Are More Megapixels Better?

All credit goes to ThioJoe

Transcript:

Hey guys so if you've been paying attention to the camera or smartphone

market in the last several years you'll know that camera megapixels are a big

talking point in marketing and I guess I wanted to talk about or megapixels the

most important thing obviously they're not but what makes a lower megapixel

count camera may be better than even higher megapixel IP camera if you have a

smartphone for example that has the same number of megapixels as a DSLR why would

you ever get the DSLR what are the advantages that's really the main

pointing to talk about this video now as I just mentioned megapixels are not the

whole story in fact in some cases having a more megapixels can actually make

image quality worse megapixels is just the resolution of the image but you also

have to look at the quality of the image itself and the quality of the image

specifically in regards to low light and noise throughout the image really comes

down to the size of the individual pixels on the sensor so you can imagine

that if you have two equally sized sensors one has a lot of megapixels and

one has fewer the one with a lot of megapixels is going to have smaller

individual pixels so it will be able to take a high-resolution image but the

center with fewer megapixels is going to have the larger individual pixels on the

center who were each pixel and a larger area for each pixel to capture light

means better image quality and it can be more sensitive without having a lot of

noise on pixel so that's why if you see a lot of small sensor cameras or phones

they typically have a lot of noise if you go anywhere above the lowest ISO and

if it doesn't then it means that there's probably a lot of noise reduction

processing going on and there are a lot of different size centers you get there

APSC then there's full frame and camera phones are very very small you can go up

to even medium format which are very expensive but they have much larger

individual pixels and those are very professional so you can imagine

even if you have a 20 megapixel cell phone camera with a tiny little sensor

and there are packed in and then a 20 megapixel DSLR with a full-frame sensor

which is much much larger the performance on the DSLR is generally

going to be much better now of course there are other things that affect the

performance besides just the sensor size such as the processor used to process

out some noise and process the image in camera so if you have a DSLR a modern

DSLR like a Digitech five-plus sensor processor that's going to be able to

process the image of higher quality and reduce the noise much better than say

something that's just slapped in new phone and that's also because you have a

lot more room in a DSLR to put all that extra technology and this is also the

same explanation for why you might see a medium format camera that cost $10,000

and it shoots about 50 megapixels and then you look at something like the

Canon 5d X which it's around 50 megapixels and say well this is the same

number megapixels and they're they're both really high-end cameras what's so

much better for the medium format that's $10,000 well it's gonna have much larger

pixels you have much less noise even at higher ISO and that's really why I like

top tier professional photographers are going to be using medium for Mac now

granted cell phone cameras have come a long way in fact you might be able to

get better performance out of a modern cell phone camera than you would a

really old first generation digital DSLR and that's just the cellphone processing

power has evolved so much over the years however in general a similar aged sensor

on a camera is never going to be able to perform up to the standard as a modern

DSLR just because of the size its inherent limitation but anyway that's

pretty much all there is in a nutshell and if you guys ever wondered about this

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