A megapixel , also known as a megapixel , is a unit equivalent to one million pixels (or pixels ). It is usually referred to in an abbreviated form as Mpx .
As you can see, to understand what a megapixel is we must first understand the idea of a pixel. This term comes from English and is formed as an acronym of pix (the colloquial plural of picture , which translates as “image” ) and element (translatable as “element” ).
The smallest homogeneous surface among those that make up an image is called a pixel. Pixels are defined according to their color and brightness .
When you put together a million pixels, you get one megapixel. It is interesting to mention that, while computing usually uses a base of 1024 to construct prefixes, in this case a base of 1000 is used.
The notion of megapixel appears when referring to the image resolution offered by a digital camera . Based on the camera 's ability to record photos at a certain resolution, it is said to be an X megapixel camera.
Let's take the case of a camera that can take images of 1600 x 1200 pixels : that is, 1,920,000 pixels . This device , therefore, has a resolution of 1.92 megapixels .
Simply put, the number of megapixels of a camera refers to the size of the images it can capture. This information is important when printing the photo, but it loses relevance when the document is kept in digital format and published on social networks , for example. It is common for popular platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook , to crop images (and therefore resolution).
It is important to make a clarification about the relationship between quality and the number of megapixels, since for many years the advertising campaigns of video or photography camera manufacturers, as well as mobile phone manufacturers, have tried to convince us that It was enough to take a look at this last value to estimate the quality of the image that we could obtain with the device. However, there are other factors to take into account to complete the equation.
As mentioned in a previous paragraph, the importance of megapixels comes to light in particular when we want to print the photograph, because independently of the quality of the image, at least a high value in this field ensures a large amount of detail. . The same happens with videos, which are nothing more than a long list of static images that are played successively: whether it is a movie, a trailer or a video tutorial, the greater the number of pixels, the greater the clarity. time to play it.
So that the number of megapixels can really be used, it is very important that the camera sensor is of advanced technology , since this component is what determines how much light the camera is capable of absorbing. In turn, another variable to take into account to know this in depth is the maximum aperture of the diaphragm, which is also known as focal aperture and is found in technical documents represented with an f followed by a forward bar and a number, such as f/1.5 .
It is necessary to point out that this value, that of the focal aperture , should be understood in the following way: the larger it is, the smaller the gap through which the light can pass, so the preferred values are the highest. Bad lighting is the worst enemy of cameras; To cope with it and make the most of each pixel, your sensor must be optimal.