What Exactly Are MegaPixels?—by shrkmusi…

So i took some pics with this 7 Megapixel camera
and the quality sucked…
i have this 6 MegaPixel camera and the quality was Magnificent. soo i wanted to know what are megapixels?

Best Answer —by LEM

Your image is composed of many many dots of different colors. A pixel is a single dot in your image that has a particular color value. It’s green, if it’s part of a picture depicting grass, or a shade of blue in the sky, etc… A megapixel is one million pixels. So 6 megapixel camera takes pictures that are composed of 6,000,000 pixels, or dots… It would be about 3000×2000 pixels horizontally and vertically respectively.Now that I explained it all. Forget about it completely! I mean it! You have just learned on a live example, that a 6 megapixel camera can be a lot better than 7mp counterpart.

The reason for this is that while pixel count is somewhat important - it is probably the least important of the other factors that go into account for good quality photo:

Optics - a good lens is crucial. No matter how many pixels are captured, but if the image projected on the sensor is poor, you won’t get a good result.

Sensor quality / size - a bigger sensor area, means each individual sensor that captures each individual pixel is bigger, hence can capture more light and less noise will be produced. Consumer level cameras have tiny sensors, professional and dSLR ones have much bigger ones, so with same number of megapixels, you’ll almost always have better picture from a pro camera. Also some sensors are much better at not producing noise. Again these qualities are often reserved for professional cameras, as those are more expensive to produce.

So all in all - you can in fact have a better picture with 3 or 4MP professional SLR camera that has a good lens on it, than with 7MP tiny little camera size of a pack of cigarettes, that has a tiny-winy lens and a pea-sized sensor behind it.

So why exactly manufacturers and sales people pushing the megapixels to the consumers? Because:

1. It’s a nice word “MEEEEEGA!!!!”, yeah! That’s millions more pixels than in your old camera!!!! It sells!
2. It’s a lot easier for budget manufacturers to throw in an extra million pixels onto the sensor (sometimes, in fact degrading quality because sensors will become smaller) and upsell you that camera as an upgrade to your perfectly functioning low-mp model, than improve optics, foe example. That costs a lot of money!

So it’s all a marketing hype, and nothing more!

Here’s an interesting and much more detailed article you may read about megapixels that has some real life examples from a pro photographer:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/mpmyth.htm

Good luck shooting!

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