The Truth About Digital Cameras

David Pogue is right that a 5 megapixel image will print well, but wrong about the implications this has for choosing a camera. First, generating a 5 megapixel test image by downsampling a higher resolution image will produce a smaller image with artificially high quality—unless you’re careful to use a really bad downsampling algorithm. Second, camera sensors and lenses matter. If you set a 13 megapixel camera to shoot at 5 megapixels, it will produce a better image than a 5 megapixel camera shooting at its maximum resolution. A more carefully designed test would show whether today’s printers are bad enough make up for these two factors.