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

Herd-mentality.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

It's possible.

[timeOday]

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.

Re:It's possible.

[EvanED]

My own experience is that "enough light" is absent more than it's present.

Even if it is, the SLR gives you manual control and a far wider zoom range.

Re:It's possible.

[Doogie5526]

I assume they did the comparison because they consider dSLRs the standard to measure by. While it's cool to see a comparison of the two. dSLRs and camera phones are meant for completely different audiences. What will likely be displaced is point & shoot cameras.

Re:It's possible.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Before anyone jumps on me, I don't have a dSLR, nor do I know how to use one.

Let's just say that their methodology is suspect at best:

"All the shots were taken with devices taken straight out of the box, and we used the default settings or an automatic mode if there was one".

A person should not be buying a dSLR if they aren't going to take the time to learn how to use it. They should just be buying a point and shoot camera. The 5MP camera, they noted that it does badly in low light and the light has a blue tinge.

The only thing that this thing compares is the quality of scaled-down pictures.

It's kind of pointless to clamor for a high megapixel camera if it's only going to be scaled down to VGA res for the web. 2MP would be plenty and offer plenty of oversampling for web. If you want to do good prints, then that's where a nicer camera comes into play, but they don't compare that.

Re:It's possible.

[CptPicard]

It's possible that this "vibrancy" factor is due to the fact that most consumer cameras "enhance" the picture automagically. They fix contrast, add saturation, etc. It's a real PITA for those of us who just want the data off the sensor though, so that we can then Photoshop things to our preference. DSLRs tend to produce "duller" pictures by default, but you're expected to add the "pop" later on, and the potential is there in the image.

Another possibility is that the tester used some crappy kit lens. For example the one that came with my EOS 300D a few years back is plain awful, and the first thing was to get a proper lens.

Re:It's possible.

[badasscat]

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.

"Good pictures" start with accuracy. That's the entire point of a camera, and that's what separates good cameras from bad cameras. Even in the pre-digital days, sure, different films and different settings would give you different results, but photographers paid the big bucks for cameras that would given them a reliable baseline of accuracy - that meant being capable of things like high shutter speeds for daylight photos, low shutter speeds for night photos, high quality light metering, and lenses capable of high resolutions, high color accuracy and low distortion. What a photographer chooses to do artistically is another matter, but the point is photographers don't rely on their cameras to be the artists; that's the photographer's job, not the camera's.

So I don't even need to look at the article to know what the word "vibrant" means with regard to the Nokia photos - it means "artificially jacked colors". In other words, not at all accurate, in other words crap.

I mean, look. I have a 2mp cell phone camera and I have an 8mp DSLR. I use my cell phone camera when I'm just out and about and don't care about quality. But there is a huge difference in color accuracy, noise and detail between even the best cell phone cameras and the worst dslr's. And that difference is not going away.

So I guess you can consider me one of your "defensive" dslr owners - but hopefully, there will always be defenders of the truth out there.

Re:It's possible.

[Rui del-Negro]

Depends. Some cameras try to cram so many pixels into such a small sensor that you end up with a noisy, grainy, blotchy piece of crap even with loads of sunlight.

Unfortunately "megapixels" are the "megahertz" of digicam marketing (same goes for lower reaction times in LCDs, often achieved at the cost of image quality and colour accuracy), and people don't realise that, for screen viewing, they're unlikely to ever need more than 3MP.

Also, cameras with "angled" light paths (ultra-compacts without lens extension) tend to have very, very bad distortion and CA.

There are several great compact digicams out there, but there are also a lot of really, really bad ones.

Re:It's possible.

[StewedSquirrel]

It's not only the AMOUNT of light that is poorly handled by the mini sensors in these cameras... but the range of light. Dynamic range is the single quality differentiator between good sensors and poor ones. Almost all sensors these days have adequate resolution. My primary camera, as a professional, is only about 4 megapixels. I've made 30x40 prints that, while not having the absolute crispness and resolution of an old kodachrome slide, it is more than adequate.

The dynamic range on my sensor, is an order of magnitude better than the sensor on my high-end point-and-shoot, not to mention my camera phone.

