Best Camera
Digital cameras are confusing to a lot of new users. In this
basic
guide to digital camera technology we hope to try to give digital
beginners at least some basis to use in deciding which digital camera is
appropriate for them. When shopping for a digital camera it's at least good to
know what the basic terms like
white balance, pixel,
ppi and
dpi mean and how they affect image and print quality. It's also
important to know the difference between things like
optical zoom and
digital zoom as well as the advantages and disadvantages between storage
formats such as
Compact Flash (CF),
Microdrives,
Sony
Memory Stick,
Secure Digital (SD)
, Multimedia and camera
interface technologies such as
USB 1.1,
USB 2.0 and
Firewire IEEE 1394.
Pixels
A pixel is a contraction if the term
PIcture
ELement. Digital images are made up of small squares, just like
a tile mosaic on your kitchen or bathroom wall.Each pixel in the image has a numerical value of between 0 and
255 and is made up of three color channels.
Pixel Count
One of the main ways that manufacturers categorize their digital cameras is in
terms of
pixel count. What this is is the number of individual pixels
that go into making each image. Today this number varies between 1 million (
1
Megapixel) to around 14 million (
14 Megapixels). A million pixels
is abbreviated to MP, so a 1MP camera has 1 million pixels and a 3MP camera has 3
million pixels. Currently most popular consumer digital cameras have between 2MP
and 5MP. A 3MP camera can make excellent 4"x6" prints and very good 5"x7" prints.
If you intend to make lots of 8"x10" prints, then perhaps a 4MP or 5MP camera
would be a better choice. Sometimes two numbers are given, total pixels and
effective pixels. Total pixels count every pixel on the sensor surface. Usually
the very edge pixels aren't used in the final image. Effective pixels are the
number of pixels actually used in the image after the edge pixels have been
dropped.
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