🔍 Diffraction Effects on Photography

Effective megapixels account for the lens's diffraction-limited resolving capability, providing a more accurate representation of the camera's clarity beyond the raw megapixel count. With a fixed lens system and computational photography, these devices can still provide higher resolving power than the effective megapixel count, but this is a good baseline for understanding the camera's capabilities. Some of these techniques include computational deconvolution (point spread function estimation), structured illumination imaging, machine learning super-resolution, compressive sensing, and more. The extent and effectiveness of these techniques is unknown, but they are almost certainly used to great effect whenever the telephoto or ultrawide cameras are used.