[ale] OT: megapixels

[Sean Kilpatrick]

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On Monday 05 May 2003 09:11 am, John Wells wrote:
> Is there any practical reason to buy a camera with 3 or more megapixels
> if you are not a professional photographer?  I can't think of any case
> where I'd need an image larger than 1600 x 1200, but I may not be aware
> of the other benefits of the larer megapixel sizes.


If you might _ever_ want to make an 8 X 10 print of a picture, you
are going to want every last pixel you can get.  All sorts of photo
manipulation software will try and expand the number of pixels so
you can get a larger print, but the efforts are, at best, not good.
Barely acceptable would be a better description.  The only software
I have used that does a good job is Genuine Fractals, which is
available as a plug-in for Photoshop (should work with Photoshop
Elements which at $90 is _much_ cheaper than the full program.) But
GF is not cheap either.
These days it is much less expensive to let a good camera store
print your digital picture, but they will be using at least 200 dpi
and many around this area prefer to use 300 dpi. Your 1600 X 1200
image would be just a bit bigger than 4X5 inches. To get it up to an
8X10 you will need four times as many pixels, well past the practical
limit for software interpolation, except for GF mentioned above.

The other point to remember is that the smallish 3 megapixel cameras
tend to come with _much_ better lenses than the cheapie cameras. Try
using software to enlarge a digital picture taken with a cheap lens
and you will get an unsatisfactory result. Every time*. The cost is
dropping fast on the 3 MP cameras and Microcenter has them all on sale
for 20% off. Or at least they did last week.
My recommendation is to get a 3 MP camera from a well-known maker
of cameras and lenses, such as Cannon, Pentax, Nikon, Fuji, etc., and
stay away from cameras made by software/hardware manufacturers such
as HP or Sony. Oh, and get a larger memory storage card.

Sean

*  That's assuming you are as picky as I am, of course. <grin> But
   I spent nearly 15 years working as a commercial photographer and
   am probably a bit pickier than most about image quality.


PS I have a bit of knowledge only about still cameras.
   I know next to nothing about the current crop of digital video
   cameras, except that many (most?) still seem to store video
   data on some sort of tape.

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