Slashdot Mirror
Digital Camera Vs. Camera Phone
An anonymous reader writes "CNet.co.uk has done some simple head-to-head testing of camera phones alongside digital cameras to see which device takes the best quality pictures. The results are surprising, with Nokia's latest handset, featuring a built-in 5-megapixel camera, taking more vibrant pictures in medium light conditions than a 10-megapixel dSLR. Of course, the pictures aren't fully representative of how the images would look at full size; but given that most people resize images to put on Flickr, we could start to see a decline in dedicated digital cameras sales and an increase in camera phone sales."
"Of course, the pictures aren't fully representative of how the images would look at full size; but given that most people resize images to put on Flickr, we could start to see a decline in dedicated digital cameras sales and an increase in camera phone sales.""
Most people? How do you come to that conclusion?
I think there are going to be a lot of defensive replies from dSLR owners. But with enough light, a small lens and sensor can take a good picture.
Most people take pictures to put them on Flickr? In what bizarre alternate universe?
And camera phones take pictures as good as a dSLR? You can be 80% blind and still tell that camera phones take inferior pictures.
Get over the "megapixel" factor of digital cameras. There are so many more factors involved in photography, it's not even close to fair to compare megapixels. Sure, it's entirely possible for someone with a low quality camera phone to take a reasonably good picture compared to something out of a dSLR. Half of the photo depends on who is taking the photo and how the lighting is set up. Who gives a frack about megapixels!
By now I'm sure this is redundant, but can we just cut back the editorializing a bit? "Most" people aren't putting their photos on Flickr. The /. editors seem to be simply trolling their readership at this point.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
But there are countless jobs (many military) where you cannot have a camera phone at the workplace for many obvious reasons. I'm sure there are many corporations in the civilian sector who have similar regulations in place.
It's quite weird, but to think that 5 years ago I paid $450 for a 3.1 megapixel camera and another $150 for a 256 Mb memory stick, and just 6 months ago I paid $500 for a slider phone with a 3.1 megapixel camera (I got it when it just came out, if I had waited till now to get it, it would have been $350) and $50 for a 1 Gb MicroSD memory card. Comparing the physical dimension is yet another distinction, as the camera is about 2.25 times thicker than the phone but about the same size, and the footprint of the memory storage device is over a factor of 20x in terms of physical volume. As for the quality of the photographs, they are both about the same, unless you want to take a snapshot of a fast moving object (or looking out from a fast moving object), then the camera phone wouldn't be fast enough.
As for other functionality, the camera phone can play higher quality video with its bigger screen, acts as an mp3 player, plays games, text messages and of course acts as a mobile phone. The camera just takes photos and short videos, plays them back (can't even attach headphones), that's about it.
I am just impressed at how in a few short years, so much advances have happened.
Please direct all bug reports to
"Is 3DS MAX really more powerful than Google Sketch?" - We gave 10 randomly selected people half an hour to learn to use them, and then compared the results.
And, coming soon...
"Is DVCPRO HD actually better than VHS (after you resize it to 64x48 pixels)?"
"Is a dual-socket, quad-core workstation actually faster than a ZX Spectrum (when playing Space Invaders)?"
Wait... Did you just link Goatse in reverse?
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
but given that most people resize images to put on Flickr
Most people with digital cameras don't even know what flickr is. They email their pics to relatives or print them out, or just save them on their hard drive.
I'm getting a sense that slashdot is in a way getting like Washington DC. People inside the beltway are totally detatched from what the majority of people are doing in their lives, and so is slashdot.
Amusing that CNet (that bastion of photographic expertise) kept commenting positively on how "vibrant" the N95 photo was. Obviously the Nokia boosts the colours artificially, to make the photo look more exciting, even though the colours are not that strong in reality. Of course, they invalidate their entire results by not making any comment (let alone measurements or reference photos) on how close the photos were to the real colours.
But the interesting thing is what this says about people - the average person doesn't care much about realism, they want a nice looking photo regardless, and if the phone adjusts things artificially to make it look "better" then that might actually be the right thing to sell more phones. It's kind of an extension of the point and click idea.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
I'm sick of all these do-it-all phones. All it does is make them bigger. It's getting harder to find a decent phone that is small enough to fit in my pocket. They all have cameras, video players, MP3 players, extra memory, web access, games, etc., etc. I don't want any of that bullshit. But I have little choice with my carrier (VWZ).
Vibrant doesn't mean much of anything to me... About as much as audio sounding "warm".
It sounds like "vibrant" to them simply means over-saturated. It wouldn't be difficult to tweak ANY of the images to be more "vibrant".
It's really impossible to tell which photo more faithfully reproduces the actual scene, without seeing it in person. The Nokia may work well on animation colors, but if people come out high-contrast, looking more like cartoons, it's not a good camera.
In other words, this article is utterly useless.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What I want to know is while posing for the group picture...
Was the gold kitty pretending to pull the cord as a train conductor, "choo! choo!", or...
Was the kitty mid stride in a left leg power lift release move? If so, that would explain the monster's reaction behind him, and the delirium cast over the M&M candy's face.
"Everybody say cheeeeeeeeeese!"
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe the quality difference came down to using poor quality software for scaling the size of the images? Some software is absolutely horrible at resizing larger images into smaller ones.
Sure, camera phones can take decent pictures for a lot of people, but let me know once one can use specialized lenses. Of course, most people don't need zoom/macro/etc lenses, so they're fine with a digital camera. However, the benefit of such lenses and the falling prices of dSLR's makes it very unlikely that higher end digital cameras will ever go away. There's just a different market for both, just like PDAs vs laptops vs desktop systems.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Well, a consumer camera like a camera phone will try to create a picture that can be used out of the box. Hence the enhancements to the color and contrast. A dSLR owner is more likely to post process their image. So the image will have less processing, allowing the user to add contrast and saturation in post processing. Comparing cameras in this way is pointless because the effect can be created photoshop.
It was interesting to see that this "test" consisted of a single scene. While I was impressed with the N95, it says nothing of the versatility of the camera. The subject was located what seemed to be about a foot or so away from the lens. It would be interesting to see its ability to focus on something further away. Currently, I think that is the biggest shortcoming of camera phones at the moment. Yes, it is a limited space that they can cram the lens into, but until they've got "good enough" optical zoom, they still won't fully replace a handheld point and click, and I think we can all agree that they'll never be able to replace a good dSLR (that's just plain silly!).
I'm suprised, the camera phone did a great job, which is a good thing for consumers who don't know how to color correct their photos. However, as the article points out, this is solely a product of post-processing in the camera. I'm quite surprised that the 400D did such a terrible job with the white balance. Was it stuck on the daylight preset or was the AWB that bad?
They didn't really address night time flash performance. Lots of people want to take pictures when they go out at night and these tests were inadequate since the subjects were small and close. Large people 5-6 feet away require a brighter flash and/or higher ISOs. Cell phone cameras haven't the room for a large flash and the capacitors it requires. I wonder how these phones would fare under these conditions?
Also not addressed was dynamic range. The test scene was fairly flat. If you're on a vacation, and whip out your dinky cell phone to take a picture of the landscape, what might on a DSLR be a nice image of the land and sky, could turn out to be a dark silhouette of the land with a detailed sky, detailed land with a blown out sky, or some combination. How good is the metering as well? Will your relatives be a series of black lumps against the grand canyon if you aren't a pro photog? The more this stuff is automatic the more joe consumer wins.
Additionally, the lens choice on the 400d is slightly disappointing. Cheap lenses like the 18-55 kit lens can't really give you the detail possible with 10 megapixels.
Photos.
Do the submitters even read the articles now? For both photo conditions tested, they found that the dSLR (a Canon 400D) better - "highest level of detail" in medium light and the best-lit and most focused shot overall in low light. All they mentioned were that the N95 camera phone showed more vibrant colors in the medium light conditions, and that that was probably due to post-processing.
