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 just the prefix for “million” (or sometimes 2^20, in some contexts, but it’s so close to a million that the difference doesn’t matter). A megapixel is a million pixel.
An image of 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels has one mega pixel. An image of 2000 pixels by 1000 has two.
>how a Canon EOS R6 II can take better photos zoomed in than an iPhone 15 PM with optical zoom
The number of pixels says very little about the quality of a photo. You can have a big blurr of several millions pixels. Having a very high resolution in pixels is only useful if the photo stored by those pixels is clear enough, so you can zoom in and still have good details. In general, the number of pixels in an image stops being relevant after a certain amount (and most phones nowadays are way above that limit). After that, it’s starting to make your photo take up more storage space for no reason. Especially when you are going to display that photo on a screen with lower resolution anyway.
Also, the optical zoom is not changing the number of pixels at all.
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