The simple answer is absolutely not. Surprised? Just because you buy a digital camera with 12 megapixels or more does not mean your pictures will turn out fantastic. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that megapixels are one of the most important things to consider when purchasing a digital camera.

Most people that will just be taking snapshots and printing them at 4 x 6 will be just fine with 3 to 5 MP. If you even think you may want to enlarge your pictures to 8 x 10 then you should consider at least 5 to 8 MP. On the other hand if you want even larger prints you will want around 12 MP. Finally I would suggest going with the most megapixels you can afford.

Camera manufacturers or at least some of them tend to exaggerate on the megapixels their cameras produce. My suggestion is to buy a camera brand that is well known and will help eliminate this problem. You may not have the budget to purchase such a camera and that is fine. Some of the brands I recommend are Canon, Fujifilm, Kodak, Leica, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Samsung and Sony, but not neccessarily in that order.

Optical quality is just as important if not more so than megapixels. A higher quality lens at a lower megapixel rating is much better than a low quality lens at the same megapixel rating. That is why you get a higher quality picture with a digital SLR than with a less expensive point and shoot

Another thing that affects the quality of your pictures in connection with megapixels and lenses is the image sensor in the camera. There are basically 2 types of sensors, the CCD (charge coupled device) and CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor). These sensors are what captures the digital image on your camera. The research that I have done leads me to believe that neither is actually superior to the other, however the quality of the image sensor will affect your pictures.

To sum all this up it is mainly a combination of megapixels, optical quality and sensor quality that will affect your picture quality. Of course there are other factors that will also affect picture quality. I’ll write more on those factors soon.