Do you have a compact camera with a 10 Megapixel sensor? Whilst not wishing to rain on your parade, in my opinion this is pointless. Ken Rockwell sums it up quite nicely here:

“The megapixel myth was started by camera makers and swallowed hook, line and sinker. Camera makers use the number of megapixels a camera has to hoodwink you into thinking it has something to do with camera quality. They use it because even a tiny linear resolution increase results in a huge total pixel increase, since the total pixel count varies as the total area of the image, which varies as the square of the linear resolution. In other words, an almost invisible 40% increase in the number of pixels in any one direction results in a doubling of the total number of pixels in the image. Therefore camera makers can always brag about how much better this week’s camera is, with even negligible improvements.

One needs at least a doubling of linear resolution or film size to make an obvious improvement. This is the same as quadrupling the megapixels. A simple doubling of megapixels, even if all else remained the same, is very subtle. The factors that matter, like color and sharpening algorithms, are far more significant.”

So when you go out looking for that new digital camera stop for a second and have a think. Think about the quality of glass on the front of it. Think about the size of that sensor rather than the number of megapixels upon it. There is no point in having 10 Megapixels on a sensor the size of a pin head, you will see far superior results on a camera with half that number on a sensor twice the size.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 12:45 am and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.