Verified answer

Any Digital Camera that has a video resolution of 640 x 480 (VGA) 30 frames a second (with sound) (MP4 or MPG2) which is roughly 307,000 pixels

or 0.3 megapixels

you see the megapixels only account for still pictures not movies,

true there are DC that record movies at 800 x 600 ( 0.48 MP) and some do HD ( panasonic TZ5) 1024 x 768 ( 0.78 MP)

but YouTube will automatically convert any quality video you upload to MP4 format which will be 480 x 360 or (320 x 240 for lower quality videos mobile phones etc.) resolution, MP3 audio and 30 frames per second upto 1 GB in size

so even if you record at a higher resolution, when you upload it to YouTube, it automatically gets encoded to MP4 (480 x 360)

YouTube accepts uploaded videos in the .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, MPEG and .MP4 formats. It also supports 3GP, allowing videos to be uploaded directly from a mobile phone

Stick to 'optical zoom' x3 the higher the optical the nearer the object comes without getting close to it. Digital zoom just expands the pixels through Interpolation

Hope thats helpful

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Assuming you are wanting to know about a still camera with a video feature, the megapixels of the camera doesn't matter, but the capture rate does. A camera with a video capture at 640x480, 30fps will good for youtube videos. You could probably go with a lower frame rate, but it would look slightly choppier.

The best brand is Canon and they have one of the best cameras, the PowerShot 770 IS. It is priced at $299 and has 10 megapixels. It should be perfect for youtube.

Anything today will look fine on youtube. It's more about how you compress it and upload it, not what it's captured with. You should focus more on holding the camera stead and getting good sound (external microphone) than the kind of camera.