Microsoft 702 manual Megapixel rating

10

Chapter 2: Making the Most of Your Camera

Megapixel rating

One of the main factors in the price of a digital camera is its megapixel rating. The megapixel rating indicates the maximum number of pixels (in millions) that are captured by the camera’s image sensor.

		Approx. JPEG file size
Dimensions	Total pixels	(with slight compression*)	Maximum print size
320 x 240	76,800	23 KB	Wallet size
640 x 480	307,200	91 KB	4” x 6”
1280 x 960	1,228,800	363 KB	5” x 7”
	(1.2 megapixels)
1600 x 1200	1,920,000	576 KB	8” x 10”
	(1.9 megapixels)
2,048 x 1,536	3,145,728	970 KB	11” x 14” and larger
	(3.1 megapixels)

*Compression, which is explained in the following section, varies by camera, so you may find different file size results.

Instead of film, a digital camera uses an image sensor—usually a CCD (charge- coupled device) or CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) chip— to capture the visual information when you take a photo. The image sensor on a simple, low-resolution camera might capture just over 76,000 pixels. The image sensor on a high-quality digital camera might capture more than 6 megapixels.

As you can imagine, the 6-megapixel camera can produce very large, high- quality photos (with very large files). The 76,000-pixel camera can capture a relatively small number of pixels, so photo quality would be fair to poor, even at small print sizes.

On many cameras, you can set the resolution at which the image sensor captures the photo. As a rule of thumb, always shoot at the highest resolution possible—you’ll get higher-resolution photos that you can print in larger sizes. However, in some cases you may want to lower the resolution so that the files will be smaller. This allows you to store more photos on the camera’s storage media, but you must sacrifice some quality for quantity.

Make sure to check your camera’s manual to find out what resolution you will get from the photo-quality settings on your camera. Beware of settings that offer “enhanced” or “interpolated” resolution. These features add extra pixels not found in the original photo to produce a higher-resolution photo, but may reduce overall sharpness or quality.

Microsoft Picture It! Companion Guide