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If you’ve been a photographer in the last 20 years you can probably remember the megapixel wars between the major camera manufacturers in the first decade of the 2000s. As we push into the 2020s the megapixel race has reignited not with the once-mighty DSLR but with everyone’s new camera of choice, the smartphone. So which smartphone camera has the most megapixels? It’s a rather complex question. With traditional interchangeable lens cameras we’ve come to realise that more megapixels doesn’t necessarily mean better image quality. Every sensor is divided into however-many-million-pixels, each of which gathers light independently. That means pixel size also plays a role as the larger the photosites, the more data they can record. It’s a question of balance, but generally speaking, a larger sensor with fewer, bigger pixels will produce better quality images with greater dynamic range. So how do smartphone cameras like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, which boasts 108 megapixels, produc...

If you’ve been a photographer in the last 20 years you can probably remember the megapixel wars between the major camera manufacturers in the first decade of the 2000s. As we push into the 2020s the megapixel race has reignited not with the once-mighty DSLR but with everyone’s new camera of choice, the smartphone. So which smartphone camera has the most megapixels? It’s a rather complex question. With traditional interchangeable lens cameras we’ve come to realise that more megapixels doesn’t necessarily mean better image quality. Every sensor is divided into however-many-million-pixels, each of which gathers light independently. That means pixel size also plays a role as the larger the photosites, the more data they can record. It’s a question of balance, but generally speaking, a larger sensor with fewer, bigger pixels will produce better quality images with greater dynamic range. So how do smartphone cameras like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, which boasts 108 megapixels, produc...