What does it mean when a digital Camera has 12 MP (Interpolation)?

Question

I know what a mega pixel is, but I am a bit fuzzy on interpolation. If someone would explain the pros and cons I would appreciate it.

Answer 1

Interpolation is when the camera "makes up" information to increase the resolution. In other words, the camera isn't truly a 12MP camera. It is something less than that and uses the information that's in your picture to "guess" what the missing pixels should be in order to get a resolution equal to a 12MP image.

Since the information doesn't exist and is made up by the camera, the resulting image will not be as good as one taken with a true 12MP camera.

Answer 2

Interpolation means increasing the size of the picture using hardware (camera) or software (photo editor: Photoshop, etc).

When you increase (Interpolation) an image from a small size to big size, it will add/duplicate pixels. Those pixels are not true from the sense, those are fake ones. Thus the final image doesn't look as good as the original one.

Sometimes camera does not tell if it have built in interpolation function or not because camera companies are always compete with each other on resolution and they try to increase the image size. And user like high resolution cameras at lower cost.

The size of the sensor of each camera can only create a certain true (non-interpolation) resolution. If you compare sensor sizes of some different brand cameras, you can tell which camera use interpolation.

Don't buy camera that use interpolation. you can do it by yourself using software.

Answer 3

Interpolation means making up more pixels based on the characteristics of the surrounding pixels. Generally, this process can make the pic less sharp and blur color edges. This process can be done with in-camera processing or with photo-editing computer software.

Some camera manufacturers include interpolation in their cameras so they can advertize high megapixel numbers. But they may not deliver as good an image as a camera whose sensor truely records that number of megapixels.

The highly rated digicams do not use interpolation. If you wish to "stretch" an image later, you can do it on computer with most photo-editing software.

Good Luck