Please Stop Caring About Megapixels

Samsung's freshly-announced 12MP camera phone will produce shitty, grainy photos that still take up 8MB of space on a card. Tell your friends and family and one stranger a day for the rest of your life: "Megapixels don't matter." [via Unwired View]

[#1 posted by oohShiny , February 2, 2009 6:27 AM]

Well, it's not so much that they don't matter at all; it's just that there's a few dozen other things that are more important once you hit the 4 or 5 megapixel mark, for most users.

[#2 posted by felsby , February 2, 2009 6:54 AM]

Exactly - and when trying to cram 12 MP in a tiny (not 18 x 24 mm or larger) sensor, things will get WORSE than with 6 MP: small pixels generate less current, which needs more amplification that in turn generates more noise. This creates the need for more aggressive noise reduction that washes away the added details from the 12 MP. So now you have a larger file with lower quality. Only the card and disk manufacturers win.

[#3 posted by Gdr , February 2, 2009 6:58 AM]

In the phone commercial segment, they should enhance the quality of the lenses, not the pixel count. 4MP with a decent lens could be more than enough for any photographic/phone use (documentation, ocr, occasional shot, even parties).
For other or more professional use... a better choice would be if they cram a phone into a DSLR...

[#4 posted by yer_maw , February 2, 2009 7:03 AM]

i would just like to be able totake a photograph on my phone without turning into a blurry mess with the tiniest of movements.

[#5 posted by jjasper , February 2, 2009 7:09 AM]

Try setting an actual camera on top of your phone. That might work.

[#6 posted by rak0ribz , February 2, 2009 7:25 AM]

From the print on the lens:
f/2.6? Really?

Well, I guess it could be a lot worse, but it kind of ticks me off. They're working with an arbitrary (and small) sensor size; the least they could do is put in another buck worth of glass and give me a nice big aperture so I can take pictures indoors.

[#7 posted by zuzu , February 2, 2009 7:39 AM]

Well, it's not so much that they don't matter at all; it's just that there's a few dozen other things that are more important once you hit the 4 or 5 megapixel mark, for most users.

Basically, yes. Although I think "4 or 5 megapixels" is like when MP3s were new in 1996, and people accepted that 128kbps could reproduce CD-quality psychoaccoustics. I feel safer with some buffer room, and would peg the megapixel race for phones as "won" once 8MP becomes common.

The problem I think of with a 12MP Samsung phone is with all the other things a phone needs to do. Sony's c905 does a solid job of combining their Cybershot point-and-shoot digital camera heritage with their SE mobile phone heritage. Sliding the lens cover changes the personality of the device between "camera" and "phone" which is as simple and intuitive as can be.

So where are the 5-8MP cameras that function well in dim light and rapid movement for smartphones such as BlackBerry and iPhone? (The BB Curve 8900 crawled up to 3MP, but that's not making me ditch my Canon G9 anytime soon.)

[#8 posted by dculberson , February 2, 2009 8:01 AM]

Well, to be more accurate, stop caring about them until the technology improves further. I would love a perfectly accurate low-noise 100 megapixel camera phone - "digital zoom" would be awesome then! For both telephoto and macro type shots. But that's unlikely to be possible any time soon...

[#9 posted by wakaman , February 2, 2009 8:22 AM]

Megapixels DO matter if you ever hope to enlarge your photos bigger than an 11x17 sheet of paper. Don't vilify megapixels. Vilify bad optics.

[#10 posted by oohShiny , February 2, 2009 10:50 AM]

#7 and #9 -- I chose 4 or 5 megapixels because I had in mind the idea of a basic user who has a point-and-shoot, doesn't seem to care when the flash makes everyone look like vampires, and never prints out pictures larger than 4x6 (if they ever go so far as to print them, not just posting them on facebook or picasa). My old 5 megapixel canon was just fine for most purposes, but when it died I was given a 10 megapixel (also a canon) which, although a little grainy at times, is I think an improvement. I was most surprised that they removed the viewfinder than anything else, though it quickly occurred to me that I never used it on my old camera. The flash timing has less horrendous results on this one, too.

[#11 posted by kerry , February 2, 2009 11:14 AM]

Thank you thank you thank you for saying this. I see too many gadget bloggers get all hot under the collar for teeny-tiny cameras with giant megapixel counts, when the photos are going to be crappy, crappy, crappy due to tiny sensors, tiny lenses and terrible optical quality overall.

[#12 posted by Caroline , February 2, 2009 11:29 AM]

Wakaman, fair enough. Shall we say "Stop caring about megapixels unless you have an SLR with really nice lenses?" An 8-megapixel cellphone camera is going to let me print a dark, blurry, grainy, crappy picture really big. But at least it won't be pixelated!

(Felsby's comment FTW.)

[#13 posted by LightningRose , February 2, 2009 12:17 PM]

I have a 6 megapixel Nikon D-50 DSLR that I purchased almost 3-1/2 years ago. For the first 2 years I exclusively shot jpeg images and was quite pleased.

Last year I started shooting in RAW mode and was blown away by the difference in image quality and the the control I have over the final look.