When i shoot pictures in daylight conditions with the camera phone, they are absolutely terrible. Sun-light highlights are either totally blown out, leaving a glowing halo on everyone's forehead, or they are adjusted for and everything else goes dark, making the scene look like a shot on the back of the moon.

As a professional, I learned to find lighting that does not have sharp high contrast definitions, but your average consumer does not practice this technique, so dynamic range is even MORE important for a consumer than for a pro in some cases.

That's all :-)

Stewed

Re:It's possible.

[Hawthorne01]

Warning: Photography Rant Ahead!

I am sick and tired of camera snobs thinking that more money = better pictures. Look people, I worked as a commercial still photog for 15 years, with clients like IBM, ITT Finance and Compaq and I got out around the turn of the millenium because I saw how things were headed. I just can't compete with the millions of great cheap/free photos out there now. If you all think OSS is revolutionizing the software world, wait 'til you see what websites like istockphoto and sxc.hu are doing to commercial shooters.

Ok, where was I... Oh yeah, cheap cameras. I had Sinars and 'Blads with enough lights to blind a whole regiment and still have my Nikons. But my favorite camera of all time was/is the Olympus XA becuase it was there when I needed it (and I'm in some good company in that regards). I ended up getting hundreds of great candids and quick landscape shots with my XA because it was with me when it was the right time and place to take a great picture. Fat lot of good that EOS 1DS will do you sitting on the closet shelf at home does you if a great picture happens to be right in front of your eyes.

And another thing about small cameras (and to some extent, cameraphones): You don't look like a freaking dork when you're shooting. Unless you're God's gift to hospitality, getting a candid, relaxed environmental portrait while trying to light the place like Yusef Karsh is a recipe for disaster. Learning how to slow down and get to know my subjects before I picked up a camera made a bigger difference in my work than anything I bought at a camera store.

Re:It's possible.

[dgatwood]

The white balance is all over the map. The N95 shot looks good, but only because of the subject matter. The particular objects happen to look better with a blue cast. The N95 white balance is actually way, way off. If you look at the image with a color meter, you can see that the white areas are actually very purple. The IXUS is very yellow. The Sony (as is typical for Sony) is very orange. The Nokia 6300 is a blusih green (more green than blue). The other Canon is very orange. None of them are anywhere CLOSE to correct white balance. None of them.

The high end Canon photo looks like it is the closest to accurately representing what your eye would probably see under the same circumstances, assuming that this was shot with standard incandescent lights (i.e. almost no compensation), while the Nokia phones overcompensated (a lot), and the Sony did just what I'd expect from Sony (exactly the same amount of overly-red hue whether indoors or in broad daylight). The others didn't appear to compensate enough, but tried to compensate a little.

As for clarity, even at this level of size reduction (which is pretty substantial), the high end Canon took slightly sharper photos, but what was most striking was that the depth of field for the Nokia N95 is so noticeably wider due to the small lens even when viewed at a reduced size. There's no real foreground or background. It is all just flat. While that might make it easier for novices to shoot photos that aren't blurry, it often makes for very visually busy photos.

The reality is that most users probably can't tell the difference, but for those who can, I would much rather color correct the Canon photo a little than use the N95 photo. If the background were a crowd of people instead of a blank wall, you would immediately understand why. :-)

Another thing that I'm not seeing is any mention of the exposure. There's no guarantee that camera phone images of moving objects/people in interior lighting would look anywhere near as good. I realize that it is MUCH harder to come up with a reproducible test case for a moving object (though a swining clock pendulum would be a good place to start). However, that's where larger lenses are most likely to result in a significant improvement. They allow you to gather enough llight more rapidly than with a smaller lens, allowing for a faster shutter speed without the graininess associated with a gain up.

Re:It's possible.

[DragonWriter]

Still, the medium light [cnet.co.uk] photos were taken in indoor lighting, and that n95 shot looks good. Its only advantage over the real camera images is better white balance, but then again proper white balance is pretty darn important.

The site notes that the N95 does postprocessing by default that results in the color vibrance. Really, I'm not surprised that a point-and-shoot camera (that it is in a phone isn't really an issue) takes decent pictures in average conditions—that's what the point of a point-and-shoot camera is, after all— nor am I surprised that one that does some automatic postprocessing no doubt designed to make pictures taken in average conditions look better is competitive with an unprocessed image from a dSLR in similar conditions.

