How many megapixels does your smartphone need?

Aside from the clever marketing tactics pushed by manufacturers regarding megapixel count, how many megapixels does your current phone have and how many megapixels do you really need?

The number of megapixels on smartphones receives a lot of attention from manufacturers. It is one of the most emphasized specifications on the labels of smartphone products. You will find them in several options like 12MP, 48MP, 50MP or even 200MP.

For some people, deciding how many megapixels is enough is not easy. So, aside from the clever marketing tactics pushed by manufacturers regarding megapixel count, how many megapixels does your current phone have and how many megapixels do you really need?

Discover the megapixel myth

How many megapixels does your smartphone need? Picture 1 How many megapixels does your smartphone need? Picture 1

Smartphone manufacturers' marketing campaigns have created a really simplistic image of what megapixels mean. They have made users think that the number of megapixels determines how good your photos will be. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S20, S21, and S22 Ultra all come with 108-megapixel sensors.

Samsung takes great pride in emphasizing the power of its 108-megapixel sensor and how it makes its smartphone cameras much better than competitors with fewer megapixels. You might be tempted to think that the more megapixels, the better the camera.

However, this argument falls apart when compared to devices like Apple's iPhone 13 Pro Max and Pixel 5. The iPhone 13 Pro Max comes with a modest 12MP main camera. Is the 12MP sensor useless compared to the 108MP sensor?

You are wrong if you think so. Of course, the iPhone 13 Pro Max has one of the best cameras of any commercial smartphone. It outperforms the Galaxy S20 Ultra and Galaxy S21 Ultra in some camera metrics. Similarly, the Google Pixel 5 Pro's modest 16MP main camera doesn't necessarily make it inferior to a device like Samsung's Galaxy A52 with a 48MP sensor.

So, if more megapixels doesn't mean a better camera, how does the number of megapixels affect the camera and image quality? How many megapixels does your phone need to take great photos?

To answer that, you'll need to understand what megapixels mean.

What is Megapixel?

To understand megapixels, it is important to understand its much smaller unit - the pixel. Pixels are small light-capturing blocks on the surface of the camera's image sensor. Or, you can call them very small building blocks that contain visual data used to build images.

A megapixel is a collection of millions of those tiny pixels. So 1MP is equivalent to 1 million pixels and 12MP means 12 million pixels. But how do these numbers affect camera and image quality?

How does the number of megapixels affect camera quality?

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Light is very important in photography. Pixels capture light on the camera's sensor surface, which makes them very important. Typically, the larger the pixel size, the more light it captures. The more light captured by the pixel, the better the image appears. Conversely, the smaller the pixel size, the less light it captures, resulting in images that look of poorer quality.

However, that is just a theory, reality is not quite like that.

Pixel size is not the same as megapixel count. They are two different things. Pixel size is the size of those small pixels on the camera's sensor surface. Megapixel is a number, in millions, of the tiny pixels equipped on the sensor. But how important is pixel size? How is it related to the number of megapixels?

Now, visualize the two images below as the camera's sensor and those gray boxes as individual pixels.

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For this first image, the pixels (gray boxes) are larger. Because the pixels are larger, only a small number of pixels can appear in the image (camera sensor).

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For this second image, even if the image size (sensor size) remains the same, more pixels can be fitted into it because the pixels (gray boxes) are smaller.

The implication is that for the same sensor size, more "smaller pixels" can be fitted, fewer larger pixels will fit in this area. Remember, large pixels are usually better because they capture more light. So, when producing cameras, manufacturers may be faced with the choice of installing 12 million large pixels to get a 12MP camera or 108 million smaller pixels to get a 108MP camera sensor.

However, this does not mean that fewer megapixels is better. Yes, in some cases it is, but it depends on a number of variables, one of which is sensor size. But what size should the sensor be?

Simply put, sensor size is the size of the camera sensor on which the tiny pixels are placed. The image sensor itself is the component of the camera that creates images using light captured by the camera.

Take a 2MP camera for example. A large sensor can comfortably accommodate 2 million large pixels without sacrificing pixel size.

However, another 2MP camera with a smaller sensor would have to use smaller pixels to accommodate the full 2 million units. In short, the size of an image sensor determines how many pixels fit on its surface and how large those pixels can be.

It can be counterproductive to squeeze more megapixels on a small sensor. On the other hand, if you have a larger sensor, you can push more pixels if you want. That's why Samsung used a very large sensor (by smartphone standards) on the Galaxy S22 Ultra, which comes with a 108MP camera.

How many megapixels is enough?

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At this point, it might be tempting to think that more megapixels don't really add up to much. Not entirely so. More megapixels means more resolution or more room for higher definition images. This can be very useful when printing images or viewing them on a large screen. Plus, more megapixels ensure your images contain as much detail as possible.

Additionally, higher megapixels are also important for zoom, especially digital zoom. Since digital zoom is essentially cropping the image, cameras with higher megapixels will capture enough detail to ensure that when you manually crop the image or when your camera performs digital zoom, the image is not pixelated. This can be very useful for smartphones that rely more on digital zoom than optical zoom for zooming.

So the higher the megapixel count, the more detail it can capture. However, you don't necessarily have to pay too much attention to the number of megapixels. A higher megapixel count does not automatically make a photo better. You may want more megapixels if:

A large sensor is included
Have a good lens. It's hard to identify a good lens, but the determining criteria these days are often based on brand. Brands like Leica and Zeiss often offer quality lenses.
Good software is involved. Samsung, Apple and Google have great photography software. Good software can get the best value out of a high-megapixel camera.
Use . This technology digitally combines adjacent pixels to simulate larger pixel sizes.

Although the latest flagships with their incredibly high megapixel count make it hard to resist, always ask the question: "What is their underlying technology?" If the underlying technology isn't good enough, then more megapixels doesn't make any sense and isn't worth the extra money.

If the underlying technology is good enough, then by all means, if you have the money, go for the higher megapixel count. However, making purchasing decisions based on megapixel count is not entirely advisable.