Above is a photo I took of the Statue of Liberty last night from a boat. It looks pretty good, right? The colors are nice and there's a decent amount of detail for a pic taken in total darkness. But 2 megapixels?! To give you some context, this is the original photo:

That's a 20 megapixel photo taken on my Canon R6 at 70mm and f/2.8. The header image on this post is just a massive crop on this original shot.

Of course, having more pixels in the image would be good, and I could have gotten that with a longer lens or with the slightly higher end Canon R5 which has a 45MP sensor, but I don't think anyone looking at the 2MP crop initially thought, "ew, that's such a bad picture." Now that you go back to it, you can surely notice some spots where it's a bit fuzzier than you might like, and if you zoom in you can definitely see that the detail is not totally there, but I truly doubt that was anyone's first impression.

My point here isn't to discount the value of additional resolution in camera sensors, I just wanted to provide a friendly reminder that resolution isn't everything.

Debunking some bad info

There was some really bad information out there recently about how the iPhone 16 Pro's sensor is really giving the clarity of a 6MP camera, and I did want to comment on that quickly as well. Here's a pair of photos taken out my hotel window in New York City. The left photo is from the iPhone 16 Pro at 48MP ProRaw and the right is from my Canon R6 at 20MP. Each camera was shooting at 24mm and no edits have been made to either photo.

Now let's zoom in on the phone number on that truck.

The sensor in the iPhone is much smaller than that in the Canon, but the 48MP are clearly being put to use to capture more information. There are certainly places where the iPhone's tiny sensor betrays it and it will underperform a camera with a larger sensor and fewer pixels, but anyone who tells you Apple is lying to you is playing the engagement bait game.