The Canon's Camera guide about Pixels.

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. 

Beside from using pixel counts for the display of digital images, nowadays, Digital Camera manufacturers also uses pixel counts to grade the capabilities of their digital cameras. Canon has digital cameras which range from 5 to 10 million pixels. They are normally classified as megapixels cameras because one mega pixels is equivalent to one million pixels. When we say a camera can take 5 megapixels pictures, this mean the digital image which the camera takes have 5 million pixels in it. The numbers of pixel a digital camera has is not important when the image is used displayed on a monitor. However when you need to print these images, the pixels do matter as the higher the picture count, the sharper and crisper the prints will be. 

When considering pixel counts as an indicator of picture quality, you also have to see the differences between "Effective Pixels" and "Total Pixels". When we talk about "Total Pixels", every pixel in an image is counted But in the final image, not all pixels are counted. The pixels at the edge of an image are normally disregarded. The term "Effective Pixels" is used to describe the remaining pixels after all the edge pixels are discounted. 

With a 5 megapixels Canon Digital Camera, you will achieve excellent picture quality prints of 5" X 7" prints. 8" X 10" prints will be off decent quality. However, if you are going to print more of 8"X 10" size images; it is recommended that you purchase a 8 to 10 megapixels Canon Digital Camera. 

---------------------
- Some Advice on Purchasing Creative Compact Cameras
- Digital Camera : A Celebration Of Life
---------------------
Tim Harris is a canon camera enthusiast. For tips on choosing and buying cameras, do check out Canon OS Camera website. Camera 40D Digital Rebel XTI 3D Blog