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lich_kingtoday at 3:11 AM0 repliesview on HN

It's dark outside. I'm sitting in my living room with reasonable indoor lighting. I point my "Pro" phone camera on the tele setting (but no digital zoom) at the wall and take a photo. I zoom in on the capture and there is basically no real pixel detail anywhere in sight. It's all smudged to algorithmically cover up severe sensor noise. Crown moulding edges are not even straight lines and all have weird jaggies.

If I go and grab my full-frame mirrorless, every pixel of the image will be usable at 1:1 crop. "Taking photos indoors and wanting to zoom in and crop" is not an extreme test. The usability of 1:1 crops from cell phones is limited even in daylight.

But yeah, if you look at a photo taken in good light with no cropping and at screen display resolutions, it looks pretty close to the output from a pro mirrorless. My only point is that you get maybe 3-5 good megapixels, not 45+.

And that's before we get into dynamic range, bokeh, etc, all of which phones more or less need to fake to approach the look and feel of photos taken with grown-up cameras.