How Important are Megapixels?

I've had camera people tell me that you should get a camera back that accepts multiple lenses (an SLR-style), and spend more on the lenses than you do on the back.

for digital cameras, you only need between 4 & 6 megapixels to be as good as a standard 35mm camera

so once you can find cameras between 4 & 6 megapixels, you look you ones with the largest lenses to let the most light in, then after than, you find the highest optical zoom you can find, don't care about digital zoom

digital zoom just takes the original pixels and enlarges them to make it seem like its zoomed but it just get blockier and crappier the more you zoom in but optical uses the lenses like a magnifying glass to actually look closer, and its best to get a camera that has an equal optical zoom as its mega pixels, so if you buy a 6MP camera its best to also have a 6x optical zoom because that means that even when its zoomed in to its full 6x zoom its still going to be taking 1MP quality photos

and anything higher of zoom would just take worse photos, like if you have a 4MP camera that has a 8x optical zoom then that means at full 8x zoom, you'd only be taking half a mega pixel quality pic

Megapixels are often misleading Chris. To this day I still use a D2H for a good chunk of my photography which is only 4MP but I have no problem up-sizing or cropping images for printing. Quality Megapixels. Conversely, my phone a DroidX has an 8MP sensor but its absolutely crap IMO. The quality of those pixels is what matters. Megapixels can really be more equated to crop-ability after the shot. There are other much more important aspects to a camera's quality like noise, low light sensitivity, sensor size and especially lens quality etc. If you are looking to buy a digicam or pocket cam then stick to those folks known for putting a quality sensor in their cameras with a good processor like Canon (digic4) Nikon (expeed) and quality lenses as well. If you're looking at a DSLR then whats even more important than all of that is the quality of glass that you can get after the fact. I'd stick with Nikon or Canon here as they have the deepest lineup of glass and their cameras are second to none.

Yarvaxea is right, but another thing is the lens. Glass lenses are better than plastic by a long shot. I'd rather have a camera with 3 megapixels and a nice glass lens than one with 10 megapixels and a crappy plastic lens.

If you would've asked this question about a decade ago, I would've said it's important depending on what kind of pictures you're taking. However, with today's cameras averaging about 14 MP, I'd say the average consumer does not need to be concerned with this since the number is so high, it really won't affect picture detail quality in a compelling way. Even if you do some hardcore cropping, editing, or what-not, the number should still be plenty high. If though, you are an absolute hardcore photographer, then I suppose you should care, but even then it may not be a big deal.

If you are a casual picture taker, and plan to e-mail, or post your photos on Facebook, Flickr, or whatever else, just about any camera 6 MP or higher will do fine. Even today's cell phone cameras can do justice. Only problem with cell phone cameras is they're not fully featured (optical zoom, proper color and white balance adjustments, etc.). Some cell phone cameras have basic editing features, but regular point-and-click cameras do more justice with that.

Well megapixels are always nice, but what's nicer is a good sensor. My HTC Desire HD has a 8 megapixel camera but the pictures from my 3 megapixel digital camera are waaaaaaaay better. The only real way to see if it's good or not is to try it out for yourself. Don't look at demo pictures because they are often photoshopped. Try it out in the store and take some pictures and look at the results. Generally the bigger the lens the better pictures, that matters more than megapixels.