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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.
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.
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.
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.