[Recovered Thread: 103269]

[yjanowski]

I took my first set of digital photo's to be developed and got into a conversation with the clerk about resolution.

He said, their are other factors like light and zoom that can effect the true amount of mega pixels that you can capturing on a point and shoot camera ( My camera: canon 620).

Can anyone elaborate what he means?
How would the zoom effect the amount of pixels that you capture?

Thanks

Yehuda

[granthagen]

If you understood what this clerk actually meant, no, the scene lighting or zoom setting has no relationship to number of pixels that the camera can capture.

What the scene lighting and zoom setting can influence is the largest available lens aperture. If the camera is billed as having something like an f/2.8 - f/5.6 lens aperture, it means that at the widest angle (lowest zoom setting) the camera has a maximum usable aperture of f/2.8, but that when you zoom out past a certain focal length, the largest usable aperture becomes f/5.6. Maybe the clerk got confused in his terminology.

Grant

[JimC]

yjanowski wrote:

How would the zoom effect the amount of pixels that you capture?

If you use digital zoom, it can degrade image quality. Basically, with most cameras, it's only cropping an image to make it look like more optical zoom is being used, then interpolating the image back to it's original size..

For example, if you use a 2x Digital Zoom (or crop an image to make it look like twice as much optical zoom was used), you end up with only 1/4 the pixels captured by the sensor before interpolating (adding pixels not captured by the sensor to begin with to get the image back to it's original size, since it threw away the edges of the image when cropping).

So, perhaps that's what he's referring to. I turn digital zoom off on cameras I use that have this feature (so that I don't accidently use it).

He could also be referring to resolution in another sense (not just the pixels, but the amount of detail a camera can capture), and lens quality is a big part of that.

Or, he may be referring to the amount of pixels representing a given subject. If you use more optical zoom (or move closer) so that your subject fills a greater percentage of the frame, you'll have more pixels representing your subject (versus where your subject is occupying a smaller area of the frame).

[yjanowski]

Thank you for your responses.

I will get the clerk to elaborate further when I go back to pick up my photo's.

Yehuda