Chapter 01: Camera and sensor types
Most people are somewhat blind to megapixels. It’s good to have megapixels, but few people really need the high numbers of megapixels that are one some modern cameras. You only need extremely high megapixel values if you are going to decorate the outside wall of your office building or are doing wildlife photography or such and need to do some serious cropping. Cropping is a part of image processing where you cut away parts of a photo to change its composition, aspect ratio, or focus. You’re essentially selecting a smaller part of the original image and discarding the rest.
My first digital camera was a Pentax K-20d and it had 14,6 megapixels. One day I paired it with a 100mm lens my dad bough in Tokyo in the 70s and took pictures in a sculpture park in my hometown. One of the pictures from that session is printed on a canvas that is 90cm x 150 cm (35in x 59 in) and the 14,6 megapixels was good enough for a print that large.
And yes; I have Pentax, and an advantage is that you can super-duper old lenses with modern camera bodies. Pentax are also infamous for building rugged and durable camera bodies. As far as I know they were the first brand that allowed movement of the image sensor. This allowed sharper pictures as it reduced movements from shaking hands. Even if it not that visible everyone’s hands shake, and this could affect image quality. Pentax has also implemented something they have called astro tracer, that can be used in astro photography. More about Pentax and this function in section “07 astro photography”.