Every digital camera comes with the option to select the image resolution and effects. It is very essential to understand the different resolution sizes and their relevance to varied jobs like email, poster printing, postcard printing and normal photograph printing.

There are fundamentally two types of digital camera resolutions i.e. VGA and megapixel. Even though VGA only cameras are hard to find, it is common in mobile phones only.

Megapixel does not determine the quality of the image, but just the size of the image. For example; shooting pictures for posters or banners might require the photographer to select the highest megapixel present on his camera.

This is because the higher the megapixel the larger the printable image. This means that shooting posters under 8 megapixel may limit the size of the poster. Similarly, while shooting images meant for e-mail attachments, it is better to stick to resolutions such as VGA, 1.3 or 2 megapixels as the image size is tinier i.e. less than 1MB per image.

The resolution of the camera is also linked to the amount of memory the camera brags of. Suppose shooting for home parties or family may require a large number of images to be clicked.

Setting the camera image resolution to 5 megapixels or less will let photographer click a lot more images than he could have if it was set to 8 mp. Most of such pictures are printed at 5″x7″ or may be even less. So, shooting more than 5 megapixels doesn’t make much difference.

On the other hand, while shooting professional snaps of fashion models, nature, wildlife, landscapes and other such subjects, the photographer may have to opt image resolutions of 10 megapixels and more. This will allow for greater image reproductions in a variety of sizes.

Among home users, numerous prefer shooting at the highest available resolution in their cameras since there are many softwares that allow sizes of the images to be lowered i.e. a thumbnail can be generated from a 8-mp image but not vice versa. Hence, shooting at the highest megapixel is just a way of staying at the safe side.

To sum up, it is ideal to click the photo in 0.5 mps to print it to 3×5 inches, 2 megapixels for 8×10 inches, 4 megapixels for 11×14 inches and so on. A resolution of 10 megapixels and above will produce a printable copy of 20×30 inches in average quality. The same resolution will deliver an 11×14 inches best quality picture print out.