design element  
   
   
 
 

Megapixels Are Not Everything

     Every day it seems that a new camera enters the market with more megapixels than you thought possible. At the high end of the DLSR spectrum today we have the 1dsmkIII coming out with a regular, full frame 35mm sensor size sporting 21mp. This sounds really fantastic, but do you really NEED 21mp? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.

     The commercial printer that I use prints at 250dpi, which means that to produce an 8x10 inch print; I need a 6 megapixel camera. That is if I don’t want to have to interpolate the image to increase the resolution. I would need to interpolate to print any images larger than that with a 6mp camera. Now, lets say I’m not happy with printing 8x10’s and I really feel that offering really high quality 16x20’s would help my business. Perhaps I have a large demand from my wedding photography customers for bigger prints, or maybe it’s the portrait clients. Whatever the case may be, I go down and I buy a new 1dmkIII. I figure hey, it’s got almost 4 times the number of pixels of my old 10D; I am going to REALLY notice a big difference! However, that’s not entirely the case. In order to print a 16x20 at 250dpi I would actually need a 24mp camera! The problem is that we are dealing with area, if you quadruple the number of megapixels you are working with; you will actually only double the print size you can attain. If you wanted to print a poster sized image, say a 30x40 at 250dpi you would need a whopping 84.4 megapixels to pull it off! Imagine being a wedding photographer and using a 1dmkIII, it’s a beauty of a camera but the storage requirements alone are daunting! You’re talking about a camera that is going to produce file sizes that are much larger than your probably currently dealing with. I know that I fill up hard drives at an alarming rate, and backup is already a daunting task. I can’t imagine having to quadruple the amount of memory I carry in memory cards and adding in essence 4 times the storage space or so to my computer just to deal with the increased file sizes.

     Now, is it worth it to upgrade to a new camera with more megapixels? It just might be if your making a drastic jump like going from 6mp to 21mp, doubling your possible print sizes is a pretty significant change and might warrant the new toy, err…I mean camera. However, if your thinking that going from something like 8 to 12 megapixels will make a big difference, you might want to do the math and see if it’s really worth it to you. You can make a 14x9 inch print with an 8.2mp camera at its native resolution and you can make a 17x11 inch print with a 12.7mp camera at its native resolution. That is only a 3 inch difference, or approximately 20%. My point boils down to this: megapixels shouldn’t be your only deciding factor, and possibly not even one of the major ones. Evaluate the other features and benefits of a camera before deciding to upgrade and don’t keep chasing the bigger numbers unless you understand what your doing. I urge you to do additional research and learn about photo sites, and how packing more of them onto a sensor can lead to higher noise. Increasing sensor resolution does reach a point of diminishing returns!