Adding item to the basket... 08 January 2023
Sunday Reads
Laura Currie
8th January 2023
With most phones now claiming to offer monumental megapixel counts, you may wonder why many people are happy to shell out for a mirrorless or DSLR system. ‘Proper camera' sceptics will no doubt argue that a phone is always with you and has a much more pocket-friendly form factor, and while this is true, there are sacrifices to make in return for convenience.
The original commercially available camera phone was brought to us by the Japanese company Kyocera and was called the VP-210. It was released in 1999 and could be yours for just 40,000 Yen – which was about 325 USD back then. It sported only 0.11 megapixel and could store only 20 jpegs, although you could send them via email which must have been pretty exciting. Tech specs have obviously come a long way since then (although battery life certainly hasn’t!).
Many camera phones now offer sensors with astonishing megapixel counts, rivalling even medium format cameras such as the mighty Hasselblad, but we will get to the sensor shortly.
A sensor is only as good as the lens delivering the light – phone lenses are made of relatively inferior quality glass, sometimes even plastic, and with no lens cap they are much more susceptible to scratches. Even minor marks and damage to the element can lead to aberrations and distortions, which we recently explored, HERE.
Phone manufacturers proudly claim to have crammed colossal zooms into their phones, but what they don’t tell us is that once you get through the optical portion of the focal length, the rest of the zoom is digital, which utilises a tiny portion of the sensor to simulate a massive zoom. It has to ‘stretch’ the frame to make up for its optical inadequacies. To name and shame an example, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra professes to wield a 100x zoom, but only 4x of that is optical. Sure, you might get more of that distant heron in the frame, but the image quality will be pretty ropey.
When using mirrorless and DSLR cameras, there is a world of lovely glass to play with that will excel in a variety of conditions. They offer specialised lens coatings that cut distortion effects right down, and large apertures provide lovely, artistic bokeh that phone cameras simply cannot imitate – they try, but even the untrained eye can see how artificial it looks compared to the real thing.
Now on to the sensors. Phone camera sensors are a fraction of the size of the ones housed in even cropped frame cameras, which is why it seems baffling that they can carry 100+ megapixels. But technically they do – Trading Standards would have something to say about it if they didn’t! To make this physically possible the pixels are absolutely miniscule – on average they are about 0.8-microns in size, to put this into perspective, anything under 40 microns is invisible to the naked eye.
A sensor with pixels of this size would capture pretty dreadful images if left to its own devices. Whilst smaller megapixels render less grain in low light, there is a limit, and ones of this size are so tiny that they really struggle. Plus, they deliver minimal dynamic range. So how is it that modern phone cameras are actually fairly decent (we can’t be completely biased here) considering the monumental pixel count?
It all comes down to pixel binning, which we recently discussed in detail HERE. In short, there are different types of pixels on a sensor that are designed to absorb different colours; pixel binning is when matching pixels are grouped together to create one big pixel, thus enlarging the pixel size, but in turn reducing the resolution. (I’ll stop saying pixel now.)
So when you see 100MP on the blurb of a new phone’s camera, it’s not technically incorrect, just a bit misleading. Manufacturers know full well that people are suckers for a flashy spec sheet!
So for now, despite the convenience of a phone in your pocket, a ‘proper’ camera will always give you better results than a phone. I know I’ll stick with my trusty Nikon for a while yet.
With most phones now claiming to offer monumental megapixel counts, you may wonder why many people are happy to shell out for a mirrorless or DSLR system. ‘Proper camera' sceptics will no doubt argue that a phone is always with you and has a much more pocket-friendly form factor, and while this is true, there are sacrifices to make in return for convenience.
The original commercially available camera phone was brought to us by the Japanese company Kyocera and was called the VP-210. It was released in 1999 and could be yours for just 40,000 Yen – which was about 325 USD back then. It sported only 0.11 megapixel and could store only 20 jpegs, although you could send them via email which must have been pretty exciting. Tech specs have obviously come a long way since then (although battery life certainly hasn’t!).
Many camera phones now offer sensors with astonishing megapixel counts, rivalling even medium format cameras such as the mighty Hasselblad, but we will get to the sensor shortly.
A sensor is only as good as the lens delivering the light – phone lenses are made of relatively inferior quality glass, sometimes even plastic, and with no lens cap they are much more susceptible to scratches. Even minor marks and damage to the element can lead to aberrations and distortions, which we recently explored, HERE.
Phone manufacturers proudly claim to have crammed colossal zooms into their phones, but what they don’t tell us is that once you get through the optical portion of the focal length, the rest of the zoom is digital, which utilises a tiny portion of the sensor to simulate a massive zoom. It has to ‘stretch’ the frame to make up for its optical inadequacies. To name and shame an example, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra professes to wield a 100x zoom, but only 4x of that is optical. Sure, you might get more of that distant heron in the frame, but the image quality will be pretty ropey.
When using mirrorless and DSLR cameras, there is a world of lovely glass to play with that will excel in a variety of conditions. They offer specialised lens coatings that cut distortion effects right down, and large apertures provide lovely, artistic bokeh that phone cameras simply cannot imitate – they try, but even the untrained eye can see how artificial it looks compared to the real thing.
Now on to the sensors. Phone camera sensors are a fraction of the size of the ones housed in even cropped frame cameras, which is why it seems baffling that they can carry 100+ megapixels. But technically they do – Trading Standards would have something to say about it if they didn’t! To make this physically possible the pixels are absolutely miniscule – on average they are about 0.8-microns in size, to put this into perspective, anything under 40 microns is invisible to the naked eye.
A sensor with pixels of this size would capture pretty dreadful images if left to its own devices. Whilst smaller megapixels render less grain in low light, there is a limit, and ones of this size are so tiny that they really struggle. Plus, they deliver minimal dynamic range. So how is it that modern phone cameras are actually fairly decent (we can’t be completely biased here) considering the monumental pixel count?
It all comes down to pixel binning, which we recently discussed in detail HERE. In short, there are different types of pixels on a sensor that are designed to absorb different colours; pixel binning is when matching pixels are grouped together to create one big pixel, thus enlarging the pixel size, but in turn reducing the resolution. (I’ll stop saying pixel now.)
So when you see 100MP on the blurb of a new phone’s camera, it’s not technically incorrect, just a bit misleading. Manufacturers know full well that people are suckers for a flashy spec sheet!
So for now, despite the convenience of a phone in your pocket, a ‘proper’ camera will always give you better results than a phone. I know I’ll stick with my trusty Nikon for a while yet.
Laura Currie – 8th January 2023
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