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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

The Canon's Camera guide about Pixels.

By Tim Harris

Buying a new Canon camera can be very confusing as there are so many terms that sound like a foreign language. In order to be able to make a good choice in your purchase of a Canon digital camera, you will need to know the meaning of some basic terms pixels, white balance, dpi and ppi. All these terms will in some ways affect the quality of the image that a Canon Digital camera will produce. In this guide, we will explain about what a pixel means and how it will determine the quality of the image.

Pixel is the short for the term PIicture-Element. All Canon Digital Camera takes pictures and format them as small squares. A digital image might look seamlessly like a normal photograph but if you magnify it to a close range, it actually comprises of a mosaic of millions of small and different colored squares stitched together. Each pixel is further defined by 3 numbers from the range of 0 to 255 from the red, green and blue color channels. For example, a pixel can be defined by 35 red channel, 70 green channel and 255 blue channel. By using this coding system, there are 16 million possible combinations of color coding. In computer terminology, pixel colors are referred by an 8 bit (bytes) number. Therefore a computer will recognize the color of a pixel by 3 eight bytes numbers, a number for each of the 3 color channel.

The use of pixel count is not only confined to digital imaging. All camera manufacturers nowadays also categorized their camera quality also according to the pixel count their camera can take. Depending on the type and model of the camera in question, most canon digital camera can take between 5 to 10 megapixels pictures. A megapixel is equivalent to a million pixels. What this mean is that a 5 megapixel camera can take an image with 5 million pixels in it. In terms of image printing quality, the more pixels a digital image has, the sharper the printed version of the image is.

You need also to consider whether when talking about pixels counts that you are referring to "Total Pixels" count or "Effective Pixels" count. Total Pixel count refers to the fact that all pixels that we see in a digital image are counted. Because in the final digital image, the pixels at the edge of an image are not used. As such the actual pixel count will be less. Effective Pixel count refers to the count only after all these edge pixels have been discounted.

Depending on the size of the pictures that you wanted to print, a 5 megapixels Canon camera, makes very good quality 5" X 7" printouts and decent 8" X 10" printouts. But if you are going to make 8" X 10" printouts most of the time, then a 8 megapixels or 10 megapixels Canon camera will be more ideal choice to purchase.

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