How Many Megapixels Do You Need?

Wow how's the blood came out with a hundred megapixel camera do you think I should get it [Music] oh hello everyone today we're going to be talking about megapixels how many megapixels do you actually need now Hasselblad came out with a hundred megapixel camera of course none of us can afford that I mean that's a very specialized camera but I'm gonna dive a little bit deeper into the Canon 5d s which is a 50 megapixel camera and do you actually need something like that so the real question is how many megapixels do you actually need when you're shooting normally so let's take a look so starting in the early 2000s there was a giant megapixel race so every you know the DSLR started out with you know four or five megapixels and slowly ramped up and then you had the you know everything started off with like a PS sized sensors because very few companies could actually even make a full-frame sensor at that point so even the professional you know DSLRs were in you know what would be considered now a very pathetic range and basically right around the 2010 or so everything seemed to peak right around you know 20 to 24 megapixels and it's really stayed there for so long and you really have to ask well why is it there why is it been there for so long and what does it really mean how many megapixels do you need so I really started thinking about this when I took this picture so this is a picture that I took on my recent trip to Utah and I'll link a high-res picture down below as well and that shot was shot with this actually it was exactly this combination this is the Panasonic g85 and I shot this with the 12 to 60 lens and the G 85 is a 16 megapixel camera and by modern standards you would say well that's crap and it's not the picture that I just showed you is a 12 by 16 and I cropped the original that was 16 megapixels that I shot with the Panasonic and I the resultant picture was around 11 megapixels and I printed that as I said at 12 by 16 or 16 by 12 it's a landscape and it wound up being around I think 187 dots per inch and I tried looking at that as closely as I could without actually pulling on a magnifying glass because no one looks at pictures through a magnifying glass that's not how things work and I could not find any problems with it I was looking at this and it looked the way that I would want it to look and that's really when I started thinking well how many megapixels are really enough and the end result when we're trying to take pictures typically is to have people see them and there's basically a couple different ways that people you know disseminate their pictures the most obvious one right now is just online and online you barely need any pixels if you're posting something on Facebook you need what 1 2 megapixels and you're fine if you're posting to Instagram where everything is already cropped and you're looking at a mobile device you need 1 or 2 megapixels and it's fine if you're posting to you know SmugMug or one of the more professional type photo sharing sites even then unless you're printing something out when you're looking at something on screen you really don't need more than you know even you know if you're looking at it from you know 27-inch iMac you really don't need more than we have five or six megapixels and everything will look the way that you're intending it the only time that things really get stressed is when you're printing something out so I took one of my recent shots and I went and I printed that out so basically what I did was I went and down sampled one of my pictures i cropped it really substantially and I printed it out at 50 60 680 300 125 and 150 dots branch because I wanted to actually see what it would look like when I'm holding it in my hands and I also showed this to my wife and you basically want to get a second opinion and for me really $125 inch at you know even even if I'm looking at it relatively close up it looks good and certainly hanging on a wall it would look just fine my wife actually had that same opinion of a hundred dpi so from this I could basically see that for most types of prints especially when you're looking at it from arm's length or half a room away life you really don't need that much resolution when it comes down to actually printing it so then you have the 5d SR that's the 50 megapixel camera and it's resolution is 86 88 by 57 92 and that is a massive resolution so how big can you print that so what I did was I plug this into a spreadsheet and I'll link the I'll make a Google spreadsheet and link it down below so you can actually look at it yourself if you printed this out at $125 inch resolution you can you know there comfortably make a 4x6 foot print most people never need to make a 4x6 foot print the resolution actually would wind up being slightly less it would be about a hundred twenty dpi it's it was like five point nine and three point eight feet or something like that it would be a spectacularly huge print are you gonna print that out probably not do you need something like that probably not if you're printing a billboard do you need that probably not and if you look at you know how a billboard is observed you're looking at it from a car it's going to be you know 20 30 40 feet away even if you're standing on the ground and the sidewalk looking at it it's going to be far away you could probably get away with you know 20 30 40 50 dpi in the only really use case that I could really think of for having something that big is if you're printing something out that's going to be inside of like a bus station or you know in one of the bus leading areas where you're gonna be having a huge print and you can walk right up to it very few things need to be that big there's no real reason to chase megapixels that much so let's say if you want to make something a little bit bigger what if you need to print something out at 100 or 80 dpi and you need to make it look better than you have better than the resolution would normally allowed well what you can do and I'll show you this right here okay so what I'm gonna do right now is I'm going to open up this picture in Photoshop and I'm going to lower its resolution down to 80 dots per inch so now that we have that done what I'm going to do is I'm going to increase that to 300 dots per inch and as you would imagine it's going to be a little bit blurrier than before and that's completely expected so what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up some free software from Google Nik tools and I'm going to add some grain back into it so the human eye it looks for detail and the detail can actually cover up the blurriness so even though it loses the resolution of the original picture when you print this out it actually will look a lot better than if you if things were just blurry because the human eye will see some of the fine structure in the image itself and it'll kind of see through it which is kind of neat so that's one way that you can do to kind of you know tricky your eye into looking at a lower resolution picture and having it look more acceptable and less blurry so speaking of grain okay so speaking of film earlier this year I shot something on film and I printed it out this is a 15 by 22 picture I shot this on ISO 400 film and when I'm looking at this really close-up I actually don't see any problems I don't see any defects I could see grain but it looks smooth and everything looks the way that I would expect it to look and the interesting thing is film has way lower resolution than digital so when I shot that picture using this this is a just a film like a okay just a film like yeah when I came home I developed it I scanned it because I don't want to I don't work with a wet darkroom anymore I have all the stuff for what what darkroom but it's it's a lot of hassle and I don't have enough space right now so regardless I printed this out I and it looks beautiful the thing is iso 400 black-and-white film is about the equivalent of 4 megapixels so if you put that in perspective with 4 megapixels and I'll link the the description or the actual stats of whites that resolution down below with four megapixels I was able to print a 15 by 22 picture and that's all in inches for anyone who's looking at it in non-us countries why do you need that much resolution you don't and the current crop of cameras all seem to be in the 16 to 24 megapixel range 16 to 24 megapixels is probably more than anyone realistically needs but it's a it's a good number it lets you crop pretty well and as the sensor technology advances and I'll make a other video on this later on what you're allowed to do is you can increase the dynamic range right now with the film camera you're actually shooting at a real disadvantage compared to modern digital still cameras you have way better dynamic range with the average digital camera than you would with film so so basically to wrap it up do you need a lot of megapixels no you don't so I hope you learned something I hope you enjoyed it if you liked it give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel and I will talk to you later [Music]

Channel: Vec Videos

Views: 348,957

Keywords: Photography, Printing, Megapixels, Camera, Resolution

Id: Q8aQqJYI8xA

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2017