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,