I have an EOS 400D and I'm quite fond of it, although I'm still getting used to it and all of the whiz-bang features it has over my old Bronica ETR (you know, one of those old monstrosities which used that barbaric technology called *film* (Actually, aside from weight and speed concerns, I prefer shooting on film, but digital is so damn fast and convenient)).
It seems to me from playing with several camera phones, several digital cameras, and a large variety of old mechanical cameras as old as the 1930's, I've determined that a lot of the quality of a camera is in how the user can grow into the feature set. The 400D didn't provide as pristine an out of the box point-and-shoot image as the camera phone, but that is also not the focus (if you'll pardon the pun) of this model. It is really made to be a camera for people who want the fine grained manual control, and who would be very annoyed if it "knew" how to correct every shot and then was wrong just even once... They'd rather set the thing up and be sure that it's doing what they want it to, just as if it were a normal old camera shooting on film.
So, I guess this test is not really apples to apples, but it does show why a casual snapshot taker might be better off with a camera (like those phone cameras) that is designed for that purpose.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
The Nokia phone post-processes the image to boost contrast and saturation a lot more than the DSLR does in its default settings.
Are you adequate?
Megapixel is not the only, nor the most important, aspect.
The lens is probably more important.
This is just like the megahertz/gigahertz race, and the number of transistors in radio: something to get people to think "it has more, so it must be better", while reality is not like that at all.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
So the pictures are more "vibrant" - read: the camera jacks the chroma values way up to make up for its shitty little lens. If you want to take a decent picture, get a camera, if you want to take goofy snapshots of your buddies on a road trip, use your phone.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Yes, for general-purpose, fully-auto-mode pictures, the cameras in *some* phones are getting closer and closer to a medium-quality standalone digital camera. Of course, with an unlocked N95 listed at around $800 on Amazon right now, it better have a pretty good quality camera built-in. It wouldn't surprise me in the next few years to see a lot of people satisfied with simply using their camera phones and not buying a separate camera. Not everyone, but a substantial number of people.
However, it's all about the camera's purpose. People who are satisfied with the features of a basic point-and-shoot might be happy with the coming camera phones. Other people have moved on past the basics and are looking for more advanced features that simply will never show up in a camera phone because of the size of the components involved. You might buy a mid-range digital camera because of the 'better' image quality over a camera phone, but you would definitely consider a camera with a decent optical zoom over a phone without it. You don't buy a dSLR just because of the better image quality. You buy a dSLR because of the vastly increased control it affords you as a photographer and the ability to switch lenses.
Phones won't have interchangeable lenses, the optical zoom on phones will be limites, and phones will continue to have a clunky interface for any 'advanced' settings. People who want a camera for more than mindless point-and-click will rarely be satisfied with a camera phone.
That said, if the masses of really poor snapshots I've seen on sites like Flickr are any indication, the camera phones will be 'good enough' for many, many people. Also, anyone who buys a dSLR and regularly shoots in full-auto (as in the article) bought the wrong camera for their needs.
Most people? Could that possibly be true? Lets even grant that they meant "most photographers in the developed world" (and not most people on the planet.) Does anyone else think that most photographers do NOT use flickr? I've never used it, but I will grant that I am not representative of most people.
My Aunt Marge in Cleveland, she has always seemed the person I know who is most like "most people." She's like a one woman focus group on the "middle" of the country, politically, geographically, and socially. She's never used it either. What do you think? I think whomever said "but given that most people resize images to put on Flickr" need to put the cap back on the glue bottle, but I'd love to hear other opinions.
San Francisco Photographers
We're going to take some camera phones and dSLR, we'll use the lowest common denominator features and resolution and we'll show you that camera phones are just as good as Canon's latest pro-sumer dSLR.
Well, no fucking shit sherlock.
I can show you that my old Voodoo 3 is quite compareable to the Geforce 8800GTX when playing Quake at 640x480.
They take pictures of bizarre, artificial objects, under unspecified artificial lighting, then judge the pictures on how "vibrant" the colors are.
We don't know what the colors ought to be. Nor do we know what kind of lighting is being used, although I'm guessing florescent office lights, given the color difference between the ambient lighting and flash pictures. Nor do we know what lighting mode the cameras were set to (sunlight, tungsten, fluorescent). Although many people many never learn to adjust their camera's lighting setting, they will also find results dramatically different under different lighting sources.
If you are going to do one kind of test, then use human subjects under bright and indirect daylight. That way the readers have a clue as to what the subject should look like, and represents common conditions that anybody can reproduce.
Overall, this test is only valid if (a) you are taking pictures under florescent lighting and (b) color accuracy is not as important to you as color saturation and (c) you don't know how to adjust your camera's settings.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'd rather have a crappy phone on a good camera rather than a crappy camera on a good phone.
Someone call me when they make a "Phone Camera"
But sure looks to me like in the "medium" light pictures that the Rebel 400D had white-balance issues and provided a yellow cast over the shot. In fairness, s*it happens and it's an interesting side-by-side test.
In the low-light (with flash) examples, note how the shadows move quite a bit - they didn't make sure the camera was at the same spot each time - bummer. Put an external strobe on that 400D and you'll get a picture that rocks compared to the compact camera with the flash next to the lens. And obviously bigger sensors have much, much better low light/high ISO performance ... but there is something to be said for being able to carry a camera in your pocket.
A not-so-perfect picture is better than no picture at all!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
It's like comparing a Porsche and a 10-speed bike and claim it's the same because people only use it to go from point A to point B.
people who use dSLR will take different shots then people who use a camera phone. People who are interested in taking good pictures will probably want to have much more functions then camera phone's simple point and click.. Those who use camera phones to take pictures will not care about about the aperture settings, ISO.. etc.
... you'll have to pry it from my dead, cold hands!
I see no point in a head-to-head comparison of products that are not actually competitive to each other. Am I missing something?
I have owned point-and-shoot digital cameras, but my best digital camera is a Canon Digital Rebel (aka 300D). I didn't buy it as a point-and-shoot camera, because that's not what it is (though it can do a pretty good imitation in fully automatic mode). What I did buy was the flexibility of an SLR: interchangeable lenses, full control over all functions. Plus the things digital is so good at: instant image review, image processing capability, zero reciprocity failure.
I can hook it up to a telescope and take first-rate astronomical pictures. I can use my wonderful Pentax M42 lenses and extension tubes to fill an entire frame with a single flower if I want.
This is not the sort of stuff you do with a point and shoot.
...laura
Let me try my hand at these baseless assumptive statements. People who buy camera phones to be their primary camera do so to put their pictures up on flickr. People who compare the merits of a camera phone to a DSLR are people who put their pictures on flickr. (Hey, baseless statements are pretty easy!)
I've stated for a long time in "defending" my ownership of an SLR and canon L-series lenses is that its a tool for how I want to take pictures. I'm the first one to admit that lugging my equipment around is not something I want to do 24/7 so it is by no means convenient. The camera on my phone, however, is extremely convenient and I have found it to be useful in its own times. So my beef with the
Honestly, it's crap story submissions like this that just grinds me about slashdot.
:wq
The results are surprising, with Nokia's latest handset, featuring a built-in 5-megapixel camera, taking more vibrant pictures in medium light conditions than a 10-megapixel dSLR.
That isn't even remotely what the article said. It said: "As you can see the top photo, taken in medium light conditions, is in focus and the colours are very vibrant, if not a little over saturated." and, "This difference in colour is likely due to the N95 processing the shot after it was taken."
Nowhere do they describe if the images actually represented a faithful reproduction of the colors of the objects, and they did not test under multiple lighting conditions, such as outdoors, under incandescent and fluorescent lights, etc. They also did not conduct any test which would demonstrate the camera's dynamic range, and they did not show us any 1:1 crop areas.
