Digital cameras are now the standard, replacing the old film cameras everywhere. You may be on your second or third digital camera by now. Looking at all the technical specs of today's models can be confusing, and I want to point out one thing that may help you avoid paying too much for one of these digital wonders: the number of pixels you need on your camera. This is commonly refered to as the amount of megapixels (or MP) your camera has. A pixel is a tiny dot of a single color on your photo. Thousands, and often millions, of these make up that favorite picture of your friends at a party or the the inevitable shot of your cat Fluffy that you put up on your MySpace page. But just how many megapixels do you really need? I hope to shed some light on that for you. It all depends on what you plan to do with those photos. Are you planning to post them on your blog? Or are you going to have them printed to put in an album? Are you going to use them as the desktop image on your computer, or do you plan to have them blown up to poster sized prints so you can feature them prominently over your fireplace? If you know that you're mostly going to post your pictures on the web, consider this: most computer monitors can't display more than 2,050,000 pixels on an image sized to fill the screen. That's 2.05 megapixels. If you print out a really high-quality 3x5 photo, it's likely you'll use 5 megapixels or less. If your camera has a higher megapixel rating than this, then you are storing more detail with each picture than your display medium is capable of using. The extra information only takes up room on the memory card and doesn't add anything to your viewing experience. The only time you'll need the latest camera with 9-12 megapixels is if you're a professional photographer or you just like blowing up photos to wall-sized prints! So don't let anything over 5 megapixels entice you to pay a lot more for a camera. In fact, rather than concentrate on megapixels, I recommend making sure the camera takes really good pictures. You know, good color and not washed out. Stuff like that. A good place to learn about these aspects of different models is to read online reviews. One such place I like to check out is CNet.com. You may insist on paying a little more and taking the higher quality photos to plan for the future when we all have computer monitors the size of a barn. If so that's fine. Otherwise, save some money, enjoy your new camera, and may Fluffy live on in your digital memories forever! | 
