Bob's Digital Photo Gallery

Effective Mega Pixels

Sony’s 3.34 mega pixel CCD:

- Number of sensor photo detectors: 2140 x 1560 = 3.34M

- Number of effective pixels: 2048 x 1536 = 3.14M

 

Interpolated (resampling) - Number of CCD Sensor Pixels

In-camera enlargement done before Jpeg compression is of better quality than on the computer. A Fujifilm Finpix S602Z, 3.1 megapixel SuperCCD produces a 6 megapixel image.

Macro or Close-up:

Optical ability to produce 1:1 or higher magnification
Close-up = 1:1 to 10:1
Macro = 1:1 to 50:1

File formats most common

Raw – image is saved without any processing by camera. The manufacture’s software is usually needed to do anything with the file.

Tiff – lossless, common, very large file, usually used if a lot of post processing is to be done. Often other file formats are converted first to tiff, before processing.

Jpeg – lossy file compression, allows for smaller file sizes to be saved. Can cause major loss of image quality.

Jpeg file compression

Many cameras allow several file quality settings for .jpeg files such as:

Olympus: Super High Quality (SHQ), High Quality (HQ), or Standard Quality (SQ)

Fuji FinePix: Fine, (F) or Normal (N)

This is done by applying different file compression ratios. A higher compression ratio results in a smaller file size, but at the cost of quality.

A few file size comparisons from Olympus C-8080, 8 megapixel camera