This paper provides a comparative study on the use of planar patterns in the generation of control points for camera calibration. This is an important but often neglected aspect in camera calibration. Two popular checkerboard and circular dot patterns are each examined with two detection strategies for invariance to the potential bias from projective transformations and nonlinear distortions. It is theoretically and experimentally shown that circular patterns can potentially be affected by both biasing sources. Guidelines are given to control such bias. In contrast, appropriate checkerboard detection is shown to be bias free. The findings have important implications for camera calibration, indicating that well accepted methods may give poorer results than necessary if applied naively.