Digital Camera

It seems for every year that goes by digital camera manufacturers are adding one more Megapixel (Mp) to their cameras. Could it be true that an existing 7 megapixel camera that’s on the market now had an equivalent model of 6 megapixels last year and 5 megapixels the year before that? Next year, will you see the same camera in an 8 megapixel version? Where will we be in another 10 years time?

But do we need the latest 8, 10 or even 12 megapixel camera? Well I have two answers for that question:

Yes, a.) You’re a professional photographer and often have to produce very large high quality prints. b.) If you love to have the latest and most up-to-date gadgets and technology, and are quite happy to spend the extra money to get it, and a little extra more to store those larger files.

No, because the biggest photo that I’ll print will be A4 or 10×8 and a 5 megapixel camera is more than capable of producing a quality photo at that size.

Let’s assume you’re not a professional, because if you were you wouldn’t need to read this article in the first place. So how many megapixels should you go for?
My short answer would be anything between 4 and 6 megapixels for an amateur who isn’t going to print much larger than A4.

Megapixels and Print Sizes
2Mp - Perhaps you have a camera on your phone. You wouldn’t want to get prints larger than 6×4.
3Mp - Will give you great 6×4 prints and good quality 7×5 prints too.
4Mp - Will give excellent 6×4 prints, great 7×5 prints, good quality 9×6 prints and passable 10×8 or A4 prints.
5Mp - Excellent 7×5 prints, great 9×6 prints, and good quality 10×8 or A4 prints. If your printer is capable of printing edge-to-edge photos then 5Mp will be your starting point.
6Mp - Excellent 10×8 or A4 prints, quality 15×10 prints and good prints up to A3.
7Mp - 8Mp - You must be a very keen on photography and looking for the best of kit.

Remember, the more pixels in your picture, the more storage space you’ll require and depending on the chip inside the camera it may take longer to process and save your files. This lag whist the camera is processing and saving the picture can be quite annoying if you like taking quick snaps. Some budget brands suffer badly from this.

To summarise, I recommend you stick with a quality brand and go for somewhere between 4 and 6 megapixels.

Bill Thomson has been a keen armature photographer for more than 20 years and runs the website http://www.DigitalCameraWebGuide.com Find out more on digital cameras at http://www.DigitalCameraWebGuide.com
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The world is going digital and people are crazy bout the hi-tech gadgets available in the market. But significantly paving the way is one of the hottest consumer products of the 21st century - the digital camera. Most people want to capture and store their precious moment forever in a form of pictures. And photography plays an important role in this business.

Digital photography has evolved over the past few years into a highly affordable luxury that some could not be without and cannot afford to loose it. If you are new to the world of digital cameras, let Office Shop Direct be your guide to their large array of product specifications.

Price ranges are a very big consideration and are mainly based on high-end specifications such as resolution, compression and zoom options. Cutting corners on some of these details will save you in the long run, but you should be sure what you are missing out on before you make that decision.

Important Items to Keep in Mind about Digital Camera Technology:

Interpolation is a method in which a camera will fill in the color holes in the pixels of a picture by estimating color blends. While this can improve resolution, it will also reduce the sharpness and contrast of a picture. Never get a camera that is low in resolution but high in interpolation if you want sharp bright pictures.

Compression routines are the way the picture is stored digitally. Some companies maintain their own proprietary compression method, and this can make sharing images difficult. JPEG is the standard, but also as with most standards can have less clarity in a picture. Consider cameras that also offer the ability to print off images at no compression for best results.

SLR is short for single-lens reflex viewfinder. Many cameras have two views: that which the user sees to set up the shot, and that which the camera sees. If you have an SLR camera both what you see and what the camera shoots are lined up as one, and not slightly off on a different angle.

Having an amazing photo shot is easy; following the above mentioned important tips will surely give you an exceptional picture. Capture your best moment with best digital camera and quality printing application.

About The Author
Marlon D. Ludovice
Actually I’m not fond of writing, I don’t even write at all. I am not expecting to be in this field. But nevertheless, I love to read books…almost everything interest me. Reading is my passion! And now that I am in an article writer team, writing gives me an additional thrill in myself…Before I love to read books but now I’m also in a writing stuff. I can say that I am not a good writer but I am always trying to be one.
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Digital cameras are basically the same as film cameras in their handling. They both have a lens to focus the specific image, a shutter to let light inside the camera, and an aperture to control the amount of light which enters the camera.

The differences between digital and traditional photography happen to be after the light enters the camera. A traditional camera captures the images on film, while a digital camera captures the image on an image sensor.

Image sensors are electronic devices made up of an array of electrodes (or photosites) which calculate light intensity. The most universally recognized type of image sensor for digital cameras is the CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) although others such as CMOS and Foveon are sometimes used.

The number of photosites in the image sensor gives the digital camera its megapixel (millions of pixels) rating. Each photosite corresponds to a pixel in the final image, so a camera which is rated at six megapixels, for example, has an image sensor which is 3008 pixels wide by 2000 pixels high.

When light hits the image sensor it is converted into electrical signals which are built-up and fed to an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter. The A/D converter changes the electrical signal into binary numbers which are processed by a computer housed in the camera body. Once the numbers have been harvested the resulting image is stored on a memory card.

Photosites can only measure intensity of light — not color. In order to produce a colour image, each photosite must be covered with a colored filter which can be red, blue, or green. These are the three primary colors which can be combined to produce any other colour including white.

The colored filters are arranged in a grid so that there are twice as many green filters as there are red or blue. This is because the human eye is twice as sensitive to green light. Filters are arranged in a pattern called the Bayer pattern - one row of red, green, red, green (etc.), and the next row of blue, green, blue, green (etc).

Since each photosite can only be covered with one coloured filter, computer processing is necessary to produce a full colored image. This is done by analyzing a certain pixel and its immediate neighbors and producing a composite colour from these calculations. For example, if a bright red pixel is surrounded by bright green and bright blue pixels, the bright red pixel must undeniably be white, because white is the combination of red, blue, and green. This process is called demosaicing.

After demosaicing the image is adjusted according to the settings on your camera. Most cameras have settings for brightness, contrast, and colour saturation. After these adjustments are made some cameras may also apply a sharpening algorithm to make the image clearer.

The final step before saving the image on the memory card is to compress it. Most cameras use JPEG as a compression format. This reduces the size of the file by eliminating excess data. This information cannot be recovered, so JPEG is called a ‘lossy’ format.

Several cameras have the ability to save uncompressed images as TIFF files or raw data. Raw data is the original photosite data even before demosaicing. It can be transferred to a computer for processing with special software that will perform all of the processing functions of the camera but with much greater control.

Drew Laughlin is a photographer extraordinaire. Digital Photography is a true passion of Drew’s and he loves sharing his research, reviews and information to help people become better photographers and help them choose the best digital camera for their needs. You can learn more about Drew and recieve a ton of free, vlauable Digital Photography information at http://www.learn-digital-cameras.com.