Panasonic Lumix FX33 (Why are all pics 72dpi)?

almost all digital cameras take photos at 72 dp, they are usually around 40×30 inches too. You need a program such as photoshop to change the dpi to 300 and in turn your photo (depending on the megapixel) wil in turn be around 10×8. Long story short is even though it is 72 dpi is still an extemely high quality photo because of its size. Hope this helps.

The camera takes pictures with a certain number of pixels across and a certain number of pixels down. The “72 dpi” bit is probably a default setting in the software—which is reasonable, because most web pages assume 72 dpi for the sake of converting inches into pixels.

jcalebs, if you convert a 72 dpi photo to 300dpi in Photoshop, you’re not really getting true higher resolution photos, right? I can’t see how you can increase a lower res file into a higher one…seems only the reverse can be done.

My older Canon took photos at 150dpi as a default.

@rawpixels: If you convert the resolution and allow the dimensions to change, you aren’t getting higher resolution, but you’re making the picture into an 8” x 10” picture at 720 dpi rather than an 80” x 100” picture at 72 dpi.

The Panasonic Lumix FX33 is an 8.1 megapixel camera. Those are the total number of pixels you will be able to capture at its greatest size settings. That’s pixels per inch, or ppi, which is a digital measure, what you will see on a monitor. A printer, however, uses dpi or dots per inch, but most printer software will do the math for you.

Luminous Landscape does an excellent job of explaining resolution at this page

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/und_resolution.shtml

You cannot change the setting, what you can change is the size of image you will be shooting, based on pixels, the largest of which will give you your full 8.1 megapixels and allow you to print an 8 1/2×11 image nicely.

If you’re shooting exclusively for web, you’re better off to use a slightly smaller size because when you reduce the image in size, you’ll be asking the post processing software to toss out a lot of extra pixels, and you don’t get to choose which ones.

Most important, have fun, experiment, you can’t go wrong with digital photography, it has a mixed learning curve because you think you have a lot to deal with before you shoot, but you can easily do a lot of cleaning up or repair post processing more swiftly and easily.