When looking at digital cameras, you will see an endless mention of how many mega-pixels they have. This is a critical factor that you need to know when buying a D-SLR camera. So, in this article I will explain what mega-pixels are and how many you need as professional photographer. There is a special device on a camera called a sensor to capture light. This device has replaced the old film used in previous cameras. The sensor has many tiny particles that capture light and then converts those captured light particles to an electric form and feeds it to the on-board computer within the camera.
Once the electronic form of captured light is stored on a memory card, they can be reassembled by printing them out with a printer, or looked at on your camera screen, or view them on your personal computer. These captured pixels can also be edited with software on your computer to manipulate the light it captured. A pixel is a tiny location of information that can be found on a sensor. When you look at the number of pixels a camera has, it is referring to how many millions of pixels a sensor has. 1 mega-pixel is equal to 1 million pixels on a sensor within the camera.
To capture images with a lot of detail, you will need more pixels, which would make it important on knowing how many you need. In addition to this, the more mega-pixels you have, the bigger you can print your images. It would also increase the price of a camera to have more pixels. So, how many mega-pixels do you actually need for your photography business? To give you an answer, it would depend on what your budget is and what you want to do with your images. Most digital cameras come out with 8 mega-pixels that you can use to print images in the size of a poster.
The nice thing about a digital camera is that you can set it to use fewer pixels, so that you can take shots to their end of use. A fact that you need to take into consideration, is that the larger your pixels are, the more memory you need to store an image, as it has much more information and detail to save. Each image will be made up of more pixels.
How Many Megapixels?
As previously discussed, the more pixels your camera sensor has, the more information it will capture and will allow you to print larger sized images. I have prepared an illustration of sizes that can be used as an example in defining the image sizes.
High-resolution images represent up to 14 mega-pixels and it has 3425 x 3245 pixels that can be used to make very large prints. These high-resolution images can easily be printed well over 420mm x 594mm in paper size. Buying a camera that has a high number of pixels is a good choice to go with when you want to be a professional photographer.
Medium-resolution images represent up to 6 mega-pixels and it has 2000 x 3000 pixels that can be used to make large prints. These medium-resolution images can be printed up to 297mm X 420mm in paper sizes.
Low-resolution images represent up to 2 mega-pixels and it has 1400 x 1400 pixels that can be used to make small prints. You will get a good 6 x 4 inch print from it.