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What is a megapixel? Examining the concept of Megapixel in very simple language

What is a megapixel? Examining the concept of Megapixel in very simple language

What is a megapixel? Why is Megapixel important? If you bought a 6 megapixel camera last year, you will definitely decide to buy a 12 megapixel camera today. But what does this really tell us? Does more megapixels really mean better image quality? Is it better or is it just advertising and marketing tricks? The answer to whether megapixels have an effect on the quality of the received image or not is definitely yes.

I remember the first digital camera I bought was a 1.5 megapixel camera, which at that time had acceptable digital quality.

But now, looking at the pictures of that camera, I realize that with the addition of more megapixels, the quality of the pictures of my phone’s camera is much, much better than that of that digital camera. Before we go on to the next story, it is better to check together what is meant by megapixel or Megapixel.

What is a megapixel?
What is Megapixel or Megapixel?

But what is Megapixel really and what does it have to do with the quality of the image you see? To make it easier to understand, note that each megapixel means one million pixels in an image.

megapixel

If you know the width and height of each pixel of the image created by your camera, estimating how many megapixels your camera actually has will be almost simple. For example, for a camera that produces images of 640 x 480 pixels, just multiply these numbers together to create a total of 307,200 pixels.

Well, it is natural that such a photo was taken from a camera that has a third of a megapixel image quality, if this number reaches one million, then your camera would have an image quality of one megapixel.

In screen images, the criterion of image quality is PPI or Pixel Per Inch, naturally, the more pixels a photo has, the clearer the image will be for the user who views it, and the images will become less raster even with zooming.

How many megapixels do I need for my work?

What size or how many megapixels you need depends entirely on your needs. If you want to present your images in a blog or website or on the Internet, from one to three megapixels is considered the best and most suitable quality so that the viewer of your website can easily view the image without any problems and quickly.

want to use your images in the printing industry, the situation will be different, if you want to print on 6×4 paper, two megapixel images will be the answer for your work. If you want to print on 10 x 8 paper, five megapixel images and finally, if you want to print 14 x 11 inch images, it is best to use seven or more.

you enjoy viewing images on your monitor screen or uploading them to a website for your friends, a 1 mega pixel camera will also be the answer to your task, and this suggestion is because your computer monitor is usually an image. With dimensions of 1000 x 1000 pixels, it shows you one megapixel.

Of course, usually considering that people like to edit or cut their images a little, it is suggested to use cameras with a quality of 3 megapixels or more.

megapixel

The more you are skilled in graphic work and want to edit images, the more pixels you will need to display images and especially zoom in images.

When you print your pictures, you usually need more megapixels. If you do not have the required number of megapixels for your image that is going to be printed, the image that will be printed will not be accurate and clear.

If you are a graphic designer and have done the work of designing advertising banners, be sure to remember that one of the most important issues in higher quality is the number of megapixels, especially when you are going to print a banner with very large dimensions. Use the examples above for a variety of applications as a guide.

Of course, please note that in the last example, we mentioned that for printing 14×11 inch and larger images, it is recommended to use a camera with 7 or more than 7 megapixels, but believe me, the same 7 megapixel camera can also do all the bigger printing jobs. also do

Pay attention that when your image is going to be printed very large, the user who views it will be at a distance from the board or banner, and this makes you not need more megapixels.

Why might we need more megapixels?

In some cases, of course, it rarely happens that we can’t be satisfied with the things we mentioned and we need cameras that have more megapixels.

Most of the time, when you want to crop a part of an image, you will need more megapixels.

Sometimes it happens that you don’t need all the photos in one image and you just want to take and keep a certain part of the photo for yourself. In such a situation, the more megapixels your camera has, the more Zoom you can zoom in on the desired photo. Do it and separate the image you want with the best possible quality from the original image.

This is the most important positive point cameras with high megapixels have. In fact, the photos taken by these cameras are more zoomable, but the question is, how much are you supposed to zoom in your images and do you do it all the time or not?

Sometimes, it is only sometimes that we use the features of a camera with a high number of megapixels, and of course, one of these features is the excellent camera and the eye and the same eye, which is considered as one of the features of phones and cameras in Iran. For example, my aunt says to my aunt that my phone camera is 16 megapixels, and the other one replies that my camera is 32 megapixels, so that you will be happy (they say to God in their hearts), but it is interesting that none of them know how to take pictures with their cameras. .

The myth of megapixel marketing

As we have raised these issues so far, you may ask yourself that considering that even a low number of megapixels fulfills our usual needs, why do camera and mobile phone companies produce cameras with megapixels every day? higher than the previous offer to the market?

The answer to this question is very simple, they want to convince us that the next generation camera they are bringing to the market is a huge revolution in the camera industry and you should go for their latest product.

megapixel

But what is the positive point in producing digital cameras with a high number of pixels by manufacturing companies?

The first lesson we learned in this article is that megapixels are great and have revolutionized the world of digital photography, so the more the better, they made the old style of photography obsolete and you have unlimited and excellent quality. You can take beautiful photos.

But we also mentioned another issue in this article, the number of megapixels is not a requirement for updating or buying a new camera or camera phone, instead of thinking about the number of megapixels the camera has, think more about what it is going to do. Give it a thought and check whether the current camera meets your work needs or not, I hope it has been of interest to you friends, we will be happy to use your experiences and opinions in the rest of the article.