There's one simple site I point any of small but persistent who claim things like "film is superior to digital" (it hasn't been for at least a few years, in terms of resolution, signal to noise ratio, and dynamic range.) Clarkvision. The guy lays it all out in cold, hard science with good illustrative graphs and examples.
Does Pixel Size Matter? lays a real cold hard blow to all the idiots that claim dSLRs are overpriced or unjustified. They VASTLY outperform "point and shoot" cameras because the sensors are huge. Current dSLRs already approach the theoretical maximum sensitivity, SNR, etc. The bigger the sensor well, the more photons it collects- and the less electronic amplification is necessary. dSLRs have sensors the size of your phone's screen. Your phone's camera has a sensor around the size of an eraser. Not only does that cause a lot of noise problems, but it causes problems for aliasing filters (which spread light across the red, blue, and green sensor wells.) It's very easy to make a very good aliasing filter on a scale required for the very large pixels in a dSLR. Sensor wells in the point and shoots are so tiny that the filters really, really blur the image.
Practically, this means that if you and I stand next to each other and take a photo towards sunset, and then take both to a photo lab and get them printed, my (several year old dSLR) will blow your (current P&S) out of the water. My photo will have more detail because of better aliasing on the sensor and dramatically less noise (which doesn't have to be hidden with blurring). Nevermind that I can shoot a photo at 800 ISO and it'll have less noise than your camera at 100 ISO, which means I get several stops of sensitivity which I can use for, oh, a faster shutter speed so there's less motion blur, or a smaller aperture for greater depth of field.
Please help metamoderate.
When the white balance is as badly wrong as the dSLR in this test got it even with post processing getting a JPEG's colours to look realistic again can be problematic.
Software Freedom Day!.
When they first came out, I got a Kodak 800-speed disposable film camera.
I don't know if it was a fluke or if it was typical of the era, but those pictures were some of the sharpest I've ever taken.
Not bad for under $10.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The reason the that the camera-phone picture turned out a lot better was because the person did not know how to use the DSLR. I would like to see this test with the EXIF data in tact and not have the pictures edited in Photoshop first. Judging by the high amount of noise on the DSLR picture, the camera was set at a very high ISO. If the person actually knew how to use the camera they could take a lot better picture.
I suspect that the author is just trying to get people to visit his article so CNET can make money off the advertisements.
OK, I don't make my living doing photography today but I have for several years in the last decade.
There are two things that pop out. I am not addressing "professional" features such as manual settings, bounce-flash, strobe capability, interchangeable lenses, large aperture effects (depth of field blurring), shutter speed considerations, flash sync, etc, etc, etc which obviously favor the DSLR. But lets just look at the things that the every-day average consumer cares about.
1) The image quality issues with the Canon cameras was due almost entirely to poor white balance. The author described this is 'vibrancy' a few times, but while there was perhaps somewhat lower color saturation, increased saturation of those poorly white balanced photos would have made them look WORSE, not better. Why did the "real" cameras have such awful white balance? Is this a problem with Canon's processing? I have a bunch of Nikon gear and have had great luck with auto white balance, though I prefer to use custom white balance for important photos, obviously Auto is simple and good for snapshots. But given the consumer target of the article, auto is the target and I'm disappointed with Canon in this regard. Go get a Nikon. Or a Fuji. Or a Panasonic even... they have good auto white balance.
2) They chose an extremely SIMPLE scene that is not reflective of the use that most people have for their cameras. A close-up, small and flat-lit still life is a very poor scene for testing overall image quality. Set up a scene with various light levels across it. A room with a light in the corner, or a bar with neon signs everywhere.... or a daylight/shade mix. Watch the compact sensors in the small phones and even the point-and-shoot camera absolutely blow the highlights and completely submarine the shadows and you can see the value of the high quality sensors of the dSLR. How about making an element in the scene move... like a parent might shoot a kid at a baseball game. In the case of a small, static, flat-lit still life, the camera phone is obviously adaquate. In the case of high dynamic range, moving, dark or varied scenes, the camera phones, in my experience, just don't cut it.
As a professional, I have trained myself to see the dynamic range of a scene and work to minimize areas of the frame that will cause problems with digital sensors (even the best dSLR is not even close to old Chrome slide films) and have learned to avoid those elements. Your average consumer snaps the picture, despite the big shadow on grandma's face. Suddenly your Norwegian grandmother looks like a coal miner because of deep shadow on her face totally submarined by poor sensor dynamic range. This is perhaps the biggest issue I see with this comparison and something that should be addressed.
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Slashdot is being run like a cheap newspaper: screaming headline, zero substance. What a joke.
Here is a side by side comparison of the photos. Ok it really is vertical but you get the point:
2 7-6,00.htm
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39029453,492899
Sorry, but the quality of the majority of the phones tell me that dslr cameras don't have anything to worry about. This may affect the purchases of disposable cameras; the kind bought at local drug stores but not dslr's.
Disclaimer: I do not own a dslr nor do I own a camera phone.
Yep, that explains consumer Fujifilm from the early 90's. That crap has such oversaturated colors it was sickening, yet it outsold Kodak Ektachrome so much that Kodak removed Ektachromee from the consumer space for everything but slide film despite it being a vastly superior film, leaving only the cheap Gold film line to compete.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Easy. Take a WB reading off of a grey card. Or just use RAW.
Great.
And under non-average conditions?
Didn't think so.
The things I use my cheap DSLR for the most are:
1. Indoor photography where flash is not an option. (f/1.8, ASA 1600)
2. Photographing moving targets where shutter lag is not an option.
3. Long-exposure star trail or milky way type shots.
4. Rudimentary time-lapse intervalometry.
A phone that can take decently detailed pictures of nearby, still objects under good lighting is one thing. A phone that gives me the ability to do any of the four above would be quite a surprise.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Neither of the phones I carry around has an embedded camera, and I've been looking for one with as decent a camera as I can find. The N95 has great quality but rattled me with sticker shock.
I want a camera phone not as a main camera but as an auxiliary I can carry around; I'm not overlooking the important features (most?) camera phones lack. Optical zoom is important; that 5 megapixel imager with a 2X digital zoom becomes the equivalent of 1.25 megapixels, and zooming further only makes it worse. Exposure settings are also important, and can make the difference between having a shot and having bupkus. But I'm not going to carry my little Casio camera everywhere I go, and having a chance at a picture is better than having no chance at all.
I would like to point out that the N95's "blue tinge" can be easily removed through post-processing.
In Soviet Russia, camera phones YOU!
Many photographers use Canon cameras because they intentionally don't "juice" up photos like other makers do. They also don't over-sharp an image and Canon's photos are "soft" out of the camera compared to others. They allow the photographer to add what they would like in post processing. It's easier to add then to take away.
The time when I would get a camera phone for the sake of the camera, would be when Canon makes a phone and integrate it into their camera, instead of Nokia making a camera and integrating them into phones. WRT the mediocre summary, I should run out and get a Nokia to take pics because the phone has 16mm wide angle with a 6 point hot-shoe I presume. Gee.
Quack, quack.
Yep, that explains consumer Fujifilm from the early 90's. That crap has such oversaturated colors it was sickening, yet it outsold Kodak Ektachrome so much
Certain Fuji color reversal (slide) films from the 80s were oversaturated. Velvia, a popular Fuji slide film introduced in the 90s, was very saturated, yet very popular with professionals for it's color rendition.
that Kodak removed Ektachromee from the consumer space for everything but slide film despite it being a vastly superior film, leaving only the cheap Gold film line to compete.
Your statement doesn't parse; Ektachrome is a generic term for Kodak E6 process slide film. Kodak Gold film is negative film for prints. Ektar was a highly regarded and unfortunately discontinued print film from Kodak - it was the discontinuation of Ektar which left only Gold on the market.
