Resolution - How Much is Enough?

Few aspects of digital photography causes as much debate as the importance of resolution or the amount of "megapixels" a camera has.  As you may know  the structure of a digital photograph contains picture elements, or pixels, that are the tiny building blocks of an image.  Millions of these pixels form together to produce a photograph.  It follows then that the more pixels a camera has the greater its ability to produce the finest details in a scene.  During the introduction of digital photograpy this was an important consideration however today it has less bearing on image quality and camera choice as there are considerablely more important elements (such as sensor size and lens grade) in a camera that determine image quality.   

A few points:

• The resolution (ie number of pixels in a digital photo) says less about the quality of the image than about the size in which it can be printed on paper.
•  The higher the resolution, the larger the image file - and the smaller the number of image files that will fit on a memory card.
• You can vary the resolution depending on what you want to do with the picture.  For example, if you are only going to email the image or upload to Facebook the less resolution (and smaller the file) the better.