I'll agree that for most people who just want family and vacation photos a 4 to 6 MP point and shoot camera with a reasonably good lens and optical zoom will suit their needs just fine.

[#14 posted by gruppler , February 2, 2009 12:57 PM]

Before commanding everyone to spread your opinion to the world, maybe you should choose your words more carefully. Yes there is a lot more than megapixels that makes a camera good, but a higher pixel count means you can scale down the photo, thus eliminating the grain, and still end up with a decently-sized image.

[#15 posted by surgicalsnack , February 2, 2009 11:43 PM]

I agree - megapixels don't particularly matter. I just decided to get myself a Motozine ZN5 after doing a fair amount of research. It's "only" 5 megapixels, but it's also got a dedicated image processing chip, a Carl Zeiss lens (albeit a plastic one), an actual xenon flash, and some great Kodak software under the hood that renders color fairly well and even allows one to save photos in lossless TIFF and b&w RAW.

I'm not real happy about the plastic lens, but the output looks approximately on par with the Nokia N95, which has a glass Carl Zeiss lens.

I'm not looking at the camera phone to replace my Canon DSLR and L glass - I look at these things as the modern-day equivalent of the Polaroid instant camera...good for quick and interesting snaps when you don't want to haul your rig around, but you'll want to bust out the real equipment for model shoots.

[#16 posted by felsby , February 3, 2009 2:30 AM]

wakaman & gruppler: you forget the noise reduction! Small sensor digicams with > 10MP invariably employ strong noise reduction. As Caroline writes, the inevitable result will be pics without visible pixels - and without details. Check any dpreview or other online comparative test. These words are chosen very carefully. It was easy, because it is true.
When comparing a Nikon D3 with D3x (12 vs. 24MP), the low-light capability of the 12MP model predictably beats the 24MP model. Of course, in sunny weather with a professional model, employing modestly applied noise reduction, MP mans detalis. But NOT in a baby-fingernail size sensor.

[#17 posted by Daemon , February 3, 2009 2:53 AM]

Why on earth do you need 12MP in a phone anyways? Phones in cameras are for snapshots, impromptu journalism and acts of porn best described as "asking for trouble".

[#18 posted by userw014 , February 3, 2009 6:43 AM]

How much is it going to cost to get the picture off the phone? A more expensive indenture to the Phone Company? Are you going to send a huge picture like this to some person whose phone contract charges per kilobyte? Besides the disk and phone manufacturers, the phone companies are winners here.

I'm a cheapskate - A cell-phone is a phone, first and foremost. A camera is a nice add-on - in case I need to take a picture of something - but not quickly.

How long does it take to "snap" a picture? The cell-phone camera I've got is nearly useless for taking pictures from a moving automobile. And the cycle time for taking a picture is immense.

I appreciate a camera with a tiny aperture - the more it's like a pin-hole camera, the more that's in focus and this is good for snapshots and photo-journalism like things where one shot every 20 seconds is adequate. But for more artistic endeavors (selective focus in particular), extreme low-light situations where a long exposure can compensate for less than fantastic photo-sensitivity, I much prefer a SLR.

[#19 posted by GregLondon , February 3, 2009 9:26 AM]

Good grief. Why not reserect some other never ending debates?

Vinyl versus CompactDisc.
Tube Amplifiers versus Transistors.

Nothing has changed. You still have three categories: quality, speed, budget. You still get to pick any two.

For people who want something easy to use and cheap, 5 mp with decent optics is fine. I just bought a digital camera yesterday because I lost the charger for my old camera on a trip.

It has decent optics. 6x optical zoom. Nice sized lens. 3 inch LCD so I can look at it without squinting or using glasses. Secure Digital port so I can use my existing collection of memory cards. Uses AA bateries, so I can get replacements if my rechargeables die on a trip (which happened on the last big vacation). And yes, it was 10 mp. I didn't care that it was 10 mp. but it had all the other features I wanted, and I wanted at least 5 mp, and it was cheap, and on sale. Sold.

I've done some cropping and whatnot with my photos and I've found that more pixels definitely helps there. So, 10 mp wasn't something I was going to turn away.

Compact Discs throw out some information when they digitize the audio. But in exchange for that, they get error recovery. you can scratch a CD and it can still play. MP3 compression loses even more information, but its based on how the human mind processes audio, and it turns out most people can't hear two distinct frequencies when those frequencies are close enough together. And the advantage of MP3 compression is you can put your entire library of CD's on one object smaller than a pack of cigarettes.

For most people, highly compressed MP3's on a cheap portable digital player is what they want. For others, the original, uncompressed and possibly oversampled digital audio is what they want. Probably professional musicians, but still, it comes down to pick any two, quality, speed, budget.

Go into a store and look at headphones. Most will say they have a frequency response of 20-20k hertz. And yet, no one would claim that every set of headphones are identical.

Yes, if a set of headphones say they have a frequency response from two hertz to forty kilohertz, then yes, frequency doesn't matter. Most people can't hear 20-20k. But no one would say "stop caring about frequency response".

