It's More Than the Megapixels

Your digital camera's sensor size also affects the quality of the photos you shoot with it. (For a ***really, really*** complicated reason why, click here.)

For those of us who aren't equipment junkies, here's a simpler explanation:

Let's say that you have a small, relatively inexpensive "point-and-shoot" camera that takes the same 6 or 8-megapixel images as my digital SLR. Assuming that we follow the same compositional, shooting, and lighting practices, shouldn't the pictures look quite similar?

Actually, no. And where's why:

Think of a digital sensor element as being equivalent to the size of the negative for film cameras. A 35mm negative is larger than some formats, but it's far smaller than, say, a 4x5 or 8x10 format.

My SLR relies on a physically larger sensor than someone else's "point-and-shoot" camera. That adds up to a higher quality image, and my resulting prints will probably be better than the other person's, ***all other things being equal***.

But it's more than just size. The small sensors used in consumer-level "point-and-shoot" cameras tend to be of a different type than the large sensors used in digital SLRs. (This also affects depth of field, but that's a subject for another posting.)