As someone that prints professionally, this is a good video for people to watch. One thing I would add is DPI does not exactly = PPI but is a good guide the print resolution is set depending on the paper used (the heavier the paper the more DPI, too much DPI on a lightweight paper and it wont absorb the ink correctly) The more MP you have, the more options you do have for printing though, getting it right in camera is always the easiest though. One thing to remember when photographing for print, is to think about the paper size and aspect ration. Most cameras shoot 3:2, full frame, or most APS-C cameras which results in a native print size of 6" x 4", 12" x 8", 18" x 12" etc or 4:3, M43 and medium format (Fuji GFX) which results in a native print size of 8" x 6", 16" x 12" etc. So it is important when shooting to frame for the print size you are thinking of printing. If you use a Full frame camera e.g. a Sony A7 series, and fill the frame, but then want to print 16" x 12" you will lose whatever is in the top or bottom of the frame, as you took the photo in a 3:2 ratio but are printing 4:3

More megapixels wont make a lens sharper.

I don't only view big prints from a few meters away - its a great pleasure to stand up close and enjoy the little details of a landscape print.

What a lot of folk don't know or seem to forget is that to calculate the increase in resolution one needs to look at the linear increase in the pixels not the area increase. So to keep the maths simple, 24mp IS NOT double the resolution of 12mp. 3000X4000 = 12mp for a 100% increase in resolution we have to double the linear measure, so it would be 6000X8000 = 48mp. 24mp represents only a c50% increase in resolution over 12mp. 48mp represents slightly under 50% increase over 24mp. Then we should consider the aesthetics of the images. My 16mp Fujifilm and Pentax images just look nicer to me than their newer 24mp equivalents on the same size sensor. I imagine cramming more pixels into the same sensor size would only make things worse. I don't want to spend megabucks to find out!

I would love to like this video twice! For the kind of work I do, 24mp is more than enough. I’ve never had a client tell me that my images didn’t have enough resolution. My Nikon D750 still delivers stunning images and partly because I get it right in the camera.

24 for most people but marketing needs more people to purchase the high res models to bring the price down so if some people needlessly purchase the high res models then it spreads the cost, everybody wins.

I find 20 megapixels is generally excellent for my needs and might actually be overkill.

Best explanation of how many megapixels are good enough in photography. Excellent video!

My first digital camera was a Nikon 1D with a 2.7mp sensor and I printed many 8x10 headshots that looked great.

12mp is more than enough for the most part. Still rocking Nikon D700s

Very Informative, Thank you. Cleared up some misconceptions I had. Cheers from Australia.

Great video! Exactly what I was looking for on this topic.

Nicely explained- thank you.

Love your presentation. Thank you for making it real!

Grate subject thank you even replies , very useful.

The 24 megapixels on my Nikon D7100 are more than adequate and allow for a decent amount of cropping when shooting wildlife and birds. And these shots are normally viewed on a 32 inch HD monitor.

Excellent video, totally agree.

One reason someone would use a higher megapixel camera for wildlife is from what I've seen the extra cost for the camera body with those higher megapixels seems in general to be less than the cost of a high quality zoom lens - so cropping for those people I would think is very important.(trying to keep equipment costs down). Another reason for higher megapixel cameras is a very small area of photography - taking shots for CGI work, like making 'natural' textures. In such cases, there really is no upper limit to how much megapixels could give benefit, i.e. the more is always better.

ARRI camera and lense company. Was using a 12 MP sensor for the longest time. On none blockbuster movies to major blockbuster movies. Which were perjected on many screen sizes.

Thank so much! Picture viewing is what matters to me. Your explanation is wonderful. 👍

I agree with you. Very well said. The only reason I like more megapixels, than I would normally need, is to aid in cropping. Mainly after shooting from the hip with a wide angle lens involving street photography.

Very well explained! 👍 While I have enjoyed 102MP as well, there are also other advantages to bigger lenses etc - but in general I am quite happy with my 26MP Fuji XH2S😊

…brilliant explanation, well done, thank you!

