Does megapixel really matters for taking good quality images?

   You experienced a lot from VGA to 12, 16, 48, 64 megapixel cameras in our smartphones & 108 will be the next number. This count will be reaching 200 and more after 2021 AD. Today every smartphone company is running after megapixel war so here comes a question " Does megapixel really matters for taking good quality image? "

The answer is NO. The megapixel is not always needed for good quality images. There are more other factors which influence your image quality. More megapixel means your camera sensors have more amount of pixels and the image captured by it is in large size and resolution. More megapixel is not equal to image quality. It helps only 1-2% on making your image good. The remaining 98% are other factors which should be good or you should be able to manage them to capture a good photograph.

    Your camera sensor captures light which needs to get through post processing before final image is shown to you. Every smartphone has different capacity of image post processing based on the processor and algorithms used in it. If the post processing is good than your smartphone camera is said to be good. You can take examples of iPhone and Google Pixel phones; they used single lens camera with a 12MP sensor but their image quality couldn't be defeated by any other smartphones. They had features like portrait mode and wide angle even in single lens. Nowadays most of other Android smartphone are using multiple camera setup but they have a lot of problems ( I don't mean all of them have problems). So you can clearly figure out the role of post processing. If you understand how your smartphone processes images you will be good at taking images.

Can smartphone cameras compete with the outstanding quality of a DSLR camera? What would it take..?

     You might have heard about pixel size. Pixel size means the size of each individual pixels used in your camera sensor which is measured in micrometers. But what is its work here? Friends, it is more important than megapixel count in your smartphone. A camera sensor with bigger pixel size always performs better even in adverse light conditions. That's why your DSLR is able to capture such stunning images but not your phone. Your smartphone has a small sensor and the manufacturers are adding more number of pixels in that small area. Your pixel count is increasing but your pixel size is decreasing. This type of camera setup will produce good images only if lighting conditions are good. As the light becomes less, your individual pixels start struggling to get enough light because it is small in size. Other than that, large number of pixels means a lot of data to be processed by processor & this is sometime burden for your processor. This will surely distort your image quality. In the camera with larger pixel size( DSLR ), the individual pixels grabs more light and produces good images even in harsh light conditions. The processor is also loaded with less data which results in outstanding performance of your camera. If bigger pixel size and a good quality algorithm is implemented in the smartphone than the image produced will always be good irrespective of the pixel count.

     Various experiments has proved that, " Actually we don't need more megapixels on our smartphones ". The images taken in our smartphone is also viewed in it and the image looks good there. If that image is uploaded to social media than it is sure that they will decrease it's quality to prevent their servers from overloading with users data. It also found that a 10MP image is enough to look good even in bigger screens like TV's.

To summarize it; More megapixel is not always needed for producing good quality images. It depends on the capability of your smartphone to process the image. A larger pixel size will give a lot of details with less burden to processor which results in production of good quality images even in adverse light conditions. Your smartphone camera sensors is not so big than a DSLR camera so it can't compete the image quality of DSLR.

The skill of photographer also matters a lot.

Article by:- Bimochan Poudel

* You can watch my video on YouTube if you are reading this from Nepal here .