Megapixels for Dummies

Megapixel comparison

In the earliest days of eHow.com, just about any bozo could hang out a shingle and declare him- or her-self (there were no them-selves in those days) an expert. A lot of the dreck pumped out by "contributors" in the early days has gone to the great electron dump in the sky, but enough of it remains that you can still get a flavor of the quality of material pumped out by anonymous hacks only interested in a few bucks. We're talking hacks like "chemist," who foisted "How to Increase Megapixels" on eHow.com back in 2009; it lives on (still) at Techwalla.com.

One can only assume that, at the dawn of the digital camera age, some moron wanted to know how to increase the megapixel count of his or her smartphone camera – of course, that's impossible without access to a new CCD sensor... but that answer would not have allowed chemist to collect that all-important stipend.
Instead, chemist claimed that to increase megapixels, you just need to use Photoshop™.  To that end, our "expert" walked the reader through the necessary steps on some long-obsolete version of Adobe's program. Why s/he didn't use Paint and "resize" is beyond us, but what the heck.

Of course, that's not "increasing megapixels"; that's resizing. But what do you expect of someone whose opening paragraph proudly intones you that,

"1 megapixel is 1,000,000 pixels. For example, if picture dimensions are 2,592 by 1,944 pixels then it contains 5,816,448 (2,992 x 1,944) pixels, or about 5.8 megapixels. Adobe Photoshop allows a user to manipulate the pixel image size in a simple way."

First, a megapixel is technically 2²⁰, which is 1,048,576 pixels. Pedantic, yes, but we prefer accuracy to simplicity. Second, 2,592 x 1,944 is 5,038,848; only by mis-transcribing the first number as "2,992" (which chemist did) can you get 5,816,448. Three cheers for proofreading... NOT.

Our Dumbass of the Day not only lied through his (or her) teeth about the subject, but also couldn't be bothered to check the work. Feh.

copyright © 2020-2022 scmrak

SE - PHOTOGRAPHY