I have 24MP and 40MP cameras. I vouch that the 40MP is much much better and I love the 40MP camera the most

Great information

Nice video I actually learned something

I found this video very useful but realising I may have made an error in my choice of camera. I have a Nikon D3 with 12.8mp sensor. I plan on printing on A3+ paper size on a Canon Prograf 300 printer. What is your opinion of my set up? Thanks a million

They're photo sites and fewer photosites on the same size sensor means the photo sites are bigger to fill the void!! I have an Olympus E1 with 5 mega pixels and a long with the brilliant Olympus 14-54 lens, I get superb images up to A3 !

Very informative and interesting.

It's been a loOOong time since I watched a video from start to finish. It was worth my time.

Very good advice! Today I was reminding myself how one of my cameras works and was trying different megapixel settings. When viewed in my PC monitor there really wasn't a significant problem when I reduced the size right down to 4MP.

Back in the early days of digital I was a wedding and portrait photographer. I used a Nikon D1X (5.7MP) and Nikon D100 (6MP). I printed images up to 20x24 inches which I sold to clients. I just recently got back in to photography after about a 15 year break and now I just do it for the pure joy of photography. My cameras now are between 6MP (D100, Fujifilm S3), 12MP (Nikon D700), 24MP (Nikon DSLRs and Fuji XT2). I don't think I need any more megapixels than what I currently have. While it would be nice to have the latest and greatest I'm content with what I have for what I do.

I only have a 24mp crop sensor Canon 200d, and have no problem printing up to and including A2 which is plenty big enough

I think what we should remember the PC you'll need to edit the higher mp's

The noise performance is not worse in high mp cameras, it just looks worse because when zooming in to 100% it looks amplified compared to a lower mp camera . Realistically it performs better as the higher mp camera has more potential to catch fine details.

Megapixels aren't just about making big prints. They're about being able to move backwards and crop in to maintain depth of field

Very useful content

Very interesting and helpful 👍👍 But I really do love my Leica M11!!

Since the majority of photos are viewed on a screen these days, Megapixels are actually almost irrelevant. Megapixels don't compensate for a poor image, whether due to lens, settings, or composition and story. Back in the day. I was always disappointed in my 35mm film images. I wasn't into developing myself. I was at the mercy of the local print shop! My uncle who did his own developing could turn a meh photo into a stunner. These days, software has eliminated that frustration entirely for me. However, no-one wants to flip through physical albums of photos anymore nor buy a print to hang on their wall. It's all digital. Any photo on a phone can look pretty good! I do print a few for my own wall decor and don't worry about the pixels, even though I am a pixel peeper! 😊

I take very nice photos on my 11mp ZVE1 (video low light beast). I just use them on social media, don’t crop heavily and cannot see any reduction in quality compared to say the A7Cii. I put some photos showing the quality in a video. There’s lots of comparison videos on KZfaq. Sure if you want huge crops etc it’s not as good, and it’s got no mechanical shutter but I never use a flash anyway. The camera has outrageous dynamic range and unbelievable noise in low light also. The sensor is still the best video sensor on the market IMO, they even filmed ‘The Creator’ with that sensor.

How did you get such a clear photo in broad daylight. Do you mostly shoot in raw or just go straight jpeg

My knowledge about resolution is minimal. Can anyone answer a question I have? On my Samsung phone, in the phone editing section, it asks whether you would like to increase the resolution. If I choose 'Yes' the image appears to be less sharp. I always choose 'No' as the picture is better whenkept at the original (Lower) resolution.

My first digital camera was the awesome Nikon 1Dh at 2.7mp I have and use many digital cameras these days the highest count being the Q2 with 48mp. Most of my work is for newspapers and KZfaq content so imho 48mp is total overkill for me. I love the Q2 with its weather sealing but I’d be happy with the 24mp in the Q1 it’s plenty for my needs. Great video Peter cheers.

