Much Mega Pixels is just a trick, right?
Remember that the term "halftone"? A few years ago, newspapers printed in all the pictures of half measures, and if you look closely, you could see all the dots that make up the image.
The printing process used could not print a smooth gradation from black to white as a photograph does. So using the halftone process to the image with small dots. Each point could be any change from white to black. The points on the dark side of the image were black and the points that make up part of the image lighest had no ink at all.
Magazines have pictures much better than newspapers, because they use much smaller, and so many more points. They also used printing processes different ink and plain paper.
Digital cameras have the same restriction on newspaper presses – that can not burn smooth gradations of color or tone, because the camera sensor is also made of dots called pixels. "
"Pixel" is short for "picture element". But digital cameras have more pixels of a press has many points that the human eye normally can not see individual pixels when printed or displayed on a computer screen. A mega pixel is a million pixels.
So think of a single pixel as one of those points. The more, more … somehow! Having a camera with a gazillion mega pixels can be like having a car with 800 horse power in the Los Angeles traffic.
Thus as an engine of 800 HP uses a large amount of gas, the cameras that produce 12 million pixels create very large files. Too large to send by email without resizing it first. They also take much longer to download from the chamber and fill a hard drive like a fire hose filled a bathtub.
If you want to take pictures and email them to Grandma, or put them on your website, or print for the family album of 3 Mega pixel camera 'll do well. Well, so 3 Megapixels is enough, why would anyone pay more for more?
Suppose you take a picture 3-megapixel camera of its basketball stars making the game-winning shot.
Unless you are very close to the action, or if you have a great telephoto face, your hero only fill a small part of the whole picture because your photo will contain about one third of all the sports arena.
So now you have a large picture of his hero … and the other players, and the 500 people in the stands! No problem because the camera comes with software so you can crop the image and expand its star so he or she will fill most of the final image.
With this software you are really trying to get a close up shot without a telephoto lens. This is when you want lots of pixels! And here's why.
The image of his hero was composed of, for example, 100,000 of its 3 million pixels in the original photo. Now, since I cut out most of all pixels, except those of his hero, who is asking the 100,000 pixels to fill the space previously filled with 3 million pixels for the final print will remain, for example, 4 x 6 inches.
From your software actually preform the magic required! Only now it still has 100,000 pixels, all you have tons of space between them.
Your software knows it looks bad, so calculated (guess!) What color dots belong to the empty spaces and gives you enough pixels to make any size picture you want.
However, only 100,000 are "real" pixels that the camera recorded. When printing includes too many "guess" pixels, you get an extension too poor and a really bad print because all the printers need "real" pixels they can get. The printers are far more stringent than one screen of computer.
Therefore, a picture can look great on screen but be as bad when printed to be just throwing away.
The moral of this story is whether to expand a small portion of the image, or thinking about expanding the original picture (especially for print) that really wants a camera that produces as many pixels as you can afford. If not, you can simply ignore the race pixel camera manufacturers and focus on search one with other features that are important to you.
About the Author
Al Stewart has been a camera enthusiast for 5 decades. See how he uses his love of photography to create acrylic photo sculptures and other gift items at his web site: http://www.photocutouts.com He hand crafts photo ornaments, magnets, cake toppers, statuettes, etc. Check out his site, it’s worth seeing!