Why is it that some phones today have cameras with hundreds of megapixels but advanced DSLRs and Mirrorless cameras have only 64?

Question

What are megapixels? How do they work? What is the difference between a 64mp mirrorless camera and a 24mp mirrorless camera of the same brand?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Digital images are composed of tiny dots called pixels. “Megapixels” is a way of expressing the detail of a digital image in terms of how many millions of pixels are in it. So, all else being equal, the photos from a 64MP camera should be more than twice as detailed as the photos from a 24 MP camera.

The 100+MP sensors on phones generally aren’t used for capturing 100+MP photos, they’re used to produce ~12MP photos that have much less grain in low light conditions using a technique called “pixel binning”. Basically, the sensor captures 100MP of image data but then immediately uses some smart denoising and resizing algorithms to create a 12MP image file.