web pics

[bagelgeek]

Can anyone suggest what camera they recxcomend to take pictures for posting to your business website, ..3 megapixels? 8 megapixels and such,.  Thanx

[Rob Pomeroy]

Depends more on the quality of the camera than the number of pixels; also depends on the size of the picture you just want to produce.  Go for quality rather than numbers: read some reviews and make your choice.

I would suspect that even the cheapest of the brand name cameras will do what you want, adequately, these days.  But if you want people to be able to download large versions of the pictures (e.g. if your business were photography!) you would need to look at the issue a little more carefully.

[soybean]

If you just want some photos for graphics on a web page, there's absolutely no reason to use a high megapixel camera.  In fact, you should focus on balancing image quality with image file size.  Do you want to keep your web page files reasonably small so that dial-up users don't have a long wait for the page to load?  If so, then you want to optimize your web page images.  By optimize, I mean strike a balance between image quality and file size.  Many websites to a poor job of optimizing images for web use.

I took the photo of the church on this website with a 2MP Fujifilm camera: http://www.hosanna-lutheran.org/.  It's about 45Kbytes but could easily be a smaller file, for a picture that looks exactly the same.  In fact, I sent an optimized version of about 30Kbytes to the webmaster but he's being a little hard headed and has not replaced the current one with the smaller file.