Megapixels vs. Image Resolution

Video Transcript

"This is a megapixel print chart. You can see here, this is the inches in size on the width and the height of the picture, and this is what two megapixels is going to do. So a two megapixel camera will do a 5x4, but most prints are like 4x6, so basically you'll probably need at least a three megapixel to do that. And this is at 300 DPI, which is basically what magazines and other commercial printings done at, and they've discovered that anything higher resolution than 300 in DPI is unnecessary. So this is like top grade to do a 4x6 in three inches with three megapixels. You can see here that if you need an 8x10, it's going to require on the order of a six or seven, possibly an eight megapixel camera, but there are people that are using four megapixels to do 8x10, and when you do this what happens is, is the print starts getting a little bit soft so that it's like a low resolution TV. And you can do that, but it's preferable, if you want to keep all the sharpness, quality and resolution, to use more megapixels, but megapixels are not the whole story."