Guide to digital cameras

February 8, 2010 By admin

Your Guide to Digital Cameras

Some people have asked us to go right back to basics and explain what all the different features are that are available on today’s modern digital compacts. So we put together a simple guide describing the key terms that are used.

What are megapixels?

These are the little dots that make up your picture. If you want to print at A4 to A3 then 12 megapixels should be fine. Too many though and you risk distorting the picture with noise (that means loads of grainy dots). See our other article for more detail – What are megapixels?

Screen size

This is commonly quoted in inches. 2.5 to 3 inches will give you enough real estate around the back to be able to zoom in and have a good old look at what is going on. The screens are normally LCDs and some of the newer cameras offer touchscreen technology. It’s always a good idea to get some plastic film protector as this is the first place to collect bad scratches.

Digital zoom

This is not the same as optical zoom. All this does is enlarge the image, you’re not getting any closer to the actual thing you’re snapping and lose megapixels in the final image.

Optical zoom

This relies on the cameras optical system to get closer in to the action so you get to keep those megapixels for a higher quality image. This is definitely better than digital zoom.

Scene Recognition

This feature is quite impressive these days. Shooting sports for instance, normally requires a fast shutter speed to freeze the action. Landscapes, however, prefer a narrow aperture for better depth of field. Don’t worry too much about these terms yet as scene recognition sorts all this out for you.

Face detection

Many cameras will detect when you are taking pictures of people and will focus in on their faces automatically rather than be distracted by distant objects in the picture frame.

Wide angle lens

This is great for shooting in closed in space as the whole point of a wide angle is to get a really wide field of view. Great for taking pictures in cities, it can also be used creatively for landscapes to get good close up foreground details.

HD

These cameras can reproduce 720 lines on the screen. That’s High Definition, that is. The next step is …

Full HD 1080p

Surprisingly these can reproduce 1080 lines on the screen. The p stands for ‘progressive’ and refers to the way the screen is scanned.

So there you have it. We’ll go into a little more detail on some of these terms in another article.

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What are megapixels?

January 17, 2010 By admin

What are megapixels?

When you take a picture with a digital camera it is made up of millions of tiny dots called pixels. Pixel stands for PICture ELement and if you put them close together you can get a decent picture. If you magnify an image enough you’ll see the dots quite clearly – they’re just like building blocks for a picture. The word mega means a million – hence megapixels means millions of pixels.

When you read about image resolution it’s all about how many megapixels you have. Basically you multiply the number of pixels along the width of the picture by the number along the height. So if your image is about 4000 pixels wide by 3000 high you end up with 4000 x 3000 pixels or 12 million pixels or 12 megapixels – simple! These figures are quite standard for a modern 12 megapixel camera.

So if you want double the resolution you’d need 24 megapixels? WRONG! To double your linear resolution you would need double the pixels along the width and the height. In other words, you’d need 8000 x 6000 or a whopping great 48 megapixels!

Camera megapixels explained

The bottom line is that sales people will often hoodwink you with figures. You know the sort of thing – “this 12 megapixel camera is much better than the 10 megapixel camera – look, it’s got a whole 2 million more pixels.” Now do the maths – to get 10 megapixels you need 3650 x 2700 pixels which really isn’t that much less than the 4000 x 3000 we started with. To be able to actually notice the difference you need a much larger increase in the number of megapixels.

How many camera megapixels do you actually need?

To be brutally honest, if you just want to print out the odd 6 x 4 inch print or post a few pictures on social networking sites then a 4 megapixel camera would do just fine. However as technology progresses, more megapixel cameras get cheaper anyway but should you just go out and buy bigger and better? 12 megapixels allows you to do decent A3 prints and as we’ve seen, to get much better than that you really need 24 and more. We do commercial work and social photography with SLRs and find 12 megapixels really is quite adequate for double page magazine spreads and wedding albums.

Problems with more camera megapixels?

You see, just going for more camera megapixels is not always a good thing. There are two things which will always operate against you:

1. Image size. Yes, that’s right – you want a bigger image? Then make sure you get the computing power needed to store it. You can’t fit many 20 megapixel images on a 4 Gb card.

2. Image noise. What we mean here is those little randomly coloured dots you often get when trying to take pictures in low light conditions. Maybe the images are too grainy? As you try and jam more pixels onto a fixed size sensor in a compact camera then they will generate more heat and cause some disruption in the way the image is recorded. This is image noise. You can’t keep packing them in because the image quality will actually decrease. You cannot break the laws of Physics!

The bottom line is that 10-12 megapixels is a great compromise. You’re at the high end of today’s digital compacts but not so high that the laws of Physics take over and start degrading your images.

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