Megapixels ...
...Everything You've Always Wanted to Know

What are megapixels (MP) anyway? How do you know how many you need? When buying a digital camera most people think that's the first thing they have to consider. The more the better, right? This may shock you, but that's not necessarily the case.

When you take a picture with a digital camera, the image is made up of a bunch of dots. These dots are called pixels. A megapixel is a group of one million pixels.

Most camera companies and most people would have you believe that if a camera has 10MP, it is much better than a camera with only 6MP. The camera with 10MP may be more expensive, but it's not necessarily better.

The thing that realy makes the difference is the size of the sensor in the camera. A camera with a small sensor--most point and shoot cameras have small sensors--and 10MP is not going to give you a good picture. Trying to force too many pixels onto a small sensor results in what's referred to as image noise. Noise is a grainy look in the picture. Larger DSLR cameras have larger sensors that can handle more pixels.

When you're trying to decide between the 6MP camera and the 12MP camera there are a few things you need to take into consideration.

Will you be printing your photos? How big will you want your prints?

If you only want to make small prints you don't need to have a lot. If you want to print 8x10 pictures you'll need 6MP or more. If you want to print 10x12 photos, you need at leat a 8MP camera.

Do you do a lot of cropping of images?

If you do a lot of cropping, you'll also need more megapixels. As you enlarge and crop a picture the pixels on the picture decrease. This takes away from some of the image quality. Having more pixels in the picture will allow you to crop and enlarge it more without making your picture look all blurry.