I run checks with different cameras and I can say in general that more pixels is better. Makes sense that if you have more information on the image that it will carry more detail, color, and depth.
When you open this image full size on a large monitor the details are very good and the color is very rich. Some of this richness has to do with the film process as opposed to digital.
Here is an cropped image of a bush taken from our yard. The first one is from a Nikon image that was originally about 11 mp.
Here is a crop of shot that was originally about 4 mp.
As you can see there is much more detail in the image with over twice the pixels.
Of course photo quality is a combination of many things. For example. Here are four shots with three different digital cameras and one film camera. The first one is with a Motorola Maxx cell phone.
When you blow these up on a good monitor the cell phone shot has the most detail. Why, the cell phone focused the best on the main image of the subject. The old film camera has good detail on the leaves because that is what it focused on. I don’t know what happened to the Sony and the Nikon.
And then there is the problem of software and the affects it adds to perfectly good pictures when it makes jpegs.
So on a practical basis what does this mean. More pixels is better in general. But that is highly affected by the lens in the camera, the focus mechanism, and the software used in the camera. Also, camera engineers are improving the results from cell phones rapidly. Learn to use the camera in your cell phone and you will get very good results. I recently went to visit relatives and almost exclusively used my cell phone camera for a week. Some the the shots were quite good.
Bob Nuttmann 