6.3 Megapixels My Ass

Three something years ago I finally made the jump from analog photography to digital with the purchase of a Canon 10D for my trip to France. I’d been using a Nikon N2000 film camera for more than a decade, but the costs and hassles of film had more or less killed the joy for me, and I hardly ever took pictures anymore. I’d been resisting digital cameras for a long time, not because I’m anti-digital or some kind of fucked up, cabin-dwelling, luddite Unabomber, but because digital cameras were either affordable but shitty, or sweet but prohibitively expensive. The 10D arrived on the scene just in time, and I bought it — a Canon — even though I’d been a Nikon fan all my life, and I tore into its 6.3 megapixels like a crack whore and took one hell of a lot of worthless test photos learning to use the thing. I say all of this only to segue into a brief rant: Megapixels are bullshit.

See, not only does no sane human being need more than about 4 megapixels in order to get a big, juicy, jaw-dropping print, but even 3 MP yields a badass 8×10, and if you’re like me this is all pointless anyway since I never print anything. Ever. Prints are for old ladies. The web is my photo album. Fuck you.

And even that’s not my point. My point is this: Not only are megapixels bullshit — I laugh at the very notion of a 12-megapixel camera — but when you buy one of those things, you’re buying a lie. The sad fact is that the “Bayer” sensor technology used in nearly every mainstream digital camera has to interpolate colors to create a final image, which is a nice way of saying that that 12-megapixel camera you just bought, while yielding a huge 12-megapixel file, only contains the image detail of about half that number of megapixels. The good news is that, since nobody but the lamest techo-geeks and fucked up gear head win.iniot PC nerds needs more than 4 MP anyway, you have nothing to worry about other than your quickly dwindling flash card space and a distant feeling of having been ass-raped by The Man.