Saturday, September 01, 2007

Megapixels Myth !

Nowadays, we hear a lot about digital camera manufacturers increasing the megapixels of their cameras to lure the public into believing that a higher megapixel camera is better than a lower megapixel one.

Well, too few megapixels compromise the quality of a photograph, but too many is a waste of money !

The number of megapixels largely determines the maximum print size up to which your image can be taken without loss in quality.As the megapixels in a camera increase, the price of the camera also goes up.

Using a 2 or less megapixel camera for instance, you can print photos that are quite good in quality for web based uses, for emails etc....The size required to store these are also pretty less.

Using a 3 megapixel camera, one can easily print stunning 4x6 images and lovely 5x7s . Some cameras of the same megapixels can even print decent 6x9 images.

I myself use a Sony Cybershot 3.2 Megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom.

I hardly take photos in 3.2 megapixels, because when you need to share them with your friends and family via photo sharing applications like Flickr and Picasa, their sites themselves restrict the sizes of each photo to less than 500KB. And a 3.2 megapixel photo takes around 1.5MB(around 1536 KB) of size !

People are crazy about going for cameras with more megapixels, but more isn't always better.
So, the number of megapixels you need to go for depends on mainly 2 things-
1)How big an image you need to print ?
2) What your budget is ?

This I say so because, there are hardly any improvements in other features of the same company's camera with different megapixels. Higher megapixels also means larger image sizes, which in turn means more expensive memory cards and more storage space required on your hard drive.

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