If you want to enlarge more than 11x14 AND you want to crop heavily, the greater pixel depth does help. I have made great 20X30 prints from my old D90 at 12 mpxls. My D7000 also does so, but I have the leeway of cropping much more. My Sony a6000 with 24mpxl has not been put to that test yet, but I see no reason it would not continue the trend. Of course, I often do 11x14 and 16x20 prints and with Perfect Resize I can get amazing prints from all of them, but I prefer to crop before shooting as much as possible.

It is also true that sensors have improved and even thought the individual pixel size may be smaller with more pixels, the characteristics have not deteriorated, as someone else here has suggested. In fact, the newer sensors have more than overcome that tendency.

Years ago, I attended a Nikon display where they had a big 4 foot x 6 foot (or about that) landscape print as a booth display. The camera was 6 mpxls. Of course they used some very fancy enhancement software to make that happen, but you would never have known that. The best we ordinary folk can do now is Perfect Resize and some of its competitors. But I would not hesitate to try making a 30x50 inch print from the a6000. (I would hold my breath to try it with the D90)

Which is what I do a lot. I would not want to be without my Mega MPs for "my type" of photography (primarily marco) in particular.

I will share my non technical experience.

My 7100 has a slightly higher pixel density than my 800e, which in some ways should make the 7100 capable of higher resolution. But, the "slightly" less density (larger pixels) if you will) of the seem to be more robust/capable...

I find advantages to each and still can't decide which is more capable to render shots that hold up to heavy cropping.

I'm leaning more towards the 800e because it just seems more forgiving if I don't have my setting just right.

Then again................:|

Images on my flickr page are done with D3200, D7100 and D800e. Many would not be possible without heavy cropping, which would not be possible without massive MPs. :wink:

Enlarging is not the a practical advantage since very few people do it routinely. What most people over look or don't fathom is the ability to crop.

Just about any image can be improved by cropping. Also it extends the focal length of all your lenses if you want.

With 36 MP you can easily extend you 200mm lens to 400mm through cropping and still have a 9MP equivalent sensor which is more than enough to do just about anything. 24MP sensor will give 6MP equivalent image in the aforementioned scenario.