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.
Imagine a mosaic. The image is made of squares. Close up, you can see each individual square and it looks like mosaic. Further away you don’t see the individual squares, you see the picture the mosaic makes.
Each mosaic tile is a single colour. Together they make the picture. If you have a few big tiles, your picture will be kinda blocky and won’t have details. If you have loads of tiles, your picture can have little details. This is called “resolution”. The higher the resolution (i.e. number of squares) the more details you can have.
A camera sensor picks up the amount and the colour of the light. It’s also split into squares. Each square picks up a colour and together the squares make a picture.
These squares are called pixels. If they’re arranged in a grid of 10 along by 10 down, you have 100 pixels. If it’s 1000 along by 1000 down, you have a million pixels.
Megapixels just means one million pixels.
Most cameras are up to about 50 megapixels, or 50 million pixels. But actually they often work together to make a picture that is 10 megapixels or so.
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.
Megapixels basically is saying “how big your photo can be displayed without becoming all distorted (pixelated)”.
So, if you want to have a picture on a billboard (550 inches) more megapixels means less distortion when resized to such a “display”.
On a phone (7 inches), having more megapixels will not have much of a difference as it is such a relatively small device.
Thats why 240p videos look like they were filmed from a potato and even on a phone they look so distorted compared to higher resolutions.
>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.
Shame on everyone who ignored this part of the question. There are two ways that it’s possible to zoom. Your Canon camera has a series of lenses that can be adjusted so that the focal width is increased or decreased. When you decrease that focal width, a smaller area is blown up when it’s projected onto the detector.
However, this takes up a lot of physical space, which most phones don’t have. So, what the manufacturers do instead is have the lens always project the same size image onto the detector and then have the software show you only the central portion of what you’re taking a picture. It basically works like if you pulled an image off the internet, loaded it in Paint, and then selected the middle with the Marquee function so you could blow it up to the size of the original. While the phone’s camera might have more megapixels than your Canon, the zoomed image on the phone that you have it in only uses a fraction of the megapixels, making it grainier than what you get on a real camera.
With cameras the megapixels are literally the number of pixels. 20 megapixels means there are 20 million pixels on the sensor and there will be 20 million pixels on the output photo (lets call it 5470 x 3660 pixels).
BUT the number of pixels isn’t the only factor, there is also the size of the sensor. [Look at the size of the sensor on the EOS R6](https://www.dpreview.com/sample-galleries/0000646042/canon-eos-r6-beauty-shots/2950879552), that entire rectangle inside the lens mount is all sensor. Absolutely huge! The sensor in an iPhone 15 is [this tiny little thing](https://wccftech.com/iphone-15-pro-max-new-48mp-sony-sensor-and-other-camera-details/).
Also look at the size of the lens, the iPhone has those tiny little lenses on the front, the EOS R6 [not so small](https://www.dpreview.com/sample-galleries/0000646042/canon-eos-r6-beauty-shots/1025571375)
This much bigger sensor and much bigger lens means there is a lot more total light hitting the sensor, and each pixel sensor is much bigger so can hold more total light before getting full.
This is what lets those bigger cameras capture much better looking images even if technically they have less megapixels, because the pixel sensors they have are individually better quality and the lens is physically capturing more light.
There are two completely different resolutions. One is the pixel count, that is megapixels. Completely different one is optical analog resolution, how small details the lens setup is capable of distinguishing. It doesn’t matter how many pixels you put behind a lens, it’s never going to improve the lens itself, and the thing with lenses is that bigger is just plain better. Well, you can’t have a big lens in a phone, so there are lots of tricks how phones try and make up in software, for what the camera lacks in actual hardware. More pixels is useful for that, it gives more data to work with. That’s why you see phones with 200MP cameras etc. But it’s very much diminishing returns. 200MP is not 4x better than 50MP, it’s not even 2x better, it’s just the maximum the sensor maker could fit.
The way a digital camera works is that a lens focuses light on a rectangular sensor. The rectangular sensor is actually divided up into little squares, where each of those little squares is responsible for measuring the portion of that light that hits it. You can visualize it as a tiny chessboard.
Each of those little squares is a “pixel”. A million of them make up a megapixel.
Since all that a each of these squares can do is measure the light that falls on it, the quality of the lens and how well it’s focused and aligned with the chip plays an extremely important role in picture quality. If the lens is out of focus, or if it distorts the image, or if it’s not perfectly aligned with the chip, then it will look terrible regardless of how many pixels the sensor is divided into. A high megapixel sensor will at best give you a very detailed view of a blurry, degraded image.
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