Digital cameras

[Skinny Shooter]

Originally posted by 338winmag
[B]In my opinion megapixle have no influence how clear your picture will be.
As more megapixle you have on your camera, as bigger you can enlarge your pictures.
Its quality of your lense which decide if you get clear picture or not.

model 70, don't meant to hijack your thread but just want to clarify a couple of things.
I'll have to disagree a little bit on camera MP rating.
Good glass is important but is only one of the variables affecting image quality. And most current cameras already have that.
But, comparing a 1mp image to a 6mp image taken with the same glass and camera would be no comparison.
I'll put it this way, if an image is captured with approx 1 million pixels and then the same image is captured with approx 6 million pixels, that 6mp image most certainly will have better detail.
You may also be surprised to find out that some digicams have glass that is of higher quality than a DSLR. Some digicams have smaller sensors than a DSLR does with the same megapixel rating.
The pixels are different in size which leads to a difference in dynamic range of how the scene or image is recorded and what detail is retained or just plain lost. The larger the pixel, the larger the dynamic range.
Fuji uses octagonal pixels as compared to other cameras that use square pixels instead. To simplify, Fuji claims the odd-shaped pixels increase their dynamic range which leads to capturing more of the transition of highlight to shadow in an image. This results in a smoother less noisy (grainy) image. Not sure I agree totally with Fuji but the end results are incredible.
Some digicams do not use their entire sensor to capture an image which leads to less effective pixels being utilized when you press the "shutter" button.
The relationship of how a particular lens interacts with the CCD or CMOS sensor chip is important also.
The higher a MP rating of a camera the less the jaggies will appear on the edges of your subjects. For instance, a rifle photographed on the diagonal across your viewfinder will show the "stepped" edges of pixels as it is enlarged. The more pixels in a sensor, the less this problem shows. All images have it, some just to a lesser degree as the MP count goes up. Jaggies become less visible as the sensor or image resolution increases.

Good illustration of the bird photo. Some of mtmiller's images were "flat" looking and needed some levels or curves adjustment. Which is a good example from my earlier post that all captured images need some kind of tweaking. And that film card inkjet printers are a gimmick. The most ideal approach is to shoot in a RAW format (if your camera supports that) and adjust your images in the camera's aquire module software like Kodak Photo Desk. Then export your image as a Tiff. Making adjustments to a Tiff file is much more preferrable than a Jpeg file. It's been explained to me this way as to why. A Jpeg contains 1 byte of color/detail information per pixel. A Tiff contains 25 bytes of color/detail information per pixel so a Tiff will "accept" that tweaking much better than a Jpeg.
But then there are ER (extended range) Jpegs which allow you some some of the post-shooting adjustment capability of a RAW-image file.
Allen