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Schnutzel t1_iyc41v6 wrote

Yes, megapixels is just resolution. It's just the number of pixels, in millions (mega = million). So a picture with a resolution of, say, 5312x2988, has a total of 5312*2988=15,872,256 pixels, which is just shy of 16 megapixels.

Videos usually have a much smaller resolution than still images, because they take up significantly more space. 4k resolution is 3840x2160 which is just 8 megapixels.

How manufacturers choose to denote resolutions is just a matter of marketing. Historically televisions were marketed using the numbers of lines on the screen (such as 360p, 720p, 1080p), then they switched to the number of columns (such as 4k, 8k). Meanwhile cameras just use megapixels.

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homeboi808 t1_iyck1wo wrote

For those wondering, most camera can record video in a much higher fps than their burst photo rate. This is usually because the video is lower resolution and has a lot more compression, this leads to the processor not needing to work as hard/long to take each frame.

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jaa101 t1_iycszs0 wrote

Although cameras are different from TVs in the way pixels are counted:

  • A 4K TV has 8 megapixels in one sense but in fact each pixel is made up of three sub-pixels (red, green and blue) so really there are 24 megapixels.

  • A 24-megapixel camera is usually made up of 12 million green pixels, 6 million red pixels and 6 million blue pixels.

This makes it hard compare resolutions. Certainly an 8-megapixel video camera has a lower resolution than a 4K TV but consumer video standards (with 4:2:0 colour subsampling) reduce TVs' advantage.

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bife_de_lomo t1_iyc41vm wrote

Megapixels work for video too, it's just counting all the pixels in an image. 1920 x 1080 would be aboùt 2 million pixels, or 2 megapixels, 3840 x 2160 is 8 megapixels.

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