My wife recently bought a point-and-shoot for family use–honestly, it is mainly for videos. When I was setting everything up for her, one of the decisions I made was NOT to use the highest image quality setting. Call me crazy. A few factors came into play: image quality, file size, and how big the photos might be printed.

I have already waxed on about the size of the sensor and how that affects image quality. What I still wondered was what the difference really was…I mean in real-life images. The settings I wanted to compare on our camera were the two 12 megapixel settings and the 6 megapixel setting (there is nothing in between). So, here you go:

Comparison of 6MP and 12MP images from a FujiFilm F50fd compact camera.

Those are all separate photos taken at the same time, from a tripod, with the exact same settings (as best I could do so with a compact camera which chooses some settings for you). So, the only difference should be the image quality setting.

Can I see a difference? Sure. On this camera the actual file size of those photos is approximately 1.2MB, 2.8MB, and 4MB, though size varies from camera to camera and photo to photo. Those look like a small difference right now, but 1000 photos later, that is gigabytes worth of difference, and if they are family photos, they are probably all going to be sitting on our laptop so we can show people. So, what I see is this: I can save a lot of space on the computer for a very small difference in quality.

And as for printing, well, never would one of these photos be printed more than an 8×10 inch size, and six megapixels is more than enough for that. So, that is not a problem.

So, my choice (for the point-and-shoot, compact camera) is to just shoot the 6MP setting. What do you think of the quality difference in the images above?