How do the number of pixels affect the quality of the photograph?
I was recently talking to someone who had bought a new compact camera and proudly stated that it had 13Mega pixels. That got me thinking about the marketing hype around cameras, manufactureres are using the numbers game to pursuade us to part with our money. Unfortunately the higher the number of pixels does not necessarily mean a better quality picture, in fact quite the opposite. The biggest factor on picture quality is the size of the sensor, the larger the sensor in general the better quality picture that is produced. Why is this? Well without getting too technical it is all to do with noise (unwanted information) in relationship to the light that we do want and the smaller the pixel the greater this ratio becomes and so the noiser your photographs will appear. (Noise is usually very fine black dots on your photo, usually more noticable in pictures taken at night in man made lighting.) So if the sensor size stays the same and they add more pixels, in general the picture will become poorer in quality. There are other mitgating factors like the quality of the process to produce the sensor that will affect the quality of the photograph as well, but in genreal the higher the camera price and the larger the sensor size the better the quality, so pictures from the extremely small sensors on mobil phone cameras are never going to be as good as those taken from a compact which will never be as good as those taken with a full frame (35mm) sensor and so on. If you want to get more tachnical about all this there is a superb article which discusses all this and much more at the website found here :http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-sensor-size.htm
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