Megapixels

It's a word that everyone uses and it should really be the first thing you look at when buying a camera - especially if you're buying a phone. WRONG!

"Bro, iPhones are so shit, it's only got a 2MP camera and even the new ones only pack a 3.2MP"

What the fuck? Do you know what you sound like? Yeah, a sales person working at a retail store trying to sell you an iPod, but is unable to explain why my 8GB iPod shows less than 7.5GB.

Bigger isn't really better. People that try and sell you the biggest and the greatest gadgets really piss me off. Why does someone who's going to use their computer for email, facebook and maybe playing farmville need a quad core, 8GB memory with a graphics card that has more memory than my RAM? Oh and not to mention 2TB of HDD.

So back to the "megapixels". Pictures consist of small dots of colour that are joined together to give the effect of a picture. These dots of colour are pixels. Obviously, the more dots you have - the clearer the pictures are. If you have an image that's got 640 dots wide, and 480 dots high - you have a picture that's 307,200 pixels. aka 0.3MP. Wow that's shit tiny right? What do you even do with a 0.3MP photo? Probably only show like a tiny logo or something. WRONG.

There's a 0.3MP photo. Pretty decent don't you think? It's definitely bigger than what Facebook resizes your photos to.

So what's a good size? Well I think even 5MP is a waste. It's a totally different story if you're a photographer. Or if you like to print out your photos. But really, Anything over 2MP and the odds are, your computer screen won't even be able to display it fully. The screen resolution of my 13" MacBook is 1280x800 or about 1MP. Yeah so what's the point in having a photo that my screen won't even be able to display its full size.

All that an average Joe is going to do with their photos they've taken with their phones, is put it on facebook/blog, email it to a friend, or view it on their phone/computer.

This is what a 5MP+ photo does:

a) hog unnecessary HDD space b) take longer to load and c) make me write this blog.

BTW: if you're more than an average Joe and do a lot more with your photos - this post would be irrelevant. :) OR unless you're Ludwig and store like crazy original 20MP photos on your Flickr pro LOL