24MP is good enough for normal using. You can ask yourself, how many large prints will you do and how many pictures will you crop?

Jesus Christ the video I have been looking for, years now, thank u so much!

I have cameras in the range between 20-32.5 MP and even though I may not necessarily need all the extra pixels, I've taken a crop of 32.5 MP image to make a print out of 20 MP, and then done an alternative crop and made a smaller print with far fewer. Sometimes even when you have a decent telephoto it's still not enough and having that little extra comes in handy. Another thing I like about taking higher res files and viewing them on screen is looking for all the little Easter eggs you can find in an image. It can be like a treasure hunt!

Brilliant explanation.

I found your video very enlightening. I have several cameras, my biggest is the Nikon D850, and I always find myself grabbing my MFT 20mg GX9. I can't tell the difference on my computer monitor, and carrying a smaller camera around is so much more convenient. Not a pro by the way.

I agree with you 100%. I have some higher MP cameras, that I rarely use. There is no benefit for me, and their files clog up my storage and slow my older Mac (Intel version). I'm mostly a enthusiast photographer who does professional work. A lot of what I do for clients goes onto their websites, and I always have to reduce the image to 2 MP or less. I also do portraits, and 8" x 10" looks great using my 12 MP older cameras. In fact, I think they look better because you don't see a lot of the subtle skin imperfections that higher MP cameras show. I have shot large group photos and events with cameras in the 16-24 MP with absolutely no problem. I certainly could have shot them with my D700 or D3S if I had wanted to (12 MP). Currently, my walk around camera is a Canon M6II. I love that camera, but not because it has 30 MP... I simply don't need that resolution. Many years ago we had a professional "all family" photo taken (around 20 people), and the photographer was using an older Nikon which was somewhere in the 6-7 MP range. I was just visiting my parents who have the photo on their wall. Honestly, it looks great...I would never had said "Oh that is a low resolution image." It looked perfect. For me it is all about having accessible buttons/dials that make a camera usable for serious work. Cameras have been great since the mid-2000s. Yes, they have advanced in all areas. However, a good ol' 5D or D700 can still take fabulous photos. For many of us the improvements in dynamic range in the last 5 years really doesn't matter, and even those older cameras had pretty fantastic low light performance (not like the "seeing in the dark" abilities currently available). However, the one area where I am envious of new cameras is their AI focusing ability. That blows me away, but since I'm not a nature photographer, I really don't need it. I know some are thinking "you need it for sport too." However, the only sports that I shoot are my wife running races, and my my kids playing sports. Believe it or not, I have gotten great shots using old cameras and super-zoom bridge cameras. Not every shot may be in focus, but many are, and they look great. Just my two cents.

I chased the megapixel thing for quite a while. I shot film for 40 years with some digital for the last 10 of those years. I noticed that for 8x10 prints that once I got to 5 megapixels in 2004 that I could confidentially shoot much of my website and catalog photography at 5 megapixels. After I went into another field I just bought cameras for myself and I found that 16 was nice, as was 18. 20 is very nice. I did get 24 megapixels rather recently. I do like it but I don't like lugging it around. Thank you for confirming my own experiences.

Great video. I have a mix of various MP cameras up to 40mp, but truly enjoy my 12mp Nikon D700. I have done 20x30 prints and they are great. Years ago many photogs did billboard prints at 8mp. As the video says, viewing distance is different. It's still all about light, composition, and sometimes timing.

Shooting subjects like this gentleman suggests is the smartest way to get the most from you camera's sensor. I shoot the Sony a6700 with a 26mp sensor. It is sensational and produces great images. I just started shooting my new camera, the Sony ZV-E1 with a 12mp sensor. I had an absolute ball with that camera. I shoot like a journalist (I was one years ago), getting as much of the subject on the sensor. That's a trick everyone should employ. You won't need anything bigger than a 24/26mp sensor. But the images were beautiful on the ZV-E1. Focusing was spot on, videos were fantastic. I'm sure I can easily make an 11x14 or larger print with no degradation with images from that camera. From sunflowers to my granddaughter's birthday part, the images all came out great. Sure, cropping and blowing up those images will show signs of losing sharpness, but that is when you look at a print inches away from your eyes. I am going to use that ZV-E1 more and more. May become my favorite camera. And look, don't need to spend all that money for an overprices Leica sporting a Sony sensor. Sony is in many cameras, you just don't know it.

