Mega-pixel clarification

[Joyce Matthews]

I recently took several pictures of the same scene. I noticed when reviewing the pictures they all had the same dimensions but the mega-pixels for each photo was different for each picture. Can someone explain to me what causes the difference in the number of mega-pixels in pictures of the same scene? I am trying to get an understanding of what influences the number of mega-pixels used. Thanks.

[dcclark]

I suspect that you are confusing megabytes with megapixels.

Megapixels refer to the number of pixels in your image. If two images have the same dimensions, then they have exactly the same number of pixels.

Megabytes refer to the number of bytes (units of data storage) needed to store your image. Due to very clever people, there are many ways to compress images -- basically, store them in a smaller amount of space, by throwing away some data that you are unlikely to notice anyhow. For example, if you have a big blue sky in your image, that can be heavily compressed and your resulting image will take up fewer megabytes.

However, there will still be the same number of pixels in the image.

Hope that helps!

[Joyce Matthews]

Thank you so much. That helps a great deal.