Topic: Acronyms

Puzzled by strange photography acronyms or abbreviations? You’ve come to the right place!

The complete Shutter Muse Photography Glossary lists and explains the most commonly used terms in photography and you can find that glossary right here. This is the best place for beginner photographers to start to familiarize themselves with the photography lingo while they are exploring tutorials, reading books and learning photography software. A lot of the time, we can also give you a link to a more in-depth article on the topic if you’d really like to sink your teeth into it!

This page you are on right now only lists the photography acronyms and abbreviations from within the full glossary because sometimes that’s all people are looking for.

If you’ve seen something missing that you’d like us to explain, please send us a note via the suggestion form and again, you can find the full glossary here.

VGA

What Does VGA Mean When Talking About Photography? VGA or ‘Video Graphics Array’ refers to an image resolution size of 640 x 480 pixels (0.3MP) at an aspect ratio of 4:3. The use of VGA to describe a specific resolution began in the early 1990’s when VGA, or 640 x 480 resolution was the standard video resolution output of the graphics chips onboard many home PCs. VGA was superseded in around 1996 by SVGA, or ‘super video graphics array’ which features a resolution on 800 x 600. The VGA resolution is now extremely out of date, but serves as a …

XGA

What Does XGA Mean When Talking About Photography? XGA or ‘Extended Graphics Array’ refers to a video display mode with a resolution of 1024 x 768 in 256 colors. XGA superseded SVGA (800 x 600) in 2002 becoming the standard output resolution of most home computing graphics interfaces. As such many websites were subsequently optimised for the new standard. In photography terms XGA equates to 0.79MP, which doesn’t seem like much compared to todays technology, but during the mid 2000s it was considered to be a high resolution for a video monitoring device. If you were a pioneering digital photographer …