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."

Comments

Why this will never be true

[SuperBanana]

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.