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.
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