I am a painter and if I paint a 50cm x 30cm painting and look at at it 30 cm away I see a lot of detail. And to see the same amount of detail on a print at the same size I need 25 mp.

It's not how many I need, it's about how many I want 😂. Also sometimes when you less expect it, it'll come handy. Specially if you shoot action or wildlife and might have to crop and have no time to compose.

Very interesting and true ! I have a Canon R6 which is 'only' 20 Mp but I love it ! The biggest prints I make are 60 x 90 cm and I don't have them printed out that often, maybe 1 a year.

TV's are the same. 4K from regular viewing distance is not noticeable until you get to a 200" TV. Pixel size, light output, color reproduction and contrast makes a TV better. Not the number of dots that no one can see. Only reason one can say that 4k looks better is because youtube has the worst bitrate for 1080p content. Bitrate matters on streaming.

72 ppi for screen will do the job 300 ppi for print is better (the more pixels in the photo the better for print. Dpi is the inkt dots on your paper

6 mega pixels is good enough to print A3 format

Great video.

And also if you definitely need more resolution for printing, nowadays there is very powerful AI upscaling software which can do it amazingly.

6mp is enough for me. 2mp was enough for me in the early 2000s. Back then I was amazed when my uncle bought a 5mp camera. But that being said the images from a bigger sensor does look cleaner when I have to edit them or fix the exposure in lightroom.

IMO, even for cropping, 50MP should be enough, so using an APS-C lens on a full frame sensor would still give enough resolution. Cropping more, the quality of the optics will be a larger factor than sensor resolution.

I stopped worrying about megapixels in 2004/2005 when I was in a camera store looking at a Nikon D40 and he had his own poster sized image on the wall behind him with that camera that was 5 million megapixels. After that I just picked a camera I liked and couldn’t care less about megapixels.

I have D850 set to 24mp and that's perfect setup for image quality and cropping if needed

Thanks for the informative video, I believe cameras, phones, computers etc are all just drip-fed technology that's carefully marketed to us to not only believe we always 'need' more, but of course, to make us want it. Otherwise we wouldn't buy next years model.

I take mostly 'street' photos, and am very good at seeing the composition I want from the scene. The problem is that the 'story' I want to capture could have dissolved before I'm near enough to frame it with a prime lens, and using a zoom can often be too slow. I've lost some good shots by just not being quick enough to compose the shot. For this reason alone, my ideal camera would be something like a Leica q3. I could get immersive, close-up street shots on it's 28mm lens, but also capture a more distant scene or a situation that I don't want to get too close to for fear of attracting attention/influencing the story by my presence. I'm currently not in a position to upgrade from my 16mp camera so cropping is generally unsatisfactory.

A nice workaround to large MP sensors is to get a 24MP sensor and then make a panoramic image of the same aspect ratio as your native sensor. My Sony a6500 is a 24MP crop sensor, but I've made over 290MP images by taking panoramic images and stitching the panels together. Still a 2x3 image, but large enough to print to fill a living room wall.

What is the sweetspot in terms of megapixels do you think?

I will never refuse higher megapixels, but anything over 10MPX is usable . Depends on many things. How much you need to crop, the medium to display the image on, and the rest you mentioned. A high mpx image can always be downsampled to reduce noise etc, so you don’t really gain anything by having a lower resolution sensor. But when you do need the high resolution…

Good Job.

My old Nikon D70 at 6 meg makes really nice 8x10.

More pixels also over more room for noise reduction, the issue is not to do with individual cmos cell size but the effective coverage they have and any weird noise that might happen as you move away from classical physics. The reason for poor lowlite performyof phones has more to do with their tiny apature and total sensor size then the size of their individual CMOS cells.

