Does picture quality go down as megapixels go up?

[BillDrew]

Originally Posted by 2sassy

I am a novice at taking pictures, and plan to just use simple point and click cameras for the rest of my life. ...

That is a serious conclusion for a novice to come to.

If you have higher resolution available, you will have more options of what you can do with the photos: cropping, large prints, ... Are you really sure that you do not want any of the options that you probably don't know about?

[elliotm00]

Originally Posted by xHassan

The point I'm implying is that they are not 14 million receptors that have translated the visual information. 'Effective' is what you get. Whatever the receptors give, you process them to your required resolution.

Actually, there ARE 14 million receptors. What makes you believe otherwise? Because the sensor size is the same? As technology advances, they can put more pixels on the same size die. Whether or not this is a good thing is another discussion.

[TCav]

Originally Posted by xHassan

The point I'm implying is that they are not 14 million receptors that have translated the visual information. 'Effective' is what you get. ...

From the specifications for the Panasonic FZ40:

Camera Effective Pixels - 14.1 Megapixels
Sensor Size / Total Pixels / Filter - 1/2.33-inch / 14.5 Total Megapixels / Primary Color Filter

From the specifications page for the Nikon P100:

Effective Pixels - 10.3 million
Image Sensor - CMOS
Sensor Size - 1/2.3 in.
Total Pixels - 10.6 million (approx.)

From the specifications page for the Pentax X90:

Effective pixels: 12.1 Total pixels: 12.7

(Emphasis mine -TCav)

"Effective pixels" doesn't mean you're getting more pixels than the camera actually has, it means you're getting fewer!

[VTphotog]

I think you are a bit confused about the meaning of EFFECTIVE PIXELS. These are the pixels used to make the image. Usually, the sensor has more than this. The camera is using LESS than what the sensor has available, by a small amount. This is done to allow for things such as sensor mount, tolerances, and that the outer edges may contain more bad pixels.
A given sensor SIZE can have different number of pixels. A PARTICULAR sensor will have a fixed number of pixels, depending on how finely it was graduated to begin with.

brian

[xHassan]

yeah that i know that, but from whatever I have studied about censors, the actual MP are less than the ones in the image. I know i might be wrong here but isn't it the reason SLR censors are more expensive than your PnS?

They actually pack those many MPs in the censors.

[rjseeney]

Originally Posted by xHassan

yeah that i know that, but from whatever I have studied about censors, the actual MP are less than the ones in the image. I know i might be wrong here but isn't it the reason SLR censors are more expensive than your PnS?

They actually pack those many MPs in the censors.

Actually, most of the higher price is due to the much larger size of SLR sensors

[ac.smith]

Originally Posted by xHassan

I am not in a position to say that they are misrepresenting in that sense. They claim 14 MP and you GET an image having a resolution of 14 megapixels.

The point I'm implying is that they are not 14 million receptors that have translated the visual information. 'Effective' is what you get. Whatever the receptors give, you process them to your required resolution.

As for the extrapolation WHY you won't jack up the res like that? It's EXTRApolation. Each pixel is replicated as an average of all the surrounding pixels. The more you extrapolate, the more inaccurate information you force into the image. To get a picture of what I am saying, take a picture and zoom it up to 200%. THAT is what will happen to an extrapolation of 10MP to 20MP....

Manufacturer's (Kodak and Pentax in this discussion) are not extrapolating when they claim 14MP on a 1/2.33 sensor any more than Nikon was when it claimed 10MP on a particular 1/2.33 sensor. The pixels are a smaller on the same size sensor in the first two cases.

Most P&S cmaeras can extrapolate - that's called digital zoom.

[frank-in-toronto]

xHassan, are you talking about this:
http://www.stsite.com/camera/images/rgbpixel.gif

[spacer]

If you're really wanting to take snapshots with a new camera with a native resolution of 3 to 5 mp, what about your cell phone? They're getting better and better, yet are still lagging a ways behind the dedicated camera units. Not so far, in some cases, as my Android packs a very nice 8mp camera that has me leaving my heavier stuff at home on short outings, but most of 'em seem to be right about what you're looking for.
Just a thought, anyway.

[lisalonewolf]

Is there really much point in getting a new camera? What camera do You have? One thing to do is to take pics with the highest MP your camera has, then, each time you download them look through them and delete those not worth keeping. Those that are duplicates and are not quite as good. Those which are obviously bad.
The ones You want to keep you can always Re-size down to a smaller size. Should also copy them to a hard disc.