- Digital Camera Resolution - A digital photo is composed of millions adjacent dots spaced so closely that you can’t distinguish individual dots. Imagine all this on a stretchy piece of paper. Now if you stretch the paper the dots are pulled apart. If you have a lot of dots to start out with you won’t notice much if any difference, but if you have to few you will start seeing the differences between adjacent dots. Where this becomes important is what your intent is with the photo.
- Image Quality Settings - All digital cameras have the option of saving photos in the jpeg format, pretty much the default for digital images. It’s popularity arises from the fact that it is a format allowing different levels of compression resulting in smaller file sizes. Understandably there are trade offs. More compression means lesser quality. It’s hard to understand why they even provide the option of normal, fine, or superfine. A ‘normal’ setting will result in a crappy quality picture even on a rather forgiving computer monitor. Always use superfine or whatever they choose to call it.
Optimal Digital Camera Resolution Settings
Digital Camera Resolution and Image Quality Settings - Almost all digital cameras have two types of resolution related settings: Actual resolution, and normal, fine, and superfine settings for each resolution (also known as quality settings). The two are only indirectly related. Whereas resolution determines the number of pixels in your photo, the quality setting determines the compression level of the file, which typically is a jpeg file.
Why It Matters - As camera sensor technology advances and memory chips get cheaper and more compact, digital camera manufacturers are one upping each other with resolution. This is great for those who really need it, but it also creates unnecessarily large files for many users’ needs. Though hard disk space is abundant and cheap, standing at a photo kiosk waiting for your 2 or 3 dozen of 7 meg photos to load can be painfully slow, not including any time spent cropping you may want to do. This article will give you some background on choosing camera settings in line with your needs.
Displaying Digital Photos on Computer Monitors - Most computer monitors have a resolution of about 72 dpi (dots per inch), regardless of size (such as 800×600, 1024×768, etc). Larger monitors don’t have anymore resolution than smaller monitors, they just have more dots because they’re larger in size. So if you intend your photos to be displayed on computer monitors only, than you really don’t need more than 72 dpi. This means that if you have for example a typical 14 x 10 inch monitor (advertised as a ‘17 inch’ (diagonal) monitor), of which about 2 inches are occupied by taskbars, headers, etc., you would need about an 800 x 600 photo (approximately (14-2)*72 x (10-2)*2 for those who like math). And in fact if you check image sizes on web pages you will find that they pretty much stick to this resolution of 72 dpi. Anything higher is just a waste of bandwidth.
Printing Digital Photos - The target resolution for photos to be printed should be 300 pixels per inch. This is not to be confused with home printer dpi. For more on printer dpi stay tuned for future articles. Most people have their photos printed at either 6 x 4 or 7 x 5 inch. This means that if you want maximum quality, your camera setting should be 6*300 x 4*300 = 1800×1200 for 6 x 4 prints, or 7*300 x 5*300 = 2100 x 1500 for 7 x 5 prints. The exact numbers vary between cameras.
Starting Points For Camera Resolution Settings:
| Usage | Pixels |
|---|---|
| 6 x 4 Print | 1800 x 1200 |
| 7 x 5 Print | 2100 x 1500 |
| Medium Computer Display | 800 x 600 |
| Large Computer Display | 1200 x 750 |
Note that your camera probably does not have the exact resolutions as listed above, and may even only list the first number (1800 as in 1800 wide). Just use something close. And remember, always use the highest quality setting (superfine).