Superiority for a given purpose is in the eyes of the market; photographers rejected Kodak's poor quality control and lack of innovation in slide films while embracing Fuji's Astia, Provia,and Velvia emulsions - films that gave sharp and accurate color rendition with increasing degrees of saturation.
ZOMG, seriously? You could even just use the tungsten or incandescent preset.
the point is that dSLRs often have a nasty tendency to get AutoWB badly wrong in tungsten light and most people don't want to mess around with manual white balance from a grey card or shooting in raw.
Software Freedom Day!.
It's not their methodology that I question, it's their eyesight.
There are some seriously shit pictures in that article. I mean, really bad. They might be acceptable for eBay, but then again, I used to use a 680x480 toy that downloaded over the serial port for taking photos for eBay. It's not exactly a high standard.
With the exception of the Nokia N95, which I do admit is impressive for a camera phone, the natural light photos are terribly yellow. They remark "the colours came out fairly balanced if not a little yellow..." about the top one of these two images. A little yellow? Look, Mr M&M there looks like he needs to get on dialysis, because his kidneys are shot. There's no white balance at all. It's tough to take the rest of their conclusions seriously when that's all they have to say there.
With the flash on, it gets the color right (apparently it's just hardwired for the 5000K flash or whatever it has in there), but all the highlights blow out -- and it's not even that high-contrast a scene. I'd hate to see what would have happened on a black background.
The N95 is, admittedly, impressive with its flash turned off. It's a pretty passable image at that resolution. I don't have much negative to say about it. But the flash image below, which they describe as "vibrant"...? I'm not sure 'oversaturated' covers it; it's bordering on ridiculous. It's not even attractive oversaturation, like you might get on some consumer films designed for that effect (Agfa Ultra, Velvia, etc.), or by playing in photoshop; it's just ugly.
Now, granted, in the 400D's photos (last page), they're doing something wrong in the available-light shot, because although they say they're using the automatic settings, it's obviously not auto-white-balancing, and I know that camera will do that in its automatic modes. Leaving that aside, the flash shot beats anything out of any of those cellphones, by a large margin. The lighting is pretty even (there are a few hot spots on the cat, but given that it was straight front flash, it could be worse), the highlights aren't blown, the colors are realistic, and the shadow detail is good.
The photos tell the tale far better than their narrative does: you get what you pay for.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A compact camera or cheap DSLR will run a sharpening algorithm over the picture before storing it.
For the mass market, this makes the picture look really sharp and therefore somehow "better".
For anyone serious about taking images, this is a cheap gimmick they can do in PhotoShop, with a lot more fine control, later whereas trying to undo it once it's been applied takes you even further away from the source image. Print the image out at a high resolution and you'll also start seeing strange color effects as edges get exaggerated and any noise being increased too.
You can artificially increase saturation too. It's another quick process in a graphics package that can be added later but is a pain to undo and retain anything close to the original image.
It also goes for brightness. Any idiot can brighten an image but you're doing it at the ultimate expense of the number of shades you're left with. Here's a simple example:
See how you now have color bands?
Finally, the same goes for TVs. More or less any TV you buy from somewhere like BestBuy desperately needs calibrating. Sure, the picture looks stunningly vivid and bright. Calibrate it and most people will think it looks washed out and slightly soft. Watch it for a while though and you'll start seeing fine detail you could never have seen on the original settings. What people think looks great and what actually gives them the best picture are often totally different.
TV manufacturers know that most people want to be blown away by oversaturation, overexposure and overcontrast, thinking that'll give them a better picture. They also know that anyone who really knows what they're doing will run a calibration DVD or have a pro come out anyway. So they set their default settings to god awful levels to look good in store, knowing it'll be fixed for those for whom it matters to.
In the same way, camera manufacturers know that the cheaper the price point, the more exagerated the default settings the user expects. Thus a cell phone will be massively exagerated, a compact will be pretty exagerated, a cheap DSLR will be somewhat exagerated, a mid range DSLR will err slightly on the side of exageration but be close and a high end DSLR will do every last thing it can to match the "truth".
Those who know nothing about that, the target market for cell phone cameras and cheap compacts, will keep thinking they're getting a great deal - and that's fine for them. It's just a shame when someone like CNet, portraying themselves as experts, tries to portray that as a source of truth to people who've come to them hoping to learn more.
I crunched the mathematics a while back and wrote an article exploring the limits of cameras with compact optics such as those found in cellphones. It's all about the light
m its_on_digital_cameras
http://snm.imeem.com/blogs/2006/10/16/23WDH-33/li
No, Ektrachrome is still the standard Kodak Slide film. What you were talking about is Kodachrome. Which is slowly phased out. In Japan you can get development until the end of 2007. Its really sad to see this one go. Probably had the best color accuracy of _all_ slide films.
;)
(and I dear cling to my small stock left in my fridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
This is very much like what happens when people try to rate video game console emulator picture or sound quality; they rate based on what is most pleasing, rather than what is most accurate in comparison to how the original console looked/sounded. In this case, the comparisons should be to a calibrated high-end reference camera. If I want to degrade...ahem...enhance the image, I can do that to a copy of the original.
A dSLR is going to beat out a camera phone in image quality under nearly every situation. This test was horribly carried out. Falling back on the fact that each camera was used "right out of the box" just doesn't work. If the white balance on the 400D was set properly the colors would have been much more accurate. I think the point of the article was to illustrate that the camera phones have come a long way, but in the hand of a competent photographer the dSLR is going to take a better picture EVERY time. Not everyone is going to want a dSLR, but you're a fool if you think the camera phone is going to take a better picture.
I can't stand camera phones. I've never used them, and whenever I go to buy a new phone they've all got cameras attached.
The sticking point for me is transferring files to something useful. I know someone who couldn't figure out how to transfer a photo from her phone to her camera, so she took a photo of the phone's screen! Technology is supposed to make your life easier, is it not?
I know some carriers will sell you phones that automatically upload your photos and such (at a cost, no doubt), but I'll stick with my USB SD card reader and separate camera and phone, thank you very much.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I just bought a bitchin canon a630 8MP digital camera.
I'm looking now for a nokia n80 3MP phone.
my last camera was a canon SD330 2MP.
even though my new phone will have a higher resolution, it can't beat my old canon camera.
it has a tiny diffused LED as the flash. it has a fixed focus. and, it only has software settings in place of hardware settings.
my new canon a630 is way better than an n95 under all conditions. 9 point aiaf. manual focus. true macro mode.
the only things the a630 is missing is canon's famous image stabilization and the facial recognition.
but for $199 for an 8MP camera, and a canon no less.
I am going to love my n80, but it's no camera.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Your right, it was Ektar I was remembering, I loved that stuff.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Due to the limits of optics, you wouldn't want to carry around something that big very much.
You may have to settle for a good camera, and a mostly acceptable camera on a good phone, for when you can't be bothered carrying around your good camera.
That is until someone gets away from this whole lens idea and invents a directional optics patch instead.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Just for curiosities sake I took their medium light still from the Ericsson and ran it through Paint shop pro 9. Automatic photo fix and saturation adjustment (normal, with a strong enhancment) left the photos looking close enough that you'd really have to look to tell the difference. The brightness is a tad better on the fixed Ericsson shot in regards to the back figure. As someone pointed out above, its likely the N95 just does some post processing on it to give it those colours.
I have a Konika-Minolta 5D and a Nokia N70. The dSLR has a 6MP sensor and the phone has a 2MP sensor. The phone cam is horrible in comparison, even in broad daylight, mostly since it seems to make really strange compression artefacts and there's no way for me to change it. The dSLR has a bunch of functions to let me control exposure and focus quickly, letting me take lots of photos with little effort. I attempt to shoot the CF card full and then just select the best of the pictures.
