Digitals are just Dots. Lots and lots of Dots. In the "old days" of real film, we used to use silver crystals in the 35mm film emulsion - same as dots. If you've ever seen "pointalism" in a museum, it's an example of the artist using minute hand-inked "dots" to create an almost photographic scene when viewed from a short distance away.

All the Dots in a digicam image are saved as a File. Each Dot can have it's own color and brightness. Besides this, the file also needs to know the order or location of each of the Dots in the image or else it would look more like a wacked-out Picasso instead of a DaVinci. Fortunately, your camera knows how to do this all for you, so the Dots are all saved "in a row" and this is what you end up with on your floppy or memory card after the camera saves the image.

A Pixel is just a Dot. I think the marketing dept. got a hold of this technology and said "Dots don't have any pizazz, let's call 'em *Pixels* :)

All of your cameras have the ability to record varying numbers of Pixels. When you get a "Megapixel" camera, all it means is that the camera can record 1 million pixels, or dots, per image. Nowadays, cameras are coming out with 2+ Megapixel resolution - this represents about a 16x20 print in 35mm photography!

But here's a problem. The more pixels you put into an image file, the larger the file gets. This means you can get less pictures on a disk. It also means it takes longer to e-mail or download it.

There's good news though! Unless you are printing big 16x20 prints or something very high in resolution, you don't NEED all those pixels. On-line, we live in the "world of the small." This means that you can't have too-big photos on the screen and you can't have it take too long for the photo to download. So we are always making photo files SMALLER here at MNRealty.com - we are throwing all those extra pixels away! :)

1)Get out your manual for the camera if you have to (Oh NO!!!) Yes, the manual is actually a GOOD thing because it can tell you where all the buttons are that you've never used or tried.... Your assignments will NOT be to read anything in the manual, but you might want or need to look something up in it to follow the assignments. Keep the manual by your computer and/or camera for the class duration...

2) Find the "Quality Setting" for your camera. Some say Low-Med-High, or Good-Better-Best, or something like that. It might be a button or else you change it by going into the menu settings on the camera screen. Use the manual if you have to - but find this feature.

3) Change the Quality setting and notice how many shots you can get on your memory. As you go "lower" in quality, the number of shots you can take increases. Now, change the setting to the "lowest" setting for your camera.

4) Take a photo of something convenient that is not moving. Now, change the camera setting again to the "highest" setting possible. Shoot the same photo again that you just shot before.

5) Take the two photos and "download" or transfer them to your computer using your normal programs.

6) Make a 4x6ish inkjet print of each shot (doesn't have to be the fancy paper, etc.) My guess is that you will not see much of any difference in the quality of the two prints. This is because even good inkjet prints do not need all those dots to make just a normal sized print. Did it take any longer to print one vs the other?