Forget The Megapixels!

‘Bigger is better’, we often hear (including diamonds, as my wife and De Beers have made me painfully aware). It’s time to officially put the ‘more megapixels’ obsession to rest.

When digital cameras first arrived, everyone was concerned with megapixels. This large, unruly number became a de facto ‘hot or not’ descriptor of your camera. Think of every pixel as a bucket that stores a little bit of your picture in it. The more buckets, the more detail of your image is captured. Photographers wanted the most megapixels they could get in a camera; no other camera feature measured up the way megapixels did. And that measurement used to be really important, back in the days when you were choosing between a 1 or 4 megapixel camera.

Well, our national nightmare is finally over. Today, any point-and-shoot camera comes in at 6 or 7 megapixels and up, so it’s time to forget this as a motivating factor completely. At 6 or 7 megapixels, you can easily print an 8×10 image with wonderful quality. I’ve printed large canvas images from a 7 megapixel camera (check out image 10, “The Arno River”, shot in Florence, Italy at my site www.TheItalyCollection.com. This was taken with a point and shoot camera, and then enhanced in Photoshop.)

Other factors like lighting conditions, shutter speed, etc., are going to affect your image far more now than megapixels will. In fact, one little hidden consequence of more megapixels is this: as you add megapixels to a sensor, you add noise. This is because each pixel is now smaller, and this results in more of that colored grainy look. Amazingly, you can actually get a better quality picture with less megapixels if each pixel is larger.

What should you look for in a camera then, if not the megapixel count? My big ones would be: support for RAW, ability to go completely manual, and high ISO support (1600 and higher).

So disregard the big-box electronics store’s marketing-hype mentality to shove a big “10 Megapixels here!” sign in front of you. It won’t matter for 95% of the photographers out there, and certainly not for any photographer that just wants better snapshots of their kids rolling in the mud. By the way, have you ever seen mud at 10 megapixels? Nasty.

Eric Doggett is a photographer in Austin, Texas. He has a site specifically for baby photography tips at ShootTheBaby.com, as well as BoxOfficeBaby.com, a site where you can order custom birth/party announcement cards and posters - a unique gift newborn children can keep forever. You can reach him at babydaddy -at- ShootTheBaby.com.