goldengod

Gales
by Andrew Ferguson

The number one question people ask me when I mentioned that I’d recently gotten a new digital camera was ‘How many megapixels does it have?’, right after ‘Do I know you?’ and ‘Why won’t you stop talking to me?’.

Why do people ask this?

We’ve been trained to recognize megapixels as the most important thing to think of when shopping for a digital camera. It’s an easy number to keep track of. In order to push the latest camera of the month, advertising continually hammers it into us.”Of course the new model is better, it has a million more pixels!” A million sure sounds like a lot more.

Understanding Megapixels

The easiest way to understand megapixels is to think of it like square footage. If a picture is 3,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels, then it’s 6,000,000 square pixels (3,000 times 2,000) or 6 Megapixels. That’s all there is to it. The trick is that any camera can seem many megapixels better by making only small increases in image quality.

Let’s stick with the same example, but change the numbers to 3,200 and 2,200. It seems like only a small difference. Multiply those two numbers together again and you’ll get 7,040,000 pixels. Seven megapixels sounds like a lot more than six, but it’s really just a small difference.

The Retail Side of Things

The salespeople at store use this ‘massive’ difference in megapixels to convince you to upgrade. The problem is that the sales associates aren’t lying, most of them just don’t know any better. They really believe that the 7MP camera has a large advantage over the 6MP one. The very manufacturers that play this numbers game have trained them to move as much product as they can.

Distracted Joy by Andrew Ferguson

Having attended many of these ‘training sessions’ when I worked in retail electronics, they’re worthless. An hour or two of “Our product is so fucking awesome! Here’s a bunch of semi- legitimate BS you can quote at customers.” The people who run these sessions are like conspiracy theorists hyped to the gills on speed and visions of profit.

Any questions you raise about the legitimacy of the tests they run to get these numbers will turn your coworkers against you. Your coworkers don’t care; they want the presentation to be over so they can get free stuff.

What You Can Do

The best thing you can do is educating yourself on the features and benefits of different digital cameras. Megapixels can matter, but not nearly as much as the manufacturers would have you believe. Image quality, colour, tone, and sharpening algorithms are all factors that need to be taken into account as well. The quality of the sensor and the quality of the lens will make a far bigger difference than megapixels will.

DPReview is one of the best places I found to educate yourself on camera information, if you don’t mind wading through oodles of data. Don’t say i didn’t warn you; this site is so far in depth that I’m convinced the writers live in houses made of cameras. You can also skip ahead to the summary page or run a comparison across the models you’re looking at buying if you’re a busy person.

Related Articles

• The Pros and Cons of Renting Digital Camera Equipment
• The Megapixel Myth at KenRockwell.com