Photography

[beaverkill]

Originally Posted by A Polinger

Aaron,

I was a photographer for a paper for 4 years and we used cameras between 4 to 6 mega pixels. For the paper you did not need high res but you did want hi speed for sports. The cameras we were using ran between $4000 to $5000. This was about 6 years ago when papers were just starting to go digital.

AP

6 years ago the best high speed cameras were 6 mega pixel - and speed was more important than resolution given the coarseness of newsprint line screens. These days those same high end fast cameras geared toward action photography are in the 16 mega pixel realm. And most printers available are able to reproduce a much finer image with more detail than a newspaper.

Remember that dynamic range, bit depth and the physical size of the photo receptors are as important in the quality of pixels as the number of them that are captured. Dynamic range and bit depth refer to the range of light to dark values that can be captured and the number of levels (or shades) expressed within those values. And the larger the pixel size the cleaner and less noisy the capture is, generally.