8MP, anti-shake, face tracking... now we're talking, and it's taken long enough too. Can you imagine a high-end phone today sporting some lame 2MP camera - I'd be soooooo angry! :-)
problem is that at a certain point, too high a pixel-density is actually detrimental to image quality.
I can't say for this specific sensor, but at that pixel/inch, i'd bet you really won't see much an improvement over decent 2MP sensors. (the digital anti-shake / digital zoom would be a fun feature in a cameraphone, though, and would require a decently high MP sensor...)
I'd happily settle for 2MP if the quality were anywhere near the Sony U20 i had back in the day. (My Samsung m610's 2MP camera is lightyears behind where that little sony was back in 2003...)
Jeff is exactly right. The "megapixel game" has gone so far these days that you actually want to look for LOWER numbers for improved image quality. (There is a sweet spot where the gain in details from an increase is outweighed by the amount of noise in the too-small sensors; more so for slimmer optics - as seems to be the case here).
That said, the article mentioned that this is a CMOS sensor, not CCD sensor as is used in nearly every other cameraphone. While each cell in a CCD sensor captures only one of three colors (a 2x2 grid will have one red, two greens, and one blue pixel), each "bin" in a CMOS sensors captures all three. There is even some patent filed by Kodak recently (ostensibly for use in some forthcoming MOTO phone) that has a fourth, transparent light sensing per bin, used for normalization. With this in mind, the "sweet spot" is going to be a higher number.
Still, 8MP with a < 8.5mm focal length is bound to produce nothing but smear.
Looks good w.r.t. statistics that the average prosumer looks at, but will hardly be capable of producing good images.
I'm not convinced, the more pixels the smaller the noise pixels too, and that's an advantage in looking at the pictures as well as cleaning them up. And comparing 2 products then saying one is better and just throwing that on pixelcount is a bit tricky, because obviously a high quality 2MP will be better than a cheapo 8MP, but the same is true for the reverse situation.
In theory you do have a point. The problem today is that manufacturers have taken the pixel density in most consumer cameras (and even some that are marketed to people who should know better) so high that the amount of noise (unwanted signal) has become too much for in-camera image processing (noise reduction, color reproduction, etc..) algorithms to do a good job.
This is especially true for cell phone cameras, where the push for ever-slimmer optics (shorter focal lengths) translates directly into a limit in the total CCD array size. If you go too far in cramming an ever-large number of photonic (CCD/CMOS/whatever) cells into a given sensor size (let's say a 1/2.5" CCD sensor for the sake of argument), then the amount of light (wanted signal) that is absorbed by each cell will have diminished significantly while the amount of noise (unwanted signal) has not.
In-camera image processing algorithms, while being able to take advantage of a larger number of data points to perform such things as noise reduction, color reproduction, reducing blur, etc., are now faced with a much lower quality of the total image, since signal/noise ration has decreased significantly compared to a camera with lower density (larger) photonic cells.
You don't have to take my word for it though. I think we all have anecdotal evidence about how an old digital camera of ours (in my case it was a Canon Powershot S110 with a whopping 2 megapixels) produced far superior images than a newer camera of the same class (e.g. a Casio Elixim V8 w/8 megapixels) - even after resizing the latter down by an integer factor...
(Other contributing factors in this case is that the latter uses so-called "folding optics" to achieve its slim profile with a 7x zoom; that aside, the CCD sensor size is comparable).
Oh, and I have used both a Nokia N95-3 (my main phone, currently in for repair) and a Sony Ericsson k850i (which I picked up from a local store in the meantime) for image capturing. Neither one is particularly impressive. The N95, of course, takes pretty crappy indoor/nighttime pictures, given no real flash; also, various factors (e.g. shutter speed) means that it is not too good with moving objects. The k850i tends to lose detail, even in bright daylight (though it is a bit quicker and more "camera-like" in its response..)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Fraggle.Rock @ Mar 18th 2008 3:27AM
8MP, anti-shake, face tracking... now we're talking, and it's taken long enough too. Can you imagine a high-end phone today sporting some lame 2MP camera - I'd be soooooo angry! :-)
Jeff @ Mar 18th 2008 11:20AM
problem is that at a certain point, too high a pixel-density is actually detrimental to image quality.