SLRs (digital or otherwise) selling point is that they provide the flexibility to do things far beyond snapshots in average conditions.

Re:It's possible.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I agree with many of the points you present, really. Having the fanciest device doesn't help if you don't know how to use it. I don't know if it necessarily applies so well to photography, but in my general experience, a talented person can do better work with a lesser device than a less talented person with the most expensive gear. I understand that it's harder to compete, but I think there's still a paying high end. I don't see the casual point-and-shooter doing shots for magazine ads, posters, wedding portraits or anything like that. In the same vein, megapixels don't matter as much as most people seem to think.

I think it is fine for an active photographer to have multiple cameras. They'll have a full size camera and a pocket camera. I see hear about the same practices in the video field too.

Re:It's possible.

[dgatwood]

remember that a dSLR with a f/1.7 50mm lens has pretty shallow depth of field, then consider that the camera phone is what, f/2.8 3.8mm, that reduces the need to focuss on anything in particular.

As I've said before, while a wide depth of field makes it easier for newbies to take so-so pictures, it makes it impossible to take really good pictures of anything but landscape photos (and other similar shots). For more typical photography (pictures of people, objects, etc.), you don't want a wide depth of field. You want your subject in focus and everything else out of focus. That way, your subject stands out from the background. If you don't do that, the background can be so busy that the photos lack clarity. Most of the time, the reduced depth of field in a larger format camera will result in pictures that just plain look better.

The only thing higher quality camera phones will do is ensure an endless supply of flat, lifeless photos with busy backgrounds interfering with the subject. Bad photos are still bad photos no matter how crisp you make them.

Re:It's possible.

[vought]

Bzzzt wrong answer. I shoot both 645 and digital professionally and film still has many advantages- better dynamic range, better resolution, less noise at high ISO, much better enlargeability, true black and white, and permanence.

Much of that stuff was accurate two years ago; that doesn't make it so today.

The widest dynamic range for slide film is Fuji's duplicating film, CDU-II. About eight stops, compared to ten or more for most digital SLRs. Negative film may get you nine stops in ideal conditions, but it's a mistake to say that the best DSLRs and studio backs have short dynamic range.

Film does have the advantage of a non-linear response to light - and non-linear response to color, which is one attraction to film - each has a unique palette. Digital sensors respond in a linear fashion. I prefer the character of film for this reason, but again, I find no reason to shoot film in most situations; grand landscape work with my 4x5 is one place where film clearly wins. In smaller formats, digital is recording more information in a wider range than any camera or film.

You won't find film capable of recording density that the best sensors are capable of. Not anymore. The only way to get ahead of large sensors today is with square inches of film; that's why I still shoot 4x5. After making test prints from a Canon 1DS mkII and 6x7 slide film scanned on a Tango at 3500 dpi, I'm convinced the 1DS is of comparable, if not better quality - and this was almost two years ago.

The clean signal of these newer, better sensors mean more of the information captured is usable as image data; there's no grain, and at low ISO, no discernible noise.

What is this "true" black and white of which you speak? Colored filters in front of black and white film do affect the image; black and white images are made by exposing color-sensitive emulsion that is made with a single layer of un-dyed silver halide. Same thing as Kodachrome slide film - without the dye.

All black and white films are sensitive to different wavelengths on the spectrum. By post-processing your own black and white using Channel Mixer in Photoshop, you're doing the same thing - selecting the percentage of each primary color portrayed as a monochrome image. Seriously - did you not understand that this is how black and white film works?

The concept of "true" black and white may make sense to someone who doesn't understand how film works - but even Photo 101 students know that "black and white" films are color sensitive.

Permanence is one department in which film wins hands down for ease of handling, cataloging, and durability - but make a print of your digital file on to Fuji Crystal Archive (a silver-based paper popular for printing digital work) and your permanence problem becomes a lot less scary - suddenly you have a more permanent copy that is human readable.

Re:It's possible.

