How to Buy a Digital Camera with Enough Mega Pixels to Meet Your Needs

When buying a digital camera you may feel like you are drowning in specifications and confusing numbers. Understanding megapixels is essential for choosing a digital camera that will meet your needs. Follow these steps to learn more about megapixels and other terms.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Understand ppi. Pixels per inch (ppi) is a measurement of the image resolution. This will define the size an image will print with good quality. The more ppi the better, but it is possible to overkill. 300ppi is the highest value that is reasonable for ink jet printers.
2. Understand dpi. Dots per inch (dpi) measures printer resolution in terms of dots of ink placed on the page when an image is printed. Photo-quality ink jet printers range from 1200 to 4800 dpi. Quality relates to the ppi: 140-200 ppi yield acceptable photo quality and 200-300 ppi yields high quality prints.
   
3. Understand Megapixels. One megapixel (mp) equals one million pixels. On your camera, the megapixels measures how many pixels your camera will capture—no amount of editing can change this once the picture is taken. The more megapixels, the better the quality.
4. Determine your photo needs. Mainly, how will you be using your pictures? If you are going to be printing them, what size? Are you going to be editing them with digital software?
5. Understand typical quality output. Most cameras range from 2MP to 5MP. A 3MP yields excellent quality 4 inch by 6 inch prints and good quality five inch by seven inch prints. A 4MP or 5MP camera is best for prints larger than 8 inches by 10 inches, although a lower megapixeled camera is capable of producing acceptable quality prints.
6. Determine if you need a higher end camera (over 5MP). These are for professional photographers with very high-end equipment. You may want to consider a higher end camera (4MP and up) if you are going to be doing a lot of cropping in digital editing programs.

Tips & Warnings

• An eight inch by ten inch print of a photo is the size of an entire sheet of computer paper. So unless you have a large format printer, 3 megapixels is going to be more than enough camera for your needs.
• Megapixels aren’t the sole determiner of quality. Printer specs matter too, as well as lighting, motion and other conditions when the picture was taken.
• Online printing services can print out those large format photos that you’re printer can’t handle.
• Anything under 2MP is intended for use for on-screen viewing (webcams, webpages) and wallet sized prints.
• More megapixels means more disk space usage. Make sure you’ve got sufficient memory for storing your photos.
• Megapixels determine the quality of -still- photos. For camcorders (that take full motion video) you’ll want to look into CCD.