Digital Camera Vs. Camera Phone 373
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."
Herd-mentality. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people? How do you come to that conclusion?
Herd-fermentality. (Score:2, Funny)
Was the gold kitty pretending to pull the cord as a train conductor, "choo! choo!", or...
Was the kitty mid stride in a left leg power lift release move? If so, that would explain the monster's reaction behind him, and the delirium cast over the M&M candy's face.
"Everybody say cheeeeeeeeeese!"
Re:Herd-fermentality. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Herd-fermentality. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Herd-fermentality. (Score:5, Insightful)
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'?
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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
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Because of simple maths (Score:3, Insightful)
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. I
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[Bolding for emphasis mine]
Can you say "sample bias"?
I suspect you meant that as funny, but somehow got modded insightful. But for those who don't get the joke, "Dewey Wins!"
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.
So why didn't soooo many people waste money on expensive cameras before mo
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It's possible. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even if it is, the SLR gives you manual control and a far wider zoom range.
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Granted. Whether due to dim lighting, fast action, camera shake, or long focal length, or (for you hockey fans) all of the above, extra light-gathering capability is very often important.
Still, the medium light [cnet.co.uk] photos were taken in indoor lighting, and that n95 shot looks good. Its only advantage over the real camera images is better white balance, but then again proper white balance is pretty darn important. (And, yes, you cou
Re:It's possible. (Score:5, Insightful)
The white balance is all over the map. The N95 shot looks good, but only because of the subject matter. The particular objects happen to look better with a blue cast. The N95 white balance is actually way, way off. If you look at the image with a color meter, you can see that the white areas are actually very purple. The IXUS is very yellow. The Sony (as is typical for Sony) is very orange. The Nokia 6300 is a blusih green (more green than blue). The other Canon is very orange. None of them are anywhere CLOSE to correct white balance. None of them.
The high end Canon photo looks like it is the closest to accurately representing what your eye would probably see under the same circumstances, assuming that this was shot with standard incandescent lights (i.e. almost no compensation), while the Nokia phones overcompensated (a lot), and the Sony did just what I'd expect from Sony (exactly the same amount of overly-red hue whether indoors or in broad daylight). The others didn't appear to compensate enough, but tried to compensate a little.
As for clarity, even at this level of size reduction (which is pretty substantial), the high end Canon took slightly sharper photos, but what was most striking was that the depth of field for the Nokia N95 is so noticeably wider due to the small lens even when viewed at a reduced size. There's no real foreground or background. It is all just flat. While that might make it easier for novices to shoot photos that aren't blurry, it often makes for very visually busy photos.
The reality is that most users probably can't tell the difference, but for those who can, I would much rather color correct the Canon photo a little than use the N95 photo. If the background were a crowd of people instead of a blank wall, you would immediately understand why. :-)
Another thing that I'm not seeing is any mention of the exposure. There's no guarantee that camera phone images of moving objects/people in interior lighting would look anywhere near as good. I realize that it is MUCH harder to come up with a reproducible test case for a moving object (though a swining clock pendulum would be a good place to start). However, that's where larger lenses are most likely to result in a significant improvement. They allow you to gather enough llight more rapidly than with a smaller lens, allowing for a faster shutter speed without the graininess associated with a gain up.
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Did you actually try this? I just did, with the color picker in gimp and a sample radius of 5. Here are the results for samples from: 1) over the monster's head, 2) on the ping-pong ball, 3)
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The site notes that the N95 does postprocessing by default that results in the color vibrance. Really, I'm not surprised that a point-and-shoot camera (that it is in a phone isn't really an issue) takes decent pictures in average conditions—that's what the point of a
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Camera phones do an excellent job in night mode of picking up detail that my dSLR might struggle with, of course the end results are only any good as snaps but if that was the idea that's good enough.
remember that a dSLR with a f/1.7 50mm lens has pretty shallow depth of field, then consider that the camer
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remember that a dSLR with a f/1.7 50mm lens has pretty shallow depth of field, then consider that the camera phone is what, f/2.8 3.8mm, that reduces the need to focuss on anything in particular.
As I've said before, while a wide depth of field makes it easier for newbies to take so-so pictures, it makes it impossible to take really good pictures of anything but landscape photos (and other similar shots). For more typical photography (pictures of people, objects, etc.), you don't want a wide depth of f
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Considering that sensors have a higher effective pixel density than film scanned at 2500 dpi, why not? The signal to noise (grain) ratio from a low ISO DSLR exposure is much higher than even the best color or black and white films.
I still use film in my 4x5 camera, and those exposures far exceed any DSLR's ability to capture information...but probably not for too much longer. I do enjoy the perspective co
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Oh crap, I meant to say "camera phone".
