PHONES & PHOTOGRAPHY
Demystifying the 'MP' Buzz
For a while now, the camera has been one of the the biggest selling points on smartphones with a lot of emphasis being placed on the number of megapixels phones can pack.
The term "megapixel" is not a foreign terminology if you're a smartphone user. Megapixels are usually one of the things that differentiate a good smartphone camera from a bad one.
So, it’s no wonder smartphone manufacturers put so much emphasis on them with some popular smartphone brands revealing mobile cameras with megapixel counts upwards of 40, 60, and even 100! But, is the number of megapixels really that important? If so, how much is enough?
But before we dive into that, you need to understand what megapixels are.
A megapixel (MP) is the number of pixels that you can capture in one photo. It is equal to one million pixels (more or less, it’s actually 1,048,576 pixels).
A pixel is the smallest unit of information in digital images and is a combination of red, green and blue dots called ‘sub-pixels’.
This number is determined by multiplying the number of pixels in the width of the image by the number of pixels in the height of the image.
HOW DO PIXELS WORK?
The physical pixels on a camera's image sensor are tiny. In modern smartphones, individual pixels are a fraction of the width of a single human hair and are measured in micrometers(μm).
Pixels capture light and the importance of light to photography is not lost on any photography enthusiasts and this makes them important. After capturing light on the camera's sensor, it turns it to data.
The data from the pixels is then combined to recreate the image.
Typically, the bigger the pixel size, the more light it can capture and consequentially the more light your pixels trap, the better your images are likely to be.
Conversely, the smaller the pixel size, the less light it can capture, leading to potentially poorer images.
But there's a bit of nuance involved. Remember, pixel size is not the same as megapixel count. But how does one affect the other?
As with everything photography, let's get practical.
Picture the two images below as your camera's sensor and those gray boxes as individual pixels.
For this first image, the pixels (gray boxes) are bigger and because the pixels are bigger, only a few can fit into the image (camera sensor).
For this second image, even when the image size (sensor size) remains the same, more pixels can be fitted into it because the pixels (gray boxes) are smaller.
The implication is that for the same sensor size, there are two options for choice of pixel size: it's either you have fewer but bigger pixels or many but smaller pixels.
So when making a camera, the manufacturers could be faced with a choice of fitting in 12 million large pixels to get a 12MP camera or 108 million smaller pixels to get a 108MP camera. Get the drift?
However, this doesn't automatically mean that less megapixel is better. Yes, in some situations, it is, but it depends on several variables, one of which is the sensor size.
Simply put, sensor size is the size of the camera sensor on which those tiny pixels sit.
The image sensor itself is the component of a camera that produces images using the light trapped by the camera.
Sensor size introduces new dynamics to how you approach the subject of megapixel count.
Take a 2MP camera, for example. A large sensor could fit in 2 million large pixels without sacrificing the size of the pixels. However, another 2MP camera with a smaller sensor would have to use smaller pixels to be able to accommodate the entire 2 million pixels.
Conclusively, the size of your image sensor determines how many pixels will fit on its surface and how big those pixels can be.
It could be counterproductive to force more megapixels on a small sensor but if you have a bigger sensor, you can push in more pixels if you want.
Summarily, the higher the megapixel count, the more details it can potentially capture. But, of course, you shouldn't necessarily get excited about the high megapixel count.
A higher megapixel count doesn't automatically translate to better pictures. You can fancy more megapixels if:
1) A large sensor is involved
2) A good lens is involved:
It's hard to define a good lens, but the definition of a good lens these days is based on brand. Brands like Leica and Zeiss are associated with quality lenses.
3) Good computational photography software is involved.
4) Uses pixel binning:
This technology digitally combines adjacent pixels to simulate larger pixel sizes.
It can be tempting to get excited about phones with a crazy megapixel count, but if the underlying technology isn't good enough, then more megapixel count isn't worth spending more cash on. We are of the opinion that making buying decisions based on the megapixel count alone is not entirely advisable.
✍️Mighty, O.
Do you feel more informed about choosing the right mobile phones for you?
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My vision for this image was to tell the story of where all meals begin—the market, with a focus on vegetables. To achieve this, I opted for a frame-filling shot of a vegetable stand with the market set as the background, and with this; I narrate the tale of
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Thank youuu. This is a great read!