Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Shoot at the maximum resolution of the camera unless for some reason you're trying to save space on your memory card. Lowering this resolution will not and can not improve your images.

Yes it can. If the camera just does a simple average of pixels when reducing the image size then it would have the effect of reducing the noise in the image. The camera could go a step further than that and do some more clever processing along the way, though I'm not sure if any of them do.
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