Digicam Glossary

Megapixels

The resolution of a digital camera's image sensor is measured in megapixels, with one megapixel equalling a million pixels, or tiny light sensors. Each camera has two megapixel values – total megapixels and effective megapixels. It's the effective megapixels that are the important figure for the consumer (and the figure that we publish in DCB) because this is the number of megapixels directly used for capturing an image.