📷 Want to start taking photos that leave your friends and family speechless? Download our FREE cheat sheets: 👉 https://photographyexplained.com/cheatsheets/

Megapixels don't matter... until they matter...

Megapixels matter when cropping is involved.  Period.

Before I retired, I was a pro photographer for 4 decades and an early adopter of digital photography. Kodak invented the first production digitals cameras beginning in the early 1990s, and but in 2001 they came out with their flagship DCS 760. Its imager (what Kodak called the sensor) was full frame (3:2). same size as a frame of 35mm film. That was an 8 Megapixel imager with a bit depth of 12 bits. Kodak claimed that this 8 MP/12-bit camera could produce images that at 8x10 inches were indistinguishable from film at a “normal” viewing distance. I don’t remember what they considered a “normal” distance for viewing that size print.

The difficult part in those days was finding “film” labs that could make decent prints from a digital file. The labs used various method of exposing the light-sensitive color photographic with the digital images. The best prints came from laser exposed paper which would then be processed in chemical developing machines. Ink-jetprints in those days looked terrible, changed color in different lights, and were not color stable. This would take another 20 years.

And of course, DPI is not PPI. One is pixels per inch and the other is dots of ink per inch.

Megapixels matter when enlarging.

On smartphone Megapixels actually matter the most. Since you can't really zoom in optical until you meet the zoomfactor of the next zoom lens(if you even got one). So if you zoom in 2 times having a 48 mpx sensor is a game changer.

Lens quality matters more than anything. 24MP is the sweet spot for most people, case in point Sony's flagship low light monster is 12MP and their pro level A9iii is 24MP. If you need more then you're likely printing huge and most people rarely print anything at all.

I'm always 50/50 when it comes to the topic of 'do megapixels matter'. On 1 hand the fundamentals of photography are the most important, having a good composition, good lighting and creativity. On the otherhand, what makes photos special to me is that fact it can be higher quality than video, giving you the ability to zoom in and inspect the moment in time.

I work on industrial printers for a living and have had the practical application discussion about DPI both at work and in photography forums! I use 16 and 20 Mp micro 4/3 cameras.

What was not mentioned in this clip is that lower megapixel = lower file size (considerably) and means less cost for storage and process. Processing and storing 10,000 photos of 24 megapixels vs 50 is hugely different.

Fujifilm GFX100II photographer here.  I used Canon R5 for my jobs...UNTIL I was hired by an advertising agency to shoot in their own studio.  The full-time shooters there just started using the GFX 100s and I decided to try one out while on set.  It is a great camera (although to this lifelong Canon --and Mama RZ back in the day--the menu was a bit old fashioned).  I find that many clients love the big MP size of the files so they can crop if needed.  Also, retouching on these files is pretty nice.

Cropping matters, that's why megapixels matter.

Probably the most important spec that most camera and chip manufacturers don’t tell you but is super important is the DMax of the chip. That spec will tell you how much detail will be captured in the shadow areas so instead of getting a mass of black in heavy shadow areas, you still have detail in there. I’ve worked in the professional photography industry for over 40 years and when digital first came out, we very quickly realised that megapixels weren’t the most important spec, the DMax was.

Ahhh, the joys of being a videographer. We innately get away with lower res sensors, but as I am a wildlife shooter mostly, I still do a bit of cropping in 4k to HD. I recently watched a video of a guy walking thru a city using 3 cameras: 4k, 1080p and 720p. He had to show which one was which res. Wish I had the link for ya’ll.

I would always choose a camera that has better colours than a camera that has more megapixels, but less colour accuracy

Another aspect that needs to be added to the discussion is post processing software such as Topaz Gigapixel the can be a very useful tool when cropping images from cameras with lower megapixel counts.  As I shoot with micro 4/3 gear and my M1 Mark II has a 20 megapixel sensor, Topaz Gigapixel helps a lot when I need to make a significant crop.  Since my prints are never larger than 13" X 19" , I haven't had any problems printing very good images.  As I'm getting up there in age, photography is much more enjoyable when I can keep the amount of weight I'm carrying on the lower side while still having the ability to carry a few lenses and two camera bodies, so the micro 4/3 system works for me.

People move back to look at larger prints but they also move in to examine the detail. There's nothing like getting up close to an Ansel Adams print.

When i upgraded to an 8k display, i had a big problem finding crisp wallpapers at that resolution. 8k it's about 30 megapixels, so a photographer needs slightly more than 30 to shot pic good enough for me

I use a Sony a7RIV and while I mostly share photos online I find the high resolution very beneficial exactly because I have gotten much more comfortable with cropping in post. It helps me with telephoto lens fomo in that I focus more on bringing wide lenses and if I did not have the space to carry a 70-200, I might crop from 70 or 85 all the way up to 200 and everything still looks crisp and nice.

In the beginning I was second-guessing my choice of the R model due to noise performance. The grain is significantly more noticeable compared to other Sony bodies from same generation. But since the resolution is so high, the noise is also much finer, so if you are not both cropping 300% in post and shooting crazy high iso, chances are nobody will notice the noise at a normal zoom level. Further, I find that the finer grained noise lends itself better to AI denoising.

The main drawback is the size of the files and the fact that I regularly have slowdowns in Lightroom because my 32GB of RAM is getting maxed out. But overall for me it has been worth it.

m43 user here — I crop a lot, but I do it optically. I just turn the zoom ring on my 12-100 lens :D