Truth or lie: the more megapixels the cell phone camera has, the better the photos

The camera is one of the decisive factors for users when changing cell phones. This section has undergone a great evolution in recent years, to the point of allowing you to record movies and take photos of very high quality. Although the key is not always in the megapixel (deputy).

Most brands use this technical feature to promote their devices. But the fact that a camera has 12 megapixels does not make it take pictures worse than one in 200, despite the large quantitative difference.

While leaving out two much more important sections in the quality of a photo: the sensor and the aperture of the diaphragm.

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Since cellphones have cameras, MPs have been the focal point of discussion to promote the advancement, so it’s no surprise that users are seeing that the bigger this number, the more photos they’ll get. take with their phone will be great.

A point easier to understand at the level marketingcontrary to explain the quality of a sensor, its series and other characteristics with high technical load.

Instead, understanding megapixels may be easier because it’s a unit of measurement that represents the size of a photo. This means that if a mobile phone has a 5MP camera, its images will be 2592×1944 pixels in size, which means that the maximum size the photo can be printed in will be 32×24 centimeters.

In addition, having more megapixels also allows you to crop a photo to a smaller size and not lose detail, which goes for printing as well as cutting from mobile or simply zooming.

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That’s as far as MP value goes, their relationship is in size but not in quality, which is defined by other factors: sensor and aperture.

This part explains the reason why manufacturers have chosen to add more lenses to a mobile phone, to the point of having between three and four. This is because the larger the size of the lens, the larger the diaphragm, which is the aperture of the lens, and the more light will enter to take the picture. Also, this is why depth, ultra-angular and other sensors are added.

Light is the key element of the image, because it is the characteristic that allows to capture the greatest number of colors and therefore the details of an element, which ultimately results in better quality.

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This all leads to two points. For one thing, having more megapixels doesn’t make for better photos because it’s not the defining element. Although “it’s much nicer to say you have 100 or 200 megapixels instead of saying you have 50 megapixels, but in practice having 12 megapixels is enough,” he said. Oliver Schindelbeck, senior director of smartphone technology ZEISSa manufacturer of optical equipment, in an interview with Xataka.

And the other point is that having more MP can work against you because “the more megapixels in the same space, the smaller they will be and the less light they will pick up” and “less light will lead to an increased noise that will result in poorer image quality,” as the image engineer explains Javier Melenchon A The vanguard.