How Many Megapixels Do You Really Need?

If you're a professional photographer, you'll likely need a high megapixel camera for many reasons.  If you're like me though, you really don't need anything more than 8 MP!

How much you need of megapixels depend on what you plan to do with your images and also with your lens.  Some lenses are simply not sharp enough to give you the details to fill in all the pixels, and if you're simply displaying your photos on a computer screen, you won't need more than 3-6 MP!  If you're thinking to do prints on paper, you still don't need much unless you're a pixel peeper!

Instead of explaining it myself, I'll refer to this video made by Simon d'Entremont who provided an excellent dissection of this topic:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThpQWhOfKO4.  You'll be surprised.

I wouldn't necessary say that you should buy an old Nikon D50 if you can afford to buy something much better for a little more.  Much better here means not just the megapixels but also more sensitive sensors for low light conditions or support for built-in HDR and Active D-Lighting as in the Nikon D7200.  However, if you normally shoot in good daylight, an old Nikon D50 with 6 MP will do just fine!