Megapixel Madness
Are you itching to upgrade your digital camera? Feeling pressure to get a new camera with more megapixels? There are many reasons to upgrade your digital camera, but the extra resolution you get from having more megapixels is often not worth the investment.
The camera manufacturers want you to think otherwise, of course – they want to sell you a newer camera. As I discussed last week, megapixels are a measure of the resolution of your camera – meaning how big your file is going to be. Improvements in your prints that you get from having more megapixels, however, aren’t as dramatic as they first appear.
Megapixels are based on an area (height in pixels times width in pixels) but increases in resolution are based on the increase in linear size, not the area. What this means in practice is that 12 megapixels are not twice as good as 6 megapixels – instead, a doubling of megapixels only gives you about a 40% increase in resolution. Going from 6 megapixels to 8 megapixels only gives you about a 15% increase in resolution.
When you are producing fine art prints, every bit of resolution and file size can help produce better prints (and give you more room for cropping). Even a 40% increase in resolution, however, doesn’t show up to most viewers until the prints get large. A new camera might give you many benefits – faster operation, better handling, improved noise, larger sensor size, etc. – but be careful if you think that a few more megapixels is going to make a big improvement in your prints. It will help, but not as much as the Canon’s and Nikon’s of the world would have you believe.
- Jim Nickelson
September 25, 2009 at 8:15 am
Well Yes! Sept. ’09. I have used (and will shortly be selling) a Canon 350 Rebel XT with a standard lens. I think I take ‘good pics’ and recently at an Expo in Brantome, France sold about 45 of them at A3 or A3+ ( sold better than A4.) The result. 8M pixel on A3. (working the area and square root etc) comes to 80 pixels per cm. Now my next move will be to go to the Canon 50D or 60D or 7D and based on 18M pixels and using A1 size the bigger picture will/would be 60pixels per cm. So, The bigger and better seems worse using the “pixel assesment.” !!! But 60pixel/cm is 0.016cm or 0.16mm. Whilst I wear spectacles I cannot see less than a fifth of 1mm !!! So, Both good, but bigger is ‘nicer’ to the person looking at (or buying a picture.) Also my 8M camera and printer (say Epson 1400) will cost about £500 the 18M camera and the A1 printer will cost about about £2,000 (near best)
So as a conclusion bigger and better (by 4 times) is dearer by 4 times and you pay for what you want. Don’t forget to charge more when you sell or sell more.