What determines the quality of a digital photo?

What determines the quality of a digital photo?

Mark Comon (Vice President, Paul's Photo, Torrance, CA) gives expert video advice on: Can a digital camera capture high-quality video?; Can a cell phone capture high-quality stills?; Can a video camcorder capture high-quality digital stills? and more...

What makes a great digital picture? First of all, it's photographer skill. You've got to know how to hold and point and capture the subject with the camera. That's number one. Number two, you need a lens quality. Lens quality is far more important than any other aspect in digital photography. And if you look, I can show you examples from three and four and five megapixel digital cameras with premium, excellent quality lenses that blow the doors right off the ten and eight megapixel cameras with lower quality lenses. So look for lens quality. Number two, you do need megapixels to be able to make enlargements. But megapixels only gives you picture size. That's all it does. Chip size is also huge. The bigger the imaging chip in the camera, the better the prints are going to be. That's why the SLR cameras take much better pictures than the compacts, because the imaging chip on the SLR is a little bit larger than a postage stamp, while the imaging chip on your compact cameras is a little bit bigger than the nail on my pinky.