Quote Originally Posted by kittycats_delight
On my old camera you could reduce the size and it had no bearing on the resolution. The resolution (quality) was a completely different setting. I don't know squat about the canon A560 but thought maybe it would be in the manual. I should have been more specific. My new camera the size and resolution are one and the same. This is why I always take pictures on the highest quality/size setting. If downsizing the pic would mean losing the quality then I would choose to resize on my own afterwards.
You probably took pictures at a lower-quality but not necessarily at a lower resolution, which can usually be done. I know on my camera I can choose a resolution AND a compression (normal, fine, superfine, etc) and define each separately (as you say you can do with your powershot, same with my powershots ).

I always recommend taking pictures at the highest resolution and highest quality possible because, as previously mentioned, pictures can always be resized later on the computer and there will be no "oh crap, this picture is to small to print an 8x10", etc.

Another think; say you have a 6MP camera and the highest resolution/quality is 2048x1536 (just using this as an example!).

IF you chose to shoot images at 1024x768 instead to save space on your memory card, you are now shooting at HALF the megapixels.

In order to get a TRUE whatever-MP image from your camera, you will have to shoot at optimal conditions (highest resolution, highest quality), otherwise you are wasting your camera's potential to shoot at it's optimal quality and, therefore, wasting money on getting a higher-MP camera when you aren't even using those MP in the first place.

I hope that made sense... hehe




Also, to answer your original question, the reason why they looked fine until you emailed them is because when you view them on your computer, they are automatically resized to fit your screen. When you upload them to photobucket, photobucket automatically compresses and resizes them to a smaller size. When you print them out they look great because they were a high-resolution and high-quality image in the first place They looked HUGE in the e-mail because that is the size of the actual image, as stored on your hard drive. In fact, if you open your image on the computer once again, there should be an icon on the bottom of the screen to "view image actual size", and that is the real size of the image