Six mega-pixels is a nice sweet spot..

However, more megapixels (or equal quality) give you the ability to crop an image and retain plenty of resolutionWarm regards,DOF'..

Image quality depends mainly on.

Lens qualityCCD sizeSoftware algorithms to get the image off the CCDNo of pixels.

There is no point in having more of one without improving the other. All thre main maufacturers are squeezing to many pixels on a minute CCD. The result is lots of noise..

I would say 6-7 Mpixels is a sensible maximum for a P & S. I used a 5Mpixel DSLR for 4 years. I now have a 6 & 10 Mpixel DSLR. I cannot say I notice the difference that often. The quality of my final image has more to do with the lens I put on..

Chris Elliott.

*Nikon* D Eighty + Fifty - Other equipment in Profile.

Http://PlacidoD.Zenfolio.com/..

A 4mp camera will make excellent 4x6 and 5x7 prints. 6mp is better for 8x10. If you assume a print has 300dpi, you can use the cameras horizontal and vertical pixel count to calculate how big the prints will be at naitve resolution... for example :.

Lets say you have a 4mp camera with a resolution of 2500 x 1600 pixels..

At 300dpi, you would get prints of 8.3 x 5.3 inches. The image would be cropped a bit to fit a 4x6 or 5x7 ratio, so you loose some of the pixels..

This is just a guideline of course. Having extra pixels gives you the ability to crop the image..

Sean.

Http://www.dustandrust.com..

The human eye can resolve, at best, 300 pixels per inch in a print - simple arithmetic tells you that a standard 6MP sensor (3000 x 2000) will do pin-sharp prints up to about A4 size (with no cropping, which assumes that you compose your pics perfectly every time). I find that in practice this figure can be reduced to 200 pixels per inch as long as you don't look at the prints with a magnifying glass - that would give you about an A3 size print with no cropping, and people would view a picture of this size from further away anyway, where the reduced resolution (200 dpi instead of 300 dpi) won't be apparent..

At this size issues like lens distortion and chromatic aberration become pretty obvious and the quality of the lens is more of an issue than the difference between (say) 6MP and 10 MP..

Of course more MP is nicer if it can be done without getting too much noise etc... but I'd go for around 6MP as a good size for normal use. If you really wanted high quality prints bigger than A3 you would be in the market for a high-end DSLR, not a compact!Mike..

Megapixels are either totally irrelevant or a negative IQ factor..

Rules:.

1. Buy the biggest piece of Silicon you can afford...with the smallest number of pixels you can put up with..

2. Buy the best piece of glass (lens) you can afford..

3. Buy the most comfortable body you can find..

4. Buy a camera that is intuitive to YOU..

5. Don't become religious about your selection! It's just a camera....

Charlie DavisNikon 5700 & Sony R1CATS #25PAS Scribe @ http://www.here-ugo.com/PAS_List.htmHomePage: http://www.1derful.info'I brake for pixels...'..

I think 8 for me. I have a 10, 6, and 4 mp camera. There are times when I wish my 6 had a few more mp.http://www.flickr.com/photos/freezingrain/..

Short answer - 4 - 7 Mp depending on the camera as a whole.

Long answer :.

As they jam more and more sensor sites onto the small area of a sensor they seem to get noisier. There have been a few instances recently of cameras getting higher resolutions and being noisier than their predecessors..

Really you need to buy a compact as a "whole package" not on resolution alone. Lens quality, feel and functionality all combine to make an image..

A handful of cameras seem to get nods of approval from everywhere, but none of them are regarded as best all round, and I think it's a case of best-of-breed. Resolution is almost the least important issue..

Last word : A 6x4 photo printed at 300 dpi ( standard ) requires a mere 2.1 Mp. I'd be quite happy if they were good noiseless accurate Mp rather than more, but noisier ones. You can get an 8x10 from 6.8 Mp. In a practical sense you can actually get prints from less than these theoretical resolutions..

StephenG.

Fuji S9600Fuji S5200Fuji F30Fuji E900Canon A710ISPCLinuxOS..

In a P&S I see no reason for more than 5MP. beyond that the sensor sites get smaller and noise becomes more of an issue..

JMOSteve..

When they first started the megapixel races, people claimed 8x10s were OK from 3 meg cameras although it settled out that you "needed" 4 megapixels for photoquality 8x10s. Of course, quality of the rest of the "system," including lenses, processing and print methods need t support he quality levels as well..

In fact, as some of the digicams raced along, the only differences between models were pixels counts and some of the times the results were worse - the lenses or sensors couldn't handle the change and noise or optical flaws were more obvious..

The typical screen view is somewhere about 1 meg or so, and few people using the compacts are printing lots of 8x10s or larger, so there is a ton of crop space, ememory usage, and extra noise out there...