Megapixel Madness

DO NOT BUY A CAMERA JUST BECAUSE IT HAS MORE MEGAPIXELS THAN ANOTHER CAMERA!!!

I’ve been reading more and more articles lately saying that the number of Megapixels (how much information your digital camera captures when you snap a photo) is getting to the point where most people aren’t well served to simply look for the camera with more Megapixels.

Check out this link to West Coast Imaging for a fantastic (and colorful) chart illustrating how different megapixel ratings affect print quality at various sizes. (Hint: the number inside each little rectangle is the effective DPI. DPI is the dots per inch and is how you measure what quality a print is.)

200 DPI or higher is recommended for photographic quality prints.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find myself printing out two foot by 3 foot prints that often. Ok, never. The largest I’ve ever printed out is 8x10, and that was in photography class in college. That means that for most people, the biggest concern is that they want to crop their picture down and only print part of it.

Let’s say you crop your picture down so that you’re only using the bottom left corner of the image (throwing away 75% of the image…seriously, shoot more discriminately). If you did this with a 4 megapixel image (2464 x 1632 pixels), the remaining image (after cropping) would be 1232 x 816 pixels. Tiny, right? Well that image could still be printed at roughly 204 DPI as a 4x6 image (remember over 200 is considered photo-quality). 4x6 is the standard size for prints from a photolab.

Bottom line…if you are going to be lazy and shoot pictures that have to be cropped to one quarter of their size, a 4 megapixel camera will still let you print photo quality images at the most common size. If you are going to print photos as 8x10s (without cropping) you only need 4 megapixels. Everything above that only serves to allow you to crop more and still print at the same size, or to print larger than 8x10 with minimal cropping.

This tells me that the most important thing in cameras, 4 megapixels and higher, is how well they capture color, sharpness, how good the lens is, how small or easy the camera is to use, and how much it costs.

Last thought. If you are only going to post your photos to your website then keep in mind that most photos get posted at a maximum of the screen resolution. Screen resolutions right now range from 1024x768 to 1920x1200. However, much more common is for images to be used on websites inline with the text at resolutions of less than 640x480. You could do this with less than 25% of a 2 megapixel image Please, please, please, do not spend a couple hundreds dollars extra JUST to move from 6 to 7, or even 6 to 9 megapixels. If the camera has other features,GREAT, if you absolutely know that you are going to crop most of your pictures, then consider it.