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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."
"Of course, the pictures aren't fully representative of how the images would look at full size; but given that most people resize images to put on Flickr, we could start to see a decline in dedicated digital cameras sales and an increase in camera phone sales.""
Most people? How do you come to that conclusion?
I think there are going to be a lot of defensive replies from dSLR owners. But with enough light, a small lens and sensor can take a good picture.
Most people take pictures to put them on Flickr? In what bizarre alternate universe?
And camera phones take pictures as good as a dSLR? You can be 80% blind and still tell that camera phones take inferior pictures.
Get over the "megapixel" factor of digital cameras. There are so many more factors involved in photography, it's not even close to fair to compare megapixels. Sure, it's entirely possible for someone with a low quality camera phone to take a reasonably good picture compared to something out of a dSLR. Half of the photo depends on who is taking the photo and how the lighting is set up. Who gives a frack about megapixels!
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.
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but given that most people resize images to put on Flickr
Most people with digital cameras don't even know what flickr is. They email their pics to relatives or print them out, or just save them on their hard drive.
I'm getting a sense that slashdot is in a way getting like Washington DC. People inside the beltway are totally detatched from what the majority of people are doing in their lives, and so is slashdot.
Amusing that CNet (that bastion of photographic expertise) kept commenting positively on how "vibrant" the N95 photo was. Obviously the Nokia boosts the colours artificially, to make the photo look more exciting, even though the colours are not that strong in reality. Of course, they invalidate their entire results by not making any comment (let alone measurements or reference photos) on how close the photos were to the real colours.
But the interesting thing is what this says about people - the average person doesn't care much about realism, they want a nice looking photo regardless, and if the phone adjusts things artificially to make it look "better" then that might actually be the right thing to sell more phones. It's kind of an extension of the point and click idea.
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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.
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It was interesting to see that this "test" consisted of a single scene. While I was impressed with the N95, it says nothing of the versatility of the camera. The subject was located what seemed to be about a foot or so away from the lens. It would be interesting to see its ability to focus on something further away. Currently, I think that is the biggest shortcoming of camera phones at the moment. Yes, it is a limited space that they can cram the lens into, but until they've got "good enough" optical zoom, they still won't fully replace a handheld point and click, and I think we can all agree that they'll never be able to replace a good dSLR (that's just plain silly!).
I'm suprised, the camera phone did a great job, which is a good thing for consumers who don't know how to color correct their photos. However, as the article points out, this is solely a product of post-processing in the camera. I'm quite surprised that the 400D did such a terrible job with the white balance. Was it stuck on the daylight preset or was the AWB that bad?
They didn't really address night time flash performance. Lots of people want to take pictures when they go out at night and these tests were inadequate since the subjects were small and close. Large people 5-6 feet away require a brighter flash and/or higher ISOs. Cell phone cameras haven't the room for a large flash and the capacitors it requires. I wonder how these phones would fare under these conditions?
Also not addressed was dynamic range. The test scene was fairly flat. If you're on a vacation, and whip out your dinky cell phone to take a picture of the landscape, what might on a DSLR be a nice image of the land and sky, could turn out to be a dark silhouette of the land with a detailed sky, detailed land with a blown out sky, or some combination. How good is the metering as well? Will your relatives be a series of black lumps against the grand canyon if you aren't a pro photog? The more this stuff is automatic the more joe consumer wins.
Additionally, the lens choice on the 400d is slightly disappointing. Cheap lenses like the 18-55 kit lens can't really give you the detail possible with 10 megapixels.
Photos.
Do the submitters even read the articles now? For both photo conditions tested, they found that the dSLR (a Canon 400D) better - "highest level of detail" in medium light and the best-lit and most focused shot overall in low light. All they mentioned were that the N95 camera phone showed more vibrant colors in the medium light conditions, and that that was probably due to post-processing.
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.
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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.
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"
Let me try my hand at these baseless assumptive statements. People who buy camera phones to be their primary camera do so to put their pictures up on flickr. People who compare the merits of a camera phone to a DSLR are people who put their pictures on flickr. (Hey, baseless statements are pretty easy!)
I've stated for a long time in "defending" my ownership of an SLR and canon L-series lenses is that its a tool for how I want to take pictures. I'm the first one to admit that lugging my equipment around is not something I want to do 24/7 so it is by no means convenient. The camera on my phone, however, is extremely convenient and I have found it to be useful in its own times. So my beef with the
Honestly, it's crap story submissions like this that just grinds me about slashdot.
:wq
The results are surprising, with Nokia's latest handset, featuring a built-in 5-megapixel camera, taking more vibrant pictures in medium light conditions than a 10-megapixel dSLR.
That isn't even remotely what the article said. It said: "As you can see the top photo, taken in medium light conditions, is in focus and the colours are very vibrant, if not a little over saturated." and, "This difference in colour is likely due to the N95 processing the shot after it was taken."
Nowhere do they describe if the images actually represented a faithful reproduction of the colors of the objects, and they did not test under multiple lighting conditions, such as outdoors, under incandescent and fluorescent lights, etc. They also did not conduct any test which would demonstrate the camera's dynamic range, and they did not show us any 1:1 crop areas.
There's one simple site I point any of small but persistent who claim things like "film is superior to digital" (it hasn't been for at least a few years, in terms of resolution, signal to noise ratio, and dynamic range.) Clarkvision. The guy lays it all out in cold, hard science with good illustrative graphs and examples.
Does Pixel Size Matter? lays a real cold hard blow to all the idiots that claim dSLRs are overpriced or unjustified. They VASTLY outperform "point and shoot" cameras because the sensors are huge. Current dSLRs already approach the theoretical maximum sensitivity, SNR, etc. The bigger the sensor well, the more photons it collects- and the less electronic amplification is necessary. dSLRs have sensors the size of your phone's screen. Your phone's camera has a sensor around the size of an eraser. Not only does that cause a lot of noise problems, but it causes problems for aliasing filters (which spread light across the red, blue, and green sensor wells.) It's very easy to make a very good aliasing filter on a scale required for the very large pixels in a dSLR. Sensor wells in the point and shoots are so tiny that the filters really, really blur the image.
Practically, this means that if you and I stand next to each other and take a photo towards sunset, and then take both to a photo lab and get them printed, my (several year old dSLR) will blow your (current P&S) out of the water. My photo will have more detail because of better aliasing on the sensor and dramatically less noise (which doesn't have to be hidden with blurring). Nevermind that I can shoot a photo at 800 ISO and it'll have less noise than your camera at 100 ISO, which means I get several stops of sensitivity which I can use for, oh, a faster shutter speed so there's less motion blur, or a smaller aperture for greater depth of field.
Please help metamoderate.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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'?
"!"
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.
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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.