Camera buying guide 2021

[GDRRiley]

On 2/5/2024 at 7:06 AM, jre84 said:

quick question I'm aware megapixels isn't everything but why is my 5 year old s21 ultra 108mp and a new camera 20mp, shouldn't these cameras be pushing 1000mp with gigantic sensors. is it a negative having more megapixels?

cameras are trying to get a good image by having a good sensor, phones now do a bunch of combining and software tricks to make a okay sensor look better. Most phones will take that 100mp sensor and downscale it to 25mph to help out their low light and noise performance meanwhile on a camera you can just have a big enough sensor to get good low light and noise performance.

[Brian McKee]

On 2/5/2024 at 10:06 AM, jre84 said:

quick question I'm aware megapixels isn't everything but why is my 5 year old s21 ultra 108mp and a new camera 20mp, shouldn't these cameras be pushing 1000mp with gigantic sensors. is it a negative having more megapixels?

Megapixels are a scam and mean next to nothing. Quality of pixels >>>>> Amount of them. A large format digital camera shooting at 12 megapixels will trounce any smaller sensor camera due to the sheer size of each photosite.

 

More pixels = smaller photosites. Smaller photosites = less light per pixel. Less light per pixel = worse signal to noise ratio.

 

Plus this is not even mentioning the optics you would need to take advantage of such high pixel counts. The higher the pixel density the more difficult it will be to make use of the resolution and actually glean more information from a photo. You'd need extremely expensive and well corrected optics to make use of such large pixel counts.