Originally posted by rparmar Don't fixate on megapixels. 6MP is enough for most applications. In fact, I have printed 6x4" photos from 1MP images and they look perfect.
The only time you need more is when printing at large sizes, while maintaining high PPI. A decent improvement on 12MP might be 24MP but a truly significant one would require a jump to 48MP.
The difference between 12MP and 14MP is truly meaningless. Any purchase decision based on such a criterion is misinformed.
You're correct, and it's an important point.
The difference in linear resolution between a twelve megapixel camera and a fourteen megapixel one is a paltry 8%. Compared to its twelve megapixel equivalent, there are only an extra 320 pixel columns, and 240 pixel rows, in each fourteen megapixel image.
To get that extra 8% of resolution, you lose a little over 14% of the available area per pixel, though -- and the reduction in active (photodiode) area is even greater, because without switching to a smaller process size, the wiring area per pixel remains unchanged. Gapless microlenses can help to some degree, but they're not perfect, and the smaller the pixel size, the harder it gets to fabricate perfect microlenses.
So you're gathering a noticeably lesser amount of light per pixel, thereby decreasing the signal to noise ratio appreciably, and getting noisier images as a result -- all for an increase in resolution that's arguably not even noticeable on-screen or in-print.
Personally, my own preference would've been for the megapixel war to end at around six megapixels for compacts, and ten to twelve megapixels for APS-C DSLRs. More than that is overkill, for the sizes most people are printing at (and the amount of cropping they do). All it does is reduce image quality, increase the storage space taken up for images, decrease the battery life and possibly the burst depth of the camera (perhaps the frame rate too, if the camera's mechanics aren't the limiting factor), and increase the CPU power required to process each image on your PC. A whole lot of negatives, for very little positive.