What you need to know:

A Pixel (despite its funky spelling) was named for Picture Element. These little fellas are like little light bulbs. Everyone has seen a scoreboard, lights are used in patterns to create letters. Pixels are the same concept, except that they can emit the colors Red ,Green and Blue (the RGB color model) or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (the CMYK color model). Your screen and your camera both use combinations of either RGB or CMYK to create the many colors that you see in your pictures.

Back in the day, when digital camera makers were trying to find a foothold in the new market, some bright (like a pixel) marketing dude decided to hype the pixel count on their new camera. This quickly became a huge selling point, as digital cameras in those days were simply trying to get enough resolution to display your standard 4X6 print. As Ken Rockwell points out in his blog “For normal 4×6″ (10x15cm) prints, even VGA (640 x 480 or 0.3MP) resolution is just fine. Digital cameras did this back in 1991!” My friends – we’ve been duped.

David Pogue (the NYT technology columnist) has even done tests with several pictures blowup to a large size at 5, 8 and 13 megapixels. He asked random people in NYC to identify the 13 megapixel image. None could! (Perhaps ironically, the header image for Pogue article is rather pixilated, as it was blown up to fill the space…)

So what IS a good way to choose a camera? This might sound dumb, but choose the one that produces the pictures that you like the best… Pixels don’t really matter, but things like color and tone are important. You should be happy with images shot in any light – colors should pop (if that’s what you want) and phrases like metallic tones should be avoided (again, unless that is what you want). Read lots of reviews on CNET.com for basic choices with price ranges or die hard camera sites for more expensive tastes. Do the research and try to find photos created with the camera you’re looking at. The best way to do this is to browse Flickr’s Camera Finder – a brilliant little program that searches through the millions of pictures on Flickr and lets you browse by make and model.

As with everything in life, there is one good exception to the rule. Pixels do matter if you stink at photography and are forever cropping out only tiny fractions of your photos (say someone’s head out of a class portrait). There’s just no way that you are going to be able to get enough data for a good print if you choose a small percentage of the original.

So that’s really it – more than you wanted to know but enough to make sound brilliant while enjoying your next geeky martini party (I should copyright that drink immediately).

Best of luck with the photos!

~ab