How many mega pixels do you need to achieve a quality image?

Answer

Pixels are tiny building blocks of color in your images; the more you pixels you have, the clearer and more rich your image will be. A mega-pixel is a set of one million pixels. Digital cameras have a range of 3.2 pixels up to 16 mega-pixels.

How many mega-pixels you need depends on how large you will print your pictures. The larger you print your pictures more mega-pixels your camera should have. For example, if you use a 3.2 mega-pixel camera to take a picture you will enlarge to poster size, the image will ?fall apart? or appear grainy and ?less sharp?. A poster-size picture taken with a 16 mega-pixel digital SLR will appear sharp and clear in comparison.

However, you don?t need a 16 mega-pixel digital SLR if you only plan to use your camera for typical 4x6 vacation and family snapshots. Your resolution will appear just as good as the professional grade digital SLR (although, the digital SLR?s picture be better due to other features and settings, not just resolution).

Answer

I had read on the Internet that a good "rule of thumb" to maintain the same quality of print as a film camera is to use 200 pixels per inch, per side. For example, if you want a 4" x 6" picture then (4x200)x(6X200) = (800X1200) = 960,000 or approximately 1 Megapixel. To print a 5x7 you need (5x200)x(7x200) = 1.4 Megapixel To print a 8x10 you need (8x200)x (10x200) = 3.2 Megapixel And to print 11x14 you need 6.2 Megapixels.

In many cases though, you will want to crop your picture to eliminate parts you don't like. In this case it is always nice to have extra pixels. For example, if you had a 4 Megapixel camera, and you wanted to crop your picture down to 1/2 size you only have 2 megapixels in that section, that that could not be brought back to a decent 8x10 picture. If you had a 6 megapixel camera, you could do the same crop and still print 8x10 with good quality.

It is interesting to see how many people buy a camera with a decent number of megapixels, then save pictures in lower resolution to get more on the memory card. Why spend the money on a 4 megapixel camera then save using 2 megapixels? Memory cards and CDROMs are cheap. Buy the camera that suits your needs then save in full resolution. You can always discard pixels later.

Answer

It really depends on what you are going to use the camera for. For instance, if you just wish to post or email pictures on the Internet, a low resolution camera would be just fine. If you wish to print out your pictures, the amount of resolution that you will need will be based off of the size of the picture that you will be printing as well as any editing that you will be doing. For a 4x6 photo, a 3MP camera would be sufficient unless you will want to do a zoom and crop (cutting out the background and enlarging just the subject)in which case you may want to have the extra resolution to make up for the amount that you cut out of the picture. I would get at least a five megapixel camera for an 8x10 picture. In any case the higher the resolution, the more flexibility you will have.

Answer

Megapixel stuff would help in cosidering picture size (& offcourse quality but in certain extent)..In fact, quality of picture will be dependent on Camera, lens, light & quality of pixels & not only quantity. Quality is function of many parameters & not just megapixels !!

First answer by Cynthia. Last edit by Raahul. Contributor trust: 35 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 165 [recommend question]