ye i no that, but i thought that it depended on the mega pixels>>> the lower they are the smaller you have to print them before you lose resolution???
How many pixels you need Many people buy digital cameras based on how many mega-pixels it supports. I'll give you the simplified explaination of what a pixel is and how many you need to have to suit your needs. "Pixel" is short for "Picture Element" and you're looking at thousands of them right now. If your monitor is set to the most common resolution of 1024x768 then your are looking at exactly 786,432 pixels displayed on your monitor - that's less than a mega-pixel worth. The pixels are the rows and columns of tiny dots that make up the display you see on your monitor. The pixels in a digital camera come from the number of little squares it has on it's sensor. The sensor is like a grid - think tic-tac-toe on a grand scale. Each little square amounts to a pixel and so the more little squares you have the more pixels. The mega-pixel value is calculated by multiplying the number of squares across the top and down the side of the sensor. For instance, my camera produces photos that are 2160 pixels across and 1440 down which gives it 3,110,400 pixels or 3.1 mega-pixels. Pretty simple so far, right? So the question remains: how many of those little squares do I need? The answer lies in what you want to do with them. If all you are ever going to do is take photos and email them to your friends/family then you don't even need a mega pixel camera. Even at just 1 mega pixel you would have to shrink your photo down just to fit on most people's monitors. I know what you're thinking: "yeah, but I might want to occationally print out some of the photos." Okay, now you need a few more pixels and this is where it gets slightly more complicated. Now we need to talk about resolution. The problem with resolution is that its meaning changes depending on context. A person might ask you, "What is the resolution of your monitor?" To which you might reply "1024x768." But the resolution of a digital photo has nothing to do with your monitor's resolution. What we want to talk about is your photo's resolution. Suppose you have a digital photo that is 1,600 pixels wide and 1,200 pixels tall and you want to make a printout of it. If you start with a resolution of 1 then you will have 1 pixel/inch. It might cover most of a football field but it would be more like a mosaic wouldn't it. If you got up close you would see squares, one inch to a side, comprising your printout. If you were to print at say, 100 PPI (Pixels Per Inch), then you would have a printout that was 100 times smaller but 100 times more detail. Now you could look at your printout and each square inch would be comprised of 10,000 pixels, 100 rows by 100 columns. If you look real close you could still see the individual pixels - something that's commonly called "pixelation". If you keep printing with more and more pixels per inch then eventually the pixels will be packed so closely together that you won't be able to see them. Remember that while you are increasing the pixel density - or resolution - you are making the printout smaller. How many pixels/inch (PPI) do you need to get good detail without any pixelation? Of course that depends on a host of things like the printer's quality, type of paper, and even the distance from which the photo will typically be viewed. A good starting point is 200 PPI. You can get away with a little less, say around 180 but that's pushing it. And you can go overboard on the detail as well. Anything over about 300 PPI, give or take a few, is a waste. If we use 200 PPI as our baseline and you don't plan on printing anything larger than a 7 x 10.5 photo then - a little math here: 7 x 10.5 x 200x200 = 2,940,000 or 2.9 mega-pixels. If you wanted to print at 240 PPI then you would need a 4.2 mega-pixel camera. Explaination: most people don't have a printer that is will print a photo across an entire 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper. You'll probably have to have a small margin. In addition digital photos don't have the same ratios of width to length as paper. Bottom line is that 4.2 mega-pixels will get you where you want to be as long as you don't want to be hung in a museum. That's it, right? . . . Not quite. You can always use Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to add pixels. In fact you can get away with doubling the number of pixels in a photo without any appreciable loss in quality. With that in mind you can simply divide your mega-pixel value in half. Now you only need a 1.45 mega-pixel camera to print nearly a full page at 200 PPI. Today's digital cameras have plenty of pixels for the common man. So instead of focusing on the mega-pixel count you can look at the other features each camera offers. Things like: telephoto capabilitys, lens quality, battery life, image quality, physical size and look of the camera, oh yeah, and cost.
