Picture Size taken by Camera

Megapixels and Megabytes are two different things.

turnercatcatcat said:

I have set my 12M camera to the highest resolution possible but the camera only takes pictures that come out at 2 -3M. Can someone explain? thank you

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I'm guessing that you are getting JPG out of the camera and have you set to the highest quality JPEG? 12M camera with highest "quality" setting will produce 4 -5 MByte range JPEG files. If set to lower quality, it could be as small as less than 1 MByte.

BlazerFan said:

Megapixels and Megabytes are two different things.

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Yes. Your camera is probably producing files that are around 3000x4000 pixels. That equals 12,000,000 pixels, or 12 Megapixels. That's the number of tiny dots that make up your photo.

The size of the actual file on disk is measured in millions of bytes, or megabytes. That is not a 1 to 1 relationship with the number of pixels. Just like the size of a text document will not be the number of words it contains.

turnercatcatcat said:

I have set my 12M camera to the highest resolution possible but the camera only takes pictures that come out at 2 -3M. Can someone explain? thank you

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It could be a case of you using the digital zoom. Digital zoom is not a real zoom… it crops your image so it has the illusion that the image is larger. You are losing resolution as only a portion of the sensor is being used, so this might explain the loss in megapixels.

sounds like you are looking at the .jpg file size. This is a compressed file and has little to do with the amount of megapixels the camera captures. Oranges and apples.