Here are some helpful Digital Camera tips from Crutchfield

How to Choose

 

Choosing a Digital SLR Camera

 

Digital Photo Printers

 

Using your Digital Camera

 

Video: Choosing a Digital Camera

 

Glossary

 

FAQs

I wanted to pass along this really cool site which has some good info on Digital Photography. It also has some nice tutorials on taking better pictures.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm 

Hi jst wnt to know the advantage of big and small pixel?

Mega Pixel "A megapixel is the term used for a million pixels — and the more megapixels an imaging sensor has, the higher the camera's potential resolution."

Source: CrutchField Advisor Article on Digital Cameras

The more pixels that you have, the greater the the quality of the picture.  A 3 MegaPixel camera is pretty much what you need in terms of most uses.  Anything larger than that is just an added bonus. 

 

for example:

10.2-megapixel recording (resolution up to 3872 x 2592)

2.11 Million pixel 1/2" CCD (1600 x 1200, 1024 x 768, 640 x 480)

There are two advantages to large Megapixel cameras:

• I am not sure of the Dots-per-inch requirement, but if your camera can only take 1600x1200 pixel images and you want to blow them up to 11"x17" or worse - you will get very grainy images.  The higher the original resolution, the more you can enlarge and print the image.
• Cropping - If you want a 640x480 image to put on a website, and your original is 3872x2592, you can select a full fourth of the image and cut it out and not need to zoom it back up.  If your original is 640x480, and you only want a portion of it, you have to upscale it which usually doesn't work well.

The disadvantage is the image files are larger and the cost is higher, but you can take images at smaller resolution with the 10.2 MP cameras, but then you can't enlarge them, so you aren't fully utilizing the camera, but you aren't hurting anything.

 

Strictly speaking, more megapixels=better quality pictures is not quite true. During the "megapixel wars" stage, camera manufacturers were cramming more and more pixels into the same-sized sensor, making each pixel a bit smaller. Bigger pixels take in more light and provide better images, particularly at high ISO settings. Sensor size, lens quality, and image processor also determine the quality of a picture.

Basically, a way to look at it is you have a pizza, and it's cut into 8 slices...if you take that same pizza and cut it into 10 slices, you still have the same pizza. But "10-slice pizza" sounds bigger than "8-slice pizza."

The more pixels you have, the bigger you can blow up a print - but you can't really assume the images will look any better. In some cases, image quality has actually been sacrificed by packing more pixels onto a sensor.

If you're having trouble deciding between an 8- and 10-megapixel camera, look to its other features. The difference between 8 and 10 megapixels is negligible. I've seen brilliant 20x30" prints made from 6-megapixel images...that's a pretty big print.
 

Great points - I was mainly talking about the jump from 2.1 or 3.2 to 5.0 or more megapixels.  With 6.0 Megapixels and up, other features are likely more important.