The only thing the phone cam is good for is that I have it with me wherever I go, unlike the dSLR, and I'm therefore more likely to capture something unique with it. At this phone cameras excell. One should however not expect the pic from the phone cam to exhibit any measure of fidelity.
All rites reversed 2010
As both a dSLR and a camera phone owner, do you really think that I lug around that big camera for my health? Do you really think that I have spent thousands of dollars on camera equipment because my wallet was too heavy and I needed something to lighten it up?
Seriously, if I could just use the camera on my phone (which I am carrying around anyway) to get the same results as I can get with my dSLR, there is no way in heck I'd bother with the dSLR.
So have I taken decent photos with my camera phone? Yes. Are we going to see a decline in dSLR sales and an increase in camera phone sales? Heh heh. I wish.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Start up speed: The time it takes from the moment you decide to take a picture to the moment you can press the shutter. With dSLR this is typically sub second, small cameras are a lot slower. This matters a lot if you want to take a snapshop.
Shutter lag: The time between you press the shutter and camera taking the picture. With dSLR you get what you see, with camera phones or compact cameras you will see what you captured once the picture is taken. Matters a lot if you want to capture that expression of your kid
Noise: The purple, green, brown, pixels you get on a black object
Color accuracy: Do you want your kid's skin to have an orange, purple, or green tint?
Dynamic range: In any complex light condition, cheap cameras either over saturate the well lit areas or make other areas too dark.
I occasionally get some of the photos printed on paper and find that any current camera has enough pixels for a good 3"x5" print.
I don't think the Nokia, although good for a phone, would do very well with tests involving dynamic range. In the samples shown, the picture taken with the flash shows posterization.
By default, most digital cameras -won't- take a very 'vibrant' picture straight out of the box in default, .jpg mode. They'll tend to take very realistic pictures. But a good hand at levels and curves and such will make that picture pop. (Just as with a film camera, digital images must be developed, except in the digital age, instead of using graded papers, you use the curves tool. Instead of playing with the exposure and developing times for the print, you use levels. High-end digital cameras are made to expedite this kind of work, by default not applying strong saturation boosts, contrast enhancements, or whatever, even when you're shooting in absolute-idiot mode. It's essentially set to capture the most realistic image, not the most pleasing one. You set the camera to automatically apply different levels of these settings when you're shooting in .jpg mode, but, out of the box, they're going to be set very 'neutral.' Given that I've seen several of those toys before, the 400d rendered the most true-to-life image. The 400d also did the best job of capturing the entire dynamic range available -- and higher-end digital cameras have more dynamic range, in general, than consumer jobbies.
But, in any case, it's unfair to compare a high-end cameraphone digital to a high-end prosumer digital, when everything's on automatic. A high-end camera is -meant- to be futzed with, even if you're just going to use it as a point and shoot. It's the difference between a mac user and a linux user -- the mac user, yeah, it works right out of the box. The linux user -- jesus, he'd be stupid to just install everything by default with most distros, and, though he may use his computer to play open-source versions of solitaire half the time, the other half of the time, he's doing particularly nifty things with the flexibility and power of the OS. Consumer point-and-shoots make it hard to take really -bad- pictures, but also make it hard to take very -good- ones. dSLRs allow you the full freedom to screw up or to exploit the power of the artform.
I freaking envy the white balance in the Nokia's top image, though. That's the most neutral grey I've ever gotten straight out of a camera without using a grey card to set the white balance.
Vibrant colors is trivial to achieve. dSLRs attempt to achieve accurate colors instead, which makes images from dSLRs actually look less good than many consumer cameras out of the box.
Yes, you firefox, you cannot resize and show a 2000x2000 image nicely in a 1024 window. Is it that hard? Google for proper interpolated resizing code.
Its no more than a few pages of code, if you're real lazy, use GDI+ on windows.
Same for you IE6. Lazy.
I cannot imagine any serious or basic program being crap at resize, unless its a demo source or ms paint, but everything else does it fine.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Its the low end digital cameras that are going to lose market - and possible disappear.
_ N95-part_3_the_Camera.php that gives some interesting comparisons with a proper camera - I'll admit I almost bought the phone though in the end price difference drove me to the HTC P3300.
No one that would consider buying a dSLR would seriously consider using a camera phone for anything more than quick snaps when you forgot or chose not to brig your proper camera along. The cameras in phones these days are good enough for the snaps most people want to take - especially if they include an led flash (pretty pathetic in real terms but again good enough to take a snap of your friend while in the pub)
I've seen a fairly indepth review of the nokia N95 on here http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia
If you have in your pocket something that can take good pictures anyway, then the quality difference you are going to require to justufy having a digital camera is going to be quite large.
I don't have a dSLR myself, I wanted something more all round when I got a digital camera - ie small enough to carry easily to take snaps. So I got the cannon powershot S50. This was 6 years ago and at the time it had the features closest to an SLR while still being a compact design.
Now I have a fairly good 2mp camera in my phone. Its got no zoom and no flash but its good enough that unless I specifically want a camera I'll leave the cannon at home. Because of thisnext camera I buy will probably be a dSLR - it doesn't need to fit the compact requirement as I have a device for that, for the separate device I want something with quality.
So yes, I think camera phones will spell the end of the camera market - atleast part of it. Cameras will become the province of specialists, people looking for holiday snaps will use their phones. All in all not a huge change from the way things used to be with SLRs for the serious people and 35mm compacts and disposable cameras for those wanting holiday snaps. The vast availablility of digital cameras with ease of use and low cost blurred these lines for a while, but I suspect it will settle right back where it used to be, but with dSLRs for the specialists and camera phones for the rest in almost all cases.
My only worry is what this will do to the choice of dSLRs, how many companies will be able to cope with losing their mass market revenues to phones...
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
Because of simple maths. A 10 megapixels image... well, ok, they count the individual RGB components in that so it's really anywhere between 2.5 and 3.3 mega-pixels. At 4/3 aspect ratio, 2048x1536 gives you a bit over 3 megapixels. How many photos that size did you see online?
So you don't have to poll everyone on Earth, you just need to look at what pictures you see online. If you don't have to scroll up and down to view it even in 1600x1200, then it's probably not the raw output of a 10 megapixel camera. It's that simple. And you wouldn't need a 10 megapixel camera to take it.
What such logic omits, though, is (A) the ignorance factor, and (B) the penis size factor, a.k.a., conspicuous consumption. Respectively:
A) People don't understand those numbers and think that more megapixels is necessarily better. A 1024x768 picture _must_ be better if it was taken in 10 megapixels.
B) A lot of those things are bought not because the owners actually needed an expensive camera, but just to show that they can afford an expensive camera. Same as buying jewellery, fur coats, or cars with a big wing at mid-life crisis. Something with an objective that looks like it belongs in a James Bond movie, is soo much better for taking unzoomed photos of squirrels in the park. In reality, just because it shows everyone else in the park who can afford it.
And thanks to the emperor's new clothes syndrome, for a lot it won't ever matter what benchmarks and image analysis tools say. Once people got it into their head that a more expensive camera is better, they'll see differences even where there are none. Because they just have to confirm it to themselves that (1) buying that expensive camera was justified, and (2) they're such great artists that they can spot imperfections where unskilled plebs can't see anything wrong. Same, if you will, as wannabe "audiophiles" swearing that music sounds better when they use a 1000$ power cable for their stereo.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If I look at the photo taken with the Canon 400D, then I would say the person who did make the shot had no idea how to operate the white balance of the camera properly. The same user would probably have done a same miserable shout with an Nikon D2Xs together with some highclass lens of total value well above 5000$. Any dSLR with an halfway fine lense does make much better photos than a poor camera phone regardless of what megapixel number they come up with. One just needs to know how to operate a dSLR camera. So the photo just disqualifies the user in this case.
