What makes a good smartphone camera?

It's possible to save RAW files (mostly) unprocessed with iPhones, either via built-in functionality (Pros) or via apps like Halide.

But the aggressiveness of the de-noising in the native JPG/HEIF images otherwise is really unfortunate if you want to look at the images on a screen larger than the phone's screen. The amount of detail lost (other than in areas like people's faces where the phone knows to specialise) can be very considerable.

I'd really like a way to dial that aggressiveness down a fair bit, even at the cost of more noise/grain and larger file size (through less compression due to the extra noise).

Another thing is the amount of lens flare you can get when shooting at the sun for sunsets/rises, etc or other large bright light sources. With very small lens elements, from a physics perspective it's understandable that suppressing the reflections and inter-reflections is very difficult on such a small surface area (even with special coatings to reduce the fresnel reflection ratios), but if you care about image quality and wanting to look at images on screen larger than the phone which took them, larger format cameras still have some benefit despite their larger and heavier size and therefore inconvenience (looks at 5D Mk IV on shelf).

The post does a great job at explaining some of the details consumers often overlook. Especially in regards to sensor size, light and accutance.

The best camera is the one you have with you. And this is why smartphones are so great, but the author also does a great job of expressing the limitations and problems.

I've worked as a professional photographer and videographer when between work. I've owned pro Nikon, canon and currently roll with some bonkers expensive leica gear. What makes smartphones so special as cameras is how easy they are taking unobtrusive photos of friends, family and kids. There are few things more frightening to me than a kid charging my way to rip the leica out of my hands because it looks so interesting. They don't do that with smartphones. Smartphones are especially stealthy because it's not clear what the user is doing with them. They could be just browsing the web or whatever. Are they taking video? Or a photo ect.

Lens for image quality and sensor size and density for resolution, but we hit pretty hard limits on those a long time ago. Software on top of that has been the major differentiator for quite some time. Exposure stacking and intelligent detail control produce more improvement for less investment than a super-complex lens assembly or exotic sensor. Though it brings its own risks.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/22/the-future-of-photography-...

Not to say there is no movement on the other fronts. Glass was pushing for a crazy anamorphic lens and far larger sensor that would have been a serious improvement, but I don't know if it went anywhere.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/22/glass-rethinks-the-smartph...

In my experience, iPhone 4 was better than iPhone 8 which is better than iPhone 17. Either I got lucky, went to more interesting places and composed better, or the technology is getting worse from an aesthetic point-of-view. I definitely had more keepers, more memorable photos of a higher subjective quality. I pretty much don't bother with iPhotography now.

Similar story on Android but I won't bore with the model names and numbers. Older handsets gave better results. Pre-smartphone, king of the hill was the Sony K800, I loved the photos from that phone. No fancy software, just quality hardware and straightforward processing gave consistent results.

That said, I should try Halide app. Bringing it back to basics with less computation might be the way forward for me.

Its funny how the best camera changes. Most of my photos used to be nature or random trinkets throughout life. Now nearly all my photos are of my little girl.

I care way less about strict objective/subjective quality in comparisons and more about which one chooses the fastest shutter speed. You can have the best sensor, colour science and dynamic range in the world but if there is movement blur its unusable.

My pixel has been okay at this but I'm apprehensive about how to find good comparisons when I need to replace this phone.

"The default setting on phones is to save storage by only using 12 megapixels, so unless you've changed settings, the 200 megapixel phone loses 94% of its megapixels as soon as you press the shutter. Bad deal!"

The final picture is the result of digital processing of the 200 megapixels, which is quite different from losing the data, all other things being the same. His point is right, but this paragraph isn't worthy of the rest of the essay.

Who else expected the "certain elements in the shot to be out of focus" link to lead to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh ?

If you don't want any frame stacking, you'd need to use a dedicated camera instead of a smartphone, because a smartphone without HDR isn't viable.

I have an old Android with a 13MP camera (Sony IMX214, 1/3.06") that leaves HDR off by default. I haven't had a need to turn HDR on except if I'm trying to photograph something with regions of extreme contrast.

The part he didn't mention is interpolation at the low end "specs are mere suggestions" end of things. I have a backup Android phone - a true "brand X" type of thing, vanilla android, bought at a garage sale. Nice enough phone, but claims a 40MP camera. The merest glance at a picture taken by it shows it has an ordinary-for-its-time 13MP camera in it and the pictures are interpolated to 40MP.

