Buying a new Canon camera can be very confusing as there are so many terms that sound like a foreign language. In order to be able to make a good choice in your purchase of a Canon digital camera, you will need to know the meaning of some basic terms pixels, white balance, dpi and ppi. All these terms will in some ways affect the quality of the image that a Canon Digital camera will produce. In this guide, we will explain about what a pixel means and how it will determine the quality of the image.

Pixel is the short for the term PIicture-Element. All Canon Digital Camera takes pictures and format them as small squares. A digital image might look seamlessly like a normal photograph but if you magnify it to a close range, it actually comprises of a mosaic of millions of small and different colored squares stitched together. Each pixel is further defined by 3 numbers from the range of 0 to 255 from the red, green and blue color channels. For example, a pixel can be defined by 35 red channel, 70 green channel and 255 blue channel. By using this coding system, there are 16 million possible combinations of color coding. In computer terminology, pixel colors are referred by an 8 bit (bytes) number. Therefore a computer will recognize the color of a pixel by 3 eight bytes numbers, a number for each of the 3 color channel.

Beside from using pixel counts for the display of digital images, nowadays, Digital Camera manufacturers also uses pixel counts to grade the capabilities of their digital cameras. Canon has digital cameras which range from 5 to 10 million pixels. They are normally classified as megapixels cameras because one mega pixels is equivalent to one million pixels. When we say a camera can take 5 megapixels pictures, this mean the digital image which the camera takes have 5 million pixels in it. The numbers of pixel a digital camera has is not important when the image is used displayed on a monitor. However when you need to print these images, the pixels do matter as the higher the picture count, the sharper and crisper the prints will be.

You need also to consider whether when talking about pixels counts that you are referring to "Total Pixels" count or "Effective Pixels" count. Total Pixel count refers to the fact that all pixels that we see in a digital image are counted. Because in the final digital image, the pixels at the edge of an image are not used. As such the actual pixel count will be less. Effective Pixel count refers to the count only after all these edge pixels have been discounted.

If you use a Canon 5 megapixels camera, the quality of its 5" by 7" is of excellent quality. Printing larger pictures like 8" by 10" will result in lesser quality but is still of decent quality. Nevertheless, if you are printing 8" by 10" pictures as a norm, then it is better if you buy a 8 to 10 megapixels Canon Digital Camera.