Picking the Right Camera Resolution for You

"Another reason why you may not need the most megapixels that you can buy is because shooting an image at a higher resolution actually takes up a lot more space on your memory card. So, a great thing about these compact digital cameras is you don't have to always shoot at the high end of the resolution. On my camera you can actually choose if you want the large, medium or small size image, which is the number of pixels. You can also decide if you want it to be very superfine, normal, or just fine. You can choose how visible the pixels are in the image. Every time you shoot a picture you can decide to change that resolution. So if you're just shooting a bunch of snapshots that you know won't be bigger than 4x6, you can go ahead and shoot it in the medium, normal size, and you're going to still get a great print. Or, if you know you are going to be shooting a bunch of pictures that are just going to be used on the web, you know that you can scale it down and shoot a much lower-resolution image, which means on your 1 gigabyte memory card you are going to be able to take twice as many pictures at this lower resolution as you will at the higher resolution. The way that the camera saves these pictures is, the format is called JPEG, which just means 'joint photographic experts group'. This just means that a group of people got together and tried to standardize the way that images are compressed. It is the most widely used method of compression. One of the side-effect of it is, if you save your image multiple times, you can actually start to lose data. JPEG is considered a loss-y compression format. There are other formats that you can use, and if you are more savvy, you could save it in Photoshop or use TIF files or the Photoshop files. But the JPEG is the most widely used, and it's great for web and it's fantastic if you don't do a lot of editing and resaving your image, and you can still get great pictures with it. The bottom line really is, for $100 or $200 you can get a fantastic camera. You don't need to spend the $500 for the more megapixels unless you were going to consistently print 8x10 photographs, or if you're often going in and cropping very in close in on pictures, then you'll need to keep that resolution a little bit higher."