - 2 - 3

Image sources: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

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_{GIF made by @foundation}

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Thanks to @camzy & @samstickkz for this amazing toon.