3 What's wrong with my
phone?
Nothing.
There's nothing at all wrong with the camera on my phone, just as
there is nothing wrong with the blade on my Swiss Army knife. Both
are simply limited by their size.
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| Galaxy Note 3 versus HS50EXR |
The
picture on the left was taken with a 13 megapixel state-of-the-art
phone camera (Samsung Galaxy Note 3), from 3 metres away, in a room
lit by a single 20 watt lamp, without flash and with 4x zoom. The
picture on the right was taken with my bridge camera under the same
conditions.
In
broad daylight, or even in decent artificial light, phones take
perfectly good photographs. It's not their fault they don't zoom or
cope well with low light conditions.
I
did use something called “pro-low-light mode” which takes 4
photos in rapid succession and combines them somehow. It's a
proprietary function on the HS50EXR but I'm sure other bridge cameras
have similar functionality.
Its
not surprising that the camera beat the phone, but it was surprising
(to me at least) how much the phone lost by.
Not
all zooms are equal
A
major factor in the huge quality difference is digital zoom versus
optical zoom. Phones can only 'zoom' by reducing the pixel count of
the image. 4x zoom means that only ¼ of its pixels were actually
used to capture the image. The bridge camera, having an optical zoom
lens, used all its pixels. So instead of 13MP versus 16MP, which
isn't such a difference, it was actually 3.25MP versus 16MP.
Pixels?
How many? How big?
Another
factor worth a mention is sensor size. Not how many pixels, but
actually how big (or small) the sensor is. In a phone it's tiny
because it has to be to make a camera that fits into a device a few
millimetres thick. In a DSLR it's as big as a 35mm frame of film used
to be. In my bridge camera it's about ½” across.
This
matters because the bigger the sensor is, the bigger each pixel is.
Think of them as buckets to catch light in: bigger buckets catch more
light. I'll waffle on more about sensor size later, when I talk about
'noise'.
I
still use my phone's camera a fair bit and I'm still impressed by how
well it does the things it's designed to do... such as this panoramic
sunset.
 |
| Sunset along Rhyl Beach - January, 2014 |
But
there's a lot it just won't do and that's why I needed a bridge
camera.
Cameras
on phones are getting better every year but there's a simple bit of
physics that the clever guys who design phones can't ignore: Bigger
windows let in more light. Photography is all about light. A bigger
“window” at the front of your camera lets in more light than a
small one, obviously.