200, 108, 64, 48: Just How Much Do Megapixels Matter?

Merely having high megapixels on your side doesn’t really mean you have the greatest smartphone camera ever designed.

The more pixels that are packed together in an image, the richer the image gets in terms of detail.

Source : Getty

Xiaomi is all set to launch the new Redmi Note series in the market. While there is likely to be more than one variant of the phone, what’s creating the most buzz is the new entrant called the Redmi Note 12 Pro Plus, owing to its 200-megapixel primary camera on the back. Not 48, 64 or 108 — which had been seen before on the Note series — but a 200-megapixel one. 

Now, Xiaomi is not the first brand to feature a 200-megapixel sensor on a smartphone in India. 

A few months ago, Motorola launched the Edge Ultra 30 which featured a 200-megapixel main sensor and more recently, Infinix also released a phone with 200-megapixel main camera, the Infinix Zero Ultra 5G. 

That said, the Redmi Note series is one of the bestsellers in the Indian market, so the presence of a new feature on it is bound to be a trendsetter — after all, it was the Redmi Note 7 Pro that made 48-megapixel sensors a thing in the mid-segment. 

It may not be as popular as 48, 64, or 108 ones just yet, but the 200-megapixel sensor seems like a trend that is starting to bud, especially if it is available at a relatively affordable price. 

But while 200 megapixels looks great on a camera spec sheet, the question that we need to ask ourselves is: just how much of a difference is it likely to actually make? 

The meaning of a megapixel 

There is more to a smartphone’s camera story than just megapixel numbers. Merely having high megapixels on your side cannot alone change a smartphone camera’s fate, just as a seemingly huge 6,000mAh battery does not guarantee long battery life on a phone.  

Having great megapixel numbers in your corner is definitely a plus but it is not all that makes a camera capable. 

The term megapixel is as common as it gets these days. But what does it actually mean? Well, a megapixel is a measure of graphic resolution where one megapixel is equal to one million pixels hence the name 'megapixel', a pixel being the smallest unit of a digital image. 

This means a pixel is the smallest unit of an image. Add lots of pixels together and you get the complete image. You can think of the pixel as one tiny rock which is part of a big mountain when all the rocks taken together make the mountain. That is exactly how pixels work when it comes to digital photographs. 

These tiny pixels are packed together to form megapixels which in turn make up your digital photographs. 

The number of horizontal pixels is multiplied with the number of vertical pixels which gives you the count of the number of pixels in a picture. 

You have seen image resolutions like 1,024x768 — what they mean is that the image has 1,024 horizontal pixels and 768 vertical ones. 

A 12-megapixel camera generally takes images of an approximate resolution of 4,000x3,000 pixels.

Do more megapixels mean better photographs? 

The more pixels that are packed together in an image, the richer the image gets in terms of detail. All other things being equal, the higher the megapixel count, the better, and more detailed your picture is likely to be. 

Contrary to what most smartphone brands would have you believe, more megapixels alone will not result in a great photograph. Over the years, smartphone manufacturers have tended to equate the ability of a smartphone’s camera to the number of megapixels in it. 

However, if this were true, the 12-megapixel cameras on the iPhone 14 or the Google Pixel 6a would rank much lower than other phones that come with cameras with a massive number of megapixels on board — you can get phones with 48-megapixel cameras for under Rs 15,000 now. 

The smartphones with the most megapixels would be the camera bosses. 

But there is more to a smartphone’s camera story than just megapixels — we did say "all other things being equal" when we stated how important megapixels were. Many other factors decide whether the picture taken by your smartphone will turn out well or not. 

Sensor-ship factor for sensational photography 

One of the biggest factors has to be the camera sensor on the smartphone. It is the key element in any camera’s performance and often steers the fate of your photography journey. 

The type of sensor that comes on your smartphone and the size of the sensor play a huge role in which all those megapixels on your smartphone’s camera will perform. The sensor is a small piece of hardware which is responsible for creating the picture that you see on your smartphone. 

