What is Camera Megapixel or MP?

Each time you come across an advertisement for some technical gadget like a digital camera or a mobile phone, you would probably find the advertiser flaunting the capability of the device camera in the terms of megapixels. What is megapixel or MP? Many a gizmo freaks not even know what megapixels mean and head out to the store for a high megapixel gadget. It might not be surprising to you that we make a gadget buying decision with camera megapixel value as an important criterion to consider. Let me tell you what a megapixel means.

Even with the lowest understanding of the technicalities, you must be aware of the fact that images on your computer or mobile screen are displayed in the form of pixels. Megapixel refers to this pixel density of the image that a specific camera captures. Greater the megapixel value, denser would be the pixels in the captured image. Technically speaking, 1 megapixel equals to 1,000,000 pixels. A common VGA camera that has a resolution of 640x 480 has 0.3 megapixel resolution (640x 480=307,200 pixels = 0.3MP). As the number of pixels in an image increases, the image gets nearer to real life and gains more clarity.

Minimum megapixel for quality printouts 

Any image clicked with a camera or mobile phone, when zoomed in continuously, starts fading and finally you get to see the pixels that form the image. Obvious now, that lower the MP of the camera, sooner are the pixels of the image revealed as you zoom in. Images with high pixel density have their clarity intact when zoomed to a good level. The same is the case with the display screen of the gadgets. Greater the pixel density of the screen better is the display. The latest technology in this field of display is the retina display technology from Apple in which you cannot distinguish pixels by naked eye.