I’ve heard about megapixels being the amount of pixels in millions that a camera can take but I don’t understand how a Canon EOS R6 II can take better photos zoomed in than an iPhone 15 PM with optical zoom despite having a lower megapixel count.
I don’t get how a megapixel count correlates to the resolution, and how significant it is to the quality of the image.
In: Technology
The way a digital camera works is that a lens focuses light on a rectangular sensor. The rectangular sensor is actually divided up into little squares, where each of those little squares is responsible for measuring the portion of that light that hits it. You can visualize it as a tiny chessboard.
Each of those little squares is a “pixel”. A million of them make up a megapixel.
Since all that a each of these squares can do is measure the light that falls on it, the quality of the lens and how well it’s focused and aligned with the chip plays an extremely important role in picture quality. If the lens is out of focus, or if it distorts the image, or if it’s not perfectly aligned with the chip, then it will look terrible regardless of how many pixels the sensor is divided into. A high megapixel sensor will at best give you a very detailed view of a blurry, degraded image.
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