On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, Peter Alefounder wrote:
> 2. At least 10 megapixels.
It seems this is not necessarily a good thing.
There is a tradeoff between number of pixels and the size of the pixel
on the the detector. As the pixel falls below around 350um across, the
noise increases and image quality degrades. 10M or so should be fine on
a digital SLR, but on a compact you're actually better off nearer 3M to
5M pixels ... if you can still find one. It seems the demand for more
pixels has resulted in a recent and marked degradation in performance.
Unfortunately I can't remember where I saw this report, but it's on the
'Net somewhere. Probably worth a search on some logical keywords to see
if you can find it.
FWIW, I'm a huge fan of Olympus. They're great cameras, mount as USB
mass storage and have always been very reliable.
I chose a 3M pixel camera with a 10:1 zoom as a better compromise than
the then 5M + 3:1 alternative.
One other thing of note .. with compacts, think carefully about a
viewfinder. My wife's camera doesn't have one and using the camera in
bright sun is a bit hit-and-miss and/or hits the batteries quite hard
driving the big display anythink like brightly enough. Mine has an
electronic viewfinder on which the resolution is low but normally
adequate when on autofocus, giving an SLR-type behaviour in a compact
camera.
ATB,
Gordon.
--
Gordon Scott http://www.gscott.co.uk
Haiku: Tragic Irony
Imagined Life Without Walls
Windows Crash to Floor.
Linux ... Because I like to *get* there today.
