I see so many phones all with the same quality but boasting about “12 megapixels” etc… what do megapixels do in phone cameras?
In: Technology
A 12 Mpix camera captures an image made up of roughly 4000 pixels wide and 3000 pixels high. A 16 Mpix cameras have a little over 5000 x 3000 pixels.
Regardless, all those pixels have to fit onto an image sensor and a typical iPhone camera has a sensor size of 6 mm and 4.8 mm (less than the size of your little finger nail). That means, the size of a single pixel on a 12 Mpix camera is roughly 1.5 micrometer.
The smaller the pixel size and the more they are cramped into a sensor they more they start affecting nearby pixels and can result in light/colour bleeding. So, higher pixel count doesn’t produce better image quality, if the sensor size remains the same.
That’s why if you look at professional digital cameras like Nikon D5 which has only 16 Mpix yet the sensor size is 23.9 x 36 mm (30-times more surface area than iPhone sensor), and likewise Canon 1D Mk III is 20 Mpix for the same sensor size. Having few pixels on bigger sensor actually give you better quality image, especially in low-light situations.
A digital picture is made up of little pixels. Each pixel is a dot of light and as they are put together they form the entire image. If you have just a few pixels it is either a very tiny image or it looks very blocky. As you get more pixels you can either have the image larger or more defined.
A 12 megapixel camera has 12 million of these dots. That means you can have an image that prints out very nice on a screen or on paper.
That’s not the only measure though. The camera can record a lot of dots of the image if it doesn’t do a very good job with them it’ll still look bad. Some cameras don’t get very good colors or they’re blurry. You could have a very large picture that still looks bad.
Some cameras catch all those pixels on a tiny little sensor. A higher-quality camera will use a bigger sensor that is much more expensive.
A “megapixel” is one million pixels. What this means is that your phone is capable of taking a photo which has approximately 12 million pixels in it.
Higher megapixel count *usually* means a higher quality photo, as the camera is capturing more information (what it can see). Lots of other things improve a photo’s quality but that’s a whole other argument.
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