How many megapixels?

[LTB]

Hi

I have a question about how many megapixels you ’‚’‚…‚’‚¦…“need’‚’‚…‚’‚‚� to take high quality digital photographs.

When I purchased my last digital camera, I was told that 3 megapixels would be more than adequate for displaying on a 1024 * 768 resolution monitor or printing on A4 sized paper (at the time, I was told that no home-office printers existed to print A4 sized pictures at a greater resolution than 3mp).

I am about to buy another camera and it seems that many entry level cameras are 5mp and many affordable cameras have 7 or 8mp.

Is there much value in having such high resolution? As a keen amateur who crops the odd photograph, will I get better quality photographs from an 8mp camera than a 5mp camera?

Thank you very much

LTB

[Rocketball]

I would recommend an 8mp camera myself.

If you do any amount of cropping this allows to maintain high resolution even with cropping out large amounts of the original image.

[sanjivpro]

hi lbt

if you want to purchase new camera.nikon d50 is the best choice...value for money..6 megapixles..shoot raw & jpg both ...editing & cropping its nice..

Bye
Sanjiv

[Aladyforty]

I got very nice A4 size images out of my 4MP G3. I would recommend at least a 6MP. I have an 8MP camera now. the previous camera was a 6MP and I could blow the photos up to poster size quite well.

[shootem]

If you are talking about a point and shoot camera, (vs an slr) 5 mp seems to be all you really need.... as the ccd sensor is small. More certainly isn't bad.... just not really needed.
You can get great pictures, fine for the web, or print up to about 8x10. The quest for more mp in a camera with a small ccd sensor doesn't make a lot of sense.

[pip22]

shootem has it right. more than 5 or 6MP on a point-and-shoot compact doesn't make sense because picture quality actually goes down instead of up (more pixels means smaller photosites on the sensor and smaller photosites means more noise).

It makes sense to the manufacturer though because many people still automatically think more megapixels means higher quality so they are prepared to pay more. I think people are slowly getting the message now though, so manufacturers are realising they must offer more useful features like image stabilisation and stop increasing the pixel numbers which adds nothing to quality.

[James_NZ]

totally depends on what ur going to do with ur images..

if they just for ur comptuer and little snaps..then 3 or 4 or 5 megs is fine..if u want to do big prints..aim at around 8 megs upwards!

[ratcheer]

Six.

Tim

[Buddha Red]

i have a digital canon power shot s3 15 which is 6 megapexels. I truly love this camera. It takes pictures so fast, you rarely get a blur effect.

[metroside]

I agree with you pip22 well put! If what is most important to you is high quality pictures using a point and shoot camera then the most important criteria is the megapixels and the size of the sensor. These two items are closely interelated. The higher the megapixel count is not always the most important thing. Having a large sensor is just as important at it means the photosites are larger, which means less noise.

For example I actually bought an older camera recently that has less megapixels then my new one, but the sensor is slightly larger which helps me achieve higher quality shots.

While I have a camera that is 5.25 megapixels it has a CCD size of 1/1.8 while the Nikon Coolpix 5700 which has exactly 5 megapixels has a CCD of 2/3 which is pretty much the biggest you can get before moving towards a Digital SLR.(which I have just done!)

The other thing that you should also be aware of the quality of the camera's optics. Generally, speaking the more glass the better.