How to Understand Digital Cameras and Megapixels
Digital cameras today are being made with more and more megapixels and the general feeling is that more means better. Before we continue we should ask what exactly is a megapixel? A megapixel is one million pixels. What is a pixel then? A pixel (or “picture element”) is a small picture cell. Consider a jigsaw puzzle or mosaic where each piece is called a pixel. Each pixel holds a small part of a picture and when they are all put together a picture is formed.
For example, one million pixels, or 1 megapixel,creates a picture.
Megapixels and resolution is a tricky subject and quite difficult to absorb for the average camera user.
As a rough rule of thumb more megapixels means greater detail or resolution, which means that more cropping or enlarging of your photos is possible. To put it another way, better quality.
However, if your pictures go no further than a computer screen, which itself has low resolution, then the number of megapixels is not so important and 2-3 megapixels should be enough.This is good enough for e-mailing or putting up on a website.
It will be unlikely that you will be able to get a very good print from this.
3-megapixels is a good compromise between quality of picture and camera price. You can print good quality 4×6 images,quite good 5×7s and if a good camera possibly larger prints.
4-5 megapixels and you can begin to think about enlargements of your photos.
6 megapixels gives great quality pictures and quite big enlargements.
However, there is a trade-off. More megapixels means higher prices, more memory usage and the camera takes longer to process shots.
I mention all this as times are hard so why spend more money than you have to.
I recently came across a site (http://6mpixel.org/en) which dispels the myth that more megapixels means better for compact cameras, and concludes that as these smaller cameras have smaller sensors than DSLR cameras then 6-megapixels is the optimum number of megapixels for a compact camera.
If you don’t want to spend money unnecessarily buy the camera that suits your specific needs and not a camera which has functions you will never use. Alternatively, if funds are not a problem you can go for the most expensive!
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