Digital camera photo megapixel tutorial guide

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What is a megapixel?

If you look at the screen in front of you its made up of LOTS of dots and each of those is actually a pixel, digital photos are the same, they are made up of many dots that together form the picture. The more dots / pixels in the resolution the better the picture quality and with digital cameras its measured in megapixels. One megapixel would be an image made up of one million pixels. Each of these pixels can be any one of over sixteen million colours (16,777,216 to be precise). Now you can probably see why some picture files are very big!

Different digital cameras use slightly different resolution sizes for different numbers of megapixels, so I have written this little resolution guide to the correct numbers (according to mathematics, not camera makers). This guide is useful for people who do not know how many megapixels their cameras are, just load any photo you have taken into virtually any art package and see how big the photo is in pixels (most programs show the size that way), then look down the list to find the closest numbers and that will tell you roughly how many megapixels your camera is. This guide is also useful for people thinking of buying a new camera, as they can see roughly how big their images will be and can then use my print resolution guide to work out if the quality will be high enough resolution for what you need.

What about interpolated megapixels?

Just be very careful if a camera says things about the resolution as interpolated pixels, that is not the same! Interpolation is a way of stretching images and guessing the new pixels inbetween the actual ones, it can create a quite good effect, but it will never be as clear as actual resolution. So imagine a camera thats description said:

"The Psyonic 720 is a 12 Megapixel (Interpolated, 6 Megapixel Sensor) digital camera that has a 2X optical zoom and an additional 8x digital zoom."

Most people would look at that and only take notice of the best bits, such as the 12 megapixel and the 8x zoom, but it is only really a 6 megapixel digital camera with a 2 times zoom, everything else is done by stretching and losing quality, so if you use the 8x digital zoom and the interpolated size you would get pretty bad photos! For more about digital zooms and stretching / interpolating images please read my guide to zoom types

Landscape orientation megapixels
(Wider than they are high)

Pixels wide 1155 1633 2000 2309 2582 2828 3055 3266 3464 3652 3830 4000 4163 4321 4472

Pixels high 866 1225 1500 1732 1937 2121 2291 2450 2598 2739 2872 3000 3122 3240 3354

Megapixels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Portrait orientation megapixels
(Higher than they are wide)

Pixels wide 866 1225 1500 1732 1937 2121 2291 2450 2598 2739 2872 3000 3122 3240 3354

Pixels high 1155 1633 2000 2309 2582 2828 3055 3266 3464 3652 3830 4000 4163 4321 4472

Megapixels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Please note:

On most cameras you can turn down the megapixel resolution, which means you would get lower quality, but can fit more photos on the memory card / camera, if you are trying to use the guide to find out what resolution your camera is then make sure its on the highest setting or you may get the wrong results. Turning down the megapixels on the camera is useful for storing more photos, but lower resolution = lower quality and although the photos might look good on the back of the camera, when you print them out it will really notice. Memory cards are getting extremely cheap, so if you can't store enough photos, then get another card, try not to turn the cameras resolution down.

Most digital cameras use a format of 4:3, which means that the height of the photo is three quarters of the width or the width is three quarters of the height depending on which way round the photo is. 35mm film cameras are 3:2, which means that the height of the photo is two thirds of the width or the width is two thirds of the height depending on which way round the photo is. Some digital cameras can photograph in both 4:3 and 3:2 formats, so if your camera is very close to one of the numbers on height, but not on width then that could be the reason. I may add a resolution guide for 3:2 digital formats if there is enough interest in it.

Copyright

This guide was 100% created by Dean Thorpe of Aspex Design, so please feel free to link to it if you think it is useful, but PLEASE do not copy it and use it on your own site, it took a lot of work to create. If you want to print it out for educational reasons then that is fine, just don't claim you created it or make profit out of it. Sorry to sound negative, but I have had a few bad experiences with people selling my creations on eBay!