I was doing some consulting work for a hotel. And the GM approched me with an idea. He wanted me to make him an intranet site with all the hotels MANAGERS pictures on it.
Now this is easy enough. HOWEVER this is the cheapest hotel I’ve dealt with. The site is free as we can piggyback off the corporate.
So I say fine, get me a digital camera and we’ll take the photos. I don’t have one. I have no use for one really.
Turns out no one in the hotel has one I can borrow.
So what is the MINIMAL number of MP I can get and still have the photos show up decently.
I have seen .35 MP for $30.00. I have done searches and they basically say for uploading photos the MP don’t matter.
What is the recommendation. This guy doesn’t want to spend money. (If he has to spend more than 100.00 bucks forget it.)
If you’re not using the photos for anything else, then a cheap camera will be fine. Pictures on web sites must by necessity be very small and low-resolution.
For website use only 2 MP is decent. It is a matter of opinion of course. A 3 megapixel camera will produce a sharp image that is wider and taller than your monitor at 1024x768 and most websites are designed to be viewed at less than that.
If the pictures are intended for download - 3MP. If they are intended to serve as part of the website design and nothing else, then 2MP.
Figure you’re right that MP doesn’t really matter. If the lens sucks or the colour balance is way off, it’s a bad camera anyhow. (If it takes pics at 1.3MP and expands them to 5MP and says it’s 5MP, it’s a terrible camera!)
Imaging-resource.com is a nice site (must remember to donate when I get Paypal). Their list of cameras by resolution has these as the lowest. Some of the pictures are quite nice IMHO. OTOH, since these are older cameras, the MP might be low, but the rest of the camera was probably made with some care. The latest cheapo cameras could have been mass-produced in a sweatshop.
Anyways, as you can see from the PDR-5 in that link, even a .35MP can give good results, but depending on the rest of the camera, won’t necessarily.
Are you kidding? An ID-type photo for a web page need not be more than 150 x 200 pixels which is 30,000 pixels or 0,03 megapixels. Any camera will give you way more resolution than you need. The cheapest webcam will give you more than ten times that.
Ugh. That seems like that should work well, but it often times seems to take a special flair for tweaking colour and resolution, as well as a decent scanner, to do it. Plus, the scanner might cost more than the camera.
There are several 1.3MP cameras that can take very nice photos, very suitable for web pages. One can look just at the pixels and say that a much lower resolution camera would work, but in practice there seems to be a huge difference in the quality of image produced.
Pictures taken with my sister’s camera (which was about 0.25MP) did not look nearly as good as pictures taken with fierra’s 1.3MP camera and shrunk down to the same end pixel size. Plus the slightly more expensive cameras, even on the low end, often have the advantage of better colour reproduction, better contrast, better focus, and better overall quality of image. Plus, there are still a lot of cheap cameras out there that won’t do faster than ISO200, meaning you have to use the flash for everything except sunlight.
I think perhaps trabi is suggesting getting a PhotoCD of film pictures made by a local lab. Ritz Camera and most one-hour processing places should offer that service. Cheaper than getting a digital camera, better quality than what you’ll find at the price range your looking at.
Yep. Any webcam or most basic digi still cam will be adequate for web use. If you want be be able to make a reasonable print at say 6 by 4 ins then at least a megapixel 1.3 is recommended but just for screen viewing you need much much less.
I know. But since even the cheapest cameras are at least 2MP I figured I’d say 2MP.
using higher MP is good anyway because you’ve got more room to modify and shrink, and a 2MP picture shrunk to 1MP looks better than a picture taken at 1MP.
Where I come from, The cheapest decent webcam or stills cam would be 640 by 480 pixel resolution. The next up 1.3 megapixels not 2MP. remember Markxxx’s client doesn’t want to spend more than they have to.
