There have been a lot of controversy and heated debate recently on the 3″ LCD monitors on the new DSLR from both Canon and Nikon. Nikon quoted a resolution of 922,000 pixels on their new D300 and D3 and Canon quoted a resolution of 230,000 pixels for their new 40D and 1Ds Mark III.

Some people noted that Nikon’s 3″ LCD display has a VGA resolution of 640 x 480. If you do the maths, that is equal to 307,200 pixels. So how did Nikon come up with a figure of 922,000 pixels. To put it simply, each pixel is made up of 3 individual red, green and blue color pixels, so if you multiply 307,200 by 3, then you would get roughly 922,000 pixels. [1]

Then suddenly, some of these people began to claim that Nikon’s 3″ LCD only has a 15% more pixels than Canon’s  230,000 pixels 3″ LCD, that somehow, Nikon was deceiving the public by quoting a higher resolution by multiplying the pixels by 3 and Canon was not doing that. [2]

Well, actually, Canon was doing exactly he same thing as Nikon. Canon’s 3″ LCD has a resolution of 320 x 240, which is equal to 76,800. If you multiply that by 3 (color pixels), then you would get a figure of 230,400 pixels.

For large LCD computer or TV displays, resolution is always quoted “horizontal no. of pixels” x “vertical no. of pixels”, for example 640 x 480, 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024 etc. However,

As long expected and rumored. Nikon just announced the new D3 and D300. Together with the Canon announcement of the 1Ds Mark III and 40D just a few days ago, the battle for DSLR between Canon and Nikon is really heating up. It is a really exciting time for all DSLR users. With the heated competition, it can only be good for all of us. They will drive each others to make better and cheaper cameras for all of us eventually.

You can read about the new Nikon D3 here and the D300 here.