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jaa101 t1_iycszs0 wrote

Reply to comment by Schnutzel in ELI5: are megapixels just resolution but for still images? by weakgutteddog27

Although cameras are different from TVs in the way pixels are counted:

  • A 4K TV has 8 megapixels in one sense but in fact each pixel is made up of three sub-pixels (red, green and blue) so really there are 24 megapixels.

  • A 24-megapixel camera is usually made up of 12 million green pixels, 6 million red pixels and 6 million blue pixels.

This makes it hard compare resolutions. Certainly an 8-megapixel video camera has a lower resolution than a 4K TV but consumer video standards (with 4:2:0 colour subsampling) reduce TVs' advantage.

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