I first got a Fujifilm S5500, which has a nice optical zoom, reasonable resolution, good feature set including various manual options, and is flexible enough for most lighting conditions. Good photography is about controlling many exposure parameters, such as focal depth. For any light condition there is a combination of ISO, exposure speed and F stop. For small camera phones the solution is to have a small lens with infinite focus. The limitations are that it can't zoom in; except digitally, and you can't get a shot that brings out the subject. Is that bad? Well, if you just want a snap a camera phone is great.
However, even the Fujifilm, which is a great camera, has its limits. The big one for me is start up time and shutter lag. When it comes to being able to quickly react to unexpected events that last only a few seconds there is simply no substitute for a DSLR. The ability to turn on your camera and have it ready to shoot before you get the eyepeice to your eye is vital. For example, before I had my Nikon D70 I went on a trip watching dolphins. There was a fantastic display of dolphins jumping clear out of the water, but I didn't get a single shot because unless you have the shutter half way pressed on most dogitals it takes a second or so to actually fire.
However, I have now been the photographer at two weedings, and the D70 has been wonderful; you can see the shot and press the shutter in a fraction of a second. At an airshow recently I captured a boeing jet taking off at a high angle of attack; impossible with cameras with shutter lag. The quality of the images is slightly better, and the lenses provide a little more flexibility, and there are more complex lighting options, such as speedlights that are better than the built in ones on smaller digitals, but the biggest feature for me on a DSLR is the instant shutter.
The review in this context limits the test to things a camera phone can do - that is take a photo of something reasonably close and not moving. Thats not to say I think camera phones are bad or poor quality images, just that they don't have the flexibility of a DSLR.
of course theyre getting better, but so are the Digital SLR cameras, ive got a pretty standard EOS-350d and i can't imagine a cameraphone coming anywhere close considering all the settings and different lens options.
Does any camera phone come with a tripod mount yet? it might help their bad rep in low light conditions.
take a look at my DSLR photos at: Stock-Imagery.com - you can download them at their original 8MP resolution to compare them to a camera phone
TechTakeaway.com for tech related articles, videos - lots of robots
You can get it developed in the US at Dwaynes photo as well. (they also process Kodachrome movie film)
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
All of the subjects were motionless, so the test is useless for real-world situations, where shutter speed must be fast enough. I saw people trying to use camera phones at a sports event. The light was fairly good, but the results were pathetic blurs.
And then there's the "vibrant colour" thing, which is seen to some extent in many digicams. Basically, the chroma has been excessively boosted, producing what photographers refer to as "Disney colour". It's a form of image distortion which can mask other flaws (especially combined with heavy denoising). As a deliberately chosen distortion, it has its place in artistic composition, but should not be the default.
I have a Nokia "camera" phone, and after laughing at a couple of test images, I stopped trying to take pictures with it. If the target moves, the image is a blur. If the light is poor, the image is so noisy that denoising produces a watercolor. The tiny aperture means that the background is in focus, even at infinity. The only thing I can't complain about is bad bokeh, because it has no bokeh (and certainly not good bokeh!).
For an always-in-pocket camera, I use the Sanyo C6, which has many compromises due to its compactness. However, in any lighting situation it will produce far better images than the Nokia, and does passable MPEG4 video also. For real photography, I have a Pentax DSLR with three flashes (wireless) and a dozen lenses.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Who started this anyway? It's about the usability. I'd rather carry a phone around instead of any point and shoot camera. It's much more convenient. And in time, phone cameras will get better, picture quality will be "enough" for the average joe, while the traditional camera will be a tool for the pros
It's pretty much like modern computers. In the beggining the were for pros, than became mainstream. And now a 500$ computer is enough for most tasks, even for gaming. Would you spend 2000 on a pc that will only use word and firefox?
bottom line, it's about needs. and a camera phone is starting to suit the needs for the average joe.
funny pics
My $200 phone has a camera on it. It's 1.3 MP. But with the image quality, you'd think it was around 0.5. it's horrible. My digital camera however, which was around $80, has GREAT quality 5MP images.
If you have $1000 to spend on a phone, it might be better than a digital camera. But then again, if you have $1000 to spend on a phone, you probably have enough money for a top of the line camera, which will most likely still be better than your phone.
Everyone knows that the radio waves from the phone usher the pixels around into sharper positions. At the same time they jack up the colour saturation. Actually I want a Camera-Phone-IceCubeMaker-JackHammer, all in one case. As well as saving me from carrying all those things separately just think how good its pictures would be! The cold would allow true macro focussing and the vibrations would optimise the composition - laws of physics again.
Since Flickr, I have stopped looking at pictures in any other way. Dumped all the family albums, took the prints off the wall. When will the art galleries stop wasting city-centre space with their big buildings full of paintings and snobbish people pretending they can tell the difference from a 100x150 Px thumbnail? Give me an hour and I would snap the lot for them on my phone and send the images where they wanted and toss the origianls. Those old masters could do with saturating up with that N95 anyway.
Photon noise (also called "shot noise") is intrinsic to the physics of photon arrival. The number of photoelectrons generated in a pixel is proportional to the number of photons incident on the pixel. The maximum number of photoelectrons (termed "well depth") which a pixel can contain depends on the size of the pixel. Bigger pixels means more photons and more photoelectrons for a given intensity of illumination. In a given time with constant illumination, a certain number of photons is expected per pixel, but the actual number in successive time intervals or in neighbouring pixels will differ. The standard deviation of this distribution is the square root of its mean value (photon arrival is governed by Poisson statistics).
In a DSLR image detector, the well depth is at least 40000 photoelectrons (often much more) representing the saturation level. In a digicam, the well depth is typically 10000 or so, and is often less than this in cameraphones. At equivalent fraction of saturation, the shot noise in a 10000 electron well is half that of a 40000 electron well, but the signal is only one quarter as large. So the signal-to-noise ratio is twice as bad in the 10000 electron detector as in the 40000 electron detector.
So, even with enough light, detectors with small pixels will produce noisier images, since their electron wells are small. It's a consequence of physics.
The situation is often worse than that, since the cameraphones and small digicams typically have tiny optics. Even though their detectors are small, the lenses don't illuminate them very well (the Nokia N series is less bad than most cameraphones), and they must resort to boosing the readout gain. This amplifies shot noise directly. So, cameraphone and small digicams either need more light to reach "enough" than larger digicams or DSLRs, or they must amplify their noise even more to operate at the same light levels as DSLRs.
Denoising in-camera or as postprocessing may make the image look better, but at the cost of losing image details with the noise artefacts. Heavy denoising produces a "watercolor" effect seen in many digicams.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I had an N95 last December and most of January. I tried it's camera and it was pretty aweful then, but that's prototypes for you. However, the thing I noticed more, and I've had this problem with other ones too, as well as point and shoots, is the time between pressing the button and it actually taking the shot - on the N95 it was a really long time. I expect they've improved it, but my 3250 and my wife's N73, isn't all that much better.
That's the reason I would still choose my 10D over a camera phone, if it were 'to hand'....which is the reason I would have the N95, since my 10D is almost never 'to hand'.
Max.
to explain how bad this article is. Oh, OK then.
1. Comparing what is effectively a P&S to a dSLR is bogus - totally different markets. If you only need P&S functionality, buy a P&S.
2. The person taking photos can't even get the white balance right.
I'll stop there otherwise I'll be typing all day - an utterly useless and ill researched article but TBH, typical of anything cNet put out.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I really wish they'd stop making every phone a camera phone. Because it has a camera in it, you're limited in the places you can take it.
Call me old fashioned, but as long as it's a good phone I'm happy.
Let's print the pictures and see which holds up at a4 or a3 @300dpi? I bet the owners of Nokia get real scared when they see the results of that. -
okinawa japan
I mean really... if a real camera won't play music (or videogames for that matter) does it really matter how good the pictures are?
