[PHOTO] "Your Smartphone Camera Should Suck. Here’s Why It Doesn’t"
Wired's Tim Moynihan wrote this enlightening article about smartphone camera technology.
Smartphone cameras are great, or at least close enough to great that you don’t notice the difference. We’ve reached the point where you’ve got to work pretty hard to find a phone with a mediocre camera, and when you do, it is an anachronism to be mocked and derided-and passed over for a phone with a better one.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time, not too long ago, when smartphone cameras sucked. They took genuinely bad photos that were underexposed or overexposed or grainy or … well, you remember. And if you don’t, consider yourself lucky. It’s taken a few years, but nowadays people take a great camera for granted. Thank companies like Nokia, which started pushing that envelope in 2007, and Apple, which gave the iPhone 4 the first camera that made people go, “Daaaaaaaamn.”
How did this happen? When you consider things like sensor size, pixel density, controls, and optics, smartphone cameras should be pretty lousy. Compared to a DSLR, they still are. But the camera in your pocket is crazy good considering the limitations manufacturers work under. And the advancements keep coming. As we look to the future, the cameras in our phones are only going to get better.
No matter what kind of camera you’re talking about, there’s a universal truth: the bigger the image sensor, the better the image. A bigger sensor will capture more detail with wider dynamic range (the detail in dark and light areas), offer superior low-light performance, and focus more sharply on moving objects. However, with few exceptions, smartphone cameras have tiny sensors.
The vast majority of top-tier smartphones use Sony sensors for their main cameras and Samsung sensors for their front-facing selfie cameras. And every phone on DxOMark’s list of the 10 smartphones with the best image quality has a sensor size between 1/2.3 and 1/3 inches. In terms of surface area, the one-inch sensor in a nice point-and-shoot like Sony’s RX100 is more than six times bigger than any of the top smartphone camera sensors, while the sensor in a consumer DSLR is around 19 times bigger. Drop the cash for a pro-grade DSLR and the sensor is 50 times the size of that puny thing in your iPhone 6S.
Smartphone cameras are great, or at least close enough to great that you don’t notice the difference. We’ve reached the point where you’ve got to work pretty hard to find a phone with a mediocre camera, and when you do, it is an anachronism to be mocked and derided-and passed over for a phone with a better one.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time, not too long ago, when smartphone cameras sucked. They took genuinely bad photos that were underexposed or overexposed or grainy or … well, you remember. And if you don’t, consider yourself lucky. It’s taken a few years, but nowadays people take a great camera for granted. Thank companies like Nokia, which started pushing that envelope in 2007, and Apple, which gave the iPhone 4 the first camera that made people go, “Daaaaaaaamn.”
How did this happen? When you consider things like sensor size, pixel density, controls, and optics, smartphone cameras should be pretty lousy. Compared to a DSLR, they still are. But the camera in your pocket is crazy good considering the limitations manufacturers work under. And the advancements keep coming. As we look to the future, the cameras in our phones are only going to get better.
No matter what kind of camera you’re talking about, there’s a universal truth: the bigger the image sensor, the better the image. A bigger sensor will capture more detail with wider dynamic range (the detail in dark and light areas), offer superior low-light performance, and focus more sharply on moving objects. However, with few exceptions, smartphone cameras have tiny sensors.
The vast majority of top-tier smartphones use Sony sensors for their main cameras and Samsung sensors for their front-facing selfie cameras. And every phone on DxOMark’s list of the 10 smartphones with the best image quality has a sensor size between 1/2.3 and 1/3 inches. In terms of surface area, the one-inch sensor in a nice point-and-shoot like Sony’s RX100 is more than six times bigger than any of the top smartphone camera sensors, while the sensor in a consumer DSLR is around 19 times bigger. Drop the cash for a pro-grade DSLR and the sensor is 50 times the size of that puny thing in your iPhone 6S.