What is a megapixel actually, and how does it correlate to the maximum resolution and picture quality?

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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.

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18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are two completely different resolutions. One is the pixel count, that is megapixels. Completely different one is optical analog resolution, how small details the lens setup is capable of distinguishing. It doesn’t matter how many pixels you put behind a lens, it’s never going to improve the lens itself, and the thing with lenses is that bigger is just plain better. Well, you can’t have a big lens in a phone, so there are lots of tricks how phones try and make up in software, for what the camera lacks in actual hardware. More pixels is useful for that, it gives more data to work with. That’s why you see phones with 200MP cameras etc. But it’s very much diminishing returns. 200MP is not 4x better than 50MP, it’s not even 2x better, it’s just the maximum the sensor maker could fit.

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