Interpolated???

[chelsea25]

When a camera says it has 3.0 mp, but 6 mp interpolated, what does this mean?

Thanks in advance :)

[wideboy]

It means that it 'computes' what could/should be in the picture. Fills in the gaps I suppose. I wouldn't use it, it only leads to bigger files than are necessary. Stick with the 'native' resolution/megapixels.

[Buenchico]

Just a note to agre with Wideboy:

Manufacturers of cameras (and printers) love to use 'interpolated' figures to (apparently) boost the performance of their products. As Wideboy says, it's best to ignore them.

Over the past few years, manufacturers have been trying to find ways to make their cameras look better than those of their rivals. If we take a 'starting point' of a camera with 1 megapixels and no zoom (a fairly common type of camera a few years ago), manufacturers have constantly tried to improve on these figures. The number of megapixels has gone from 1 to 2 to ... at least 5 and possibly more. This means that some people are now taking pictures with file sizes over 5Mb, even when compressed into jpeg format!

Now I've got a test picture on my PC which I use to check on the quality of printers and inks. It's a head-and-shoulders portrait of a young boy. Printed on good quality A4 paper it produces perfect skin tones and you could take a magnifying glass to the print and examine the fine detail of every single eyelash on that kid. You can't tell the difference from a professionally printed photograph. The file size? 0.16Mb! So, what's my point? Simply that all those extra megapixels are wasted!! (All they do is waste space on your memory card).

Going back to that starting point of "1 Megapixel, no zoom" it's been the (optical) zoom figure which manufacturers have been slow to improve up until recently. Even now, you'll find many cameras offering "5Mb, 3x optical zoom" when what most amateur photographers really require is "2Mb, 10x optical zoom". (If you're wondering, my camera has 3.2 Mb - but I never set it to optimimum quality - and 10X optical zoom"

So, don't be conned by the manufacturers. Ignore 'interpolated' figures. Ignore 'digital' (rather than 'optical') zoom figures and, most of all, disregard all megapixels above 2!

Chris

[fo3nix]

I disagree with you there Buenchico.

A 2MP camera will give half-decent 6x4's, but nothing much larger.
A 3MP will give a pretty decent A4 sized picture, with a 4MP giving a high quality A4 print.

5MP+ are wasted on most people (that usually don't print any larger than A4 size), but not 2MP+!

[wideboy]

I agree with fo3nix. I've noticed a big difference in going up from 2MP to 4MP but unless you jump to a digital SLR with 8MP or more, a person probably won't notice much difference between 4MP and 5MP (I certainly didn't - law of diminishing returns?). The thing is that 5MP cameras are getting cheaper and people will buy them anyway.

I would agree with Buenchico about optical zoom. I used to recommend people to choose a larger optical zoom over the number of MPs if cost was a problem. Zooming in saves you having to enlarge a picture on the computer and lose quality. So this extra zoom can make up for the loss of pixels. (I never use digital zoom).