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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."
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.
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).
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!).
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'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.
;-)
*Gee*, do you think? Look, I've been around here for a while (and so have you from the looks of your ID), but Slashdot has always been an online home to a subset of society that is rather technically inclined, so yeah... we are a bit detached from what *most* people (I'd say unwashed masses, but, well..... you know) are doing... like Windows.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
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.
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.
Five megapixel cameras with small cheap lenses do not take more "vibrant" pictures than digital SLR cameras with Zeiss lenses.
The N95 to which your refer does in fact have a Zeiss lens
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
The problem I have with the OP is that
The N95 post-processed the image, by CNet's own admission. Then they didn't post-process the rest of the images. If vibrancy is the top measure of quality, they should at least be running a batch auto-levels on the images afterwards.
But there's another problem. Vibrancy isn't the top measure of quality for digital cameras. With digital photography, taking the picture is just the first step in a process. That's when the photo-editing begins.
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.
They probably had it set on daylight white balance. Canon's auto white balance isn't the best in the world, but it's pretty good at recognizing tungsten light.