Save money: Understand The Camera In Your Phone

The general public has a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings about a fair number of the technologies that are in popular use today. As a photographer by trade, the most concerning issue for me, is digital photography. Ever since the photography industry moved away from expensive film processes and over to cheap digital ones, more and more novices have begun to pick up cameras. This is both good and bad.

Good, in the sense that there is now a plethora of creative work being spread throughout the world. Bad, in that the majority of people taking photos to share with the world, don’t take the time to find out what the heck it is that they are doing. Since the majority of consumers don’t understand the process of digital photography, they can’t understand the hardware that they are using. They simply press a button, and get excited about their new photo.

But who cares, right? What does it matter as long as people are doing something they love? Here’s the problem: Consumers are flushing money down the toilet buying technology that they don’t use, need, or understand. A lot of money. And in a good number of cases, it is also decreasing the quality of their pictures.

This has gotten even worse since they started putting cameras into cell phones and smart phones. Now that apps such as Instagram have become popular, people are clamoring for the best camera possible in their phones. Even to the point of spending hundreds of dollars extra for the phone with the most megapixels (mpx). Except that in most phone cases, more mpx, is actually A BAD THING.

Just for emphasis, let me say it again. In most cases, MORE MPX IS A BAD THING.

In an effort to save people time, money, and unnecessary confusion when buying their gadgets, I am going to quickly (I promise to keep this as brief and simple as possible) run through some key concepts that people should understand before purchasing a new camera and/or camera phone.

All digital cameras have a sensor in them that records whatever is in front of the camera when the button is pressed. These sensors have pixels on them, which allow the to sensors to create the image. These pixels capture small amounts of light, as well as red, blue, and green colors. When the pixels are combined and viewed as a whole, they form a picture in much the same way old-timey newspaper comic strips did. The more pixels, the more detailed or dense the image looks.

Having more mpx does not make an image sharper, it does not make the colors clearer or more vibrant, and it does not make the camera take better low light pictures. All it does is make the image denser.

Most sensors that are located in phones are about the size of your thumbnail. So, if you want to make, for example, an 8x10” print of a picture taken with your phone, you will have to take a thumbnail sized image and stretch it out to the size of a print. The more mpx, the further you can stretch it before you start to see the individual pixels (dots).

For professional photographers whose work will be on billboards that are 30 feet wide, this is important. For iPhone 4s users, whoes 8 mpx camera produces images that are 3264 pixels wide and then post them to Facebook which doesn’t allow photographs that are bigger than 2048 pixels wide, this is just plan pointless. If a person only posts their photos to the web, the largest mpx count that could ever be necessary would be about 3-4 mpx. Any more than that are just getting thrown away by the website that they are being loaded to.

Having an 8 mpx camera for pictures going to Instagram is a lot like filling a swimming pool with water to give a kitten a bath. Except that excessive amount of water wont hurt the kitten any more than a bucket full would. More mpx could hurt your photograph.

If we are not talking about image density or resolution (the number of rows and columns of pixels on a sensor), it is not the number of pixels that matters. When talking about quality of color and accuracy of luminosity (brightness), size of the pixels is what matters. Remember that pixels capture light/RGB color. The bigger the pixel is, the more light/RGB it can absorb. And the more light it can absorb, the more accurately it can record light and color.

If the pixels are smaller, they capture less accurate light and color. The 8 mpx sensor that is in the iPhone 4s is about the same size as the 5 mpx sensor that was in the iPhone 4. To get the extra pixels onto the same size sensor, they simply made the pixels smaller. This in fact, can hurt the quality of the picture and create what is known as “noise”.

Noise is commonly known to occur in low light situations. However, the smaller the pixels are, the more susceptible the picture is to noise. (Noise is actually much more complicated then I am explaining it here, but most people probably don’t need/want to hear about the details, as this is the major bullet point)

But then why are the pictures taken with the iPhone 4s much sharper and nicer than the ones with other camera phones? This is because of the incredible lens that Apple made for the 4s. How sharp or crisp an image is, is due almost entirely on the lens. The better the lens, the sharper the focus of the image.

Have you ever seen a professional photographer using a lens that is 2 feet long and looks like it ways 25lbs? These are not mini telescopes. The reason that these lenses are so big is that they have several pieces of glass in them. These pieces of glass focus the light coming through the lens before it hits the sensor. It is by moving these pieces of glass closer and further apart that allows the a photographer to pick what they are focused on.

The more glass there is in a lens and the better that glass is made, the sharper and more accurate the focus of the image is. What this means is that if a camera has a 35 mpx sensor and the pixels are huge, but it is using a cheap lens, then the very dense, color accurate, high quality image that comes out, is still likely to be blurry. So unless a consumer is going to spend the time, and money to make sure that the lens that they are using with their camera, or that is built into their camera phone, is of a high quality, then there is really no point in worrying about the pixel count. Cause the image isn’t going to be very good anyway.

I will note here that no matter how good a lens is, if you try to stretch out an image past what the pixel count will allow, the image will get blurry. But again, if your images are going straight to the web, this is a none issue.

You may be wondering: if all of this is true, why do my photographs look so nice on my camera/phones display? This is because the screen is optimized to match the camera. When camera and phone makers design the screens on the back of a device, they make sure that the resolution (# of columns and rows of pixels) on the sensor is in a specific ratio to the ones on the display. That way, the images look their very best.

Just because an image looks good on the small screen attached to the camera, does not mean it will look good on the larger computer screen of someone else looking at it on the Internet. This is why you will often hear people say, “Oh! It looked so much nicer on the back of the camera!”.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting a high quality camera/camera phone. However, it is important for one to know what it is they will be doing with their camera and therefore, what they need in terms of hardware. Otherwise, consumers will simply continue to get caught up in the mpx propaganda and end up spending way to much money on features that they will never actually use. Such as a 40 mpx camera phone that really doesn’t take pictures that look any better than a 4 mpx one does.

image of noisey dog procured here