Pixels

Pictures are made up of little dots called pixels. The picture is made with enough of them together arranged horizontally and vertically.

If you get close to an image or use a magnifier you'll see them.

The picture of the left gives you the example on how you could see an image with a magnifier glass and depending on your distance to the image you'll see it clearer.

The same happens with the size. Depending on how big you want your picture, you will need a picture with more Megapixels, therefore if you want a 2.1" x 1.6" picture, you don't need a camera able to take 24 Megapixels or something like that.

Final Print Size Megapixels Image Size on Monitor
2.1" x 1.6" 0.3 640 x 480
4.25" x 3.2" 1.2 1280 x 960
5.3" x 4" 2.0 1600 x 1200
6.8" x 5.1" 3.0 2048 x 1536
10" x 6.5" 5.3 3008 x 1960
10.25" x 6.8" 6.3 3088 x 2056
13.5" x 9" 11.1 4064 x 2704

Here is what we name resolution, which refers to the size of the image that your camera will produce, so if you have e.g. a 2.0 Megapixels camera and you print a picture as a poster, then you will get a print with a lot of big dots as on the left picture showed above.

To figure out the amount of megapixels that will give you, you multiply the dimensions. 

For example:
1600 x 1200 = 1.92 million pixels or 1.92 Megapixels. This would commonly be rounded up and referred to as a 2 megapixel camera. 

As this amount goes higher, you will notice a much sharper image, so then....more pixels don't mean better quality, everything depends on the size and the distance.







- Nicole