[bodex]

Yes, inflated mega-pixels is mostly a marketing scheme to the average consumer... it's always the first thing people ask when someone is showing off their new point-and-shoot. As Nate said, most buyers nowadays are only going to be using their images for online use, which require very little in the way of mega-pixels to push out a nice image.If you are going to print out sizable copies... then yes, more mega-pixels will help make for a crisper image. If you find that you need to do a lot of cropping to your images, then again more mega-pixels will help. If you are posting images on facebook, forums, flickr, etc... you need very little.