Digital Cameras: Higher Megapixels Means Higher Quality

Have you ever gone looking for a new digital camera and gotten baffled by all the choices? One manufacturer says it offers the best digital camera with 7.2 megapixels, while other says its 12 megapixels camera is the best in the market. Latest digital cameras are boasting more and more megapixels, for example Canon SOE 7D offers a generous 18.2 megapixels resolution.

So, what are megapixels and how they affect digital photography? Generally, in digital technology, the more pixels a picture has the more detail you can get. This also means the picture file size will be bigger, needing larger storage capacity. One important thing to consider with higher resolution is; you won’t be able to take as many photographs compared to lower resolutions due to the storage restriction.

More pixels allow additional color and shading providing more realistic looking pictures. Put differently your picture sharpness is contingent on the resolution of a digital camera. For example, Nikon D5000 with 12.3 megapixels offers amazing image quality for many photographers.

Digital cameras with 4 megapixel resolutions can still give you high quality detail for 5″x7″ prints.

Megapixels are just simple mathematic expression for pixel count; you can multiply the number of vertical pixels by the number of horizontal pixels. For example a 5 Mp camera has 2,592 (horizontal) x 1,944(vertical) pixels or 5,038,848 pixels or 5 Mp.

Small variations in pixel count are seemingly insignificant when it comes to picture quality. Doubling pixel count improves resolution only by about forty percent which is not enough to make much of a difference. You need at least doubling the linear resolution to make a visible improvement. It means you need to quadruple the megapixels. Other important factors, like sharpness and color algorithms are also significant.

You can get good, high quality prints up to 20x30cm (8×12 inch) and maybe larger, with a 5 megapixel camera. It is doubtful that you would see noticeable improvements in quality, when taking the same image at the same print size on a 10 megapixel setting. Surely, you would see the difference if you enlarge the photograph to poster size, but only professional photographers are likely to do that.

So go for a digital camera with the highest megapixel you can afford to get highest quality possible. However, you should also take into account other factors that affect photograph quality such as lens quality, light sensor and ISO settings.