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The shocking news of the day — Nokia is making a phone with a 41-megapixel camera—is shocking for all the wrong reasons. It may shoot higher-res than most DSLRs, but that won’t help you at all. Why? After a certain point, megapixels don’t matter.
Pencils down, everyone!
A megapixel is one million pixels, referring to the number of pixels a camera’s sensor can capture when it’s exposed to light. In plain thinking, the higher the better — more pixels generally mean more picture detail. So wouldn’t 41 megapixels be a hell of a lot better than the 36 Nikon’s juggernaut D800 packs? The phone must be even better than the DSLR, or at least close, right?
Not at all. Not even close. Not all pixels are created equally.
A phone, obviously, is much smaller than a camera — especially a big pro shooter like a Nikon or Canon DSLR. This means that phones can only accomodate a dramatically smaller sensor — the light-sucking plate that takes photons and converts them into pixels. A small sensor means that pixels themselves have to be smaller if there are going to be a lot of them, and small pixels suck. Like a crowded fraternity basement, a small, high-megapixel phone sensor creates images mired by discoloration and noise. They may be large images, in terms of the JPEG you view on your screen, but they’re not precise, beautiful images.
That’s why a big sensor and a nice lens — also lacking in a phone — are what you should focus on. That’s what yields beautiful shots in low light settings, accurate colours, and broad dynamic range. It’s these factors, not megapixelage junk-measuring contests, that you should be concerned about. A large sensor, like those found in actual cameras (and DSLRs in particular) accommodates spacious, luxurious pixels that have room to stretch out and pick up more light. This means a more accurate image — even if the megapixel number is far lower.
But why, then, do the top-end DSLRs pack massive pixel counts? Because pro photographers are using them for pro settings: magazines, billboards, television. But the naked eye can’t tell the difference between 8MP and 100MP if you’re printing on anything smaller than A4 pad-size, or posting to your Facebook wall, or sending as an email attachment.
This shouldn’t be hard to put together. A small smartphone with 41 megapixels sounds impressive, sure, and it may well take a good picture. But remember that those megapixels, like the ones in countless beefed-up point-and-shoots, don’t have room to breathe. And even if they did, your eyeballs wouldn’t be able to tell the difference unless you’re printing up posters on the regular. The result, short of some engineering spectacularity, will be largely diminishing returns.
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It’s not even Megapixels that matter. 99.9% of consumers are technically illiterate. Take the iPad2 for example, it’s got 1/5th of the megapixels that my 7 year old Nokia 6300 had, but they don’t really care, if it’s got shiny plastic and it means people think they are a “winner” for owning one, they don’t care.
Specs don’t matter to these people, what everyone else thinks and expects of them is all that matters, they will do an own what they are expected to.
Jealous Fandroid? I didn’t see a post like this when HTC made that 16Megapixel Titan.
The samples that came out of this phone were damn amazing. It almost has the same size sensor as the Nikon 1…
We know its not got a APS-C sized sensor, but its got one thats a heck of a lot larger than any other phone. Not to mention its got Carl Zeiss lens to back that up.
Stop comparing it to a DSLR, try comparing it to a point and shoot. You don’t even sound like you know what your talking about half the time in this post.
Stop trying to rain on Nokia’s parade.. I’ll just wait a few several years before someone else makes a phone with a better camera than this..
Tbh I thought the article made sense to inform those that didn’t already know that megapixels arent everything. If they wanted to rain on Nokias parade they could just point out the os that this phone runs on.
But who cares about Symbian when you have 41 MEGAPIXELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can easily imagine Nokia and 41 megapixels will just be like the old Sony and Ridge Racer from a few years ago.
If only it was 1 more, then it would be the answer to everything.
Ridge Racer
Ah bless Sam, you do realise the approach they are taking is spun out from high end imaging (satelites / microscopy (the one I have experience of)). You’ve conflated the std megapixel race arguement (which I would agree with) with a situation where the expectation is you will be oversampling (massively) most of the time.
Only on full resolution / max zoom would the arguement hold and as you say how often do you need a 34MP photo.
You totally missed the point here!
This is great because you can crop or digital zoom without the image getting crap. This negates the need for a large expensive optical zoom, it’s a genius way around the problem that all smartphone camera’s have. Once you’ve cropped or zoomed the photo, the amount of megapixels you are going to be using on the image will be about 4megapixels, or in other words just what you need, whilst my iPhone will look shit if I zoom or crop.
Mega Pixel counts are a useless piece of information – I recall when George Lucas did some image tests regarding digital cinema years ago on audience and found that colour and DR was far more important to a viewer’s enjoyment than pixel count. It is good to have a higher pixel count, but only if you are also getting the best low-light, colour and DR, if not then it is useless.