Your phone’s camera - why more megapixels isn’t better
Having more megapixels does not necessarily mean you have a better camera.
Selfies - they have become an annoying and unstoppable part of our daily lives. A whopping number of more than a million selfies are taken every day. The term was even added to the Oxford dictionary in 2013 and voted word of the year.
Okay, so why all the talk of selfies? Well it is partly because of this phenomenon that cellphone cameras have expended at such a phenomenal rate. We went from having 5 and 8 megapixel cameras, to 12 and onward in short space of time.
When phones are sold to the general public, one of the biggest selling points is the camera. People have a habit of wanting to have everything bigger and better than before, and cellphone cameras are no exception. Here’s a shocker though; these larger megapixel cameras are not necessarily better.
When we refer to a megapixel, we refer to the measure of resolution. One megapixel consists of one million pixels; so a five and twelve megapixel cameras have five and twelve million pixels respectively. HD screens only have two megapixels while 4K screens see eight megapixels. So that picture that you just took with your eight megapixel camera is only being seen in two mega pixels on your screen anyway.
The higher the megapixels, the larger the image can be blown up without there being any pixelation or distortion of the image, but what are the chances of you blowing up your selfie to an A2? Basically, you pay an arm and a leg for something that you will likely never use to its full potential.
One piece of advice that I can leave you with is that you should not judge a phone on its camera, but rather judge it on its RAM (Random Access Memory), it’s processor and its storage.