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
Megapixel just refers to a million pixels.
The pixel is the smallest piece of the photo which takes the form of a square of a single solid color. The number of pixels or Megapixels is what determines your resolution. For example a common screen resolution is 1920×1080 or simply 1080p which is a grid of 1920 by 1080 pixels or about 2 megapixels. Or 4K which is 3840 by 2160 pixels or about 8 megapixels.
The more pixels you have in a certain area, the higher resolution you have and the more details you can capture, because you have more little colored squares dedicated to each little detail on whatever you’re taking a photo of.
The zoom has nothing to do with resolution, it just determines how small of an area you want to capture with your fixed number of pixels.
If you zoom in a lot before taking the photo, you can see more details than you could with your eye, but the image is still the same resolution.
Latest Answers