remember

When I'm told that this or that camera has 6.1 MP or 7.1MP, what is the amount of area that the MP resolution rating is for? Is it for the size of the screen of the camera? or is the MP resolution rating only for 1 square inch of picture area?

DCIScouts

Wikipedia does a much better job than I could ever do... (or have the effort for...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megapixel#Megapixel

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The_Other_One

Or a comparison, a 5MP image is just under 8x10" printed at 300dpi(basically high resolution/photo quality)

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computerhakk

MP accounts for the resolution of the prints. So basically, the bigger it is, the bigger you can make your prints. More pixels will accumulate on a picture horizontally and vertically to make the picture. So the more pixels, the bigger the picture can be.

If two camera's are both good camera's and taken at a certain resolution both camera's can take, you probably wont be able to tell the difference if one was a 3mp and one was a 7mp. It has nothing to do with the screen size of the camera, that's something else; such as in inches (2" lcd screen vs 3" lcd screen).

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remember

To DCIScouts:
Thanks for the wikipedia reference. It was very complicated, so I just bought my camera today with a 1 month return policy. So hopefully I'll finish reading that before I change my mind on this camera. Its a Kodak C875 (5x optical zoom and 8.0MP) for $200. The only other slim/compact I could find was 10.0MP with 6x zoom but it was $500. Hopefully I made the best "tech-time dependent" buy I could. It seems good, except the LCD screen is very grainy, but produces good pics once uploaded on to a monitor.

To The Other One:
What you say doesnt make sense. If 5MP produced 300dpi for a 8 x 10 photo= thats 80inches times 300dpi, which is only 24,000. So this whole thing doesnt make a lot of sense to me. I think that 8MP is actually way more than I need, because I couldnt even send someone more than 4 photos due to the size of the res. Now Ive got to figure out how to reduce the res on this pictures.

To computerhakk:
I understand what you say, but this is the same confusing subject I still cant understand with TV projectors. My cameras LCD screen is 2.5", and when you see the graininess, you'll know there is Not 8MP on that screen size. But what screen size will this camera produce 8MP's on?
If I keep enlarging the picture being produced from a TV projector that is HD 1080p x 1920 res, eventually its not going to be HD. So when these resolution "values" are given, I still dont know what the surface area size was when these resolution values were determined.

Aero

No...300dpi is 300 dots per inch or pixels per inch...8x10 is a size of printed photo 8inches by 10inches...so u dont multiply thats only with megapixels(how many overall pixels are in the picture)...hopefully that clears that up a little

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computerhakk

Reason it's not showing good it supported resolution it takes is because of the camera itself. As good as some of those 300-500$ 5, 6, 7 megapixel camera's are, they are still considered low-end. If you are looking for great quality images, you will have to invest in SLR camera's rather than compact, small, SLR-like camera's. You never want to keep enlarging a picture. You should try to take it bigger, than down-size it. Enlarging it will obvious cause it to lose quality.

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remember

I just googled SLR(Single Lens Reflex) I dont really understand why its called that and it seems so affiliated with the non compacts, but what am I going to do about it. They are just too big for me who likes the idea of being able to keep it in my pocket.
As for the res, I didn't mean that the resolution was bad, if anything I thought it was pretty good. In fact I thought it was good enough to even downgrade to a 6 or even 5 because there was another one with a zoom of 10, which seems more of an advantage than to have so many MP's.
Im not a professional camera man, I just thought as long as decent enough pictures can be taken with 5 or 6MP for sizes up to letter size at the most I would ever make, then having a 10optical zoom is a huge advantage to me-its like a mini telescope- as long as the camera still takes pictures of 5MP with the camera in 10x zoom optical mode?

dragon2309

yes, as long as it is optical zoom and not digital zoom, if you use digital zoom the picture quality will start to degrade fairly rapidly. Optical zoom keeps it looking good.

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Motoxrdude

Well, MP=megapixel=1000 pixels. 1mp=100x100, 500x200, etc. It just depends what aspect ratio your camera takes pictures at.

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