The drive to own bigger, faster, smaller, and ultimately better things have made the average consumer myopic about what he really needs. Remember the first time VCRs came into the market? It flew off the shelves, but very few have really put all of its features to good use. Well, the one of the current frenzies has to do with pixels. People salivate at the thought of more dots per inch. And while this ratio does matter to computer screens and LCD televisions, it matters less for the photographer, especially your casual picture taker who likes to preserve every little thing his Siamese cat does. When it comes to megapixels, more doesn’t necessarily mean better.
Forget what your friends and the men behind the counter say – the key to great pictures isn’t in the high megapixel pixel count. Megapixels only determine how crisp your photograph becomes once it is enlarged; this may be relevant in the bygone years when negatives were still used and every shot counts, but with modern digital cameras affording you to take and retake pictures without worrying about scrapping Polaroid prints, it is less likely that you’ll be tempted to blow them up to very large sizes. At best, you’ll make prints in 6×4s and 7×5s, but even if you want to crop, enlarge and the picture to 8×12s, you still wouldn’t need a high megapixel count.
If you want to publish them at the web, the megapixels matter even less. You’ll most likely publish them at 7×5 inches, with thumbnails at 72 dots per inch. You’ll also have to consider loading times and the patience of the viewer, so a very large, hyper-real picture won’t count for much if it takes forever to download. If you intend to send them via email, you’ll either have to compress them or keep the dot-per-inch ratio small so they’d get through as quickly as they can.
Photos were meant to be printed, and that still applies for many people today. But do you really need all those megapixels? Well, yes and no. Professional photographers need a higher pixel count, that’s for sure, since they’ll need plenty of space to work with in editing, cropping, or enlargement. But for those who intend to keep their pictures in photo CDs and stock photo websites, they’d do fine with less – five megapixels should be enough. You can come up with high quality pictures with sizes as large as 8×12s, and you’ll notice no difference if you do the same thing with a ten megapixel camera. Of course, the distinction becomes visible when you enlarge the picture to poster size, but consider this: which of the prints you currently have now are that big?
Digital cameras with higher megapixel counts surely have other features which can enhance the clarity of the shots and the quality of the prints, and for this reason they are worth buying. But buying a camera solely for its pixel count is like buying a 1-terabyte hard drive; they’re only good if you can handle their capacities and put them to good use.
