Good Digital Camera Important Factors

Whatever your level of expertise, one of the least important factors in your purchasing decision is a digital camera’s pixel count. In fact more pixels can even hurt your pictures.

Having just two megapixels would be perfectly adequate for printing standard 6x4-inch photos. That’s the same resolution as a FullHD TV.

Five to six megapixels is more than enough for almost any purpose. Even poster prints will look good at this resolution – remember, the bigger the photo, the further back you will be to look at it.

But the worst part of the Megapixel Myth is how it distracts from more important factors.

See the light

If there is just one question to keep in mind, it is: How much light can this camera capture?

More light, not more pixels, makes a better picture, so shift your ‘bigger is better’ attention away from pixel count and toward the key light capture components — the lens and the sensor.

It’s easy to inspect a camera’s lens. The more glass, the bigger the lens, the more light can get through the gate and onto the digital sensor. The size of a lens is a very important trade-off when choosing between convenience and picture quality.

In broad daylight most cameras are going to get the light they need, but as the light goes down a compact lens will always struggle compared with larger cameras. The sensor is where your light is being recorded, and just like the lens it is size that really matters.

Unfortunately the numbers are terribly confusing, hidden in specification sheets and largely offered only as fractions of inches. Once you dig them up, you will find you are often comparing numbers like 1/2.5 and 1/2.3-inch in small compacts, and 1/1.7 and 1/1.63-inch in mid-size compacts.

Bigger is better, and as more megapixels have been added to these same-sized sensors, it actually means each pixel has become ever smaller.

Let’s make up a statistic. Research shows that 95 per cent of camera buyers believe the more megapixels, the better the camera. However inaccurate this percentage may be, it holds as much truth as this belief in the "Megapixel Myth".

Big megapixel numbers are not a basis for choosing a good digital camera. Here are what should be your real deciding factors.