thanks that was a good bit of info. the problem i have is> i want to print an a4 photo but i am afraid it will loose quality when printed. what do you think?????
you should have no problem printing a 8x10 with a file size of 3.1 MEGA PIXELS,the q should be on the money.. get your feet wet and print a test pix.. In the United States, Canada and Mexico the standard paper size is 8-1/2" x 11". However in most other locations around the world, papers sizes follow the ISO Standard The physical measurement of an A4 page stays constant at 210 X 297 mm, or approximately 8.25 X 11.69 inches. SIZE WIDTH (mm) HEIGHT (mm) WIDTH (in.) HEIGHT(in.) A0 841 mm 1,189 mm 33.11 in. 46.81 in. A1 594 mm 841 mm 23.39 in. 33.11 in. A2 420 mm 594 mm 16.54 in. 23.39 in. A3 297 mm 420 mm 11.69 in. 16.54 in. A4 210 mm 297 mm 8.27 in. 11.69 in. A5 148 mm 210 mm 5.83 in. 8.27 in. A6 105 mm 148 mm 4.13 in. 5.83 in. A7 74 mm 105 mm 2.91 in. 4.13 in. B0 1,028 mm 1,456 mm 40.48 in. 57.32 in. B1 728 mm 1,028 mm 28.66 in. 40.48 in. B2 514 mm 728 mm 20.24 in. 28.66 B3 364 mm 514 mm 14.33 in. 20.24 in. B4 257 mm 364 mm 10.12 in. 14.33 in. B5 182 mm 257 mm 7.17 in. 10.12 in. B6 128 mm 182 mm 5.04 in. 7.17 in. How many megapixels you will need depends on how you plan to use your pictures. For e-mail, an image size of 640 by 480 pixels (0.3 megapixel) is usually best: large enough to look sharp on a computer screen but small enough to upload or download quickly. For prints, more resolution is required, and the bigger the print, the greater the difference the pixel count makes. For prints measuring up to 8 by 10 inches, the difference between shots with two megapixels and five megapixels can be hard to discern. In prints larger than 8 by 10 inches, differences in pixel counts become more noticeable. Few amateurs make prints that big, but another reason to go for a higher pixel count is the ability to crop. Pictures that looked good when you shot them may contain distracting elements; cropping allows you to prune those elements away and make the picture stronger. Crop out 40 percent of your picture, though, and you lose 40 percent of its pixels. That might be a worthwhile tradeoff if it reduces a five-megapixel image to three megapixels, but not so if the image goes from two megapixels to a paltry 1.2.
Indeed, you're certainly right about that Ireland...and its going to be a big consideration when I get my digital camera (well, my good one). I'm an artist as you know. It is not uncommon for me to crop and enlarge. Cropping and enlarging a large element of the pic is fine but if you're going to crop and enlarge a small section...well, sometimes you must can't. I have quite a lot of 35mm pentax equipment and in the next few months, I plan to get a DSLR which will allow me to use my equipment. It will cost me about 600 to get the body; it is 8 megapixels. I don't think I'm going overboard if this will allow me to crop and enlarge a portion of a photograph which would be impossible otherwise. Sometimes, I'll do this as the source of the draft what I'll then paint or draw. It the same then with a monitor or a TV? I ask because when I bought my HDTV, it quickly became clear that they weren't all created equal LOL! Some has a great picture but if you got too close, all you could see were those little squares which make up the picture's structure. Some TVs were great at a distance but start getting close and it becomes really annoying. I never quite know how to answer when I see questions about screen size as it relates to room size. There are charts which will tell you, for example, that ten feet is the optimum distance for a 50 in TV but I could never figure out where that number comes from. Some TVs will look great at that 10 feet while others look like someone glued the pic together from little squares. I always knew there was more to TV size relative to room size and seating distance. If I'm reading your words correctly, that would be the number of pixels making a 50 in TV viewable at 10 ft without all those little sqsuares of which the picture is comprised?