Hopefully the camera doesn't upscale and then downscale again if told so save at its actual native-ish resolution.

> in the darkness, your camera will need to use a longer shutter speed

the alternative, which many smartphone cameras do now, is to capture a burst of many photos of a short shutter speed and then combine them in software. For static things, this is equivalent to a longer shutter speed (with the additional advantage of not blowing out the highlights), and for moving things, we can filter in software to avoid smearing them out.

I sometimes use the 200MP mode on my phone - it does render more detail in images and sometimes that's what I want.

To counter the unnatural look of noise reduction I often add a film grain effect.

To expand on the HDR example: There’s this interesting lecture series about computational photography by Marc Levoy, who worked on the earlier Pixel cameras: https://youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc

From what I remember, the core thesis is “take a lot of pictures and take the best parts”, which works for a surprising number of cases.

Easy: you can remove the smart phone and plug it to a USB port with an off-the-self converter, and it works out-of-the-box with the universal video usb driver.

Any modern flagship has good enough camera capabilities, as long as it has okay low light performance that’s enough for me.

Having tried the iPhone Pro lenses, while impressive, the sensor size is never going to match a full-frame mirrorless.

personally, I applaud the high pixel count cameras: they will usher in a new era for digital holography, enabling novel holographic digital microscopes and 3D scanning, metrology applications, ...

My DroidX from 2010 took better pics than most modern phones. Zooming in on those photos look better! Crazy

Light your subject

the main issue is when you blow the image up, the details in the highlights and shadows don't hold up, you need to study Chroma subsampling to understand this. Sensor size is still important, but they're getting closer

Solid overview, but it underweights what's arguably the single biggest determinant of whether a phone camera produces a "good" photo: ISP tuning. The post frames software processing as a short list of named features (HDR, Night Sight, AI moon shots), when in reality almost every pixel has already been through dozens of tuned pipeline stages before any of those "features" run.

The ISP pipeline that turns raw Bayer data into a JPEG includes black level correction, lens shading correction, defect pixel correction, demosaic, auto white balance, color correction matrix, tone mapping, multi-stage noise reduction (raw domain, luma/chroma in YUV, temporal across frames), sharpening, local contrast, and multi-frame fusion. Each stage has dozens of parameters and most of them are scene-dependent.

"Tuning" means months in a light booth shooting color charts at every CCT from roughly 2300K to 7500K, then more months outdoors capturing skin tones across ethnicities, foliage, sky at different times of day, neon, candles, fluorescent shop lighting, mixed lighting. Every sensor + lens module gets its own calibration. Then you tune the perceptual layer on top: skin tone preservation, sky and foliage segmentation feeding AWB, AE metering weights with face priors, highlight roll-off, the chroma vs luma noise tradeoff across frequency bands.

This is why two phones with the same Sony IMX sensor look completely different. Sony ships a reference tuning. Apple and Google throw it away. Pixel phones famously have small sensors and beat phones with 2-3x the sensor area on real-world output, almost entirely on the strength of ISP tuning and computational photography stacked on top.

The headcount is genuinely large. Apple and Google each have camera organizations in the hundreds, with a substantial fraction doing nothing but tuning: color scientists, ISP tuning engineers, perceptual quality engineers running blind A/B against competitor output. It's why nobody else -- not Samsung, not Xiaomi, not the smaller players -- quite matches them even when they buy the same or better sensors. (Disclosure: I run a camera company and we live this problem.)

The sensor size advice in the article is correct but easy to misread. A small sensor with great tuning regularly beats a big sensor with mediocre tuning, and the gap is bigger than people expect.

Works instantly the moment I tap it

As a hobbyist photographer that still likes using a nice phone camera, the thing that is most important to me is that the phone camera accurately reflects skin tones in photos of people. The only things I'm really photographing with my phone are snapshots of myself and my family and friends doing things together. For everything else I use a real camera. I think the current generation iPhones are pretty good at this and I don't really need it to get any better than it already is, if I want to take a serious photo I will go use a serious camera.

All that really matters is that it exists. If you really care about the quality of your camera, you're going to want to get a dedicated camera. For everyone else (i.e. basically everybody except photographers), literally any phone camera is as good as another.

“The best camera in the world is the one you have with you”

[dead]

One that I can physically turn off with a switch.