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

1 Megapixel is 1,000,000 pixels. It represents the maximum “image information” the camera is capable of. It’s like…. the page count of a book. You just can’t tell a story like Lord of the Rings if you’ve only got 10 pages to do it.

If the camera doesn’t have enough megapixels, then nothing else matters, and you can’t make images that look good.

But the QUALITY of the image is entirely different. If you can’t write, having 1,000,000 pages at your disposal doesn’t really help.

There are lots of different factors like lenses, photo sensor size, and fancy algorithms that make pictures better or worse. Here’s a primer: [https://www.alanranger.com/blogs/beyond-a-point-and-shoot-camera](https://www.alanranger.com/blogs/beyond-a-point-and-shoot-camera)

And here’s the easy chart of sensor sizes that make a HUGE difference: [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5013f4b2c4aaa4752ac69b17/f1daf258-4822-465e-83b2-963217b2528a/camera+sensor+size?format=2500w](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5013f4b2c4aaa4752ac69b17/f1daf258-4822-465e-83b2-963217b2528a/camera+sensor+size?format=2500w)

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