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
Imagine a mosaic. The image is made of squares. Close up, you can see each individual square and it looks like mosaic. Further away you don’t see the individual squares, you see the picture the mosaic makes.
Each mosaic tile is a single colour. Together they make the picture. If you have a few big tiles, your picture will be kinda blocky and won’t have details. If you have loads of tiles, your picture can have little details. This is called “resolution”. The higher the resolution (i.e. number of squares) the more details you can have.
A camera sensor picks up the amount and the colour of the light. It’s also split into squares. Each square picks up a colour and together the squares make a picture.
These squares are called pixels. If they’re arranged in a grid of 10 along by 10 down, you have 100 pixels. If it’s 1000 along by 1000 down, you have a million pixels.
Megapixels just means one million pixels.
Most cameras are up to about 50 megapixels, or 50 million pixels. But actually they often work together to make a picture that is 10 megapixels or so.
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