The megapixels in a digital camera are a rather strange subject to talk about.

If you ask a novice, they’ll say it’s about the only attribute of a camera they actually look for. No surprise here as it’s about the only attribute being marketed upon in regular stores. On the other hand, if you ask an expert, they’ll say megapixels don’t really matter when choosing a camera and some don’t hesitate to pick an older model drawing upon reasons that may leave a novice truly baffled. Here we should not that one of the Nikon flagships held only 4 megapixels and was still successfully marketed until a couple of years ago.

As with any subject, we can argue until we reach a balance of opinion.

So, why megapixels? Why do these matter?

• first of all, a higher megapixel count will give you greater detail as it captures more information from the light that reaches the sensor. This result in better RAW images which will allow for lossless editing.
• from the above, an immediate effect is that you can make larger crops of a good image, which gives you in fact many levels of extra zoom (this trick is used by some cameras as the so-called digital zoom, but these cameras also interpolate back to the original resolution, resulting in poor quality)
• higher megapixel count gives you access to larger prints from your photos. At 300dpi, a 16Mp camera can give you various poster size prints without any drop in quality.

That’s about it. If you’re not keen on printing or manipulating your photos, then megapixels don’t matter at all. It’s still a good thing to have for when you miss framing the shot but you can still salvage something by cropping, but otherwise it’s not something to get all too excited about.

The core of the camera is, in fact, like in most processing electronics, the processor and it’s best help, the image processing software. Als, the sensor size and built are more important than the megapixels it carries.

A bit sensor (like the full-frame -35mm- sensor on Canon’s 1Ds Mark II or EOS 5D) means better precision and thus less image noise at high sensitivity.

A good processor means high fidelity in colors and detail, while a capable processing software means high color fidelity and speed in saving those images. Unfortunately, these things aren’t marketed as they should be, especially in digital compact cameras, where most of these have severe shortcomings when compared to DSLR’s.