Digital camera resolution is a measure of how many pixels there are in the CCD that records a picture. Some cameras produce bigger images than the CCD by interpolating, or inventing, more pixels. The more you have on the CCD, the more detail you will see in the picture - providing the lens is good.

A camera with a resolution of 1280x960 pixels produces pictures with nearly 1.3 million pixels which needs almost 4mb of space for storage. This is clearly impractical for non-professional users. To overcome this, most cameras compress the images using a method described by the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) although some use other proprietary methods.

Compressing an image discards some of the information, and the more the image is compressed, the more detail is lost. Cameras normally allow a degree of compression to be set for each shot. The selectable options are usually labelled something like FIne, Normal and Basic. In addition many cameras allow resolution setting, providing VGA (640x480) in addtion to the full resolution. Use of these features allows the user to trade-off the number of images stored against the image quality.

The quality setting typically provides a selection of 1:6(Fine), 1:12(Normal) and 1:24(Basic) although exact ratios vary from camera to camera. Some models provide a non-compressed setting fo those highly detailed shots where any loss is unacceptable.

General, everyday picture taking can be confidently done with the camera set to Normal quality and its highest possible resolution. Only if very fine detail is required, or you need to print the images to a large size, should Fine, or uncompressed setting be needed.

So the thing to remember is that the resolution of a digital camera is basically fixed and is a matter of the lens and CCD. The Fine, Normal and Basic settings are to do with the image compression and do not alter the resolution.