Do more megapixels on the same sensor give you more crop room or apparent reach?
Asked 8/24/2015
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If two cameras use the same sensor size and the same lens—for example, both full-frame with a 50mm lens—but one has 24MP and the other 12MP, does the 24MP camera effectively give more “reach” because you can crop more and still make a good print? For example, if the goal is an 8x10 print at about 300 DPI, would the higher-resolution sensor let the image look more like it was taken with a longer lens?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
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Yes, and that is the maybe the major advantage of high-resoluton sensors, for typical print sizes. You can crop the image and still get an image with reasonable detail.
That said, the actual resolution of the image depends on the quality of the lens, too. Only quite high-end lenses will actually make good use of a 24MP sensor. if you look at a lens comparison like dxomark, you see that the top lens in this selection has a sharpness rating of only 21 "perceptual MPix", as they call it.
Following up on the comments, i'd like to forward to this extended discussion on the relationship between sensor and lens resolution.
Originally by user32110. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user32110
10y ago
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Yes—on the same sensor size with the same lens, a higher-megapixel camera gives you more cropping room, which can create an apparent increase in reach. It does not change the lens’s actual focal length or perspective, but cropping a 24MP image can leave you with more usable detail than cropping a 12MP image.
The gain is real but modest. Doubling megapixels does not double image width; 24MP vs 12MP is only about 1.4× more pixels per side. So don’t expect dramatic “infinite zoom” results.
Also, the final benefit depends on lens quality. A higher-resolution sensor can only record as much detail as the lens delivers. If the lens is not very sharp, some of those extra pixels won’t translate into clearly finer detail, though they can still help with cropping, geometric corrections, and processing.
So the short answer: yes, more megapixels on the same sensor can help you crop tighter for a given print size, but it’s not the same as using a longer lens, and the improvement is limited by the optics.
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