“Recent announcements from major camera makers have offered a parade of a slim, pocket-friendly models with resolution of 9, 10, even an unholy 12 megapixels. Thats about the same, if not more pixels, than the average SLR digicam.
Now if you believe the teeny little pink thing in your purse is going to capture images of anywhere near comparable quality to even a low-end SLR, I’ve got a war of national liberation you might wanna buy.
That’s because cramming all those pixels into a slim case means shrinking the image sensor. That means shrinking the individual pixels/photo sites and/or the spaces between them. The result is noise, which become more and more obvious the closer you come to viewing photos at actual size.
Our recommendation: Don’t buy a point-and-shoot without visit a camera weenie site such as DP Review, where you’ll find comprehensive camera specs that include the size of the image sensor. Anything with a denominator (the number under the “1/” for you high school math dropouts) larger than 1.8 inches means you’ll likely be sacrificing quality for portability and pixels you don’t actually need, unless you happen to be in the billboard business.”
Do you agree? What megapixel camera do you have? Do you think there is a point of diminishing returns?