Thursday, Nov 14, 2013 at 22:15
John, I'm by no means an expert on this subject, but I can give you some tips.
I'm sure there are more qualified folks on here who can better assist you.
The resolution that you can achieve will be dependent on your camera.
Once the shot has been taken, there is nothing that we mere mortals can do to increase the number of pixels in the image, and this is what determines how good that image will look when it's blown up.
Logically, if you have only a few pixels, they will look good when crammed together on a small screen, but will necessarily be spread much thinner to fill a large screen, and so the image will become grainy.
Many cameras have the facility to alter the image size depending on whether you intend to send the
pic as an email, watch it on a small screen, a big screen, or print it.
Many cameras also have the facility to reduce the number of pixels in a finished photo, but they can't increase them.
An example would be my Panasonic ZS20, I can elect to take photos at resolutions of 0.3, 3, 5, 7, 10 or 14 mega pixels.
I can then reduce them on the camera to any size that I want, plus keep the originals.
The higher the number, the better quality will be the picture, but it will also take up more room on your SD card.
With the available size of SD cards these days, that's not normally a problem.
For example, a 16GB SD card will store over 80,000 photos at 0.3Mp, around 5,000 at 5Mp, and about 2700 at 14Mp. You will get less if you take movies as
well. I can also increase these numbers further by opting for a coarser picture quality setting, but I always use the fine setting.
Not too many of us take more than 2700 images before downloading to a storage device, so use settings over 7Mp if you wish to get good results on a TV screen, and go all the way if you want to print.
You can always reduce images down to 0.3Mp for posting on the web or viewing on the computer, and this can often be done on the camera or via a photo management program.
As has been stated, you will normally see the size of of the file when you download it to your computer, if it is less than 3MB it is too small to get a decent 6x4 print and only reasonably viewable on the TV.
At 0.3Mp the file size will be just a few KB, so that gives you an idea of the variance.
Going into the digital zoom region of your camera when taking distance shots will also reduce the picture quality, and the total zoom ratio is normally restricted to a lower figure on the higher MP settings. Again for example, at 14Mp I can get a maximum zoom of 80X, at 7Mp I can get 112X and at 0.3Mp it goes out to 168X, but at that zoom, the image will be very poor.
Each individual photo file size will vary with the make up of the photo, level of zoom, picture quality setting, aspect ratio, etc.
Hope this is of some assistance.
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