01Which of these numbers actually change your photographs
Spec tables flatten everything to the same visual weight, which is how people end up buying a camera for a feature they will never use. Only a few of the rows above will change a picture you take next weekend.
Sensor area and pixel pitch
These two together decide how the camera behaves when the light runs out, and they are the specs most worth caring about. Sensor area sets how much light the whole frame collects; pixel pitch, the width of one photosite in microns, sets how much each individual pixel gets. A 24MP full-frame body has roughly 6-micron pixels; a 61MP one on the same sensor has about 3.8-micron pixels and will be visibly noisier at ISO 6400. This is why the highest-resolution body in a line-up is usually not the best one for a dark reception.
Burst speed, and the trap inside it
Burst matters enormously for sport, wildlife and candid work, and not at all for landscape or studio. Be careful reading the number, though: the headline figure is often the electronic-shutter rate, which on many bodies comes with rolling-shutter distortion on fast pans and a drop to 12-bit RAW. The mechanical rate is usually the one you will really live with. Also remember that a body shooting 30 frames a second produces about 1,800 RAW files a minute, and every one of those has to be looked at later.
Megapixels
24MP prints sharp at roughly 20 by 13 inches at a true 300dpi, and much larger at normal viewing distances. Unless you crop aggressively, print enormous, or shoot commercially where a client demands the file size, resolution above 24MP mostly costs you: bigger files, more storage, faster cards, more expensive drives, and less forgiveness for a slightly soft frame. The print-size row above shows exactly what each body gives you.
In-body stabilisation
Worth two to five stops of hand-holding, which is the difference between a usable frame at 1/15s and a blurred one. It matters most on wide and normal lenses in low light, and for handheld video. It does nothing for a moving subject: stabilisation fixes camera shake, not subject motion. If your problem is a running child at a dim reception, you need a faster aperture or higher ISO, not IBIS.
02What a spec table cannot tell you
Ergonomics, menu design, viewfinder feel and autofocus behaviour on a real subject decide how much you enjoy using a camera, and none of them fit in a column. Autofocus in particular has improved so much between generations that a 2024 body's tracking is a genuinely different experience from a 2018 one at the same price, in a way no published number captures. Use the table to narrow to two or three candidates, then handle them.
03Frequently asked questions
Sensor area and pixel pitch if you shoot in difficult light, since together they set how much light each photosite collects. Burst speed if you shoot anything that moves. Megapixels matter far less than most buyers assume.
They mean more cropping room and bigger prints, at the cost of larger files, more storage and more visible camera shake. On the same sensor size more pixels means each one is smaller. A 24MP full-frame body usually beats a 61MP one at high ISO.
They are indicative used-market bands for a body only, not live listings. Condition, shutter count and region move a used price more than the model name does, so the tool shows a range rather than pretending to know a figure.
The database covers 174 popular bodies from 2012 to 2024 whose RAW format imagic can open. If yours is missing, tell us and it can be added.