Pixels in photos

Do you remember when we talked about pixels? If you zoom really close to a picture you will also be able to detect the colored squares. Those are pixels.

Most smartphones have cameras between 5 and 12 megapixels. In mathematics, mega means 10⁶ or 1 000 000. So a regular photo taken from a smartphone has about 5 000 000 to 12 000 000 pixels. Because of the sheer amount of pixels in a picture, our eyes are not able to see the squares instead they see the picture as a whole.

The term resolution is often considered equivalent to pixel count in digital imaging. Below you can see examples of different pixel resolutions. The first image consists of one big pixel while the last one has 100 pixels vertically and horizontally so 100 x 100 = 10 000 in total.