[dgatwood]

I somewhat agree about the 300D lens. It's a LOT better than most of the smaller cameras I've seen, but it pales compared to the same camera with a nicer lens. I found that out when I borrowed a prime lens from one of my coworkers while my lens was malfunctioning. Wow.

I now have a much nicer lens and only use the stock lens when I'm in a high risk situation (e.g. the beach). :-)

When I saw the flash photos fo the D95, the word "cartoony" came to mind. Anybody else think so?

Re:It's possible.

[demon driver]

For more typical photography (pictures of people, objects, etc.), you don't want a wide depth of field. You want your subject in focus and everything else out of focus. Well, you might want it for a particular purpose and that's fine, and it's clear that you won't get it with a camera phone or any other miniature imager device. The suggestion though that good photos (even considering the exception of landscapes) could only be made with small DOF is equally wrong as suggesting more DOF was always better than less. Relying on artifically blurring out the background is fine for special applications like artistic portrait, but sometimes it is just lack of imagination and ability to compose a picture with harmonious fore- and background. By the way, a completely blurred-out background is far from what the human eye sees when it focuses on a foreground object. So, for 'naturally' looking photos, for example, you would not want to do it at all.

Re:It's possible.

[troc]

Indeed, I have my DSLR set to do almost no post processing In the camera when I shoot JPEG (I shoot RAW or Jpen depending on the situation) as I and Photoshop can do a much better job late on. So, indeed JPEGs straight from my camera don't look vibrant, they aren't even that "sharp". Compared to pictures from my little compact, they look flat and a bit fuzzy. Run them through my photoshop actions however and they are vastly superior to anything a point and shoot, or camera phone can produce, given the same subject and photographer.

And lets not forget my f/1.8 (and better) lenses that allow me to get pictures that NO camera phone or compact can obtain. Or photos with any decent control over depth of field - it's fundamentally impossible to get extremely narrow depth of field with a small lens-type camera.

I can set my DSLR to behave as a point and shoot (or camera phone) and it does lots of post processing and produces a picture worthy of "flickr", just like a camera phone :)

So, as the poster above pointed out, in point and shoot conditions, a point and shoot will win out - because it's smaller and portable but if you go on safari, don't expect your N95 to produce National Geographic quality prints!

Re:It's possible.

[gullevek]

The only thing I want to comment here. A negative film has still much more dynamic range than a digital Camera. But I agree that nowadays top digital cameras have a wider dynamic range than even the best slide film.

I personally shoot film, because I enjoy it. But professionally I would not do it anymore. Development, scan, spot cleaning. Thats a big hassle. And you can avoid this all with a digital camera.

But for a private guy like me, who does only hobby shooting, Film is the only way to get Medium Format. I really cannot, nor want to invest into any digital back. Getting and old Rolleiflex, Hassleblad, Bronica or something like this is way cheaper.

Re:It's possible.

[timeOday]

The white balance is all over the map. The N95 shot looks good, but only because of the subject matter. The particular objects happen to look better with a blue cast. The N95 white balance is actually way, way off. If you look at the image with a color meter, you can see that the white areas are actually very purple.

Did you actually try this? I just did, with the color picker in gimp and a sample radius of 5. Here are the results for samples from: 1) over the monster's head, 2) on the ping-pong ball, 3) the M&M's foot. After each, I put the distance in color space from the mean of the color components (gray) to the specific color:

n95 : 160,158,165 (5.1); 225,212,227 (11.5); 208,210,210 (1.6)
400d: 174,145,106 (48.3); 232,199,168 (45.3); 219,187,146 (51.7)

Can you look at those numbers and still argue both cameras are equally wrong? It isn't even close! The D400's error is many times that of the n95 in this particular image.

There's no question an SLR can capture motion better and reduce depth of field much more than a cellphone cam. But I don't think there's any question that most people want white things to look white when they shoot under tungsten lighting, and in this particular image, those other subtleties are hard to notice compared to the strong brown cast on Canon image.

Sure, it would be a mistake to draw general conclusions like "dSLR's have bad auto white balance" from one image from one model. I'm just surprised anybody can look down that page of photos with their own eyes and not admit that, in this particular case, the best looking image is from a cell phone.

