Camera manufacturers strive to create cameras with more and more megapixels. This is because most of the general public think the more megapixels they have in a camera, the better the quality the photographs will be. This is a myth and a ploy by camera manufacturers to hoodwink consumers into thinking this is how you measure quality when it is not. Megapixels are used to determine the size you can print an off an image at without losing quality. If you had 2 identical cameras but one was a 4 megapixel camera and the other a 16 megapixel camera and you printed off a small photograph the quality would be exactly the same.

Photographs are created by lines of dots (pixels) aligned vertically and horizontally. Pixels are normally expressed as Megapixels and this is done by simply multiplying the number of horizontal pixels by the number of vertical pixels. It’s exactly like calculating area. A 3 megapixel camera has 2,048 (horizontal) x 1,536 (vertical) pixels, or 3,145,728 pixels. We call this simply 3 megapixels.

Most people only print small photographs off so a camera with a low amount of megapixels would actually be sufficient. The quality of images your camera takes depends on the lens, the camera sensor and of course the user. The diagram below shows the size of prints you can get from cameras with different megapixels:

The above diagram uses print sizes in inches and a 12″ x 10″ is a little bit larger than A4. So at that size you would get the same quality printing off at 5MP as you would at 10MP.