How Many Megapixels Do You Really Need?

Do you really need that 50 or 100 megapixel camera for shooting your products?

Lets take a realistic look at what is really needed.

Amazon for their main image – the one that shows up in the search results – specify that it needs to be at least 1000 x 1000 pixels for zoom that is 1 megapixel, they recommend your image is 2000 x 2000 that equals 4 megapixels, other sites will have similar specifications.

If you run your own website then the image size is up to you but bear in mind that a larger image will take longer to load on your customers screen. If there are a lot of large images then your website would take a long time for it to open. Remember that a picture that fills a 4K monitor would only be about 8.3 megapixels

I am not saying that a 1 megapixel camera would work but it shows that you do not need to spend thousands on a high megapixel camera the one you have will work just as well.

Where a high megapixel camera comes into its own is if you need to crop your image (removing the edges of your image) in post production. Cropping will remove some of the pixels that the camera recorded reducing the number that are left. Crop too far and the image would have too few pixels left and start to look pixelated (you will be able to see the squares that make up the image.)