I need ALL the MP's I can get! 75-100 would work!

Good advice. For me about 20mp is ideal and I do not do video so am able to buy used pro level gear at great prices and spend the extra on good glass.

For normal photography 24 mp is quite enough. But since I shoot wildlife and aircraft it comes in very handy to crop them. I can crop my Z9´s images much more then my Z6´s images. I could buy bigger lenses but they are very expensive and heavy. So 40-60 mp works nice for me:-)

I'm totaly happy with my fuji xt100, they produce excellent lens. But i notice almost no difference between 24mp halfframe fuji 2018y and 12mp quaterframe 2009y samsung with schnider kreuznach lens(compared same scene side by side on same focal dist.) When i need extreme high detailed image, which happened very rare, i take my old japanese retrack 13x18cm field film camera, its metal, and equiped w/lens, tripod and lens&holder damn heavy and if you travel with it by car, its ok, but if you on bicicle, it tore your arm and you think twice next time before you do such foolish thing...

I’ve recently sold my Sony a7iv and lens collection because I was loaned a Fuji X-T1 with the 16mm F1.4.

I find that 24 Megapixels is the sweet spot for me. I can crop it a bit and still get good pictures.

10 Megapixels is decent value for an A4 or A3 print, so if you have around 15 megapixels so you can crop the edges, it's a solid outcome.

I'm a fashion and beauty photographer, and high pixel count makes retouching easier, if you have good lenses. Or you go the other way and use old lenses, grain and low pixel cameras for a more artistic look

Some large printed pictures are viewed at close distances... like a gathering of people, say in a group photo of school students. Would you not agree, that more pixels would be required for that situation?

There is a case to be made for 4K to 8K video based solely on the fact that composition of moving objects is far less achievable and what if you need to format the shot in a verticals display… then you want as much cropping as you can afford storage!

60MP is great if you want to print HUGE. On the other hand if there is no wind you can just create a stack like I did a 200MP stack in Canada of lake moraine with a 24 MP camera and it looks incredible. I could print this 2 meters wide.

Happy with my 20M Olympus EM1X 👍

I used to shoot with the Sony A7Riv. It’s overkill for most people. Unless you mega pixel peep it’s near impossible to tell the difference. I’m with Fujifilm X T5 and X H2s with 0 regrets. Can’t tell between 40 and 26 either lol.

Printing Aficionado's a Question for you: Why does my Nikon z6II 24mp print (24"x36") look just the same as My Hasselblad Medium Format (50mp) Print (24"x36") Both Printed at the same Professional Shop (Digital Pro Lab) in San Antonio, TX and yes printed on same paper (Kodak Endura). Not happy because on my computer 5k Monitor the Hasselblad blows the Nikon away in everything Detail, Dynamic Range etc. Nikon Z6II workflow: Camera to Computer, then Edit in Photoshop, then Upscale to 24"x36" in photoshop save file in .Tiff, hand off to Print Shop Hasselblad x1d workflow: Camera to Computer, then Edit in Photoshop, file saved (large file size) no upscaling, save as .Tiff , hand off to Print shop this time I seen the Owner convert it to a jpeg and crop image. did not upscale. Please help as I want my large 24"X36" to look just as good as my monitor. Thank you to whomever responds appreciate it immensely. Al from Tx, USA

I am too used to 36mp and above. 24mp is not detailed enough for me.

If you intend to view your pics on a modern 4K TV, you need 9.8 mega pixels. You can round this out to 10 MP. 2 times this gives you enough room to crop/zoom. Which implies that 20mp is probably more than sufficient. One could argue that to view on an 8K screen you would need 4 times these many pixels. But let's be honest, most of us are never going to use an 8K screen at the right size or the right distance as amateurs/enthusiasts. 8K TVs may become cheaper and mainstream but for home use, you will never be able to see the difference betweek 4k and 8K on these screens. We need larger pixels or pixels with a great dynamic range because we definitely can make out the difference on an HDR screen. As HDR and WCG displays become more ubiquitous, capturing, processing and displaying wide dynamic range and colour gamuts may become more important. Bigger pixels might be more useful there.

