Every camera announcement follows the same script. The press release lands, the spec sheet unfolds, and there it is: a bigger number than last time. Sensor resolution has become a headline feature, the thing we’re supposed to gasp at before we’ve even seen a sample image. What was once considered professional territory is now dismissed as “entry-level,” and we’re told that serious photographers need 45, 60, or even 100 megapixels to stay competitive.
But here’s a question worth sitting with: When did you last crop away three-quarters of your frame and still need to produce a gallery-sized print from what remained? If you’re struggling to recall such a time in your career, you’re far from being the only one. The truth is that ultra-high-resolution sensors serve a narrow set of specialized applications: archival work, heavy cropping for wildlife and sport photography (not just cropping because of a lazy composition, something I’m frequently guilty of), or commercial projects demanding extreme enlargement. For the overwhelming majority of photographic work, 24 megapixels isn’t merely adequate. It’s frequently the superior choice.
Where Your Photos Actually Live
Before we talk about what cameras can capture, let’s talk about what screens can display.
Instagram compresses and resizes your carefully crafted images down to somewhere between one and two megapixels. That landscape you agonized over? It’s being viewed on phones at a resolution that would fit comfortably on sensors from 2005.
Perhaps you’re thinking about larger displays. A 4K television or monitor, the current gold standard for home viewing, resolves approximately 8.3 megapixels. That’s it. Every pixel beyond that number gets mathematically discarded before the image reaches your viewer’s eyes.
Even the emerging 8K displays top out around 33 megapixels, and let’s be honest about how many people actually own one of those. Your neighbor doesn’t. Your clients don’t. The gallery showing your work almost certainly doesn’t.
What this means is stark: if your photographs live primarily in the digital realm (and the vast majority do in 2025), you’re capturing enormous files only to have them aggressively downsized at every destination. That additional resolution isn’t being appreciated. It’s being thrown away.
The Costs Nobody Mentions
Resolution comes with a tax. Consider storage. A raw file from a 24-megapixel sensor typically runs between 25 and 30 megabytes. Jump to 60 megapixels and you’re looking at files ranging from 60 to 80 megabytes with lossless compression, or well over 100 megabytes uncompressed. That’s filling your memory cards and hard drives two to three times faster. Over a career, we’re talking about thousands of dollars in additional storage costs and countless hours managing exponentially larger archives.
Then there’s the processing burden. Editing software doesn’t care about your deadline. When you’re pushing 60-megapixel files through Lightroom, every adjustment takes longer. Scrolling lags. Exports crawl. Your entire workflow accumulates friction that compounds across hundreds or thousands of images.
Sports and wildlife photographers understand this problem intimately through buffer depth. High-resolution sensors force the camera’s processor to work harder, which means fewer frames in a continuous burst before the camera needs to pause and catch its breath. While the 24-megapixel body keeps firing, capturing the decisive moment, the higher-resolution alternative is still writing to the card, having missed the shot entirely.
The Print Size Question
“But I need resolution for large prints.”
This concern sounds reasonable until you do the arithmetic. A 24-megapixel file prints comfortably at 20 by 30 inches at 200 pixels per inch, which exceeds what most viewers can perceive as sharp when standing at a normal distance from a print that size.
And that’s the key insight people overlook: viewing distance scales with print size. Nobody presses their nose against a three-foot-wide photograph. The larger the print, the farther back people stand, and the less resolution you actually need per inch. Billboard photographers have understood this for decades. A print meant to be viewed from six feet away has dramatically different requirements than one examined with a loupe.
For standard wall art, the kind that hangs in homes and galleries and offices, 24 megapixels provides more than enough information. You’d need to be producing truly massive architectural installations before resolution became your limiting factor, and at that point, you’re likely using medium format or specialized equipment anyway.
The Low-Light Reality
Here’s where sensor design gets interesting, though the reality is more nuanced than pixel-counting suggests.
On any given sensor size, resolution involves tradeoffs. Pack more photosites onto the same surface area and each individual photosite must shrink. Smaller photosites collect less light per pixel, which means more visible noise when you examine images at 100% magnification. But here’s the complication: most people don’t view their images at 100% zoom. When you display a 60-megapixel file and a 24-megapixel file at the same output size, whether on a 4K screen or as a print, something interesting happens. Downsampling the higher-resolution image averages out random noise, cleaning up the file considerably. At matched viewing sizes, the gap between modern sensors narrows significantly.
Modern back-side illuminated sensor technology has compressed these differences further. The generational improvements in how photosites capture and process light mean that a current 45-megapixel sensor often performs closer to older 24-megapixel designs than the raw pixel math would suggest. That said, physics still favors larger photosites at the extremes. Sony’s a7S III uses only 12 megapixels on a full frame sensor precisely because those oversized photosites excel in the most demanding low-light scenarios. If you’re regularly pushing ISO 25,600 or beyond in near darkness, fewer megapixels still provides a meaningful advantage.
For typical event, wedding, or concert work in dim venues, both 24-megapixel and higher-resolution modern sensors will serve you well. The low-light argument for fewer megapixels is real but narrower than it once was.
The Diffraction Problem
There’s an optical phenomenon worth understanding, and it changes the calculus on resolution. Diffraction occurs when light bends around the edges of your aperture blades. This is a property of the lens, not the sensor. At wider apertures, the effect is negligible. As you stop down past f/8 or f/11, the bending becomes significant enough to begin to create a slight softening in fine detail.
Here’s what matters: a 60-megapixel sensor and a 24-megapixel sensor pointed through the same lens at f/16 receive identical optical information. The diffraction blur is the same in both cases. The difference is that the higher-resolution sensor has enough pixel density to reveal that softening, while the lower-resolution sensor never resolves it in the first place. If you downsample the 60-megapixel file to 24 megapixels, it looks essentially identical to the native 24-megapixel capture.
The practical implication is this: to actually benefit from 60 megapixels of resolving power, you need to shoot at wider apertures where diffraction hasn’t yet limited the optical system. Stop down to f/22 for your landscapes and you’re capturing a file that, once viewed or printed at normal sizes, delivers no more detail than the 24-megapixel alternative would have.
You haven’t lost quality by owning the high-resolution sensor. You’ve simply paid for resolving power you can only access under specific conditions.
A Better Way to Spend the Difference
The price gap between a high-resolution body and its 24-megapixel counterpart is substantial. Compare a Nikon Z6 III to a Nikon Z8, or a Sony a7 V to a Sony a7R V. We’re frequently talking about a thousand dollars or more for the privilege of managing larger files. That money could go toward glass. A professional-grade lens will transform your images in ways that extra megapixels never will. Sharpness, contrast, color rendering, bokeh character, autofocus speed: these qualities live in the optics, not the sensor.
Or take that thousand dollars and buy a plane ticket. Photograph somewhere you’ve never been. The images you’ll create from genuine experience and inspiration will outshine technically perfect but soulless captures from the most advanced sensor on the market.
Resolution has long been a marketing lever, a number designed to make last year’s purchase feel inadequate. Don’t let it. Your 24-megapixel camera captures more detail than any screen can display and more than any reasonable print requires. It writes files your computer can handle and your storage can accommodate. It sees well in low light and forgives your aperture choices.
That’s not a compromise. That’s a tool refined for how photography actually gets made and consumed. The pixels you have are almost certainly the pixels you need.