What R Mega Pictures?

Answer 1

On a guess, I think you're probably referring to "megapixels". A megapixel is approximately one million pixels, so a camera that shoots in a 1200 pixel by 900 pixel format (1,080,000 pixels total) would be identified as a "one megapixel" camera. A camera that shoots 1600x1200 images (1,920,000) would be identified as a "two megapixel" camera. The higher the megapixel rating of your camera, the more massive the image becomes (consider that a common screen resolution is 800x600, which is not even enough to display one full megapixel image, while many modern digital cameras can shoot 6 megapixel images and a few can go as high as 12 megapixels), and, more importantly for most people, the better the image quality will be when you print it to paper. It doesn't take much to produce a shot that will look decent when printed out as a 5x7, but you'd want something fairly robust to print out an 8x10, and your choices of camera are very limited if you want to be able to print out poster-sized images that don't look really grainy.

Answer 2

Okay, I think you mean megapixels. Megapixels are fairly simple: they're mega (one million) pixels (PICture CELLs). This usually applies only for still photography, but megapixels do make a small impact in video as well. For most cases, more MPs= better. But that's not always the case. Let's say for example that you have a 12" pizza. You split it in half, so you have two pieces of pizza. But you could also split it into 10 slices. Now if you didnt know the size of the pizza, and you were asked how many slices you want, you would probably ask for the 10 slices. But each slice would be smaller. So basically what I'm trying to say is, more MPs isnt always bigger. Sometimes the image sensor is the same size, but the pixels get smaller. So in the end, you get a bigger picture with more pixels, but because they were smaller, there is more image noise and distortions. Perhaps 6 MPs only look good when you make the image a 5x7, instead of an 8x10. If you look for higher megapixels, see if there is a bigger sensor as well. Or subtract 1-2 MPs from the labeled MPs to get an idea of what size the image will actually look good.

In video, this doesnt make a huge difference, because there are standards that make everybody's video signal the same. Not the same picture size, because we would all have the same size tv if that happened, but the same resolution. In simpler terms, every video signal (within a specific region) has the same number of pixels. In NTSC video (North America), video has about .3 MPs. So when buying a video camera, buying anything above .4 MPs probably wont make a difference in picture quality. Hope this helps!