Wondering which camera you should buy? Here's a hint: the number of megapixels doesn't matter...anymore. Most point and shoots on the market today will have at least 6.0 megapixels and that is all you need. There are many other features you should base your selection on. On the other hand, if you shoot portraits and like to print big, you need pixels! Let's take a look at the image below.
This image was taken with an older digital camera, Nikon's D1H, which was the first professional digital camera marketed by the company. The D1H has a resolution of 2.74 MP and was meant for photojournalists and sports photographers. Like all pro cameras, this one can record images in lossless compression RAW format. So what happens when you fix this fast sports body with a portrait lens and point it at your cute niece? At first inspection, the results are great! If you take a closer look using a popular noise reduction tool , we see more of the story.
Above is the RGB view of the image after JPG compression and noise removal. There is something not quite right about it. To see what is going on we can take a look at seprate color and luminance channels. the most revealing is the blue channel.
Click on the above image to view it at full size in your browser. You can see pixels!! This what looked a little off...what should have been smooth skin tones were actually visibly divided into HUGE square blocks! Since that pixel has to have the same value over the whole thing, it is impossible to "smooth" this out.
So while this camera is still one of the best values for photojournalists who want small images destined for the printed page, it is not a studio portrait -making machine. In fact, when you see one of those really big images hanging up at Gap or Abercrombie, you can bet it was taken with a $30,000 50 MP (or film) medium format camera.
Above is the RGB view of the image after JPG compression and noise removal. There is something not quite right about it. To see what is going on we can take a look at seprate color and luminance channels. the most revealing is the blue channel.
Click on the above image to view it at full size in your browser. You can see pixels!! This what looked a little off...what should have been smooth skin tones were actually visibly divided into HUGE square blocks! Since that pixel has to have the same value over the whole thing, it is impossible to "smooth" this out.So while this camera is still one of the best values for photojournalists who want small images destined for the printed page, it is not a studio portrait -making machine. In fact, when you see one of those really big images hanging up at Gap or Abercrombie, you can bet it was taken with a $30,000 50 MP (or film) medium format camera.
