Dear Girl Geek…

I am in the process of looking to buy a new digital camera. I know that having a high number of megapixels is a good thing as the camera will take photos at a higher resolution allowing photos to be printed bigger at better quality. But what is a good number of megapixels to have?

Response

Well, lets start firstly with what is a megapixel?

A megapixel is 1 million picture elements (pixel being an abbreviation of picture element), imagine it as a tiny dot in the photo. More dots should mean more resoultion but in reality too many dots can introduce electrical noise into the image and interference with the lens reducing sharpness of the image (diffraction). So for example, 6 megapixels = 6 million picture elements.

So what should you get?

Look for a digital camera with 7 or 8 megapixels, there are a few good 12 megapixel cameras but for printing reasonable size photos 7 or 8 is all you need. Above that and you introduce the negative issues eg.noise, less low light sensitivity.

Other factors to consider are image stabilization, this is a must and helps reduce blur in lowlight. Optical zoom (x3 or more) as opposed to digital zoom and a decent size screen (at least 2.5″).

Hope this helps.

Luv

girlgeek

Tags: Digital Cameras, Megapixels, Printing

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Dear Girl Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.