I have a camera that claims to be 6 megapixel, but when you read the smallprint it’s only “3 effective” meaning the 6 is done by interpolation.
Whenever I take a 6MP picture it looks slightly blurry on my computer, so I reduce it to 40% size which is the closest round figure to the size of the screen. This sharpens the image slightly.
Question: If I took the pictures at 3MP would I end up with a better image on the computer than if I took the same picture at 6MP and reduced it to 40% size? (apart from the fact that it’d be slightly bigger)
In other words - if I set the camera to 3MP does it use the same level of mp but doesn’t bother to interpolate?
If I can take at 3mp it means I can fit twice as many pics on my card (which is kind of a redundant advantage since my card can fit 200 high detail 6mp pictures)
IMO you should never use in-camera upsizing. That means any camera with so-called digital zoom. The interpolation has to happen on the fly and fast so it usually does a poorer job than using something like smart size in paint shop pro or one of the more sophisicated fractal methods.
That said you probably shouldn’t upsize for printing as it is unlikely to improve the quality of your prints. You can’t make detail information that wasn’t there to begin with though some programs fake it awfully well.
Make sure your camera is always in the highest quality mode, raw if possible but highest quality JPG otherwise.
If I’m right, he’s got a Fuji, probably an S5000, with that funky ccd layout. This review has some good information on the relative merits of shooting at 6MP vs shooting at 3MP.
almost from the first week of owning it I have been dissatisfied with the sharpness of the pictures (and ‘brilliance’ of the colour) compared with those that one could get off newsgroups and the internet taken with other cameras.
And 3 megapixels is perfectly adequete for prints up to 5 X 7. If you must do upsizing as part of post-processing, I’d recommend a program such as Genuine Fractals.