What is a mega pixel and why is it so important when purchasing a digital camera?

Answer 1

If you zoom in a LOT on one of the pictures on your computer, you will notice that their are little squares of colour. These are pixels. The more pixels in the picture, the more detailed the picture is. Therefore, you can zoom in a lot and still see shapes and details when you have more pixels. Without a lot of pixels, your picture is hard to resize to a larger format.

The downside to having a lot of pixels is that the more pixels, the more space it takes up on your computer.

If you are doing photo editing, it may be important to have a lot of pixels in case you need to edit something very small. Or if you plan to print off your pictures very large, you may need a lot of pixels to insure it is not blurry.

I've never found the amount of pixels extremely important on my digital camera, but you do have higher quality photos with more pixels.

Either way, even if you do buy a camera with like 12 MP, you can always change the number of pixels your camera is using on the menu if you want to save space on your computer.