digital camera megapixel question?

lor

is higher megapixel the better? (image quality)
because i have a 2 mp camera and my brother has a 7 mp camera....when i compared the difference of photos.....i don't see any difference!.....
so that made me wonder???
i heard 4 or 5 megpixels are good enough for everyday pictures.....

Answer
In general higher resolution (more megapixels) means better image quality. There may be situations where that isn't true (i.e. where the higher resolution camera has a low quality lens and the lower resolution camera has a great lens) but generally more megapixels = better image quality.

There may be several reasons why you're not seeing any difference in the images.

1. Many times I've seen people unknowingly using cameras at lower resolutions than the camera is capable of. That lets you put more photos on your memory card, but the quality will be lower. If a 2MP camera and a 7MP camera are both set to 1MP resolution, they're going to look pretty much the same. Check to see if both cameras are shooting at their highest resolution.

2. If you're viewing the images on the camera display or on a PC screen, the resolution of the display or screen is far lower than the maximum resolution of the camera, so you probably won't see any difference. If your PC display is set to 800x600 resolution, that's less than 1/2 megapixel being displayed, so the images will look pretty much the same. Even a 19" monitor set to 1280x1024 is only about 1.25MP, so that's still far less than the maximum resolution of either camera.

3. If you're printing photos at 4x6, you probably won't see much difference. The differences will show up when you get to larger prints like 8x10 or larger. Like with the screen, the smaller size of the print isn't going to show the differences between the cameras. Large prints usually will show the differences.

If you're doing any image editing, having a higher resolution camera can be important. Say you have a photo of Uncle Frank at the beach and you decide you want to crop it down so that the lifeguard stand on the right and that goofy kid who jumped into the picture in the background on the left aren't in the photo and all you have is a nice close-up of Uncle Frank with the sand and water behind him. When you crop the image to only show the parts you want, you're reducing the effective resolution of the photo. If you crop out 1/3 of the image on the right and 1/3 of the image on the left, what remains is only the center 1/3 of the original image. If you shot the original at 7MP, that means that you have about 2.33MP left, because you threw away 2/3 of the image. If you shot the original image at 2MP, that leaves you with only about 0.67MP. You'll probably notice the difference between 2.33MP of image and 0.67MP of image in a 4x6 print.

So if you're going to be doing any image editing and/or printing at larger sizes, having a higher resolution camera may be a good idea. If you're doing just snapshots that you'll be printing at 4x6 or maybe 5x7 or just viewing on a PC screen, then you may not see any benefit to having a 7MP camera over a 2MP camera. And if the 7MP camera is set to shoot at a lower resolution, then there may be no difference at all.

Cheap 10-megapixel camera?

Tiffany

I was reading a Magazine at work called 'Quick&Simple' and it featured a 10-megapixel camera that was at a lower price than most on the market. If I remember correctly, it had a 'CX' in the name. I cannot find this camera or the magazine it was featured in. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Answer
Here's a listing of cameras 10 megapixels or better:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/DIGCAM12.HTM

I didn't see anything there with a CX in the name.

However, there are a number of very good cameras on that list; I would find something in your price range and go from there. Note that you should check for the most current prices, as camera prices change just about daily.

Among some good cameras at low prices the

Casio EXILIM Zoom EX-Z1080 and the Fujifilm FinePix F50fd

are both worthy of being looked at.

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my vga was better than my 1.3 megapixel camera???

Anunnaki

my vga camera on sharp gx15 was very good in quality compared to my new ericsson Z550i 1.3 megapixel camera. the new phone's pictures look very dirty full of dots everywhere even on the highest best quality. Can anybody tell me why this is? And also if picture quality does not depend on megapixels then how does a person determine which camera will be better?

Answer
Megapixel count determines the size of the photo and assures more colors. Hopefully more colors will lead to more realistic photos.

But a camera is also very dependent on the lens to produce breat photos. In fact, the lens is the more important part of the camera. In your case, it may not matter much because camera phones use cheap and tiny lenses.

For a digital camera, the third important element is the processing/cleaning engine. This is a firmware that cleans up the digital image to remove "noise" (i.e. grain, hot pixels or dots). The drawback in using a strong cleaning engine is that it reduces the details of the photo. I imagine that if you set your camera to the "highest" photo quality, the cleaning engine is almost switched off.

The problem with setting the camera to take the highest quality image is that it can be prone to a lot of noise. Try setting your phone to take medium or low quality and see if its comparable to the relatively low quality noiseless photo by your Sharp phone.

The number of megapixels assures a bigger photo, but the size and quality of the lens is more important, and nowadays, its a race for a better cleaning engine.

If you want good quality photos, you need a more expensive phone (or better yet, a real camera).

Does more megapixels mean a better camera?

John Czarc

Does more megapixels mean a better camera?

Answer
Megapixels taken by themselves is no indication of the quality of a camera. The camera's optics are as important, or perhaps more important than the number of megapixels your sensor has.

And if over-done, too many megapixels can cause low-light performance to suffer.

And other issues, such as color balance, exposure accuracy, and a dozen other parameters can really make a difference in the quality of a camera.

So you cannot judge the quality of a camera by just looking at the number of megapixels it has.

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