OK, so Doreen and I went to the Mystic Aquarium on Saturday and took a bunch of pictures, she with the 3.1 MegaPixel Olympus, and I with the 640x480 (0.3 MegaPixel?) Creative WebCam Go. Needless to say, mine were awful! In fact, they were so bad as to be unusable. I suspect that there is a problem with it, but some pix did come out OK. I'll try to upload these someplace later, but for the issues at hand, here is an example of one of the pictures taken with the Creative: Rupert Helping Navigate. On Sunday, we went to Jumptown, but because of the wind, I only made two jumps, and Doreen was not there to take pictures, so I only got a few "around the DZ" shots. Here is one taken with the Olympus: Rupert Finished Packing. This is a full resolution (2048x1536), 24-bit JPEG with some compression. There is a mode to store files with less compression (== better image quality, same number of pixels), but I didn't try it. Here is the same picture at different resolutions (created in PaintShop Pro): 1707x1280 (83%) 1280x960 (62%) 1024x768 (50%) 512x384 (25%) This should give you a good idea what the various camera sizes will get you. The 1280x960 is about what a 1.2 MegaPixel camera will do, the 1707x1280 is 2.1, and of course the 2048x1536 is the 3.1 MegaPixels. So in order to decide what is best, print some of these out on a decent-quality ink jet printer at photo quality on good, photo quality paper. You will see what the difference is. The deal with the printers is that they will print at resolutions much higher than these photos, but can do more with more pixels. For example, an 8"x10" photo on a 1200x1200 dots-per-inch (dpi) printer prints a total of 115 MegaPixels! It fills these in using its own algorithms, which are pretty good, but for a 3.1 Mpix image, it will obviously have to do less "filling in" than it would with a 1 Mpix image. I think there is a difference, but you print them and judge for yourself. Another thing to take into consideration is how much editing you want to do. With more information, the software for smoothing, etc. has more to work with. Even if you don't do all this fancy stuff, you will probably want to do the occasional cut and paste, or at least some cropping. Starting with a larger image will allow you to still have plenty of resolution in the smaller image: Just Rupert. Anyway, after considering all of this, I am planning on going with a 3.1 Mpix camera. I think I could get good pictures from a 1 Mpix, but I want the flexibility to be able to print blow-ups of cropped images. Besides, with the 4 and even 5 Mpix cameras coming out now, the 3s should start dropping in price. Hope this helps! Carl
