Digital Camera

[hot_pastrami]

Originally Posted by richlevy

I thought 5mp would give me 8x10's indistinguishable from film if I did not crop and blow up the image.

It depends on how picky you are about clarity. It's always subject to some debate, but it is usually said that "photo quality" prints are 300dpi, as described by this link, which was just one that I quickly googled.

True, the human eye can barely detect the difference between 300dpi and 275dpi; but there is a difference, and the more you drop below 300dpi, the more it becomes noticable.

For instance, images from my old 3mp camera are 2048 x 1536, which is 5x7 at 300dpi. If I print an 8x10, it'll be 204dpi. It still looks nice, but the pixels can be seen when scrutinized. Forget about 11x14 unless you have some good software to process and enlarge the photo.

At 5mp, you should get very nice 8x10s if you don't crop, and that is more than plenty for the average user. Frankly, 3mp is more than plenty for the point-and-shoot types, as long as you don't mind slightly pixelly enlargements... it just depends on how picky you are about that sort of thing. I have lots of optical zoom on my cameras, but I still crop sometimes, when I see that a crop would make for better composition.