In the past, the digital camera makers have usually been fighting technological hurdles when increasing the number of megapixels in their product. But it’s gotten to the point where you can buy a 3 megapixel camera for less than $300. That picture’s four times the size of your desktop wallpaper, and will give you a nice 8x10 print. Does the average consumer need more than that? Do you?
I do.
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that 3MP is barely good enough for 4x5s, forget 8x10’s.
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Digital pictures are often cropped, the uninteresting sections tossed. I’ve faced many digital pictures that can’t print well once they were cropped – too many print nozzles chasing too few pixels, the other pixels having been tossed in the bit bucket.
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It depends a great deal on what you’re doing, but 3MP can be limiting in other ways. I strongly disagree that 3MP is good enough for an 8x10, but I’m pretty fussy. However, please do try this at home: take a picture of, say, a smiling group of folks (say 20-30) whom you know well, and print the result at 8x10. Note objectionable pixels all over people people’s faces.
What would be ‘good enough’ ? I recall reading somewhere that 20MP would be about minimum to really do a good job on an 8x10 under all circumstances. No cite, but I tend to agree.
On the other hand, please do also try a landscape shot with a 3MP camera. It’ll probably look great (uncropped) at 8x10. In most cases, you won’t see the pixels when looking at a picture of, say, a barn in a field.
The limitations of 3MP show up when you photograph something that contains quite a bit of recognizable detail, such as my example above of photographing a large group of people.
We have a 1.3 and it works just fine.
I have a 6MP camera and I’m wishing for more. I can still see some artifacts on an 8x10 printout. (Though to be fair, they may be JPEG artifacts. I haven’t set up the software to handle RAW files yet.) I guess I’m not an “average consumer” but a very picky “serious amateur.” I’ve heard that it takes about 14MP to match the image quality of a good pro film.
If 35mm film were digital, it would have a resolution of about 15 megapixels. Silver particles are only so small. I think we’re gonna hit that pretty soon.
Some more thoughts:
Average consumer scan is probably done at 300 dpi. That’s only 2 megapixel for a 4x6.
A 3 megapixel picture is already too big for most people to deal with on their screen, and they resize it to a more reasonable size. Beyond physical dimensions, the filesizes become huge too. A meg a picture and beyond. Tough to move around, even with USB and broadband.
Camera shake becomes a real issue at some point. 3x and higher optical zoom doesn’t help either. Adding more pixels to a blurry edge just makes it a wider blurry edge.
And almost 8 megapixels for an 8x10.
I thought we were talking about CCD resolution. The image can be a lower resolution and still benefit from a higher resolution CCD. After all, a 4 megapixel CCD only has 2 million green pixels, 1 million red pixels and 1 million blue pixels. Ideally you’d want a 6 or 8 megapixel CCD to produce a 2-megapixel image file.
Camera shake is indeed a problem, but there are plenty of users who know how to avoid it. Some cameras are equipped with image stabilization optics which greatly reduce camera shake.