In this EASYDSLR Photo Snack #3 I look at Are Bigger Pixels Better?
*if you were paying attention you may have noticed Photo Snack#2 was missing – I’ll post that later 🙂 *
Bigger Pixels on a digital camera sensor means more photons (light particles) per pixel.
The pixels are the single Photo sites that make up the sensor (the total count gives you the MegaPixel rating of your camera).
More photons per pixel means better sampling and less sampling errors between pixels – resulting in:
- Less Luminance (light level) noise
- Less Chroma noise (color variation from sampling errors)
Overall this gives better Image Quality (IQ) of your images.
A larger sensor camera (like a Full Frame PRO level DSLR) has larger pixels and resulting better Image Quality than smaller sensor cameras. It’s one of the reason you are paying a lot more for the Pro level cameras – or put another way – why it’s worth paying more.
So Pixel size DOES MATTER!
note: this is assuming you are dealing with similar sensor technology.