The color 'correctness' of most PCs is abysmal. If this matters to you then you look at getting the PANTONE SPYDER which does wonders for color issues.
As to the camera colors, a little help by selecting the color temperatures goes a long ways.
As to pixels, I started at 640x480 pixels and still have a few 'wow' shots from that Epson PhotoPC camera. My next camera was the Canon 2.1 MP Digital Elph. What a step up. I didn't like the battery time on it.
Now I have a pair of Kodaks. The 4MP DX6490 and the 5MP DX7590. I like the 7590 a bit more not for the pixels but for the better controls. Turning on the 6490 makes one wonder what were they thinking. The optics on both are very nice and I have very little to complain about the 7590.
Hope this helps,
Bob
I believe I represent the majority of digital camera users. Basically we take 'snap-shots' for our own use and to show to relatives and friends. Some of us enter pictures in digital Photo Contests, occasionally we might use a photo to advertise something we want to sell, or to submit to a local newspaper or journal. On the whole however, we take pictures to remember episodes and elements of our lives, and to enhance our enjoyment of hobbies and interests, etc. etc.
So I say again, how many pixels do we need in a digital camera to facilitate and enable our picture taking ambitions? It seems to me the digital camera industry is going nuts in promoting ever more 'sophisticated' cameras with more and more pixels. Indeed the primary measurement of a digital camera's capabilities seem to be how many pixels it can take. To me, that seems to be analagous to classifying cars by how fast they go, or how many passengers or baggage they can carry.
So what are the hard facts and criteria that we really need to know (be told about) in order to make an informed decision about what to buy?
1. Are you going to want to print hardcopy pictures, and if so how big will they be on average? The vast majority of camera users almost never print anything bigger than about 4'' x 6''.
2. How many dpi (dots per inch) does your printer have? How much would you pay to have a high resolution printer to print large (or super high quality colour) pictures?
2. How many pixels do you think are available on your computer monitor? I set mine to work at 1024 x 768. In otherwords just over 780.000 - thats less than 1 Megapixel folks. If you use 1200 x 860, thats just over 1.2 Megapixels.
Having more than 2 megapixels will not enhance your viewing pleasure, be it on your monitor or on snapshot size prints. On your monitor, the software will reduce the resolution (in effect reduce the number of pixels in the digital image to match the resolution of your monitors screen). On your printer, as a 'snapshot' sized print, you wont be able to see (without a magnifying glass) the difference between two pictures taken with cameras of different Megapixels more than 1 Megapixel.
The most important quality of a digital camera (any camera for that matter) is the quality of the glass lens (eg. how sharp and how chromatically correct). Umpty-umpty MPs linked to a less than high quality lens will uniformly produce low quality pictures - significantly less quality than a camera with relatively low MPs but with a good quality lens.
Just check the prices between cameras of less than 3 MP compared to ones of 5MPs and above!!! - are the lenses significantly better????
What do you think?
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