Real Self Sufficiency - Living Better for Less
Digital Photography
To get the best value in money terms from a digital camera is to weigh up the specifications of models, always read reviews of them on the internet and go from there.
If you simply storing pictures on your PC and occasionally having one or two printed, a high resolution isn't so necessary. You also have to consider that if you're taking mountains of shots to store on PC, a high resolution camera will produce far bigger pictures and soon take a lot of space on your hard drive
The more megapixels, the better the quality of a print. Usually you will not tell the difference between 200dpi (dots per inch) and higher like 400dpi. DPI is roughly equivalent to pixels. A guide for the size of printed photographs, as to resolution and file size is as follows.
| Mega Pixels |
File Size |
Image Size |
6"x4" | 5" x 7" | 6" x 8" | 8" x 12" | 10" x 15" |
| 0.3 | 50kb | 640 x 480 | Low Qual | Low Qual | |||
| 0.5 | 100kb | 600 x 600 | Good Qual | Low Qual | Low Qual | ||
| 0.8 | 150kb | 1024 x 768 | Good Qual | Good Qual | Low Qual | ||
| 1.2 | 200kb | 1260 x 960 | Top Qual | Good Qual | Good Qual | Low Qual | |
| 1.9 | 350kb | 1600 x 1200 | Top Qual | Top Qual | Top Qual | Good Qual | Low Qual |
| 3.1 | 700kb | 2048 x 1536 | Top Qual | Top Qual | Top Qual | Top Qual | Good Qual |
| 4.3 | 1.1Mb | 2400 x 600 | Top Qual | Top Qual | Top Qual | Top Qual | Top Qual |
| 6.0 | 2.0Mb | 2832 x 2128 | Top Qual | Top Qual | Top Qual | Top Qual | Top Qual |
In 'the good old days' of film cameras, most of our holiday snaps would be of the 7" x 5" size
There is no shadow of doubt that a higher resolution will give you better quality, but the quality for most people would not be noticed.You can see from the chart that unless you want to print out posters, most modern cameras will have enough megapixel capacity.
What Camera to Buy?
The choice is up to you, of course. For the best quality of photograph you need a good lens and that really means an established quality make like Cannon or Olympus. Rather than pay for their latest model, check out the second hand market on sites like Ebay. Our 5MP Olympus takes wonderful photographs because of the lens and only cost £50.
We've also got a cheap very slim camera that takes acceptable quality snaps. Great for slipping into the pocket and although it has 8MP we use it on the lower MP settings.
Photo Editing Software
Most cameras come with some software to enable you to play with the photographs on your computer. Often it's not very good though. We use Paint Shop Pro but the professionals tend to use Photoshop .
It's worth checking out the shareware market and testing to see what is easiest for you to understand.
Printing the Photographs.
You can print out yourself on a decent colour printer but for a professional result, try the online printers where you upload the photo and they post you the prints or take a memory card into a camera store.
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