At nearly every party, inquisition or casual chat, after the “which Mac should I get” question, I’m often asked “which digital camera should I buy?”

My answer is simple: Get one made by a real camera company that has a good lens and uses normal batteries. The victim then responds with a string of Japanese company names and numbers which includes the word “megapixels” and something a friend said.

To which I reply, as my wife cringes and heads back to the punch bowl: “Magapixels are bullshit.”

If you’re not a professional photographer shooting REALLY big pictures, there are more important things to be concerned with than the number of dots on your thingy. Learn to take good pictures with a cheaper, easier to use camera and you will get better photos. Being able to replace the battery in Peru is more important than the quantity of bits in your box. Falling for more is more better will just cost you more - for something that’s usually not any better.

So now, famous David famous Pogue of the NYT puts his quarter on the rail - once again demonstrating how some of the people are fooled all of the time.

Breaking the Myth of Megapixels
By DAVID POGUE

For an industry that’s built on science, the technology world sure has its share of myths. Thousands of people believe that forwarding a certain e-mail message to 50 friends will bring great riches, that the gigahertz rating of a computer is a good comparative speed score, or that Bill Gates once said “640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody.”

But one myth is so deeply ingrained, millions of people waste money on it every year. I’m referring, of course, to the Megapixel Myth.

It goes like this: “The more megapixels a camera has, the better the pictures.”

It’s a big fat lie. The camera companies and camera stores all know it, but they continue to exploit our misunderstanding. Advertisements declare a camera’s megapixel rating as though it’s a letter grade, implying that a 7-megapixel model is necessarily better than a 5-megapixel model.

Oh, there’s more: LINK

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 8:25 am and is filed under Tips, Arts, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.