David Pogue challenges the megapixel myth.

(Interesting article. Keep in mind most people I know barely print half of their photos and then only to 4X6! Unless you're making transit shelter szie photos, 6 is plenty. Even with six, I have published to billboards & transit shelters. Pogue's point is concentrate on features or qualities in the camera that will help you make better photos, reagardless of file size.)

By DAVID POGUEPublished: February 8, 2007

For an industry that’s built on science, the technology world sure has its share of myths. Thousands of people believe that forwarding a certain e-mail message to 50 friends will bring great riches, that the gigahertz rating of a computer is a good comparative speed score, or that Bill Gates once said “640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody.”

But one myth is so deeply ingrained, millions of people waste money on it every year. I’m referring, of course, to the Megapixel Myth.

It goes like this: “The more megapixels a camera has, the better the pictures.”

It’s a big fat lie.

The camera companies and camera stores all know it, but they continue to exploit our misunderstanding. Advertisements declare a camera’s megapixel rating as though it’s a letter grade, implying that a 7-megapixel model is necessarily better than a 5-megapixel model.

Breaking the Myth of Megapixels - New York Times