The Megapixel Wars

I started out with a very very basic digital camera, although in its day it was state of the art. The Sony Mavica was revolutionary, it had a 3.5 inch floppy disk (remember those) that slotted into the side, a big battery,  a 10x zoom lens (40-400mm) and took VGA photographs sized 640 x 480.   

It cost a fortune, but there wasn’t a lot of competition, and what existed was far more expensive. Its photos where not very good, but printed onto a postcard sized print they weren’t too bad. And that’s the size we used to print film camera photos at.

And those VGA photographs were 0.3 Mp.

I then bought a 6Mp Pentax istD that I didn’t like for various reasons, before buying a 5Mp Canon A540 that took staggeringly good photos for its cost and size.

I then jumped to succession of 10 Mp Canons, and to be honest although there is a noticeable improvement from 5Mp to 10Mp, it isn’t double. It is probably nearer to 10%.

I now have an 18Mp Canon EOS-M.  Are the photos 4 times better then the A540?  Absolutely not.  They are probably 50% better, and half of that is probably the more advanced processing hardware and software, and the better quality of the actual CMOS rather than the number of pixels it has on it.

And that completely overlooks the fact that the A540 had a cheap tiny plastic zoom lens, whereas the EOS-M has a razor sharp prime 22mm prime lens.

Yes if you zoom right in and “pixel peep” until you see the individual pixels, then you will see a difference.  But photographs are not seen like that. 

They are a holistic eyeful of vision. And even that Mavica could produce them.