Where to Start?

[smack.addict]

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.

Re:Where to Start?

[fan of lem]

Flickr is more than a place to upload pictures - it's also a community of photography aficionados, with categorized groups (think yahoo or google groups for photos). There are groups dedicated to photo critiques, so you can post your shots there for hopefully constructive analysis from other flickr users. It's a really interesting place, and I for one go there 75% of the time just to look at other people's works.

And I dunno, the N95 shots do look good _at the resolution presented_. A handy device to have, if you don't have your SLR or P&S with you. Of course, for high res pixel-per-pixel quality, nothing beats SLR. (And cameraphones will suck in low-light.)

puleeeeze!

[cashman73]

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!

Maybe...

[imamac]

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.

Next article on CNet...

[Rui del-Negro]

"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)?"

Re:Next article on CNet...

[j79]

Regarding DVCPRO vs VHS, you completely forgot that most people will recompress the video to put on YouTube...so seriously, what's the point of DVCPRO HD?

Re:Next article on CNet...

[Rui del-Negro]

You're right. I completely forgot that 87% of home users and 95% of broadcast professionals use YouTube as their "master" format. ;-)

Re:Next article on CNet...

[Rui del-Negro]

It's not a matter of providing superior quality. They are deliberately limiting the quality by assuming that everyone's final goal is to post scaled down pictures on Flickr. Hence the comparison with video scaled down to a point where the original quality is irrelevant. 64x48 pixel video is worse than DVCPRO HD but my point is that it's also worse than VHS.

Most people (especially the ones with two X chromosomes) like to be able to print their pictures, and most camera phones can't really produce acceptable results above 15x10 cm (6x4"), regardless of their resolution. Their sensors are simply too small and too noisy. In fact, for the same sensor size, a 3MP sensor is likely to have better quality than a 5MP model.

Flickr?

[dreamchaser]

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.

Re:Flickr?

[BWJones]

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. ;-)

More vibrant = more artificial, but people like it

[AaronLawrence]

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.

"Vibrant"

[evilviper]

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.

Re:"Vibrant"

[servognome]

Vibrant doesn't mean much of anything to me... About as much as audio sounding "warm".

Your text is very "Chewy"

Re:"Vibrant"

[evilviper]

That ping-pong ball should be white.

Not if the lighting in the room has a yellow tint to it.

I wonder how people would feel if they captured a picture by a campfire, only to have it turn out perfectly clear and white, looking like they are standing under massive lights...

Of course, I'm not being entirely honest, because HOW WHITE that ping pong ball should be is entirely debatable. In the N95 images, it certainly isn't pure white. Just open it up in your nearest image editor, and use the eraser tool on the ball...

What's more, anyone could easily increase the contrast of any picture to make it look even WHITER than white, and blacker than black. Cameras are supposed to capture a image as close to reality as possible... not blue-shift everything to play perceptual tricks on the viewer.

Herd-fermentality.

[skoaldipper]

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!"

Re:Herd-fermentality.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is total bull. Does the OP work for Nokia? This looks like viral marketing gone wrong. Five megapixel cameras with small cheap lenses do not take more "vibrant" pictures than digital SLR cameras with Zeiss lenses. Also, the assertion that "most people resize their images to put on flikr" is ridiculous. Less than one thousandth of one per cent of images taken with digital cameras have ended up on flikr. What are the authorities the OP relies on? I don't think I'm going to take Slashdot seriously any more. It's being invaded by bs.

Re:Herd-fermentality.

[The Great Pretender]

Funny, I put all my digital pictures of my kids on Flickr and have never resized a single one. All 600+ are there in their full glory for family to download as they want and create their horrible home-made cards and calendars that they then send back to me (thanks Apple for that software). As for phone cameras taking taking better pictures I have to agree with our AC friend here, bunch of bull, or at least in my experience.

Re:Herd-fermentality.

[trisweb]

Their definition of "better" was simply not accurate (the better camera is apparently the "one that got the white balance right"), and they probably didn't know how to take a representative shot with either the Canon P/S or dSLR cameras -- simple settings would have made the white balance correct and the colors more "vibrant" (used as their biggest measure of quality). The scene was obviously also very poorly lit.

