I recently subscribed to The Digital Photography Weblog and I have been pleasantly surprised with the amount of really good stuff I came across there.
People often go on at me about my poor 6 mega pixel camera compared to their 7 or 8 meg pixel point and shoot and why I bother with this expensive camera with such low pixel count.
Well in this article they explain the difference between a DSLR's 6 meg pixels and that in the shiny point and shoot or worse camera phones, check it out:
The dirty little secret of digital camera sensors is that they capture only monochromatic light intensity, and due to some technical wizardary (hack!) of putting colored glasses, can they guess what color might be relevant for that pixel. This interpolation, it is pretty messy - really - the good news is that larger sensors(SLRs) do a far better job of capturing the light intensity and thus color accuracy.
Well said, sums it up pretty well. They also point to a nice glossary of terms for DSLR's.
Sure - and actually 6mega good quality pixels is all you need unless you want to produce huge prints, in which case they're billboards, not photos. Too much talk about megapixels in my opinion. (and I do have a 13mp camera.....)