This might be more of a 'novice' question, but I couldn't find the answer in this fine site's faq's or product evaluations. My wife is a cake designer and I've been taking pics of her work with my SLR, scanning them at 100dpi or so, and emailing .jpg copies to her customers. These file sizes are around 50k or less -- not the best quality, but adequate for efficient sending/downloading. I'm anxious to cut to the chase and join the digicam scene and have been checking out the Casio QV-2000ux to do the job. But, I'm confused on its resolution capabilities. What size .jpg file could I expect at its 800x600 and 1200x1600 res, from low to high quality? Could I dictate picture size, or is it dictated by the camera's megapixel capabilities? Is there such a thing as too many megapixels, or will megapixel produce a mega jpeg file? Hope I've been clear enough (and haven't shown my digital ignorance too much). Thanks in advance, Bill

-- Bill Prodigy (BUTFL@Prodigy.net), January 25, 2000

Answers

Mega pixel is only a reference to the two pixel dimensions being multiplied, or a total pixel count of the image. The mega was attached when the number jumped over one million. The amount JPEG compresion will dictate your final file size at any given dimension. You will be able to reduce the picture for email purposes.

-- Don (deldon@hotmail.com), January 26, 2000.

From my casio qv-2000ux manual:

1600x1200: fine- 850kb/image normal- 600 economy- 350

800x600: fine- 200 normal- 150 economy- 120

From my experience, that's about right. For the web, I find the 150 kb looks great. The 850 k size should allow you to print an 8x10 and not be able to tell the differnce from film....

Good luck. I love the quality of the pics, the camera's features are great, but I had a defect, and Casio gets an F- for customer service; I won't even begin to flame here.

Z

-- Ken Zemach (kzemach@hotmail.com), January 28, 2000.

Dear Bill,

OK, the thing with JPGs is that they are lossy compression meaning that a lot of things contribute to the final file size, including the type and complexity and color of the specific image in question.

It is not possible to generalise about this matter except to say that with a camera with specs as good as the Casio, you will be able to take whatever image you get, and manipulate it to a image size, and a file size, which suits your needs. As others have pointed out, CCD resolution capability is not the sole determining factor where JPG file size is concerned.

I would susgest that most of the time, you should take at maximum resolution (i.e. 1600x1200) and save at high quality, just in case you should ever need to have that picture done at 8x10 inches.

Then, after transferring to the computer, you can resize the picture down to a smaller picture (most people have their monitors set for 800x600 or so, and sending them a 1600x1200 file means they either have to scroll, or zoom out to view the whole pix anyway. For your sort of purpose, I would reckon that 640x480 should be adequate to let customers see things with sufficient detail.

You can resize to 640x480, and then apply jpg compression of whatever degree of losslessness you want. This translates to image quality -- higher compression would mean that there are more JPG compression "artifacts" or irregularities when zoomed in, whereas lower compression generally means better pixs.

For the purpose of apply jpg compression, an image should always be high or true color i.e. 12-bit or deeper in color depth.

HTH.

KH

-- K.H. Tan (kht7@columbia.nospam.edu), February 25, 2000.