A simple camera works in three basic steps: light falls in through the lens, the rays are then redirected and converged on a single point on a surface and then an image is created. Now the surface where this image is created is the sensor. 

The sensor is the equivalent of the canvas on which a painting is made. The better the quality of the sensor, the better the image will be and the bigger the size of the sensor, the more area will be available to capture more detail. 

This is why many smartphone brands have started talking about the kind of sensors they have on their smartphones (Sony IMX, Samsung's Isocell and so on) to highlight how great the quality of the image taken from their smartphone will turn out to be. 

The size of a sensor is so far not that much of a factor in smartphone cameras as the space inside a smartphone is limited but some high-end phones have started talking of sensor size too. That said, most brands still prefer focusing on megapixels as a larger number like 48, 108 or (now) 200 is easier to understand than say IMX 766 or a ⅔ inch sensor,

Apart from the sensor and megapixels, other factors like the software on the smartphone, the camera tuning and processor running the smartphone, and optical image stabilisation (for stability) — all come together in making a smartphone’s camera a hit or a miss. 

Of course, even as we write, AI is playing a bigger role in photography, with Apple and Google both talking about computational photography. 

Megapixels mean more detail, larger pictures…and more zoom options 

All this does not mean that megapixels should not be given importance when considering a smartphone. Megapixels are actually very important and in most cases, they can deliver greater detail. 

A camera with a bigger megapixel count can potentially shoot better quality images — for instance, a 10-megapixel camera would capture double the detail as compared to a 5-megapixel camera. This difference might not come across while reviewing images on a smartphone screen but would come to the fore when the images are printed or zoomed in. 

This brings us to another reason why a higher megapixel count comes in handy on smartphones. Unlike proper cameras where the lens actually moves to zoom and go near the subject, on smartphones what one usually gets is a digital zoom. 

There are some smartphones that offer optical zoom but it is usually about 2x or 3x at most and is largely absent in the mid-segment. In the case of digital zoom, the camera is not moving closer to the subject but is actually cropping (cutting) the image to zoom in on the subject. 

This means the more you zoom in digitally, the more detail you lose. This is where a higher megapixel count comes to the rescue. When you have a camera with more megapixels on your phone, you do not lose as much detail as you would compared to a camera with a lower megapixel count. In very rough terms, you could crop a large portion of a 64-megapixel shot and still get a relatively clear 12- or 16-megapixel shot. And more megapixels means larger images — if you want to print out huge poster-sized images, megapixels can make a difference. 

Mind you, a high megapixel count also brings heavier image files. This means the more megapixels on a camera, the more detail it will capture and would need a bigger processor to process those images and more storage on board to store them. 

This is the reason why many brands bring high megapixel counts on their camera setup, they often tweak settings for the camera to capture with a lower megapixel count by default. Even the iPhone 14 Pro series which comes with a 48-megapixel sensor, takes 12-megapixel images by default, claiming that it crams all the detail into a smaller, but still rich image. 

Moving beyond megapixels

While megapixels matter, they are not solely responsible for producing a good image. One should not ignore megapixels altogether, but consider them along with other features that affect camera performance. Lots of megapixels are of little use if accompanied by a poor-quality sensor, a sluggish interface and a processor. 

There are any number of phones with 108-megapixel cameras at prices of around Rs 30,000 or even lesser, but their performance is nowhere near that of some devices with 12-megapixel cameras (ask anyone who uses an iPhone 12/13/14 or a Pixel 6a). 

So when Xiaomi takes the wraps off its 200-megapixel snapping Redmi Note in a few days, remember to look beyond that megapixel count. 

It always helps to have more megapixels on a camera — even the new Pixels and iPhone Pros now have main sensors with megapixels aplenty — but that alone does not ensure great photography. 

Megapixels are an important part of the photography equation but are still, only a part. There are other factors too.