Mega pixels set on camera

[Goldcoin79]

Hi all

After a bit of advice on setting the mega pixels setting on my camera. My camera can be set to 14mp's which says you can print pictures up to A2, however If I have a great picture I want to print I will never print in any greater than A4 and if I set my camera to 7mp's it can print upto A3.

Should I then just set it to 7mp's then. What do you think?

 

[SCraig]

Set it to the maximum resolution you can get out of it and never change it again. I have never set any of my cameras to less than what they are capable of producing. I can always reduce them with software later but I can never get that lost resolution back if I need them bigger.

 

[TCampbell]

Hard disk space is cheap these days. Let the camera use the highest resolution possible and don't worry about how much space it takes.

 

[KmH]

+3 ..... Set it it it's maximum, and leave it there.

The pixel dimensions of your photos define the photo's resolution. Most DSLR cameras make photos that have a 3:2 aspect ratio. Some of the popular US print sizes have a 5:4 or 7:5 aspect ratio making cropping a 3:2 aspect ratio photo necessary to print those other aspect ratios. Cropping reduces the pixel dimensions, and thus the image resolution.

Print size is controlled by the pixels-per-inch (pixles-per-millimeter) assigned.

For those not familiar with ISO print sizes -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size
ISO paper sizes are all based on a single aspect ratio of square root of 2, or approximately 1:1.4142. The base A0 size of paper is defined to have an area of one m². With this definition and the given aspect ratio of square root of two, one can calculate the sides of an A0 sheet as follows: The long side is 1 metre multiplied by the square root of the square root (that is, the fourth root) of 2 and the short side is 1 metre divided by the same. Rounded to millimetres, the A0 paper size is 841 by 1,189 millimetres (33.1 × 46.8 in).

 

[scorpion_tyr]

I agree with all above. Set it to the max and leave it. Even if you never print anything bigger than a 4x6, you never know when you'll want to crop an image down, and 14mp will allow you to crop down a lot more than 7 without losing as muc quality.

 

[Solarflare]

A RAW image is 20 MB or something. A Terabyte harddisk can thus hold 50,000 of these buggers. Thus there is no need to be too peculiar about disk space.

 

[ClickAddict]

The only advantage I would see to setting it lower is that some cameras can give faster bursts with lower resolution. (Since there's less data to write to card per shot) So let's say you're shooting sports for a small school paper, where reslution is not that important, then perhaps having double the frames per second might be something to consider? Otherwise I agree with everyone above, keep it to the max.

 

[Joshonator]

I only lower it when I'm taking shots for a friend or family, easier to email, otherwise it's left at the highest.