The Canon T2I: Megapixel Overkill

You may remember my post from a while back, Let’s Talk Megapixels. In this post, I talked about what megapixels actually are and how they affect your images. Well, Canon has upped the ante in the war of the megapixels with the upcoming Digital Rebel T2i, weighing in at a whopping 18 megapixel sensor. Granted, the T2i has a lot of other nice features, including the ability to capture video. But 18 megapixels in a consumer-grade camera is a little absurd if you ask me. Like I’ve said before, the mindset of “more megapixels automatically means a better camera” is seriously flawed.

I’m not sure why a person buying a consumer-grade DSLR would need something that can produce billboard-sized images. The only people really benefiting from the continuous increase in megapixels are the folks in the digital storage industry, since these images quickly eat up hard drive space. Instead of trying to constantly increase the megapixel count, I wish camera manufacturers would focus on more performance-related features, such as improved low-light capabilities (as this article from Gizmodo suggests), noise/dust reduction, focusing, frame rate and expanding on video capture abilities (since this seems to be the apparent future of DSLRs).