Stefanie Khaw

Nowadays, with mobile phones regularly sporting built-in digital cameras, the term “pixel” is bandied about quite a bit.

I’m sure you’ve heard many phone vendors telling you that this cameraphone and that cameraphone have so many megapixels.

In fact, you might have asked some vendors how many megapixels a particular cameraphone has. But do you really know what megapixels actually refer to? Have no fear, the explainer is here. And the topic for my inaugural column is none other than… pixels!

 
What’s it all mean?

The word pixel is short for picture element. It’s the smallest addressable unit on a computer display screen. Think of it as an individual dot out of all the other dots which form a graphic image. A graphic monitor displays an image by dividing the screen into millions of pixels, arranged in rows and columns.

These minute coloured dots are so close together that they appear to merge to form an image.
A megapixel is normally used to describe the resolution capabilities of a digital camera.

One megapixel is equivalent to one million pixels. The more pixels your camera has, the more detail your camera can capture and hence, the more you can blow up an image before it starts getting grainy.

 
Choosing the settings

Many cameraphones let you choose the size of pictures you take. They often include a low, medium and high setting. For optimum results, you should program your cameraphone to the highest setting.

You may not be able to see a difference on your display screen but the difference will be quite evident on a computer screen. Your phone probably won’t tell you explicitly the maximum resolution it is capable of. You’ll have to do some math for that.

Common picture quality options available would be 640 x 480 pixels, 1216 x 912 pixels and 1600 x 1200 pixels. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, just know that it corresponds to around 0.3 megapixels, 1.1 megapixels and 2.0 megapixels respectively. Better?

 
The Pioneer

One of the first cameraphones by a mainstream manufacturer was the Nokia 7650 which hit the stores in 2002. Being the first of its kind, it roused up quite a bit of excitement back then, even with its minuscule capability of managing only 0.3 megapixel images (tiny in retrospect but back then, it was considered cutting edge).

Right now

Now, let’s look at where we are today.

Earlier this year, Samsung showcased its amazing SCH-V770, a whopping 7-megapixel cameraphone which is capable of manual photography (don’t go rushing out to your camera shop, it’s not available here yet). Detractors say it’s more of a camera with a phone added on as an afterthought. I’m no detractor but I must say it looks remarkably similar to a Sony Cybershot.

The SCH-V770 is an anomaly. Most phones don’t offer anywhere near that many megapixels.

If you’re seriously into cameraphones, and can get one that reaches the “2.0” barrier, you’d have a pretty good device in your hands. Sony Ericsson’s K750i and Nokia’s N-Series each boasts 2.0 megapixels.

Many cheaper cameraphones offer 0.3 megapixels but if you want to get a “good” cameraphone (I define this to be at least 1.0 megapixel), you’re looking at paying at least RM1,000.