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
A pixel is a discrete “dot” on screen. A megapixel is a million dots.
A digital image is made up of dots in a grid. If you multiple the x and y of a grid, you get the number of pixels on a screen, so say 1920×1080 as math is ~2 million pixels so its about 2 megapixel.
Now quality. Lets say you take that grid but fill it in with marker. The marker im your phone is too fat, and so when you draw with it it fills in 4 grid squares/dots at a time. Even though you have so many, youre not using them well.
The canon is able to draw one dot at a time with its marker, so it gets more detail on the page despite having fewer dots.
Apple knows the average person doesnt know about the markers, so they make even bigger grids to sell you despite knowing it wont ever look that pretty.
People are notorious for judging things based on very simple measures so a 6 megapixel camera that can only really give you 3 megapixels worth of detail sounds better to a consumer than a 4 megapixel camera.
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