Disadvantages of More Mega-Pixels in Digital Cameras

Disadvantages of More Mega-Pixels in Digital Cameras

Having more megapixels isn't always an advantage and is sometimes detrimental to shooting fine images.

First of all, cameras with a lot of megapixels and a full-frame sensor are much more costly than cameras with a smaller sensor, so price is significantly affected by the pixel count.

Secondly, a high-megapixel camera shoots larger image files and operates more slowly because it takes longer to transfer the sensor's data to the memory card.

Thirdly, the memory card will hold fewer of the larger images so it takes longer to download the large files to the computer and hard drives will reach capacity more quickly.

Most of these problems can be solved by using larger capacity storage devices and by being a bit more patient waiting for the files to be written.

The more important drawback to shooting images with large megapixel counts is that you can miss images altogether, because either the camera's buffer is full or the shooting speed is too low for fast action.

While this is more of a consideration for action (wildlife and sports) photographers than landscape shooters, we rarely meet folks who are exclusively one or the other.

So let's look at each of these factors in detail because they're critical to getting or missing images in some circumstances.

Canon's 1Ds Mark II, for example, shoots 16.7 megapixel files.

The large amount of data requires more time to be transferred to the camera's buffer so the fastest speed at which this camera can shoot images is four frames per second.

When shooting, data from the sensor are sent to a temporary storage area called a buffer and then written to the memory card. Let's consider an analogy.

As you put water into a bucket having a hole in the bottom, it's leaking out, but if you put water in faster than it leaks out, you'll eventually have a filled bucket.

So it is with your digital camera's buffer writing to card memory!

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