If you're using a phone, your voice will get stripped down to a 300-3khz range. low quality, but it's all you need to talk. But you wouldn't want that for your music. Maybe for your commuting music, or while running on a treadmill at the gym music, but not the in your home all alone everything else turned off and just you and your classical music collection music.

All other things being the same, if I have a choice between 5 mp and 10 mp camera, I'd go for the 10 mp. Because all other things are the same. Same quality on the optics, same speed, same price. The only difference is twice as many pixels to work with if I ever need to crop and zoom after the shot.

[#20 posted by Anonymous , February 3, 2009 9:44 AM]

It's not megapixels: It's pixel size.

The physical limitation is the light collecting area of the sensor (the quantum efficiency of converting the light into electric charge being constant for the type of sensor.)

So a 12MP at full 35mm frame size will make great pictures whereas 12MP at 1/2.33 (or smaller) chip size is a waste. Now you can't fit a big sensor with the big optics to go with it into a phone, so the optimal solution is an appropriate sensor size matched with a reasonable pixel count that gives a good pixel size.

[#21 posted by Ito Kagehisa , February 3, 2009 10:11 AM]

Size matters? I had no idea.

[#22 posted by arkizzle , February 3, 2009 10:15 AM]

USERW014 @18

*cough cough*

Free, with bluetooth?

Don't tell me you've been paying your network to get your photos off your phone.. ouch!

[#23 posted by p96 , February 3, 2009 10:56 AM]

Also see http://www.imaging-resource.com/ , where you can compare images side-by-side and see the difference lenses, sensors, and compression make on images at the same scale. (I have no affiliation with the site.)

[#24 posted by airshowfan , February 3, 2009 3:08 PM]

I've been saying "Stop caring about the megapixels" since 2004!

That was when I got myself a Panasonic FZ10, which had an exceptionally sharp Leica lens, image stabilization, 35-420mm equivalent and f2.8 all the way, and a sensor that was a bit bigger than most digital cameras at the time. Cameras were coming out with 5, 6, 7, 8 megapixels, and I could see that most of them could not take pictures as sharp as my FZ10, since they were grainier, their lenses were not as sharp, and image stabilization makes a huge difference in low light and/or long focal lengths. (The FZ10 could go down to ISO 50, which was still grainy compared to an SLR but much better than other non-SLR cameras). At the time I worked at a camera store, during my last quarter at school, and so many people I knew asked me for digital camera advice that I started a website about it. The main point I stressed (other than ignoring "digital zoom") is that you can pretty much ignore the megapixel number as long as it's greater than, like, two. (This is for people who would only print 4x6s, and post the images online at no more than 800 pixels wide, and do no post-production, not even cropping). And then when I got a Canon 10D at the beginning of 2005, the DRASTIC improvement in image quality certainly has less to do with the change from 4 to 6 megapixels than it did with the huge sensor, even sharper lenses, and a vastly superior AF system.

So what easy number could be used for consumers to judge image quality? I have an idea. Maybe the angular resolution, compared to the field of view of the lens. That is, if you have two tiny dots or two thin parallel lines, how far apart can they be (as a fraction of the image width) and still be discerned as separate? This would have to be plotted (or averaged, for the short-attention-span consumer) at different focal lengths, apertures, ISOs, and between the middle of the frame and the corners. This number would be the inverse of the effective average resolution of the camera.

For example, if the number is, say, "1/1200", then this means that for this camera, down-sampling the image size will not cause a reduction in quality (as in the New York Times link in this post) as long as the width stays above 1200 pixels (making for an image of about one megapixel). A better camera might have a relative average angular resolution of, say, "1/2000", meaning that it captures so much detail, you'd already start losing some if you down-sampled the image size below 2000 pixels wide (about 3 megapixels). So the number is basically an "effective pixels" number; If you decrease the image size down to that number (but not any lower), you would still pretty much have all the detail you captured, so really that's the resolution you effectively have. This would take into account the effects of not-perfectly-sharp optics as well as sensor grain.

So that's my proposal. Average Relative Angular Resolution. ARAR. My old FZ10 would probably be an ARAR-1000 camera, on average, while my 5D with a really sharp lens on it might be an ARAR-3000 camera. This means that with a typical-use ISO and typical-use aperture, averaging the sharpness across the frame, an FZ10 picture would probably not lose detail until it was reduced to less than 1000 pixels across (about .7 megapixels), while a 5D picture would probably not lose detail until it was reduced to less than 3000 pixels across (about 5 megapixels). Something in that ballpark.

(Or hey, add something that begins with "A" to the end of the acronym, and call it the ARARA rating, and put a little picture of a macaw by the number on the box ;] . See, this is why I work in engineer, not in marketing).

(And you might guess that I was a less-than-stellar camera salesman. I was indeed problematically honest, but I was the only person in the store who could actually explain what all the specs meant and what kind of impact they had on what kinds of picture-taking. So I actually did all right at the camera store).

[#25 posted by jackdavinci , February 11, 2009 4:05 PM]

@AIRSHOWFAN

Great post! I was going to say, griping about people using megapixels as a quality determiner doesn't help unless there's some better way of quantifying it. I wonder if we could get some of the more popular digital camera comparison websites to do something similar?