Here Are The Smartphone Camera Features On Every Photographer's Wish List
If the success of social apps like Instagram and Snapchat is any indication, smartphone photography has become the primary way people take and share pictures. Case in point: Deloitte, a consulting firm, estimates that up to 2.5 trillion photos will be shared and stored online in 2016, and that smartphone will capture 90 percent of them. Which explains why smartphone manufacturers continue to double down on their camera technology, adding on new features like image stabilization, bigger sensors and higher quality lenses.
Yet as impressive as current smartphone cameras are, there's still room for improvement. Compared with the output of DSLRs and premium point-and-shoots, smartphone photos often fall short in definition, depth of field and color saturation. We teamed up with Honor 8 to uncover the most sought-after smartphone camera features and improvements on every photographer's wish list.
It's all in the sensor
When it comes to capturing beautiful, high-resolution images, no single component is more important in digital photography than the sensor. The sensor is made up of millions of photodetectors that determine how much light is used to capture a photograph, and as a general rule, bigger means better. Most mainstream DSLR cameras have sensors that measure between 330 and 548 square millimeters; smartphone camera sensors are typically 15 to 30 times smaller, meaning they capture 15 to 30 times less light than their DSLR counterparts. Finding a way to increase the size of the smartphone camera sensor is crucial to raising the bar of smartphone photography.
More megapixels must be good, right? Not necessarily
A digital camera's number of megapixels equals how many millions of photodetectors there are on its sensor. If the sensor that has 8 million photodetectors, we're talking about an 8-megapixel camera. One of the biggest misconceptions about megapixels? The more you have, the better your photos are going to come out.
Here's the wrinkle: In the race to boost smartphone camera performance, sensor makers may integrate more photodetectors on a sensor while keeping its size the same. In other words, it's possible to double the number of photodetectors of the sensor mentioned above to get 16 megapixels, but each pixel would be half as small.
This can be problematic because, for one thing, the phone must work twice as hard to process the input from each pixel. And in low-light situations — when the camera has trouble determining the correct brightness for each pixel — the more tightly packed sensor can yield variations in color and brightness, resulting in grainy, or "noisy" photos.
Emphasizing greater pixel size over sheer number of megapixels will lead to the camera capturing more light and result in sharper photos. Another way to improve photography in low-light environments? Integrate a dual lens camera — such as the one on the Honor 8 — in which one lens measures the correct brightness and sharpness, and the other ensures that the colors remain accurate.
Open wide and zoom in
Due to their compact nature, smartphone cameras have a fixed aperture (the hole that controls how much light reaches the sensor), which doesn't sound like a big deal until you take into account that every lighting situation calls for an ideal f-stop, the number used to describe the size of the aperture. Integrating a mechanical aperture into smartphone cameras would give users the flexibility they need to shoot in a variety of diverse lighting situations without relying on finicky post-processing software to do the job. And while we're at it, adding optical (yes optical) zoom to a smartphone lens would allow smartphone cameras to maintain picture quality while zooming in — unlike digital zoom, which "crops" a portion of the photo and blows it up, making it blurry and pixelated.
Speed it up
A big complaint for many smartphone users is that the amount of time it takes to open up the camera app, focus on a subject and take a photo is far too long relative to the performance of DSLRs and even conventional point-and-shoot cameras. Even the fastest smartphone cameras top out at 1.5 seconds from app open to shutter click — a lifetime in action photography. (A DSLR's shutter pops at 1/500th of a second, no sweat.) Further, improvements in camera software and hardware could give smartphones the leg-up they need to make continuous shooting in burst mode, vital in sports photography, look and feel like the real thing.
Smartphone have gotten pretty good at taking photos, but if they want to catch up to DSLRs, there's still some room to grow. Now that you know the most coveted camera features, consider the $399 Honor 8, a highly praised smartphone with a bionic dual lens camera, to capture the magical moments in your life.
