Camera & Image Megapixels
A Pixel is one of the many tiny dots that form an image in the computer's memory, pixels may
have different shapes, intensities, and colors (RGB or CMYK model). The more pixels used
to represent an image, the finer will be the result.
A Megapixel is one million pixels, is used for numbering the pixels in an image, but also to express
the number of digital elements of digital camera sensors or the number of digital elements of digital
displays.
An image with an array of 3000x2000 pixels its said to have 6 Mega pixels -
(3000 x 2000 = 6.000.000 million pixels).
Also, a digital camera with an array of 2048 x 1536 sensor elements will be 3,1 Megapixels
(2048 × 1536 = 3,145,728).
If our computer display is set to a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, this means that the whole image
viewed on the display contain a total of 786.432 pixels, and to view a larger image in the real size,
we must scroll through the image.
Bits Per Pixel (BPP) is the number of distinct colors that can be represented by a pixel.
The more bits per pixel, the more colors a pixel can show and the color transition in an image
will be smoother.
4bpp = 16 colours
8bpp = 256 colours
16bpp = 65.536 colours (Highcolour)
24bpp = 16.777.216 colours (Truecolor)
Different graphical file types support different bits per pixel. For example, the TIFF format can
support 48-bit pixels, however this bit-depth is not supported by computer displays, these files
are used for professional scanning and printing applications, and can be viewed at 24-bit depth
on computer displays. On the other side, the GIF image format supports only 8-bit depth, meaning
that in the whole image you can see only 256 distinct colours. The most common image file
format is JPEG.
You can learn more about different image file formats by reading the 'Image File Formats' article.