That said, it is good that the better camera phones got the white balance correct; that's the main problem I have with my dinky camera phone, all the photos come out too orange or blue, never what they're supposed to be. But come on, obviously, you can't say a camera phone can compete with even a midrange pocket digital camera with options and lens quality and stuff, no less any digital SLR. You just can't make stupid comparisons... but then when have we ever trusted CNet with being 'intelligent'?

Re:Herd-fermentality.

[amorangi]

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

Re:Herd-fermentality.

[Annirak]

I heartily agree, with the exception that the N95 does have quite high quality optics.

The problem I have with the OP is that

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.

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.

Re:Herd-fermentality.

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Dynamic Range

[ironring2006]

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!).

Re:Dynamic Range

[vought]

It was interesting to see that this "test" consisted of a single scene.

Exactly. C|Net wouldn't know how to do a real photographic "test" if Ansel Adams came back from the dead and held them by the hands while explaining the Zone System - which is still a great way to understand sensitometry.

Sensationalized

[metalhed77]

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.

RTFA

[richdun]

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.

It is the lens that counts

[kbahey]

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.

it's all about the camera's purpose

[adrenalinerush]

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.

Rediculous

[EnsilZah]

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.

Re:Rediculous

[revengebomber]

I can show you that my old Voodoo 3 is quite compareable to the Geforce 8800GTX when playing Quake at 640x480. Apparently, you can't even tell the difference between 330 and 1180 frames/sec. N00b.

Kind of a bizarre test

[hey!]

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.

Phone camera?

[DeadboltX]

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"

Re:Phone camera?

[asninn]

Myself, I'd rather have a good camera (without a built-in phone) and a good phone (without a built-in camera). Seriously - when I want to take pictures, I'll use my camera, and when I want to make a phone call, I'll use my phone.

Camera phones are useful for people who want to take quick snapshots that they can MMS to their friends (or that they can show them on the phone in person later on), but little more. That doesn't mean that they're necessarily a bad idea, but they simply aren't the same as cameras, and given the size constraints on phones, they never will be, either (since you can't put a decent lense in a camera).

wrong comparison

[Eugene]

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.

Apples are not oranges

[spaceyhackerlady]

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

Baseless assumptions

[MasterC]

...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.

Sorry, but what complete and utter horseshit. People who buy DSLRs don't buy them to put pictures up on flickr. People who buy thousand dollar lenses and up (e.g., me) don't buy them to put pictures on flickr.

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 /. summary is that predicting a sales trend on the assumption that the majority of people are flickr users is beyond absurd, it's stupid and reckless. And, of course, 4 cameras is sufficient sampling to draw such conclusions to boot (where's the top-of-the-line camera with top-of-the-line lens to compare against the bottom-of-the-barrel camera phone?).

Honestly, it's crap story submissions like this that just grinds me about slashdot.

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.

As a professional photograph

[StewedSquirrel]

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

Canon Less "Vibrant" Intentionally

[chromozone]

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.

Camera Phone.

[bronney]

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.

Re:More vibrant = more artificial, but people like

[vought]

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.

Did they *look* at their own images?

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:More vibrant = more artificial, but people like

[gullevek]

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

Defensive?

[lorcha]

But with enough light, a small lens and sensor can take a good picture.

I would agree with this statement, but your statement differs significantly from the submitter's claim:

we could start to see a decline in dedicated digital cameras sales and an increase in camera phone sales.

That claim, of course, is total bunk.

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.

Because of simple maths

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Because of simple maths

[pla]

So you don't have to poll everyone on Earth, you just need to look at what pictures you see online
[Bolding for emphasis mine]

Can you say "sample bias"?

I suspect you meant that as funny, but somehow got modded insightful. But for those who don't get the joke, "Dewey Wins!"



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.

So why didn't soooo many people waste money on expensive cameras before modern digitals? Or do all-things-digital just have inherently higher "bling" value?



Same, if you will, as wannabe "audiophiles" swearing that music sounds better when they use a 1000$ power cable for their stereo.