I can't say for this specific sensor, but at that pixel/inch, i'd bet you really won't see much an improvement over decent 2MP sensors. (the digital anti-shake / digital zoom would be a fun feature in a cameraphone, though, and would require a decently high MP sensor...)
I'd happily settle for 2MP if the quality were anywhere near the Sony U20 i had back in the day. (My Samsung m610's 2MP camera is lightyears behind where that little sony was back in 2003...)
Tor Slettnes @ Mar 18th 2008 6:29PM
Jeff is exactly right. The "megapixel game" has gone so far these days that you actually want to look for LOWER numbers for improved image quality. (There is a sweet spot where the gain in details from an increase is outweighed by the amount of noise in the too-small sensors; more so for slimmer optics - as seems to be the case here).
That said, the article mentioned that this is a CMOS sensor, not CCD sensor as is used in nearly every other cameraphone. While each cell in a CCD sensor captures only one of three colors (a 2x2 grid will have one red, two greens, and one blue pixel), each "bin" in a CMOS sensors captures all three. There is even some patent filed by Kodak recently (ostensibly for use in some forthcoming MOTO phone) that has a fourth, transparent light sensing per bin, used for normalization. With this in mind, the "sweet spot" is going to be a higher number.
Still, 8MP with a < 8.5mm focal length is bound to produce nothing but smear.
Looks good w.r.t. statistics that the average prosumer looks at, but will hardly be capable of producing good images.
Wwhat @ Mar 19th 2008 1:22PM
I'm not convinced, the more pixels the smaller the noise pixels too, and that's an advantage in looking at the pictures as well as cleaning them up.
And comparing 2 products then saying one is better and just throwing that on pixelcount is a bit tricky, because obviously a high quality 2MP will be better than a cheapo 8MP, but the same is true for the reverse situation.
Tor Slettnes @ Mar 20th 2008 1:09PM
@WWhat:
In theory you do have a point. The problem today is that manufacturers have taken the pixel density in most consumer cameras (and even some that are marketed to people who should know better) so high that the amount of noise (unwanted signal) has become too much for in-camera image processing (noise reduction, color reproduction, etc..) algorithms to do a good job.
This is especially true for cell phone cameras, where the push for ever-slimmer optics (shorter focal lengths) translates directly into a limit in the total CCD array size. If you go too far in cramming an ever-large number of photonic (CCD/CMOS/whatever) cells into a given sensor size (let's say a 1/2.5" CCD sensor for the sake of argument), then the amount of light (wanted signal) that is absorbed by each cell will have diminished significantly while the amount of noise (unwanted signal) has not.
In-camera image processing algorithms, while being able to take advantage of a larger number of data points to perform such things as noise reduction, color reproduction, reducing blur, etc., are now faced with a much lower quality of the total image, since signal/noise ration has decreased significantly compared to a camera with lower density (larger) photonic cells.
You don't have to take my word for it though. I think we all have anecdotal evidence about how an old digital camera of ours (in my case it was a Canon Powershot S110 with a whopping 2 megapixels) produced far superior images than a newer camera of the same class (e.g. a Casio Elixim V8 w/8 megapixels) - even after resizing the latter down by an integer factor...
(Other contributing factors in this case is that the latter uses so-called "folding optics" to achieve its slim profile with a 7x zoom; that aside, the CCD sensor size is comparable).
Oh, and I have used both a Nokia N95-3 (my main phone, currently in for repair) and a Sony Ericsson k850i (which I picked up from a local store in the meantime) for image capturing. Neither one is particularly impressive. The N95, of course, takes pretty crappy indoor/nighttime pictures, given no real flash; also, various factors (e.g. shutter speed) means that it is not too good with moving objects. The k850i tends to lose detail, even in bright daylight (though it is a bit quicker and more "camera-like" in its response..)