The Megapixel Myth

"The more megapixels the better"

You might have heard this sentence or a reference to it by many people around you. Mostly in the case of a phone's camera. Is it true? There is only one answer to it...........

History

This myth came into existence during the initial phases of the digital camera. A marketing scheme at first, it became one of the most popular of myths in the digital world. This was first limited to the cameras but it soon caught up in the mobile world as well. Companies now take advantage of this and stuff more pixels in their cameras to woo potential customers

The Science

Although the pixels affect the picture quality they are not the only factors for making a good image. I'm not going to use any technical words here for the ease of people not much into photography. So here's the other stuff that matters
  1. The sensor size i.e the size of the image capturing space
  2. The size of the pixels: Pixels of higher size would take in more light resulting in better lit photos
  3. The sensor and lens quality: This one's quite obvious. A well built camera sensor and lens will ultimately give better outputs
  4. Camera Algorithms: It means the sets of instructions a camera module follows to capture a photo.
80's and 90's kids would clearly remember cameras with films and negatives. The pictures that came out of them in small sizes were pretty decent even from today's standards. Here's the good part, most of them had VGA(0.3 MP) cameras!!!

So what does this mean? This means that an average consumer wouldn't be able to spot the difference between a Postcard size photograph of a 5 and 8 MP camera, they will have to look REALLY closely to spot the differences.

It has actually been proven that you wont find a significant difference in photos unless the pixel count has been increased by 4 times(Approximately). So, you can see some clear differences between 4 MP and 16 MP images without the need of cropping in to the image

Our take

Just don't run into megapixels for the perfect image. Look around, take a few sample shots of the cameras and then compare them. I've seen cases in which 5 MP photos looked way better than 8 MP ones. The megapixels are actually more of a hype than reality. So if you find someone boasting of the megapixels of the phone(Provided he doesn't have the Lumia 1020 :D), break the myth for him/her

Did I miss something?? If I did suggest your views in the comments 

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