How Many Megapixels do I Need?

Click on one of the buttons below to choose the number of megapixels you want to test, then:

see how much you can enlarge your picture before it starts to lose quality.

see how small a piece of a picture you can enlarge to standard print size (4x6").

We're not going to explain about digital-picture resolution here, for good reasons:

  1. We're amateurs, like most of you, and as such we know that all the technical explanations don't tell us what we want to know: "How many megapixels do we need our digital cameras to provide?"
  2. There are plenty of excellent sites to explain resolution, accutance, noise/grain, and other relevant photographic concepts. What we haven't found is a single site that shows the effect of our digital cameras' megapixels on things that we care about, like enlargement size and cropping.

'Til now.

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Certain assumptions, like the resolution of the printer that your local photo-shop will use to print your picture, went into our calculations. Those assumptions may not be exactly accurate in your case, but the relative results for different numbers of megapixels should hold true.