On my wall I have photos taken with Fujifilm X-T2 what is 24 mpix. Still, those prints are taken from JPGs what was only 6 Mpix and the quality on A3 sized prints are excellent. Also the bigger the picture the further the viewing distance, so yeah, on paper bigger than 6 Mpix is quite useless to me. Nowadays I also move many of my Canon R50 photos wirelessly to my iPhone and those are only 1 Mpix sized and 99 % of times that is more than enough in average usage. By average usage I mean that I can share those easily to my friends who anyway watch those on mobile devices. Also I can print 10x15 cm photos (4"x6" in USA I think) with good quality and most of the times I print only Instax Mini photos where 1 Mpix is much more than what is needed. Of course I store my original photos to memory card on full size and then save those sometimes to my computer, but in all realism, 99 % of my use cases those 1 Mpix smaller photos are more than suitable in almost everything. To blog, to social media, to prints, to share to others :)

Higher megapixels are only useful if you crop, but they require ever bigger computer capacities. As a professional photographer in the 2010s, I used a 12 Megapixel Nikon D300. We enlarged these images to 90x60 cm (23x35 inch) every day on an Epson 7600 printer. The resolution, even close up, was superb. No pixel in sight anywhere. There is a physical limit to pixel size on the sensor. Higher pixel numbers are obtained by interpolation, which means subdividing one pixel into 4, 16 or more. You are not physically registering pixels any more. The camera software is inventing them on the spot.

Thank you!! Insanity.

We shoot weddings - and we create art books upto A2 but we could go bigger. Cropping on our old Fuji GFX50s was sometimes limited - Whitewall would not allow certain crops as it didn't meet their high standards. Now with Hass X2D100c and it's little sister 907xCFV100c we have no issues. For canvas re-prints up to 60 inches it didn't matter so much, but actually the difference between the two systems is huge. We tried a Nikon 24mpx ZF for Black and White - nope - we now have a Q3 set to black and white - its just about there. Interestingly though in the old days of shooting Mamiya RZ we could go as big as a house with no drop off - 35mm 60"x40"? We have three from our old days still in our studio!!! Megapixels do matter and if anyone says they don't there is a good reason they are lying. Its becuase they have not seen the difference in the real world - sure for Insta a camera phone will do but not for printing more than a 5"X7"

24mp enough until 8k monitors and video becomes the norm.

The mega pixel race has been stagnant for years the D600 came out at 24MP and most still hover around there. The S series from Panasonic the Z5 and Z6 the R3 the R6ii R8 are still 24MP most cameras have been focusing on video features and mot photography. The higher end cameras got higher MP. But the midrange should be alot higher about 50MP

The current iPhone having 48 MP and the Leica Q3 having above 60 MP have more or less the same reason: Being able to crop in to compensate for the lack of real "normal" lenses (they use wide-angle lenses as their "standard"). For cameras with interchangeable lenses or "universal" zoom lenses, around 24 MP is just fine. I had a Leica M9 and was quite happy with its 18 MP, but I would consider this the "low end". I would rather go after 24 or 25 MP.

For prints… you can’t get enough megapixels - BUT !!! The pixel count needs to be inline with the sensor size, otherwise it’s a waste of- 8-12 megapixels on a tony phone sensor is more than enough, but far too little on a medium format sensor (much bigger than full frame sensors)

It depends on the kind of work you’re dedicated to. A whole bunch of videos on this very same subject, none of them resolve anything.

As an A7R5 user I rarely used 61 mp mode. 🤔🤔🤔

Higher MP arent for everybody. If people want or need, they get them. Its like people who drive a prius It does a job very basically with no frills,no excitement..fitting owners personalities. Then you have the rest of the world who like driving and demand more from a car..and life in general

3.