How would a camera that takes 640×480 digital photos be rated? Bad, Alright, Good?
June 1, 2010 by
Filed under Camera Binoculars
I’m considering purchasing a combination binocular/camera that takes 640×480 digital photos. I just do not know what quality photo that is. Would I be able to” fix” on a photo program its brightness and contrast, and could I crop and blow it up, say twice its original size, without loosing resolution?
640×480 (0.3 megapixels)is a very low resolution, as is often used on a standard webcam. The pictures would be fine to display on a website but would look quite awful when printed out or expanded to fill the whole screen. My camera has a resolution of 4000×3000 pixels (12.2 Megapixel) and it takes very nice pictures which look good when printed on A4 photo paper. Anything under 1.3Mpixel isn’t worth considering, really you need at least 4 or 5 Mpixel.
640×480 is exactly “standard definition”. In other words, it’ll only get as clear as if you were watching it on an old tv, like one from the 90s, getting tv off antennas. If you blow it up twice the size you would definitely lose resolution. In comparison, a $100 digital camera would take about 17 times more pixels. (10.0 pixels, as opposed to 0.7 pixels.)
The first digital camera back (that went onto a Minolta 7000 SLR) was VGA (640×480) quality and cost thousands. The first Nikon Pro digital cameras (B&W only and $30000+) were VGA.
How times change.
You would get a print of about 3.2 x 2.4 inches if printed at 200dpi. You’d be able to tell what you were looking at but I don’t think you’d gasp (in awe, at least). Drop the res further and it would look ridiculous very, very quickly. Upsampling wouldn’t help much.
I’ve just resized a picture in photoshop to VGA and it looked okay(ish) up to about 5x 3.5 inches.
Cropping the image would just make matters worse.
It would be rated bad if you want to crop and print images. This camera is 0.3mp. As a minimum to edit then get good 4×6 prints you should have 6mp. For 4×6 prints without editing you need 3mp. The more you want to edit and/or the larger you want your prints the higher mp resolution youll need.
If all you want to do is edit and display on your computer its still a very low resolution. Youd need more like 1024×960 or 1mp.
640×480 is quite small. That’s the original VGA resolution when Windows was just 3.0. Picture quality from a pair of binoculars would probably be not that good. Yes, you can adjust brightness, contrast and crop all you want but when you blow it up, you are losing much more quality to gain resolution.
That is the advantage of getting a high megapixel camera. You can shoot at maximum resolution and size it down without losing much quality.