One of the mystifying things in selecting a digicam is deciding how many mega-pixels you should have a look for. The answer is dependent upon what you're counting on doing with the completed pictures. First, you want to grasp what a pixel is. Apropos digital prints, a pixel basically means a dot of color that makes up the image. A mega-pixel is equal to 1,000,000 pixels. The more mega-pixels a camera has, the bigger the quantity of info it records. The best way to choose what to go looking for is to understand what size prints you are probably going to print from your camera. An one mega-pixel camera is fine for people that don't plan on printing pictures but instead just post them on the web. A details, say four x six, will print acceptably from this camera. When you reach four mega-pixels you can print out fantastic quality eight x 10 prints and sufficient eleven x seventeen prints and a five mega-pixel camera will enable you to print out top quality 11 x seventeen prints.

Most families find a camera in the 3.2 Mega-pixel range to be a great choice. Any camera over five mega-pixels is needless for all but pros in photography ; even then, only people who have need for poster-size prints find that many mega-pixels worth the money. Most independent photographers find four or five mega-pixels to be enough for excellent-quality prints. Look to what you are planning on doing with your pictures and then decide. In most cases spending the money for increased optical zoom and lower mega-pixels is the finest choice.