How to Choose the Appropriate Digital Camera Megapixels for Your Needs?
Dec 11, 2009 Photography
How to Choose the Appropriate Digital Camera Megapixels for Your Needs ? A regular concern among digital camera users is which size photos will they be able to print out. This is connected to your digital camera megapixel rating. The bigger paper size you choose to print photos the more likely you are to see pixilation. This is when you start to see the individual pixels that your photo is made of.
So What Megapixel Rating Should You Choose?
Unfortunetly, there is no clear choice on this. The megapixels is only one consideration. If you are looking for quality photos you must also consider the paper quality, the type of printer, and the conditions the picture was first taken in. These are just the beginning.
We can however, provide a starting point or rule of thumb for a high enough digital camera megapixel rating. Pretty much since digital images have been around we have counted pixels. Analogous to your printer’s DPI (dots per inch) the PPI (pixels per inch) rating gives the amount of pixels in one inch of your digital photo. In this article we are referring to both the X and Y axis. So a PPI of 100 would be 10,000 (100 x 100) pixels per square inch.
Commonly, the link among PPI and photo quality go something like this:
PPI 100 - bad to fair
PPI 200 - good
PPI 300 - excellant
So What Does Tha Mean For Paper Size?
We are now set get the digital camera megapixel rating needed for for an acceptable paper size and quality level. We do this by first multiplying the page langth and width to get the total area of the paper (i.E. 4×6 = 24sqin). Now we multiply the total area of the paper by the square of the PPI rating.
The calculations are:
Page Size Bad to Fair Good Excellent
4×6 0.24MP 0.96MP 2.2MP
5×7 0.35MP 1.40MP 3.2MP
8×10 0.80MP 3.20MP 7.2MP
11×14 1.54MP 6.16MP 13.9MP
16×20 3.20MP 12.80MP 28.8MP
20×30 6.00MP 24.00MP 54.0MP
This is not an exact figure however should be a good start. The good thing is that for less than a couple hundred dollars you can purchase a 10 megapixel camera. That should be a decent enough digital camera megapixel rating for the normal vacation pictures and acceptable enough for good amateur photography. (By Don Casas )
Tags: Digital Camera, guide, how to, megapixels
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