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How-To Guides

Getting Started | Still Images | Moving Images | Additional Operations

Digital Camera: Getting Started

While this guide was written with a Sony Mavica digital camera in mind, these instructions are designed to communicate the basic concepts behind nearly every digital camera. If you need additional assistance, please call 974-9670 or email itc@utk.edu.

When using a digital camera, you will need to determine the level of quality you want in your final pictures before you begin shooting. Most cameras allow you to change the resolution of the picture to a lower quality so that you can store more pictures on the camera media. Likewise you can increase the resolution for a better quality picture, but fewer photos can be stored.

Megapixel:

The term megapixel means 1,000,000+ pixels. More pixels mean higher resolution, better quality, as well as a physically larger picture and a file that takes up a large amount of disk storage space. Older Sony Mavica cameras take pictures in 640 x 480 mode, which is 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels high (307,200 pixels or .3 megapixels).

Computer screens normally display at 72 pixels per inch, where as most printers print at 300 pixels per inch. The Mavica’s lower resolution means that you cannot print a film-quality 8”x10” photo with this camera, although the images look fine on a computer screen.

Resolution/Size:

Resolution means the quality of the photo that you are taking. DPI, or Dots per Inch, means how many dots of color per square inch are on your photo. The higher the DPI the clearer the photo and larger the file size. Using low-resolution pictures on the Internet (or in an electronic portfolio) are fine with a DPI of 72-100, since the primary display medium is the computer screen. When storing images on a CD or diskette for personal use a DPI of 150-200 is more than adequate.

When taking pictures with the higher megapixel digital cameras, bring the images into a graphic editing program such as PhotoShop and reduce the resolution to 72-100 DPI before inserting the image into the portfolio.