3 ms·

I know megapixels are used when discussing cameras but I find the unit hard to understand. It would be so much more informative to know the resolution of the im

• mejutoco 4y ago
  Even megapixels are not a guarantee (since the camera might do some processing) but at least they relate to the resolution _of the sensor_. It is a bit like the nanometer nodes of the cpu processes vs using the surface size of the final cpu.
  • account42 4y ago
    s/the camera might do some processing/the camera is almost always doing processing and only captures ¼ of the information content compared to what its marketed resolution implies/ That is, the sensor will have that many "pixels", but each sensor pixel only captures a single color and the rest is interpolated.
    • mejutoco 4y ago
      Agree. A consumer camera might advertise too many megapixels, while more professional cameras, like medium format cameras (the ones used for architecture, for instance) do not distort it so much. In this, it is like the node size. It is not directly comparable but gives a reference to talk about.
• Dalewyn 4y ago
  The only thing you need to understand is: Bigger Is Better Resolution. The unit itself is basically hogwash at this point, not unlike TDP, silicon process nodes, processor clock speeds, and USB.
• account42 4y ago
  What you really want to know is the information content (in the information theory sense) of the image. The number of pixels is somewhat arbitrary depending on the processing involved - and especially for nonlinear projections like used here, there is no definite answer on how many pixels it should have beyond an upper and lower bound.