Image resolution refers to either the number of horizontal and vertical pixels in the digital image or to the total amount of pixels in the digital image, even indicated in megapixel. One megapixel is equivalent to one million pixels. The term megapixel is also used by the digital camera manufactures as a reference to the resolution of the digital camera’s image sensor. The general rule is that a high image resolution will lead to high image quality but also to a large file size.

Pixel is abbreviation for Pix, picture, element and is the smallest square on a screen or digital image. By combining the pixels a digital image will be created. Each pixel has only one colour assigned to it which consists of one or three colour channels. A black-and-white digital image has only one colour channel that consists in general of 8 bits or 1 byte per pixel. A coloured digital image has three colour channels, Red-Green-Blue even called for RGB, which consists in general of 24 bits or 3 bytes per pixel.

For comparison purposes a conversion table over megapixel, resolution, print size and screen size definitions are available below.

Megapixel	Image Resolution	Print Size, 240 dpi	Screen Size
0,3	640 x 480	2x3	VGA
0,8	1024 x 768	3x4	XVGA
1	1366 x 768	3x5	WXVGA
1,3	1280 x 1024	4x5	SXVGA
2	1600 x 1200	5x6	UXVGA
3,2	2048 x 1536	6x8	WQXGA
4	2560 x 1600	6x10	QSXGA
5	2560 x 1920	8x10	QSXGA
6	3000 x 2000	8x12	-
7	3000 x 2300	10x12	-
8	3264 x 2448	10x13	-
9	3456 x 2592	11x14	WQUXGA
10	3648 x 2736	11x15	-
12	4000 x 3000	12x17	-

It is important to mention that the image resolution size is not standardised, therefore a digital image can almost be found having any number of horizontal or vertical pixels. A table over the number digital images that each memory card capacity can hold can be found at digital image storage table. More information can be found regarding the different digital image formats such TIFF, RAW and JPEG.

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