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Hello and welcome to my blog. I enjoy messing around creating websites, YouTube videos, blogs and other stuff. I write this blog in my spare time to share my enthusiasm for technology, gadgets and the internet.

01/06/2010

Understanding pixels, megapixels and video resolutions

Megapixels can be quite confusing. They are generally used in cameras to tell you how good the picture will be. One megapixel is one million pixels. A pixels is a tiny dot. If you look at a screen very closely you can just about see the pixels.

An example of where you might find megapixels is on a digital camera box. At the moment, a good amount of pixels for a digital camera is probably around 10 megapixels.

In films and TV, standard definition is 720×480 pixels which can be multiplied to give 345600 pixels. This means the total resolution of one frame of video at standard definition is 0.3456 megapixels. In high definition video, there are two different types - full HD/1080p HD and 720p HD/half HD. 720p HD is 1280×720 pixels which gives 921,600 pixels when multiplied. That is nearly one megapixel. Full HD is 1920×1080 which gives 2,073,600 pixels which is about 2 megapixels for each frame. This shows how much better picture quality you can expect from HD compared to SD but HD also takes up far more storage space.