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
Mega is a prefix meaning million. So a megapixel is just one million pixels. Often this will be in a certain aspect ratio (like a 3:2 photograph, or a 16:9 smartphone camera).
Now, the question is how can something with a lower megapixel count take higher quality pictures? Two basic reasons.
The first is that the quality of the components, especially the sensor. The sensor in that camera may be more color accurate. While there are less pixels, they’re more likely to be completely color accurate to what you’re seeing yourself. More expensive cameras generally have better sensors that are more accurate. Other things like actual shutters can control how much light comes into the camera, which better controls how accurate the sensor can be.
The second reason is that there are two different kinds of zoom on cameras. One is optical zoom, where the lenses physically move to change the zoom level of the picture, while still filling the whole camera sensor. The second is digital zoom, which is a fancy way of saying “crop out the relevant portion”. Digital zoom effectively reduces your pixel count.
While some phones these days have two or three back cameras with different levels of optical zoom (and the camera software automatically switches to the appropriate camera for the zoom level), once you get to the highest one, that’s it. All you can do is crop. If you zoom a photo in 30x, but the best lens is a 3x lens, you’re effectively cropping to 1/100th of the original pixel count in the photo (1/10th in each direction). That’s going to seriously kill your quality.
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