I've just started using a dSLR, Cannon as it happens, after trying to use a dinky little digital camera last year in Africa. The main reason being that, while the smaller camera was ok from a bore friends and family with repetitive pictures of elephants perspective, I really yearned for a telephoto lens. So my logic was a 10-megapixel dSLR with a telephoto lens would allow me far far better chances of nabbing a decent photo, or cropping one to look decent, in that open air environment (and I need all the help I can get). This is something no mobile phone can ever hope to achieve.
I have an N95. I'm really impressed with it. It's not going to take the best pics, but it's pretty damn good for a camera phone and, as someone else posted here, it's always with me so I can grab a shot when I see one easily.
The thing also has a great web browser, email, wifi, GPS with mapping and navigation and takes some decent videos.
I'm not a professional photographer. I'm not the best at picking out the best shots, composition, etc. I'm just some Joe taking pics of my life and stashing them somewhere.
I started out with a T610, then a Nokia 6600, N90, and now N95. The rapid advancement in quality these little phones put out is incredible. It's pretty neat stuff and lots of fun and that's all I really care about.
How can a tiny device in which they fitted some cheap optics because there was some room left, take better pictures than a dedicated device based on a proven design with high-quality optics and electronics? In fact the article is not to blame because it doesn't aspire to be a professional camera review and sticks mostly to presenting the facts. The slashdot summary on the other hand reeks of either advertising or the opinion of someone who doesn't really know what he's talking about.
The point is that a good digital camera produces an accurate, high-range representation of the scene, which contains all the information required to turn it into a good final photo. This doesn't necessarily mean that the photo will 'look good' on-screen immediately, it's the job of the photographer to do some postprocessing to make the photo look more 'vibrant', to use our word of the day. The point is that you can easily go from a 'raw' photo to a 'vibrant' one, but not the other way around. Making colours look more vibrant mostly boils down to increasing the contrast and saturation, which means throwing away information. This is exactly what these built-in cameras do: postprocessing is built-in and probably also involves some tricks to compensate for the less than ideal optics and sensor. If they would have provided the full resolution images and done some more tests like outdoor images with white objects in bright sunlight, you'd probably see artefacts like blurring and purple fringing in the corners of the cellphone images. It would also have been interesting to see an attempt at a night shot of a city skyline.
It's also not just the tiny lens that's problematic in a cellphone camera, the sensor also is tiny which means tiny pixels that are prone to noise. Again, seeing the full-resolution images would be interesting to evaluate this. To keep the story short, if you use the same technology as in these phones but upscaled to the size and design of a classic camera, the result will always be better.
Nevertheless, if your only goal is to take pictures on-the-go that look good on average without having to run them through the GIMP or Photoshop, and to post them on Flickr in low-resolution format, then the tiny built-in camera in a device you're always carrying anyway is perfectly adequate. Just don't try to make an awe-inspiring poster from these images or submit them to National Geographic.
I went to a conference recently at Web 2.0 in San Francisco. I learned that statiscally nowadays more digital pictures are taken with camera-phones than standalone digital cameras. Its really a moot point. When you think about it, a camera phone is always available (if you have one you take it everywhere you go). Its simple to share pictures through web, sms bluetooth etc. It way more accessible. The fact is if you take a room of people you can bet your bottom dollar that a good chunk of them are carrying a camera-phone and little to none will be carrying a standalone one. I really dont see how that means we will "start to see a decline". As far as i am concerned there are way more phones out there than cameras already!
;)
However its good that image quality is getting better, the real test however is how well they take pictures in smokey nightclubs and pubs as that's where most of the pictures get taken!
N.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Digital Camera: Larger image sensor, space and engineering for proper optics, removable storage, zoom lens(es), a dedicated interface, auto/manual focus, et. all.
Phone Camera: Tiny webcamish image sensor, tiny fixed pinhole lens that can't be focused in most cases, hampered by whatever storage is available in your phone since most don't have card slots, and an interface that's meant to be a phone and not a camera. And your phone camera is tied into your phone, which is in turn tied to the service contract from your cell provider. I dunno about you, but my phone won't let me do anything let alone get at the camera with no SIM or an invalid SIM.
The problem here is we're talking phones with lousy excuses for cameras tacked to them. The only way a "cell phone camera" is ever going to outstrip a proper digital camera is if we start developing cameras with lousy excuses for telephones tacked to them.
I've always loved big sheets of film. My P&S back in the day was a 6x7 so that I could make contact prints big enough to be viewable and give away to friends. My 4x5 negs are the treasured records of my youth. So when you say digital is better than film, I'll just wear a little smile and remember that generalizations are bad but that you generally can't convince people of that.
Once we get into little-camera world (35mm-size SLRs and smaller), you make lots of sense. I *really* want to get heavily into digital photography and I always have a digital camera of some sort that will make photographs good enough for web publishing. HOWEVER, my big stumbling block is image quality from cameras small enough to carry around. Back in the day, it was possible to buy a 35mm film "pocket" camera with a high-quality 35/2.8 lens and be able to produce killer-quality photos easily and conveniently as long as you knew what you were doing and had a good method of defeating camera vibration during exposure. (A monopod works for me, even if it does seem a little silly to be holding an Olympus Stylus Epic atop one.)
What kills me about this whole digital business is this question: Why doesn't some manufacturer recognize that there are people like me out here and make a camera for us? Give me a full sized (24x36) sensor, a fixed 35/2.8 lens, and a good viewfinder. That's all I really want. I can give up the LCD on the back. I can give up the 27 preset modes that include making me coffee first thing in the morning. Hell, I'd give up internal storage and put up with either a wireless or tethered link to a battery operated hard drive carried in my pocket for storing all those RAW files (and you know a camera like this should output only RAW, right?).
How about it, camera makers? Wanna build a digital P&S for us quality-conscious luddites? Pretty please?
And if you do, then lets talk about morphing it into a non-interchangeable lens, short-zoom, true ZLR format, next, OK?
First this article make no sense. Second, good luck with making a 12x lens for a camera phone (which doesn't make the phone bulky). Third, if you want to take excellent photos, take a course, or at least read the freaking manual. Fourth, I seriously doubt any mfg will make an underwater housing for a phone. The way I pick my digi-cams is based on the specs of the housings. I know, I'm not most people, but with the current price of dive housing, there are more and more diver with digicams. I am an amateur (almost wrote armchair) photographer, and the photos which receive most of the compliments from friends & family are my underwater photos. Rant-out.
You can, the people who are into point and shoot are too dumb to (personal expierience with family members-they don't particularly like the photos they hav from the short time they used a SLR camera and can't figure out how to make them look better and can't be bothered to). Frankly, I can, but I can't be bothered to- if my cameraphone can print out decent 8x10s (I shit you not- but then again I don't buy my cameraphones from the States- not when Korea and Japan offer far better) I don't need anything better.
OSx86 FTW
Yup, just read that in the wikipedia Article. But as I live in Japan, I am happy that I still can get in country development and do not have to wait so long ...
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
You're right about that.
As a dSLR owner, I wonder whether the people doing the testing were skilled in the use of the dSLR. Taking a camera straight out of the box and using the automatic settings seems like a rather amateur method of testing. If you are going to get something with the ability of a good dSLR, you better spend some time practicing with it.
That said, if you are like a lot of people and just want the ability to take point and shoot pictures, you don't really need a dSLR. At 240 DPI, a 4x6 photo would require about 1.4 megapixels. Having more megapixels would allow you to do enlargements and cropping, both of which I would guess are relatively rare compared to the number of point and shoot pictures taken. (Are there any stats on this?)
An additional advantage of point and shoot devices, be they cameras or camera phones, is that they are a lot more portable than a dSLR. This means that you will have them available when you need them AND can use them discretely.
