How many megapixels is enough?

[viper69]

class="H2"I plan on getting a digi cam for party situations/family. Some close up work taking pictures of animals mostly...And if I am lucky..maybe some pictures at night like city scenes or pictures of places/things during sightseeing.

I like how the Kodak cameras feel in my hand..easy to hold. But most of them are 5megapixels. Sony and a few others have 7.1 megapixels now. I am not so sure if I will ever blow up anything/print what I take..Perhaps I will, but I suspect the majority will be images and archived onto CDs

Plus the screen on some cams is up to 2.5"...Kodak for some reason hasn't increased the megapixels of their cameras yet...

Do people think 5megapixels would be adequate for my purposes??

Second, do people find that the cameras with aluminum bodies are somewhat slippery to hold?? I know I do.

I would prefer a point and shoot camera. I own a film SLR that I would use for all my scenery scenes that I intend to enlarge.

Just know sure what camera to buy.

[robbo]

5 megapixels is plenty. I recommend the Fuji F10, mostly because you mentioned that you want to take some night pictures and this camera's high ISO images are decent, better than the competition in its class at this time. It's 6 megapixels.

I had a Canon A75 at just 3 megapixels which took very good pictures, but it wasn't great in low light. Most point and shoots have that problem.

[viper69]

It looks like a good camera thanks....large screen too...But no viewfinder....Im not sure how good that is, having a dig cam w/out a viewfinder....I'll have to ask around...