The very first time I get to use a digital camera is somewhat 10 years ago which my company bought. It was a Sony Mavica which uses floppy disk as the media to store the photo file. It was a stone age technology and a bulky piece of camera plus it eat battery like no one else. It capture a rather small resolution photo and the 1.44MB floppy disk could keep dozens of photo. But well, that is where the digital photography era started. I was impressed and really want to have a camera that could take photo and save it into computer.

Soon after, I get to buy my very first digital camera. It was a Minolta digicam with 2.3 MegaPixel resolution. Back then, it was really something to Hoo Hah about as not many people own a digital camera and the price was a cutthroat. The Minolta 2.3 Mega Pixel digicam cost me over RM2,000! And the worst part is that the camera freeze when I bring it to Shanghai. It was a cold weather there of about 5 degrees and the camera just froze up and stop working at all, WTF!

Right after that, the battery cover broken and the camera there after has been kept as an historic artifact in my closet. Guess I would tell my grand children how my first digital camera looks like few decades after this lol.

Today, digital camera comes in all shapes and sizes. The price has drop tremendously that every Bill and Joe could own one. But what puzzle me is that the image resolution is getting more and more. It was like every camera brand tends to show off their super high Mega Pixel capability on their product.

A regular 5 mega Pixel Camera

I guess you could hardly find a digital camera below 5 mega pixel in the market nowdays. But for what a normal consumer need is just this few mega pixel for a normal 4R to 8R print out. There is just no significant difference in the print out quality even if you have more than 10 mega pixel camera.

10 mega pixel DSLR camera

Photography enthusiast would certainly go for a DSLR camera and today's market DSLR camera usually has 10 mega pixel and above. For those who are pro and like to perform photo editing work, a higher resolution photo such as 10 mega pixel would help more a bit.

Crazy 20 mega pixel DSLR camera

It was already in the market and these types of camera usually tend to be the camera's company flagship product.
Canon EOS 5D Mark II is capable to snap a whooping 21 mega pixel photo resolution. That would be equivalent to 5616 x 3744 pixel! And just recently, Sony announced their flagship professional camera, the Sony Alpha 900 with a crazily 24.6 mega pixel resolution! Just what people want to do with a 6048 x 4032 pixel photo?

The new Sony Alpha 900 flagship DLSR camera

Well, I guess the file size itself could already made my computer hang from opening them. A typical 10 mega pixel photo could already stand around 5MB in size (jpeg format). I wonder how big the size could be for a 24.6 mega pixel file, especially if it was in RAW format lol!

Technology will keep on advances and the battle for greater mega pixel will continues probably until no computer could support them anymore hehehe. But them I still could not get a clue why?
Why so much mega pixel?

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