...And the "warmth" of low copper digital interconnects. That one cracks me up every time. ;-)

Re:Because of simple maths

[walt-sjc]

And of course nobody has EVER cropped a picture, right??? Oh, wait...

Re:Because of simple maths

[Sandbags]

Squashing your theories: A) You're right about 2 different resolutions reduced to 1024X768 being meaningless, but most people don't care about why their 10MP camera looks the same as a 2MP at 1024X768. They care about the quality of their 8X10 prints they either make themselves or order online. Also, 10MP cameras (most of them) use miltiple CCDs (or better things than CCD), and eliminate artifacts, hard lines, and false colors on edges. They simply take better pictures, especially close-ups of nature and other high contrast environments, and they take better high speed images. They also have better focal length and less distortion. Many people may post their pictures online, even most as you say, but ALL of them print pictures, and ALL of them can easily see that difference.

B) First, very few people buy expensive things simply because they're expensive. There is a reason Haselblald cameras cost 10s of thousands of dollars. Professionals buy the best because they are the best. The consumer grade equivalents hold the the same premise. Sure, there are some overprices items on the market that some few stupid people buy without a true comparison, but those items don't survive well once their quality becomes an issue vs the price of a competitor. Consumers also know that not only does a 10MP image look better as an 8X10 than a 6MP, but also that DSLR has exchangeable lenses, better zoom capability, faster image capture, external flash support, etc.

Just like all the SUVs that never see dirt roads, there are some features that every device has that aren't needed, but you can't get a big vehicle for a family that's not a minivan unless you buy a big honking SUV. There's no middle ground. There's not a high rez camera with cheap features. Manufactures NEVER put out a single model that has what people actually want. There's always one thing missing and several things you don't want. Try buying an HP 6 color photo printer with wired and wireless, bluetooth, scanner, fax, and memory reader all in one. It doesn't exist. If it did, they wouldn't sell any other printers. You can get a wireless fax/photo printer, but no card readers. You can get a great wireless photo printer/scanner, but no fax. You can get a great all-in-one with everything, but no networking. Thus, we spend more because we have to.

Case and point: I have both a Cannon film SLR and an 8MP 10X zoom Sony point-and-shoot. I shoot far more photos in film simply because when scanning and cropping, I can get much more detail out of a film image that I can in digital. I don't do it every day, but I do it sometimes, and that's enough. Also, I have the film (negative) as a backup in case I loose my hard disk. I can't afford a camera nice enough to replace film completely, nor the drives or backup systems to protect my images. I use the point-and-shoot for portrait photos and panoramic scenes. It's not good enough to use for professional shots or action. It is however a LOT better, and completely worth $200 more than the 6MP i got first and then quickly returned.

Oh, and your math? A 10MP image, at screen resolution of 72dpi, is over 50" wide and 38" tall. This includes the crossover of RGB. See the CCD actually takes the image 3 times on the same 10MP backing within a few milliseconds. This is why you sometimes get some funny colored lines on the edges of high contrast objects. 3CCD cameras use 3 separate 10MP image captures on separate CCDs and eliminate this ghosting, which is why they cost significantly more and produce better pictures. It's 3748X2746 x3 concurrent images, not 2048X1536 all at once for 3 separate colors. You do really get 10MP from a 10MP camera.

As for 1) usually it is justified, and people who have that kind of money are willing to spend it and 2) Even my father, in his late 60s and wearing reading glasses could tell the difference immediately between a 6MP 4X6 print, and 8MP print, and a negative that was scanned and printed on the same paper as the other two. As such, he bought a $

Cameraphone = phone + bulk != phone + camera

[AliasMarlowe]

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.

Re:It's not really possible.

[AliasMarlowe]

But with enough light, a small lens and sensor can take a good picture. You should look into the noise characteristics of digital imaging. There are differences between CMOS and CCD with regards to readout noise and pattern noise (and these are areas in which great improvements have been made), but they are not necessarily the worst noise sources.

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.

The N95 is a great device

[weave]

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.

Beyond film, sensor size

[BenEnglishAtHome]

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?

A few things

[KiwiCanuck]

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.

dSLR Responses

[geek2k5]

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.

Sensor size, response time, depth-of-field

[A440Hz]

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.