Megapixel is not really important in terms of image quality. megapixels just determines the size and resolution of the image, if you can reduce the amount of megapixels, you increase the size of the pixels itself on the sensor, thus being able to capture more light. In the digital camera world, this can be seen in the higher end compacts. you see cheap compacts having 16mp is the norm, even phones goes up to 12mp, but the higher end ones like say the Panasonic LX series all still maintain their MP count at a lowly 10mp.

another example is the Canon G series. The G10 was having a 14.7MP sensor but everybody was complaining about the high amount of noise and lack of sharpness with that camera eventhough it has 14.7MP and the LX3 of that era easily beats it with only 10mp. It's successor, the G11, downgraded the MP count to just 10 as well and the results is much much better image quality, dynamic range and most importantly, low light noise performance.

This post has been edited by Nightstalker1993: Feb 20 2013, 04:12 PM