What Is the Difference Between Pixels & Megapixels?
A pixel (short for picture element) is a tiny unit of an electronic image. There are 1,048,576 pixels in a megapixel.
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Pixels
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An electronic image is made up of thousands of pixels arranged in rows and columns.
Colors
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Computer Monitor Each pixel is made up of smaller units called bits. Eight-bit color mode means that each pixel showing on a color computer monitor is made up of eight bits with a possibility of 256 colors in the display.
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Types of Images
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The two main types of computer images are raster images and vector images. A raster image is made up of a grid of pixels. The image is said to be bit-mapped because the characteristics of the pixels are revealed bit by bit. The other type is a vector image which is represented by a mathematical description.
Manipulating Rasters
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A raster image cannot be enlarged or cropped much without a loss of clarity. Since there is a limited amount of pixels, expanding the image can cause the individual pixels to be obvious.
Megapixels
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Cameras are often evaluated on how many megapixels are in the photos it takes, but this is only one of the features that should be considered. A large number of megapixels is very important for photographers who will be shooting photographs that will be enlarged because quality will not be compromised: The more megapixels, the higher the image resolution; the higher the image resolution, the larger the print size possible.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit Image by Flickr.com, courtesy of Steven Straiton Image by Fotolia.com, courtesy of Sergey Tokarev
