does it make sence to use over a 1 megapixel camera for the web?

i sometimes wonder that iu mean for pics ya will only use on the wb never have em printed out

Yes it does. It gives you the option of cropping and only using part of a larger picture.

I use a digital camera almost exclusivly for macro shots that I use to advertise on the web.


I never have the time to crop. So i would like to know if a 1.2 megapixel is equal to say a 6 megapixel on the net?

http://www.fototime.com/ftweb/bin/ft.dll/standard?pictid={A07FAF40-5324-4472-A21D-A8D159A8AFBF}&exp=f&moddt=38727.9742465856

http://www.fototime.com/ftweb/bin/ft.dll/standard?pictid={2E0B5235-30B9-4825-8064-1A8DB2D93601}&exp=f&moddt=38670.9892748495

http://www.fototime.com/ftweb/bin/ft.dll/standard?pictid={DBE227F4-65D5-4282-9104-2F2C7A0B863A}&exp=f&moddt=38670.98978375

http://www.fototime.com/ftweb/bin/ft.dll/standard?pictid={69D38757-C2BE-47F8-848C-F621FF012F14}&exp=f&moddt=38671.0006234143

http://www.fototime.com/ftweb/bin/ft.dll/standard?pictid={C994058A-8EEA-4059-BBC7-A51D90C76EEC}&exp=f&moddt=38670.9982105787

http://www.fototime.com/ftweb/bin/ft.dll/standard?pictid={6ED3AB8F-E9C5-4DF8-BECD-044ECF204311}&exp=f&moddt=38670.9879134491

http://www.fototime.com/ftweb/bin/ft.dll/standard?pictid={048185DD-6DD5-45F6-863F-196BCF7960AB}&exp=f&moddt=38670.9885297685

http://www.fototime.com/ftweb/bin/ft.dll/standard?pictid={3CD92152-6C35-46E6-91F5-C23FDE4B030F}&exp=f&moddt=38670.988497581

I use a 2.0 megapixel camera. It's tiny, so it travels with me everywhere. Much better than if I had a huge camera that I didn't EDC. 2MP seems fine for internet use. I think anything more would be wasted... at least on me.

yeah i love my camera but its huge awesume pics btw colibrid i love snakes

Typically though, with more Megapixels, you are going to have a better quality picture. I have a DSLR making 8MP pictures. The only reason I resize my pictures down is to help others when viewing. I dont want people to have to wait 10-15 seconds, even when having a good broadband connection, to view one picture. Typically I will also host fullsize images of the same picture(if my webspace has enough of that, space) with a slightly modified URL so the viewer has the option to get the full size view. If I am going to allow one to use my photos for backgrounds, I sure dont want to host them at 800x600, cause many people now use higher resolutions than that.

-Cameron

As someone once said, if you start with a 6 megapixel picture you can resize it downwards without losing quality or detail. If you start with a 1 megapixel picture you can not resize it upwards without losing the picture quality. The reason you can't do it is bacause the 1 MP has not stored the informaton needed to expand it to 6MP. The software has to guess at what information is missing.


Daniel
NOTE: the fancy software on CSI where they point to a corner of a picture and say "can you enhance that" and the blur becomes a legible portrait quality shot???? It does not exist.

gadget_lover said:

NOTE: the fancy software on CSI where they point to a corner of a picture and say "can you enhance that" and the blur becomes a legible portrait quality shot???? It does not exist.

Click to expand...

LOL, I just pointed that out to my girlfriend while watching 24. Jack Bauer took a pic of a terrorist, while hiding in the ceiling, through a grilled vent, 59ft away, WITH HIS PHONE CAM, and then asked to "enhance" a portion of the picture to reveal the mysterious device. I also like how tv portrayed computers still beep, blip, and buzz as they use it.

If you have a 1.2MP camera, you can resize your images to 1/2 the resolution along each side and get about 640x480, which is great for the internet.

My wife's 5MP will do the same trick, just resize to 1/4 the resolution along each side. If you resize with a multiple of 1/2, you don't risk losing quality during the resizing. I have seen this with cameras that had several intermediate steps of image quality. Sometimes the lowest setting of 640x480 would give better quality than the higher settings that required interpolation of pixels.

If you had a camera that had low resolution and would only take a 640x480 image, the resulting image would have much less detail than either of the above methods.

Aside from the better image quality with more pixels and having the ability to crop, IMO they're much easier to perform some editing tasks on than smaller pics. I often have to lift part of an image off it's original background and drop it onto something else for the site I take care of. I find I can do a quicker, better job if I start out with a bigger image. Of course, lots of memory and a fast processor become more important as image size increases.

Usually the last step I do on an image is to reduce it's size for web viewing and then readjust the brightness/contrast one last time.

I always tell the people who supply me with images to just give me the biggest, original images they have as that will always give me the most options. If I want to knock it down to a more managable size to work on it wil only take a minute.

Also, the cameras that have higher pixel counts have lower quality settings. One of those is likely to be in the 1 MP range. So if you know you are taking pics that are only for the internet and you don't want to bother resizing or cropping you can set the camera to take them at the lower setting.

My wife's 5MP camera has a lot of different resolution settings. The lowest is 640x480. I tell her to use that for her internet use and that saves her the time of using photo editing software to resize. I noticed that of the other settings, it has a setting twice as big per side (1280x960) and 4 times as big per side (2560x1920). Therefore the camera does not need to do any complicated interpolation for the lower resolution settings. Her older camera had an intermediate setting that was an odd fraction of the maximum resolution and if you used that setting you got a really bad image, much worse than the lowest resolution setting of the camera.

For professional web-only use, then yeah... the higher end cameras have a lot of advantages beyond just the megapixel rating. But... the 3.2MP Canon EOS-D30 and the 4.5MP Canon EOS 1D serve a great many professionals and with their 'far below current average' MP ratings.

Personally, if you have a 1.2 or 2.1MP digital camera that is good enough for your needs, then I don't see a need to upgrade just for web use. I mostly use a 2.1MP Canon A40 that I bought for $20 I think that does more than everything I need it to.