Clutter is even thinking about issues like this.

Even my dektop wallpapers need to be 3.8 million pixels — with an aspect ratio of 8:3. To shoot that on a 4:3 camera it’d take 7.7 megapixel (3200×2400). On a 16:10, it’d be 6.4 megapixel (3200×2000).

Wanting to do any cropping at all increases the pixel count substantially. Even a 100 pixel margin brings that 4:3 camera up to 8.7 megapixel.

So what if the photos are 20MB; disk is cheap and capacity per dollar growing rapidly. Newegg says ?$100 for 500GB. That’d be around 0.4¢ per photo. (Backups, of course, raise the price somewhat)

(I agree fully with the other points people have made. Pixels are worthless if filled with distortions and random noise.)

All of this assuming, of course, that I typed into my calculator correctly

Going for a higher megapixel sensor and setting it to shoot at a lower resolution will often provide a higher quality image with less noise or artifacting. However, I agree with the basic tone of many people’s comments, and would advise against being caught in the megapixel trap.

The tiny lenses on compact cameras don’t.

As RKB said, cropping is important. One of the advantages of digital photography is that it no longer takes a huge budget to take photographs like a professional, in the sense that you take a lot and worry later about which ones end up being worth keeping.

The file size argument is completely irrelevant, and somewhat laughable. If you can afford a digital camera, you can afford a 500GB hard drive, which can be bought now with rebates for around $100 or less if you shop around. If you take more pictures between now and when hard drives double in size again than will fit on that 500GB drive, then either 1) you’re saving way too many pictures, as most of them are probably crap or 2) you’ve fallen out of the range of what would be considered consumer photography, and shouldn’t be looking at point-and-shoot models anyway.

It makes me sad that I can’t use any of the pictures I took in my first several years with a digital camera as a desktop background at all. Even now, cropping a photo from my current 5MP HP point-and-shoot leaves me with very little room if I want it as a desktop background. LCDs are getting more and more pixels per inch, especially on laptops, and if you’re like many in the creative class, a dual monitor setup is becoming a necessity. 3200×1200 desktops aren’t that uncommon now, and if you want to still have photos that are useful in five or ten years (I assume you do?), you probably ought to plan and budget for expanses in computing technology.

So if you have a compact in the range of 10mp unless you’re shooting under perfect conditions it’s going to be difficult to crop quite so ruthlessly. (This is especially true at higher ISO with smaller sensors)

On the other hand I would hazard to guess that most consumers with compacts don’t want to make prints as large as those as prosumers with SLRs.(So image quality isn’t quite as essential).

Already this summer — since upgrading from a 3MP point-and-shoot to a 10 MP digital SLR — the handful of most memorable photos are those that were cropped from a much larger scene, but didn’t suffer from the resulting loss of pixel counts.

My wife and I just had a baby and were looking for a camera that would satisfy our need to take videos and shoot attractive pictures.

Eventually we settled on the Canon G3, because it has the ability to use off-camera flash, attachable lenses and we found an inexpensive 4GB SD card which can take over 1 1/2 hours of video.

We found everything on eBay and came shipped for less than $300, which is much less than we would have spent on any new camera, one without f-stop / apeture / ISO settings.

Not to mention you can find fisheye lenses on eBay for less than $40! What bullsh*t point-and-shoot can offer that?!

I find it difficult to accept that it is now standard to have 7MP in a compact, that is getting close to our digital SLR. Realistically you are never going to take as good pictures with a compact as with a SLR and therefore will not want to print a cropped portion of the picture or to print it very large and therefore need large megapixels.

I think this is a case of manufacturers offering something that the consumer doesn’t really need.