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The marketing departments at the camera companies love to market cameras as being ‘better’ if they have more megapixels. This tactic is nothing new; it has been going on for years. Mobile phone companies have even jumped on this bandwagon with their cameras. We are seeing the same approach used to sell televisions with the marketing divisions telling us 8k is better than 4k (more is better, right?). Well, no, actually. In the case of televisions, 8k makes virtually zero sense since the human eye has to be sitting so close to the screen to resolve the fine detail that you would miss the peripheral sides of the image. Sit far enough away that you can see the entire picture and no longer resolve 8k with your eye. The human eye cannot fully resolve an 8k image at a comfortable viewing distance for the average-sized television set and viewing distance. So why the push to 8K televisions? Simply put, the general public understands what megapixels are in the broadest sense of the word, and if you tell them more is better, then most will believe you. Try to market a television set as having an improved colour gamut. The entire population’s eyes will instantly glaze over in confusion – yet an improved colour space is vastly more important than more megapixels. I would trade an 8k television or projector for one capable of REC-2020 colour space in a heartbeat.

Nevertheless, that is how marketing companies sell us televisions, and the general public usually falls for it. Camera companies use the same approach in the photographic world with megapixels. Intelligent, educated photographers recognise this as nonsense, but many new to photography fall for this old chestnut of more being better.

I have long advocated that more is not better regarding megapixels. It is often detrimental to the final photograph as more pixels equals more noise at a given ISO (that’s just physics, and it’s inarguable). At times, I have stood alone on the battlefield, banging my drum on this topic (old man yelling at clouds) as I watched photographers spend tens of thousands of dollars on high-end cameras just for more pixels, believing it would improve their photography. It didn’t, and in point of fact, it never will.

Over my years as a professional photographer, I have made and sold countless 40 x 60 and even 60 x 90-inch prints from files as small as 20 megapixels. Not one client looked at the print and said, ‘I wish you shot it with more megapixels’. Even today, I choose to shoot cameras with 24 megapixels because they offer a sweet spot in terms of resolution vs. noise, with the added benefit that they don’t create a storage headache or require a supercomputer to process in a timely fashion. There is an excellent reason the Canon EOS 1DX MK I, II and III were all sub 30 megapixels and why the EOS R3 is 24 megapixels. Working professionals recognise that this is all they need in most cases.

“But I can see the difference on screen at 100%” is the usual cry of the high-megapixel evangelist. Well, yes. Of course, you can. If you compare a 100-megapixel file to a 24-megapixel file at 100% on screen, then of course, the larger file will show more fine detail. But guess what… Viewing images at 100% on screen is not how we or our viewers consume photographs. We look at them at the native resolution of the display device (scaled inside that device’s native resolution since no one even makes a display with more than 8k resolution). Or, we view them as prints. And guess what… in all instances, the extra megapixels provide absolutely no advantage. NONE. They just cost you storage space and processing power. Never, not once, in my entire career as a professional photographer have I had a client ask to look at a photograph at 100% magnification on screen. This is simply not how we view photographs. High-megapixel cameras are occasionally requested in the commercial space, but it’s usually just for bragging rights by the end user.

Those few times I have found myself needing more pixels (when I wanted to make a huge print), I upscaled the image with Photoshop and got a fantastic result. We should be clear that the only real argument for more pixels is bigger prints (or maybe cropping power if you shoot loose). Even websites prepared for 4K monitors (such as my own) need a lot less than 20 megapixels; we need less than a fifth of that for social media (where most photographs seem to end up these days). So before you convince yourself you ‘need’ more megapixels, take a moment to ask yourself what do you actually need them for?

Subsequently, I moved on to Topaz Gigapixel AI when I needed to upscale an image, which is the software I still use today. I have done extensive testing of Topaz’s Gigxpixel A.I software in my own workflow and have found it to be genuinely superb in upscaling photographs. Like all of these sorts of filters and plug-ins, the defaults are often sub-par, and you need to spend a little time fiddling with the dials to get an optimum result. I have long wanted to do a demonstrable post on this topic showing the benefits, but I was recently beaten to it by Lens Rentals, who have posted their extensive test results. If I do get some time one of these days, I may yet sit down and do an exhaustive comparison (consider it added to the list as a future project).

Although Lens Rentals’ test methodology differs from mine. Lens Rentals took a 100-megapixel file, downscaled it to 30 megapixels and then upscaled it again to 100 megapixels for their comparison. I would have preferred to see them shoot a 100-megapixel native file and compare it to an upscaled native 24 or 30-megapixel file. Regardless, their test results speak for themselves and demonstrate that using software such as Gigapixel A.I effectively negate any benefits of a natively higher megapixel file. Of course, the examples used are 100% screen crops and again, that’s not how we consume or view photographs, but the results speak for themselves. Check out the article HERE, and please don’t shoot the messenger. After all, I may have saved you the unnecessary expense of purchasing more pixels. :-)