Still, there are those of us who have dSLRs because we are either skilled amateurs or professionals who desire and often need the abilities they offer. I suspect that it will be several years before camera phones will reach the point that you can take a closeup portrait from thirty feet away that is anywhere near the quality of what I can shoot with a tripod mounted dSLR.
We are also the people who want the higher megapixel cameras because we do lots of cropping and enlargements. But then, we know what we are talking about when it comes to megapixels.
Unfortunately, there are also those who, as mentioned by another poster, buy dSLRs for the brag factor. I suspect that a skilled photographer, with a good point and shoot camera, can get consistently better results than the bragging types who have all the equipment but never use anything other than the automatic settings.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some of us read the article but object to the comments the poster of the article made.
For example, while the summary poster said that the Nokia takes more vibrant pictures than the dSLR, they didn't specifically mention where the dSLR does better. That seems a little bit biased.
Then they make the comment that we could see a decline in dedicated digital camera sales as camera phone sales increase.
I can see this happening for point and shoot cameras, especially if camera phones keep improving. But I don't see it taking much of a bite out of the dSLR market.
If the poster had mentioned that the dSLR camera did better in other areas and had suggested that high end camera phones might displace dedicated point and shoot digital cameras, I would not have a problem with the comments.
What I think that the poster meant to say, was that sales of P&S cameras might suffer as camera phones improve. After all, we don't buy P&S cameras as an artistic tool. We buy P&S cameras for convenience; and what could be more convenient than the cellphone that you're carrying around already?
Personally, I was very impressed with the photos taken by the N95. Oversaturated, yes. WB off by a longshot, yes (unless you are going to try to convince me that purple is the new white). But for a camera that is always in your pocket? Amazing! I wonder what the shutter speed/lag is on that thing. Also, it'd be interesting to see a fullsize shot to see how much noise is in the shadows.
On the other hand, I'm not going to be selling my DSLR and equipment any time soon.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The simple answer (and correct) is no.
The digital camera will be used by people who need a camera.
I would say that the rant comes because of the phrasing the poster used. For those of us that use dSLRs in something other than point and shoot mode, even a vague implication that a camera phone is 'better' than a dSLR is enough to raise our hackles.
If the poster had said that camera phones are reaching the point that they meet the needs of the average Joe, there would be less controversy.
I suspect that the article the poster referenced will create a lot of discussion outside SlashDot where the semi-average Joe, computer literate but not camera literate, will say that the Nokia did 'better' than the dSLR, based strictly on vibrancy.
There are three things that I would add (I am a semi-pro photographer who uses a dSLR).
First, the megapixel race has really distorted the idea of image quality in the pop mindset. Many think that the more sensor sites a camera has, the better images it will produce. WRONG. With the dSLRs, the sensors are generally quite a bit larger than the P&S and camera phones. Larger sensors means more photons per sensor, and thus, less measurement noise. A 6-megapixel dSLR vs. a 6-megapixel P&S competition would almost certainly show the dSLR blows away the compact in noise performance (assuming a larger sensor on the dSLR). Camera phones probably have much smaller sensors even than dedicated P&S cams -> higher noise.
Second, the response time of many camera phones is horrific. I have an LG vx9900 (enV) with a 2MP camera, and while it takes OK pictures, I can't get a good shot of my daughter to save my life. I really need Nicholas Cage to see about 2 seconds into the future in order to press the shutter at the right moment. My Nikon D70s is well nigh instantaneous. I rely on extremely fast response in my portrait and wedding business. Those split seconds make the difference between a great expression and a so-so one.
Third, one of the things many people love about high-quality portraits is selective focus, or narrow depth-of-field. I use this outdoors to get my subject in focus and the background blurry. With my 80-200mm f/2.8 lens (cost twice as much as my camera body), I get incredibly soft background blur that is very pleasing. There is no way that a camera phone with a focal length of a few millimeters is ever going to achieve that, since such a short focal length lens will have huge depth of field. One needs a telephoto lens, and the faster (lower f number), the better. This means $$, generally. The fast telephotos-- the extreme example being the sports sideline shooters with their huge glass on monopods, their cameras hanging off their lenses-- are pretty pricey. But for many portraits, a fast telephoto is invaluable.
For me, I can't imagine a camera phone ever approaching the capabilities I need from a camera. It's the physics of the thing. The orig article is obviously written by someone who is not really a serious photographer. Like someone mentioned-- white balance. Duh. Digital photography 101.
My parents often tell the tale of showing slides I took with an Instamatic using Kodachrome when I was around ten. A family friend, who had a 35mm camera with additional lenses, exposure meter and equipment, asked what F-Stop and shutter speed was used for the shots because he was impressed with the results.
He was somewhat bemused to find out who had taken the pictures and what was used.
In the right hands, with the right topics, those point and click cameras could do very good pictures. Of course they were designed to take decent pictures in the hands of amateurs.
Comparing megapixels works for marketing types and people who think that bigger is better. Plus it is something that advertisers can put in large red type to 'prove' that their product is 'superior' to others. And to the average casual point and shoot photographer, having more megapixels does allow the pictures to be improved when they are reduced to manageable size.
Those of us who go beyond point and shoot often consider the other factors and don't let megapixels have a major influence, except when we want to justify a new camera body.
You made a good point about camera availablity and photo accessibility. Why carry a dedicated camera of any type for spur of the moment photos when a camera phone is available?
This does mean that privacy goes out the door, for better or worse. With the right camera phone, even the bathroom is no longer a safe place for privacy.
The possibility of blackmail, intentional or otherwise, greatly increases, especially in nightclubs and bars. A few choice photos of a person who has had a few too many can instantly go around the world in a matter of minutes.
Then there is the inevitable increase in the sheer number of badly composed and poorly shot photos. As it becomes easier to create and distribute digital pictures, the quantity of bad ones increases. (Perhaps the next level of improvement will be in autocomposition and editing.)
Still, camera phones may have some positive impacts. Crimes might be solved or even prevented through camera phone surveilance.
It should be interesting.
Making mobile phones all the more annoying. I'm really waiting to see what comes next. I guess an MP3 player / cell phone would be the ultimate in annoyance. *waits for the iPhone to come now*
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
And a so your mind will "see" the ping pong ball as white because you know it's white. If you take an uncorrected picture, it will only look "right" under *precisely the same lighting*.
I think everyone agrees that I am not going to get as good of a picture from my phone as some $1k Cannon, but for the rest of us that just carry around a 4 or 5 MP point & shoot, I think many people would be excited if those could now safely be left at home.
The average person just want to have a camera around to snap a picture of a kids first step, first day of school, etc. For these people a camera phone makes a lot of sense, and in fact will perform better than the pin hole camera. I have to agree that for the average person, a camera phone makes a lot of sense, in many cases better sense than a separate digital. p. The only thing I find silly is that the n95 is not a small form factor, and 10 megapixels is much more than the average person needs. At the 750 price tag, the average person can wait to spend $500 on an iPhone, and then $250 a camera with real optics.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
...what about the fact that most people still use cameraphones that make you pay to copy the pictures to your computer.
If I have to pay to access the actual photo, who the f*** cares how much better the "white balance" is? (and I did read the comments - the quality isn't actually better)
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I'll admit the camera phone is a handy tool. I never miss that shot and say "Damn I wish I had my camera with me", but if I'm looking to take a decent photo, I'll always prefer to use a digital camera that's designed to function as a camera! Prety much my opinion on these new phones... I want a cell phone that works primarly as a phone, with the extras being extra, not having a device that's designed for photography/or to be a PDA with a cellphone built into it... Also, if I was going to take photos in less than perfect light, I'd much prefer a camera with a decent flash!
Someone modded this "overrated"
well pffft.
That's all.
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.