by Noah Ongoro

Created on: February 09, 2010

The importance of the megapixels value in a camera phone is interesting and rather confusing. Recently, the mobile phone has been stealing all the limelight. It has developed into a highly versatile device, so much that most people would prefer a camera phone to a digital camera and a separate handset. Major mobile phone companies have set the pace with to include cameras with cutting edge technology on mobile phones. Major competitors consider the camera a major decider when it comes to choosing handsets. This has prompted the development of quality and dependable cameras.

When talking about the camera, the megapixel value arises as one major indicator of camera quality. A pixel is defined as the smallest element or particle making up an image. It is the fundamental unit of a picture in digital imaging. It can be viewed as a dot in a digital image.

The word ‘megapixel’ has two parts, mega and pixel. Mega is a prefix denoting a million. Therefore the megapixel is a million pixels. In digital imaging, several pixels are used to form an image. If few pixels are used, the image appears blocky and blurred. The image also tends to lack detail. However, if several pixels are used, the image appears sharper and clear. It also includes all the finer details of the image.

In camera phones, the term megapixel are used to express the number of image sensor elements or the number of image display elements that the camera produces. The megapixel value is the product of the number of pixels along the length and the number of pixels along the width of the camera display, which is the phone’s screen.

This depicts that a phone with a higher megapixel value will produce images which are sharper, clearer and possessing finer details. This is because it is able to use more pixels along the length and the width of the display to produce an image. In action, it has been found that phones with a higher megapixel value produce sharper images.

However, the picture quality may not necessarily depend on the megapixel value alone. There are several other hardware and software which contribute to the picture quality. These include the lens, flash and the light intensity. A camera phone with 3.1 megapixels and a powerful flash was found to produce a better picture than a 5 megapixel camera phone with a standard flash.

The megapixel does really matter, but the final goal is to have a picture of good quality. The supporting hardware and software play an important role to arrive at this.  

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