I heard the Surface duo having an 11 megapixel camera, but able to record 4K, whereas I have a camera that’s 20 meagpixels but only 720p, and the camera on my phone is 13 megapixels and 1080p. Can you please tell me why? Does it have to do with sensor size?
​
Thank you in advance.
In: Technology
1080 is 2.1 megapixels and 4K is 8.3 megapixels. Anything that can take pictures at a resolution higher than 8.3 megapixels has a sensor that can handle 4K, but it might have a bottleneck somewhere else, like the processor, or the software.
They’re basically the same thing.
“Resolution” typically includes the size ratio, but otherwise it’s just a measurement of pixels.
A still camera generally only needs to take one picture, and so can take a relatively long time to do it. With video you have at least 24 pictures per second, usually more. So the resolution of still images can be way higher. Video is restricted in quality by having to put out so many images per second.
Your brand new £8,000 TV would seem a lot less impressive if they advertised it with a MegaPixel count from 20 years ago, which is one reason they don’t like to use the same number for both.
Pictures are just lots of little coloured dots, each of those dots is called a pixel. If you have 4000 pixels in height, and 5000 pixels in width then you have 20,000,000 pixels, or 20 mega (million) pixels.
Videos are like lots and lots of photos stitched together. 30 frames per second is 30 photos per second. If you’ve ever looked at the file size of one of your pictures, it’s pretty big. To take, and process, and stitch together and then store 30 (or 60 if in slow mo, or 120 if you’ve got super slow mo, takes a lot of processing so while some phones can take big photos with lots of pixels, they can’t keep up when doing video at that rate so they do smaller size.
When movies say 720p or 1080p or 4k they are talking about the number of pixels in height. More pixels generally (but not always) means more detail / better picture but just because the sensor can take that many, doesn’t always mean the phone can keep up with processing them all.
Videos require a lot more resources than taking a simple photo. The camera’s processor needs to process 30 or 60 images per second, compress them and save them to the memory card. Therefore cameras can usually take only videos with a smaller resolutions than the photos they can take.
Latest Answers