The Biggest Digital Camera Myth

If you've ever shopped for a camera (or a device that has a camera--like a phone or tablet), you've probably heard of the term "Megapixels".  Today, our cell phones produce pictures with more megapixels than the cameras of just a few years ago.  However, most people only have a limited idea of what a megapixel is, and many will fall for a simple marketing trick involving megapixels.

A "pixel" is the smallest physical point in a digital image.  It can refer to the display on your monitor or TV (anything your see is simply a combination of pixels that change rapidly) or it can refer to a point in a still image.  If you take a digital picture and attempt to enlarge it over and over, you will find that the image becomes unclear, eventually looking like a series of boxes more than an image.  This happens because you have enlarged the image so much that you are starting to see the individual pixels.

A pixel consists of three instructions denoting the strength of red, blue, and green (the primary colors of light).  All the colors you see on your screen are a compilation of varying strengths of these three colors.

A "megapixel" is something that is comprised of one million individual pixels.  So, a three megapixel camera will produce a image comprised of three million pixels.  Monitors and TVs are usually expressed in their resolution--the number of pixels horizontally by the number of pixels vertically--instead of megapixels.  Therefore, a monitor with a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600 would be a four megapixel monitor (2560 x 1600 = 4,096,000 pixels).

For a camera, you would think that the greater the number of megapixels, the greater the quality of the image produced.  However, this is not the case!  A camera may actually take a picture at a lower resolution and then duplicate the pixels to produce a higher resolution image.  This is especially true for lower-end smartphones and tablets.  Yes, it may say it takes 8 megapixel images, but the quality may not be nearly as good as 8 megapixel images from more expensive devices.

If you are concerned about the actual quality of the images, then you need to look for another piece of information:  the sensor size.  This will allow you to compare the quality of the images cameras will produce.  It may not be nearly as well-publicized, but it is available in the technical documentation for every camera.

More megapixels does not mean better quality images, it simply means bigger images.  For most people, the actual quality of an image will be of little concern.  However, if you are considering entering the field of high-level photography, don't be fooled by a typical sales myth that treats the quality of an image the same as the well-publicized number of megapixels.