Comments on: Quality Difference Between 6MP and 12MP

By: ChinaCoop

ChinaCoop — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:13:36 +0000

My D100 is a 6MP camera as well, and it has proved a great camera. I rarely make such a radical crop that the extra megapixels would really help in that way. If I crop, I just crop a little of the edges. The extra megapixels would only be nice to print a little bigger at 300dpi.

By: Ormo

Ormo — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:11:28 +0000

On second look I think you are right, I was basing my thoughts on printing outputs, but I think the printed DPI needs to be much higher than the photo’s PixelsPI as each dot can only really be one of however many ink colours the printer has… where a pixel can be one of millions of colours… so there needs to be a bunch of dots to each pixel to give the desired effect…
But then 8×10 still needs 7.2MP to give an actual 300 DPI photo…

To be honest I’m not too bothered… like I said the results always still need to be appreciated, and I doubt my eye is discernable enough…
I’m happy with my old canon’s 6MP, sometimes more would be nice for a crop of a hastily taken shot, but its just a bit of fun really!!

By: Cooper Strange

Cooper Strange — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:51:55 +0000

I guess you have a point about the editing: the more pixels you have the more the editing software has to deal with. I did not really take that into account, because even with my SLR, I do not do that much editing. On top of that, this is just the compact camera. I do not foresee too much editing.

I really wonder about your comments about printing, though. 300DPI is standard in the printing industry, and going above that does not really help much does it? 300DPI is already really high. I don’t know. I am not the printing expert.

I think for my SLR, I still would want more megapixels than, but still, only to a certain point. At some point, it is excessive, depending on your needs. I could use more (I am thinking 12MP or so), but I think the new 24MP cameras are beyond what I would ever need. Well, maybe the files are not all that much bigger. My 6MP camera shoots 10MB raw files, and several 12MP cameras also save files just a little bigger than that! So, it might not have many bad effects.

By: Ormo

Ormo — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:14:20 +0000

The issue with megapixel size isn’t really one of quality per se… It is one of image data. In using more pixels, more data is recorded for that image. Then when you are applying effects, GIMPing, etc etc there is less degredation in visible quality as the computer has more data to work with when applying effects etc. (It also is lovely for cropping at a later stage!)

Printing is a slightly different story… An 8×10 at 300DPI (decent print quality) requires 7.2 MP ( (8*300)*(10*300)/1000000 = 7.2 ) and most current home inkjets will go well above that quality on decent paper and so better quality is easily aquirable (That’s ignoring pro-printing…) But the results need to be appreciated and the difference between a 6MP and 7.2MP will only really be discernable at very close inspection…

But yeah, it is worthwhile remembering though that in the early days of digital photography National Geographic photographers (I know of one for sure, but don’t remember his name!) were producing full spread photos on 3MP dslrs!

My personal choice has always been to shoot on high-res… When space is at a premium I will burn originals off onto DVDs and do a batch resize of keepers to a resolution that is fine for my laptop screen, presentations etc… I very rarely print photos to be honest…