Nikon 8 and 10 megapixel?

Question

is there really that much difference between an 8 and 10 megapixel camera? I can get an 8 megapixel nikon for 150 dollars but the 10 megapixel is 230 dollars. Is the 10 really worth it?

Answer 1

Zero difference in image quality.

Answer 2

It depends on a few things.  What will you be using the pictures for?  For showing on a digital picture frame, emailing to friends, putting on a blog, showing off on an imaging site, you can get by easily on an even lower megapixel count.  For small prints, either will be great.  For 8x10 enlargements, you can still use either.

It will matter if you do a lot of enlargements, especially with cropping and photoshopping.

Answer 3

no noticeable difference by eye if enlarging a great deal you may see a slight difference. go for the 8mp

Answer 4

If I were you, I would have bought the 8M camera, since it is from Nikon.

To get into more specific technical details, a 10 megapixel camera will definitely give you better granularity for your pictures since it adds more pixels to the image - means, image will be "slightly" less blocky than 8M. However, unless the "quality" of each pixel exposed is not the same for both these sensors, you cannot say that 10M camera is better. eg: if the diagonal length of the exposed area of sensor is the same, say 1/1.8" each, then the total amount of light that falls on 10M pixels and 8M pixels is the same and the 8M sensor will capture color and brightness per pixel more accurately. In this case, 8M sensor could give better quality than 10M sensor. Else, 10M sensor "may" give better quality. Megapixel and sensor area together determine the quality of the raw exposed image.

Further to this, the quality of Image processing and JPEG encoding algorithms matter. These vary depending on which analog front end and which imaging processor is used in the camera. Same camera vendor can use different processors and analog front ends in their product lines and can use different design houses to tune their image quality on these cameras. So it's not just the megapixels that determines the quality of an image.