Megapixels when is enough enough?

every year we see all the camera manufacturers come out with new cameras and every year the new cameras have a larger and larger pixel count. What is the right amount of pixels for what you shoot? do you even know!.

If you are a weekend shooter shooting for fun and as a hobby how big of prints do you print? most people shooting for fun or as a hobby print 4 x 6,  5 x 7,  8 x 10 and some 11 x 14 prints. Very few people in this range of photography ever print a 16 x 20 or larger. So for the weekend shooter or hobbyist the question would be why spend a ton of money on a 12 megapixel camera when you don’t need one.

Let’s take a look back at Digital photography just a few short years back. Professional photographers were shooting with two megapixel and three megapixel digital cameras and printing and selling 16 x 20, 20 x 24 and larger prints. Sports shooters shot double-page spreads for every national Magazine you can think of all with two to three megapixel cameras.

I myself shot with two megapixel, three megapixel, four megapixel, six megapixel, eight megapixel, 10 megapixel and now 12 megapixel cameras and I have printed 20 x 30 size prints from all of the cameras over the years. What is change the most is not that a larger print has more pixels in it making it look better it’s that newer cameras over the years produce better colors,   better shadow detail, and much better low light shooting abilities.

If you look back at a camera like the Nikon D2Hs a four megapixel camera and you look at prints printed at 20 x 30 and then look it a print from a 8MP or 10MP camera printed at the same size looking at both prints side-by-side you will see no visible difference in the print quality the four megapixel print will look just as good and not show any pixelization at all in fact if you do not know what camera shot each print it would be very difficult for you to tell what camera shot it.

So if you’re shooting for fun and even in a professional capacity more is not necessarily better. One of our favorite cameras is the Nikon D40 it is a fantastic six megapixel camera that can produce outstanding large prints in any size you want including billboard sized prints. This camera sells for around $600 with a kit lens. This is by far the best all-around low-cost camera you can buy today.

I currently use a Nikon D3 as my main camera for most everything I shoot. One of the big advantages of the D3 is the ability to put the camera in a cropped mode of shooting. In this mode the camera instead of shooting large 12 megapixel files it can shoot five megapixel files that are fantastic and can be printed large looks grate and have all the high end color technology and low light shooting abilities of the D3. Also we have a Nikon D700 camera that offers the same cropped function so we get the best of both worlds small files that print large and large files that print even larger and give us lots of extra room to crop the image we want. See us at here