Steve Jobs says something smart! (about megapixels)

Steve Jobs said something that caught my attention during his iPhone 4 presentation/ tech orgy today.  In reference to the iPhone's new 5 megapixel camera, he said:

"Now everybody loves to talk about megapixels, but we tend to ask the question how do we make better pictures? Megapixels are nice, but what these cameras are really about is capturing photons and low light photography. So we've gone from 3 megapixel to 5 megapixel, but we're using a backside illuminated sensor."

"In addition to that, when most people increase megapixels they make them smaller, but we've kept ours the same size. They don't capture less photons."

Hey, what's that-- an acknowledgment that more megapixels are not necessarily better?  I couldn't agree more.  5 MP on a phone is as much as anyone reasonably needs, and anything more than that is just marketing hype.

It's too bad this came during the presentation for a cell phone, as I've been waiting for the world's camera manufacturers to embrace this concept for some time now.  I thought we were making progress last year when Olympus announced that 12 MP was enough, but then Canon released their 18 MP Rebel T2i, and who knows what's coming next.  My hard drive weeps just thinking about all those pixels.

Two other thoughts:

1) How did I get on Apple's mailing list?  I don't own a single Apple product and my next cell phone will likely be running Android.  Yet for some reason I get a pretty email from Steve Jobs every time they announce a new product.  Weird.

2) Despite that first statement, I have to give credit where credit is due-- that's one snazzy looking phone:



Steve Jobs quote via Engadget.