Do megapixels actually matter in photography? Rod Lawton looks at why this is not necessarily the case any more
Will we ever be able to stop talking about megapixels and start talking about photography? Probably not. And yet this fixation with megapixels will often distract us from things that actually matter and sometimes lead us into buying things we don’t need.
Megapixels used to be very important, when compact cameras had 4MP (if you were lucky), DSLRs had 6MP and digital imaging was still in its infancy. You could make a big A4/letter size print at home and still see the pixels, or at least the point where the resolution ran out. But by the time we got to 12MP this was far less of a problem, and let’s not forget that we’re now in an age of digital image consumption where we look at images on a screen, not in a print. A 12MP camera can produce horizontal images roughly equivalent to 4K in width, so a 12MP image will fill the full width of a 4K monitor or TV without magnification.
So have our resolution needs actually diminished? At what point is enough, well, enough?
Numbers sell like nothing else, whether it’s in marketing brainstorming sessions, ad campaigns, camera stores, or social media quarrels. Megapixels have remained a marketing mainstay long after they ceased to be the most important measure of camera quality. They are used especially creatively by smartphone makers selling phones with 48MP or 108MP sensors, for example, that are ‘pixel-binned’ down to 12MP for regular use. The new Samsung S23 Ultra has a 200MP sensor, pixel-binning the output down to 50MP or 12.5MP, depending on the settings.
Some smartphones can be used at their full 48+MP advertised resolution in the right circumstances (bright light) but noise control and dynamic range are the first things to suffer. It does at least mean you can get phones that shoot 8K video even though regular stills are 12MP, but you really wouldn’t
