A Question....

[Dirty Harry]

Will a 10 Meg camera only take 10 Meg photos if the lighting etc is right to do so ?

[dazza74]

Will take a 10 meg picture whenever you click the shutter regardless of conditions

[Yandros]

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

Will a 10 Meg camera only take 10 Meg photos if the lighting etc is right to do so ?

Actually, that's quite an interesting question. If you don't have enough light, you need to turn up the sensor sensitivity (either manually or automatically), and this increases sensor 'noise' (random dots). You can't really see this noise too much unless you start looking at the image up close, so what this means is you can't print the image very large, and you can't crop it heavily. It's effectively a 'lower megapixel' image, because although it's still a 10MP image, it's fuzzy if you view it up close.

So, there is a big difference 10 million pixels, and 10 million USABLE pixels. So, when choosing a camera, high ISO performance is becoming more important than pixel count.

[DPinBucks]

Don’t confuse the number of pixels of the camera’s light-sensitive screen with the size of the pictures which are stored on the memory card.

The 10 million pixels on the screen are compressed by the camera into a JPEG file whose size depends on what you have told it to use: high, medium or low compression, say. The higher the compression, the lower the underlying resolution. On my 10Meg 400D, a 2gb card will hold about 440 low, 766 medium or 1350 high compression images. Uncompressed, it would hold about 50.

To answer your question, from one point of view the camera always takes 10 Meg pictures; from another point of view it never does. The ambient conditions are largely irrelevant (but see Yandros’ comment).

[Dirty Harry]

Yeah well im getting roughly 4 meg photos with it being set on 10 meg

[Valleyman]

Are you saying you get 4 MegaByte pictures from 10 MegaPixel photos?
We refer both as "Meg", but they're completely different. The Meg just means "Million". As in millions of bytes, or millions of pixels.

MegaByte is the filesize on your computer.
MegaPixel is the number of pixels the camera sensor uses (For example a 1600x1200 is 1600x1200/1000000=2 So this would be 2 million pixels, or 2 MegaPixels).

[Dirty Harry]

Yes i am.


So its all good the way it is ?

[Yandros]

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

Yes i am.


So its all good the way it is ?

Yes. jpg files are compressed, so about 4Mb is about right.

[Valleyman]

It's fine.

You'll actually notice that simple pictures (big uniform blocks of colour, not much texture etc) will have smaller filesizes, and very complex pictures will have larger file sizes.

All of them will still be 10 MegaPixel though.

[Dirty Harry]

Thanks guys

Out of interest, does the black tint on the outside of some photos just mean a lack of light ? I just use Intelligent Auto on my Lumix.

[dazza74]

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

Thanks guys

Out of interest, does the black tint on the outside of some photos just mean a lack of light ? I just use Intelligent Auto on my Lumix.

I think your referring to a vignette (could be wrong). Most lenses cause a picture to get darker in the corners of images it's easily fixed in photoshop afterwards.

[Yandros]

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

Thanks guys

Out of interest, does the black tint on the outside of some photos just mean a lack of light ? I just use Intelligent Auto on my Lumix.

I think what you're describing is vignetting. All lenses do it to some extent.

Vignetting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia