What is a mega pixel??

Question

i know it may sound obvious...but i dunno...the higher the better or worse??? I want to get a camera...is 6.0 mp good?

Answer 1

A megapixel is 1 million pixels, and is a term used not only for the number of pixels in an image, but also to express the number of sensor elements of digital cameras or the number of display elements of digital displays. For example, a camera with an array of 2048×1536 sensor elements is commonly said to have "3.1 megapixels" (2048 × 1536 = 3,145,728).

Digital cameras use photosensitive electronics, either Charge-coupled device (CCD) or Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors, consisting of a large number of single sensor elements, each of which records a measured intensity level. In most digital cameras, the sensor array is covered with a patterned color filter mosaic having red, green, and blue regions in the Bayer filter arrangement, so that each sensor element can record the intensity of a single primary color of light. The camera interpolates the color information of neighboring sensor elements, through a process called demosaicing, to create the final image. These sensor elements are often called "pixels", even though they only record 1 channel (only red, or green, or blue) of the final color image. Thus, a so-called N-megapixel camera that produces an N-megapixel image provides only one-third of the information that an image of the same size could get from a scanner. Thus, certain color contrasts may look fuzzier than others, depending on the allocation of the primary colors (green has twice as many elements as red or blue in the Bayer arrangement).

In contrast to conventional image sensors, the Foveon X3 sensor uses three layers of sensor elements, so that it detects red, green, and blue intensity at each array location. This structure eliminates the need for de-mosaicing and eliminates the associated image artifacts, such as color blurring around sharp edges. Citing the precedent established by mosaic sensors, Foveon counts each single-color sensor element as a pixel, even though the native output file size has only one pixel per three camera pixels[1]. With this method of counting, an N-megapixel Foveon X3 sensor therefore captures the same amount of information as an N-megapixel Bayer-mosaic sensor, though it packs the information into fewer image pixels, without any interpolation.

Answer 2

mega stands for million (sinccre it's derived from computers it should mean 1024*1024, a a little over, but that's not important here).

The number of pixels a camera's sensor has is important up to a point and depending on what you want to do with the camera.

But there are a lot of other parameters that are equally important.

For a point and shoot camera used for e.g. holiday pictures that will not get blown up to poster size, 6 MP is plenty (actually it's on the high side as morew isn;t always better (it requires more storage to keep them as they get larger). Focus on lens quality, and make sure you like the results.

(Semi) Pro Digital SLRs typically start at around 8MP with no top limit beyond what technology can do at the moment. But they have much better lenses and a goal of making pictures that can be enlarged.

Answer 3

A pixel is a tiny square of color. Millions of these squares are put together to form the pictures. For example a 640x480 picture consists of 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels tall. Multiply that to get the total number of pixels. A megapixel is 1 million pixels. I would assume your not a professional photographer or anything and 6.0 MP is very good and very high quality. It has incredible detail. 6.0 MP is very nice.

Answer 4

6 mega pixel is pretty good and yes the higher mega pixels the better. The more mega pixels the bigger you can print the picture or zoom in and crop without losing resolution.

Answer 5

YES!!! My digital camera has 5.8 MP. The higher the better the photo comes out!

Answer 6

i think it means million pixels

6.0 is really good