Bill,
I'm not saying there is only one answer in the zoom vs pixels debate! I'm only saying that for the majority of people they should go for zoom and not for pixels. Nowadays, they do the opposite because they are misinformed.
Follow me on this one:
A "Joe Average" wants to buy his first digicam, and steps into a shop. The salesman will 99.9% of the times say: "go for the 3MP as you can enlarge these to A4 (letter) size without having the chance of getting bad print results".
Now THAT is a very simplistic reasoning!
But to the salesman it makes sense as a 3MP chip costs more, so he earns more money. Of course, our Joe Average is buying the story. After all, he's used to getting ALL his pics printed, so he thinks he will do the same with every digital shot he makes.
This is what our Joe Average forgets:
-Once you own a digital camera, you get "trigger happy". After all, you can take as much pics as you want, it doesn't cost anything (yet).
-A 2MP shot (1600x1200) will look incredible on a 21" screen or a TV, but can never be enlarged to the same size on paper. The highest you can (hopefully) go is 8x10 (A4- or lettersize).
-Printing shots will cost money, about as much as film prints, but probably even more as you would rather like bigger prints (as you are already used to seeing them in a bigger size on your PC).
-You could print yourself, but you'll have to buy a printer, color cartridges and foto paper. These cost money too, especially the paper.
-There is free sofware on the web to create digital albums. Albums that can be put on CD and can be shown on PC or on your TV (via DVD).
-Pics on paper will eventually fade away (20 years?), but there is no color loss on any digital format.
-Digital formats can be changed to a newer and maybe better format later, and techniques may evolve. But prints...
Being an average Joe myself, I quickly came to the conclusion that from now on I'd only need printouts for other people who want a copy of my pics, and especially people who do not have the knowledge of the latest technology (like elderly people). And maybe I'd also need one or two pics to hang on my wall or put on my desk.
Seel, you're certainly not the "Joe Average" out there Bill, as you say you'd like 98% of your shots printed out as enlargements. To me, printing 10% of my shots is closer to the truth. But as I said in my previous message, out of those 10% not all will need to be enlarged to A4 size. Maybe only half of them (and now I'm already over-estimating). And out of those 5%, there may be some that I could have taken with panorama mode, or that I could enlarge further with enlargement techniques in editing software.
Also, for some of these pics the extra 1MP may not be needed, as they enlarge just fine to A4 format, because the object itself has not got that much detail in it, or because I have a superior lens that compensates for (at least part of) the extra megapixels of the other camera.
My guess is: about 2 to 3% of all the 2MP pictures of "Joe Average" will have "a problem" because he wants them printed AND enlarged. Well, the "problem" is just that they will have slightly less detail than a 3MP pic. That's something he can probably live with.
Now the question is: is it worth investing that much money into a bigger chip, just for those pics? Or would you rather invest that money (or part of that money) in a better lens with more zoom reach?
Now, zoom reach is something awkward: everybody out there will say "I'm quite pleased with my 3X" ...until they get used to more!
And once you have that extra zoom and start calculating the number of pics where you needed more than 3X, you'd be very surprised.
Ask yourself these questions:
-How much pics turned up only average because you could not get close enough? (Your kid is playing in the garden but his "pose" is unnatural as he was aware of your camera as you were "in his face", or the action shot of Michael Jordan slammin that BBall in the oponents net, ...)?
-How much pics were not taken at all, as you just could not get there (the rare bird on your lawn, the butterfly on your kids head, ...)?
You'd be surprised what pics you can take with that extra zoom. And you'd be surprised how many! More than 2 or 3%, I can tell you that! How does 30% sound? It's like that for me. And I am just a Joe Average; my previous cam was a Nikon Nuvis APS 3X zoom.
-I can live with the fact that some of my pics cannot be printed at A4 size with the same amount of detail as a 3MP camera; I just print them at a bit less than 8x10 (7x8.75 ?) and the jaggies dissapear...
-But now that I have 10X I know that I could no longer live with a 3X as I know now how much good opportunities & thus pics I missed in the past.
So the conclusion for our "Joe Average" will have to be: go for the zoom, not the pixels.
Of course, I agree this is only part of the story. A lot of other factors are important as well: the quality of the lens, the possibilities of your camera for special situations (portraits, low-light,...), the quality of your CCD (lot of people forget that one 2MP chip is not like the other 2MP chip), ... and last but not least the capabilities of the photographer.
Ciao,
J.
