Stephen Chinnadorai

You’ll hear at least once in your life someone asking you “How many megapixels does your camera have?”And, of course, if your camera has less megapixels it is considered “worse” than the one with more megapixels. This isn’t the case. So many people have been fooled by the marketing of megapixels — when the truth is: Megapixels mean nothing; at least on point-and-shoot cameras.

Digital SLR cameras are another story. Usually on SLR cameras, the sensor size is large enough for the millions of pixels to actually look good, rather than distorted. This means that full-frame DSLRs, more megapixels are even more effective.

6 megapixels is the ideal resolution for compact point-and-shoots — it’s large enough for print, yet isn’t too large to cause noise. Although there are some top of the range compact cameras like Canon’s PowerShot G9, which could be an exception to this theory; they produce fine, crisp images - even at 12 megapixels.

The next time someone compares a camera purely based on megapixels, educate them that, on point-and-shoot cameras, it really doesn’t matter - and can in fact make your images look worse - whilst wasting valuable megabytes on your memory card.