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Why you should care about megapixels

by 3 Comments

Megapixels

Tony Northrup has stirred more than his fair share of pots in the photography community. But time and time again he comes back with another in-depth video that shows us an intricate component many of us either overlook on a daily basis or understand but take for granted.

That’s precisely the case with his latest video titled ‘Megapixels – Should You Care?’ In it, Northrup shares a detailed rundown of almost anything and everything that relates to the pixels inside your camera.

In the fifteen minute video, he covers everything from how megapixels affect print quality to how important of a role glass quality plays in the world of pixel peeping.

Whether you’re new to the photography world, are looking for a refresher or just want to pick up a few technological details you’ve never heard before, the video is well worth a watch when you can set some time aside.

You can head on over to Northrup’s YouTube channel to subscribe to his future videos.

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  • Renato Murakami

    Yep… this is less why you should care, and more if you should care at all (guessing that’s why the video title was posted as a question).
    But it’s a good explainer.

    To the point, it’s a thing for pros and for people who wants prints as detailed as possible.
    Personally, I’ve been taking prints out of my Xperia Z3 shooting at 8Mpx. “Yuck” some will say, I don’t care. xD

    There’s another factor that Tony didn’t cover there that’s extremely important and interferes a whole lot, and that is the whole printer part. Doesn’t matter if you are shooting at 50Mpx, Zeiss Otus or whatnot if you have a shitty printer that will produce crap results.. sometimes it’s better to have a camera with less pixel count and invest in a better printer, if sharpness is the objective. Well, considering you print stuff yourself.

    For me personally, the prints I’ve been taking all things considered, are coming out pretty ok. It’s not perfect, not the sharpest it could be, color reproduction is far from accurate (I don’t even have a calibrated monitor in the first place), and the highest of crimes: I’m printing jpegs. OMG! xD But it’s just enough for the purpose: family and friends photos to put up in my photo mural.

    I also print with a cheap HP printer, with cheap photo paper, a spray of transparent varnish for protection that isn’t exactly specific for photo prints. I’ve printed up to A4 size… came out better than expected.

    Great present for the family too, as I have no one in the family who’s a photographer. xD

    If it’s non-professional, I’d highly advise to try something like this out to see for yourself. Depending on case and on expected results, sometimes it can be good enough with what you have or with cheaper stuff, rather than spending tons of money for differences in outcome that people won’t even notice that much.

    What I’m trying to say is: if it’s not professional work, and you are doing it for yourself, at first, don’t sweat too much. Use what’s available. Results might impress. Or at least be just enough.

    Just a piece of advise though… if you are going to print with a setup like mine (mostly crappy consumer stuff), you’ll have to experiment with editing to make results a bit better, specially if you’re working with low res photos. I also printed some photos taken in the past with either smartphone cameras or low res point ‘n shoots, A4 size and standard photo sizes, going as low as 2Mpx.

    That’s the point were things started to become… well, too bad. Those are family photos, so content is irreplaceable, so you end up needing to ramp up sharpness, resizing, mess around with color, and work some magic to make prints barely acceptable…

    This is another point that comes up when deciding if you should go for high megapixel cameras: how results holds up in the future. You might not be doing prints now, and might not expect to put it up on a wall anytime soon, but if there is a possibility, you might want to go as high as possible, specially if the photos have irreplaceable content (meaning you can’t go back to shoot once again).

  • Florian Diehl

    I was very critical of the previous video(s) but this one I liked, because it put things in perspective. It didn’t focus on the sensor aspect, but you talked about printing and viewing distance as well. The down-side was of course, that the video seems incoherent and tough to follow…

    I am not commenting on the Perceived Megapixels directly, I just want to add something that is almost always overlooked when talking about sharpness of images:
    We tested this with a picture which was printed at different DPIs on 8×10″ paper. I think it was 80, 150 and 300 dpi. Now, you would think that 300 dpi was rated the sharpest when shown to people who didn’t know what dpi the images were printed at.
    The 150 dip image was rated sharpest! Yes. Weird, right. Well, not so much if you stop trying to think of the eye as a digital(ish) sensor. It works totally differently, and therefore works out sharpness totally differently. Thus, a little “noise” from the 150dpi resolution was perceived as an increase in sharpness, because the eye focuses on the edges, noise around the edges can to some extent increase the perceived sharpness when viewed at the right viewing distance….

    What’s to make of all of this? PMPix is even less important than people think, and the subject that is photographed is even more important than people think.A high frequency image can deal with a lot more noise and or a cheaper lens (less resolution) than a low frequency image.

    I hope this totally confused everybody 😉

  • mike

    You should care in so much that you should know what the resolution of your sensor means. You should not be using it as a “more megapixels = more betterer” benchmark.

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