Most people don’t know this about cameras, but even the smallest, cheapest camera can shoot a picture with enough pixels to produce a poster the size of your living room wall.
In this day and age where almost no one is printing photos, it’s a capability that is pretty much useless. It is also very destructive! I would suggest that as soon as you get a new camera, or better yet, check your regular digital camera, for the size of the pictures you are shooting. Look for the Menu that shows these numbers: 18M 15M 8M 5M or 3M. This indicates the size of the photo you are shooting. 18M is large enough to print a picture for your living room wall. The sad part of this is that many a beginner photographer never considers setting this to 5M or 3M. What happens if you don’t? Complete disaster!
At 18M your memory cards will fill up quickly and you will run to the store to buy more and more memory cards. That sells cards, but you can save yourself time and money by shooting at 5M which is large enough to produce 8x10 or 11x17 photos. Do you really print that many photos? Most people these days are posting online. Smaller photo sizes are best for this. Many web photo display services automatically reduce your huge photos for display online. Shooting 5M is better. It has enough size for detail in printing. If you post photos on personal web sites you might get away with 3M—what used to be called “email” photos back in the day when we sent most of our photos by email.
Tragedy awaits with 18M photos. Many beginners don’t know that if you keep your 18M sized photos on your computer, you are filling up your memory with huge photos that will soon overload and crash your computer. If you use a back-up system for your photos, your back-up company will soon charge you more money to protect those unnecessarily huge photos. Save yourself some money, prevent computer crashes and over-payment by adjusting the SIZE of your photos down to 5M.
How do I know these things? I’ve watched too many beginners blindly shoot themselves in the foot. Take my advice and check your camera for photo SIZE. Bring it down to 5M and you’ll be doing better. No more overloaded discs just as you were about to shoot that prize-winner. No more mysterious computer crashes. Live in peace and wonder. Yes, wonder. Why did they invent 18M in the first place?
