The Big MegaPixel Myth
First allow me to begin by saying this much, does anyone print hard copies of the pictures they take from their digital camera? If you do, and I do, then how often is it that you’re printing billboards? Yeah, me either. Come to think of it, Facebook sees more of my shots than any printer roll ever will. So why are we all so obsessed with megapixels and how many the camera is equipped with? Go ahead, ask yourself… do you truly know the mathematical answer? I sure didn’t.
For the standard 4X6 print, 640 x 480 or 0.3 megapixels are just fine. If you owned a digital camera circa 1991, you knew this because they were able to print perfectly clear pictures at that resolution back then. If it is clarity and sharpness that you want, you need a steady hand, not 22 megapixels.
If you make a comparison of pictures with varied megapixel densities, the difference isn’t even detectable by the naked eye. Or the monocled eye for that matter. David Pogue ran his own little test on this in 2007 and myth busted some false beliefs.
Surely more megapixels offers up peace of mind for professionals who rely on their work looking immaculate, but for your 13 year old daughter’s iPhone I doubt the megapixel factor is going to change her life.
Before you opt for the more expensive digital camera (or phone) because it has more megapixels, remember this post.
megapixel, megapixel myth
All photographs aren’t created equal. If you’re shooting things for facebook or the web in general to post at social web sites, any camera will do because you’re not attempting to make a fine art photograph necessarily.
However, some photographers spend at least some of their time making images that will end up in print and for them, more resolution is useful, even for smaller prints. The trained human eye can see differences between stretched pixels and not. Having more resolution than is needed for a given print size allows cropping and straightening images as well.
The bottom line is, if you plan to print images or use them in a print publication, you’ll do better with more resolution. And, you never know when a publication will find one of your images online and want to put it in print.
Oh, and having a full frame DSLR vs a cropped frame is also useful in that each pixel is bigger, has less noise associated with it, generally has better color gamut and the resulting printed image (from those big pixels) will look better.
Richard, I agree with all of your points! Since I never blow my exposures up or use them in cropped frames, I don’t need a large pixel count. A ton of professionals out there do and this feature matters. Great points you make, sir! =)
I don’t think it’s a myth, but it’s just not visible that easy. The test was done using a 5, 8 and 13 Mpx images. We have:
2736 x 1824 – 5 mpx
3464 x 2312 – 8 mpx
4416 x 2944 – 13mpx
This concludes that the actual difference between 5mpx and 13mpx is 4416 / 2736 => 1.61 increase in width and height. In some extremely lame terms 2 horizontal pixels at 5mpx will be able to hold 3 pixels at 13mpx. Also a reminder to all, the megapixel represents the number of bi-dimensional pixels, or an area. And will grow exponential according to width and height. If printing at 400 dpi, an image at 13mpx will be 11inches in width. Also printers can’t actually reproduce square pixels, or half pixels, and relay on dither technique to represent colors. In my conclusion it is proven that people can’t actually notice the difference. The same principle is used for compressing CD quality music into mp3 files. You might not hear the difference if you have to change headphones, but you might notice it if you just had to push a button to change signals.
Most mobile phone commercials on TV still point out that the phone they are selling has a photo camera. I don’t know if there are many mobile phones without a camera. Most of us are so used to this crappy quality in everything around us, that we no longer notice quality.
And yes it is possible to get better quality on 5mpx camera if it has a proper lens attached to it. I have a DSLR camera, and I was able to test a cheap plastic lens. From this point of view, you can have as many pixels you want, but a crappy lens will always result in crappy photos.
Never the less, most consumers are idiots. If it’s new or shiny they will probably buy it. People just don’t care about quality. And this is why this myth exists.