Why is there a decimal in some camera's megapixels?

Question

For example, some cameras show their megapixels to be 6.1 rather than just 6.0. Is it simply that the megapixels are a tenth higher than 6? What difference does it make? Why don't the manufacturer round it to 6? I guess I'm comparing that to sound systems, and wondering if there's an equivalent to a subwoofer involved, bumping it up by that .1

Answer 1

1 Megapixel is one million pixels.

A camera that shoots an image that's 3,000 x 2,000 pixels in size is precisely a 6 Megapixel camera.

If the sensor is, say 3,045 x 2,030 pixels in size then the pixel count is 6'181,350 pixels, of 6.2 Megapixels for short.

In reality it's mostly marketing, nobody wants to have any of their camera's megapixels ignored. People will always perceive a 6.2 megapixel camera as better than a 6.0!

Hope this helps!

Ignacio

Answer 2

The megapixel count comes from the count of physical light sensors in use on the camera's image sensor.

Sometimes the image sensor has more light sensors than are programmed for use in a camera. But another camera may have the same image sensor, but be programmed to use a few more of the light sensors.

There is also some rounding going on. No images resolution is exactly 6MP (or any other number). Just multiply out the max resolution for the camera.

The MP rating for a camera is part of the marketing for the camera. (MP is the simplest thing for the sales people to explain as a difference.)

Don't worry about differences in MP count too much. Small differences don't mean anything to usability. Larger differences only matter if you are going to print very big enlargements, or often crop out pieces of one pic to make a new pic.

There is way too much importance given to MP count. In some cases, the camera manufacturers are losing image quality by squeezing too many pixels onto the same size image sensor.

Good Luck

Answer 3

Alas, the point 1 does not indicate 3d imaging, X-ray powers or anything of the sort... it's simply + 1/10th megapixel.
A .1 megapixel advantage won't provide any real-world improvements, but there's no reason to work only with round numbers... so why not?

Answer 4

People would buy the 6.1 rather than the 6.0 cameras, even 0.1 means almost nothing.