How Many MegaPixels is a VGA Camera
While high end camera have gone upto and more than 10 MegaPixels there are still many VGA Digital cameras in the market, specially the ones with Mobile phones. If you ever asked the dealer hom many MegaPixels is the VGA camera and ‘VGA cameras are a Class apart’, ‘They are not termed in MegaPixel…’ or similar to one of this reason is being conveyed to you then the dealer is misleading you either because of ignorance or for intention.
The largest image size supported by VGA camera is 640 x 480
640 x 480 = 307200
Divide it by 1000000 (or 1048576 for purists) and round off appropriately to get the value in MegaPixels
307200 / 1000000 = 0.3072 or 0.3 (rounded)
So a VGA Camera is in fact a 0.3 MegaPixels Camera.
Similarly, for a camera with largest image supported as 1280 x 1024, the calculation would be as :
1280 x 1024 = 1310720
1310720 / 1000000 = 1.3 MegaPixel (rounded)
Tis true. Generally, megapixels are like PageRank or Alexa Rank … ie virtually meaningless. My current camera has 13 of them, my last had 6. It’s not twice the sharpness or twice the resolution ( actually, when you multiply the X and Y counts, you get the total, but to actually double resolution you need to double the sample count on both axis, yielding 4x the number of pixels ). More importantly, because of better sensor technology, I can crop out a 6 million pixel region from the 5D and it will have measurably more detail than the same area from my old D60.
With that said, 640×480 pixels isn’t large enough to make a small print. Moreover, anybody who’s going to cut corners to this extreme and deceive their customers about it shouldn’t be trusted to make sure the other elements of a good camera system are in place … like the optics, for example.
Forrest
3 Jan 08 at 6:09 pm
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Sometimes it depends on the brand and not the pixels.
paulette
7 Sep 08 at 12:52 pm
@paulette
Is it true that canon quoting 3 megapixel is different than kodak’s?
I always knew that x*y/1000000 gives the camera mp size and the higher size of the image only helps if someone is very interested in taking bigger prints.
Tech Blog
6 Oct 08 at 7:00 pm
good n clear explaination abt resolutions to define megapixels .. i also want to knw d full form of vga camera .
jatin
10 Oct 08 at 8:11 am
Im just confused: one product is 0.3mp (vga) and the other one is 1.3mp. What is more clear between the two or what’s their difference?
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