Don’t go for megapixels I tell everyone and even had written about it in a tech column that I used to pen for a youth magazine. But given all the guru gyaan and the advertising blitzkrieg that digicam companies have embarked upon, very few people had taken my advice seriously.
About a year later I find a voice of support, from New York Times columnist David Pogue.
It goes like this: “The more megapixels a camera has, the better the pictures.”
It’s a big fat lie. The camera companies and camera stores all know it, but they continue to exploit our misunderstanding. Advertisements declare a camera’s megapixel rating as though it’s a letter grade, implying that a 7-megapixel model is necessarily better than a 5-megapixel model.“
I own a 4.1 megapixel camera, but I hardly shoot any photos using the highest resolution, most of my photos are shot at 1 megapixel, and the results are as good. In fact a few of my best photographs have been shot at VGA resolution (640X480) and the prints are as clear as the rest. Unless I need a humongous print of my pics (which is a 1 in 100,000 possibility), what would I do with a 10 megapixel camera?
Most of us hardly get prints of our pics and when we do we get at most a postcard-sized print. That’s many thousands of rupees of worthless megapixels down the drain. I would suggest that you put your money where it matters – the lens. And no digital zoom please. That’s another hoax.
[The accompanying pic was shot at VGA resolution (640X480)]