"True, but if you're using prime lenses, are you really even going to think about using a camera phone?"
Didn't mean to come off as a film snob.
(And actually even that isn't quite what I meant... I meant "If you're the kind of person who w
Re:It's possible. (Score:5, Interesting)
Much of that stuff was accurate two years ago; that doesn't make it so today.
The widest dynamic range for slide film is Fuji's duplicating film, CDU-II. About eight stops, compared to ten or more for most digital SLRs. Negative film may get you nine stops in ideal conditions, but it's a mistake to say that the best DSLRs and studio backs have short dynamic range.
Film does have the advantage of a non-linear response to light - and non-linear response to color, which is one attraction to film - each has a unique palette. Digital sensors respond in a linear fashion. I prefer the character of film for this reason, but again, I find no reason to shoot film in most situations; grand landscape work with my 4x5 is one place where film clearly wins. In smaller formats, digital is recording more information in a wider range than any camera or film.
You won't find film capable of recording density that the best sensors are capable of. Not anymore. The only way to get ahead of large sensors today is with square inches of film; that's why I still shoot 4x5. After making test prints from a Canon 1DS mkII and 6x7 slide film scanned on a Tango at 3500 dpi, I'm convinced the 1DS is of comparable, if not better quality - and this was almost two years ago.
The clean signal of these newer, better sensors mean more of the information captured is usable as image data; there's no grain, and at low ISO, no discernible noise.
What is this "true" black and white of which you speak? Colored filters in front of black and white film do affect the image; black and white images are made by exposing color-sensitive emulsion that is made with a single layer of un-dyed silver halide. Same thing as Kodachrome slide film - without the dye.
All black and white films are sensitive to different wavelengths on the spectrum. By post-processing your own black and white using Channel Mixer in Photoshop, you're doing the same thing - selecting the percentage of each primary color portrayed as a monochrome image. Seriously - did you not understand that this is how black and white film works?
The concept of "true" black and white may make sense to someone who doesn't understand how film works - but even Photo 101 students know that "black and white" films are color sensitive.
Permanence is one department in which film wins hands down for ease of handling, cataloging, and durability - but make a print of your digital file on to Fuji Crystal Archive (a silver-based paper popular for printing digital work) and your permanence problem becomes a lot less scary - suddenly you have a more permanent copy that is human readable.
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I personally shoot film, because I enjoy it. But professionally I would not do it anymore. Development, scan, spot cleaning. Thats a big hassle. And you can avoid this all with a digital camera.
But for a private guy like me, who does only hobby shooting, Film is the only way to get Medium Format.
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Re:It's possible. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's just say that their methodology is suspect at best:
"All the shots were taken with devices taken straight out of the box, and we used the default settings or an automatic mode if there was one".
A person should not be buying a dSLR if they aren't going to take the time to learn how to use it. They should just be buying a point and shoot camera. The 5MP camera, they noted that it does badly in low light and the light has a blue tinge.
The only thing that this thing compares is the quality of scaled-down pictures.
It's kind of pointless to clamor for a high megapixel camera if it's only going to be scaled down to VGA res for the web. 2MP would be plenty and offer plenty of oversampling for web. If you want to do good prints, then that's where a nicer camera comes into play, but they don't compare that.
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Then again, there's no reason a dSLR should not be a very good point-and-shoot camera in auto mode.
In this case the white balance on the dDSLR is wrong, and scaling down has nothing to do with that. It would be one thing if you simply couldn't tell the difference in scaled-dow
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This is not how they are marketed though.
It's an article that points out the fallacy of buying the most phenomenal camera out there to take pictures. It also points out just how good pictures the camera phones can take.
A lot of people out there still think you need an
Re:It's possible. (Score:5, Insightful)
Warning: Photography Rant Ahead!
I am sick and tired of camera snobs thinking that more money = better pictures. Look people, I worked as a commercial still photog for 15 years, with clients like IBM, ITT Finance and Compaq and I got out around the turn of the millenium because I saw how things were headed. I just can't compete with the millions of great cheap/free photos out there now. If you all think OSS is revolutionizing the software world, wait 'til you see what websites like istockphoto and sxc.hu are doing to commercial shooters.
Ok, where was I... Oh yeah, cheap cameras. I had Sinars and 'Blads with enough lights to blind a whole regiment and still have my Nikons. But my favorite camera of all time was/is the Olympus XA becuase it was there when I needed it (and I'm in some good company in that regards [masters-of...graphy.com]). I ended up getting hundreds of great candids and quick landscape shots with my XA because it was with me when it was the right time and place to take a great picture. Fat lot of good that EOS 1DS will do you sitting on the closet shelf at home does you if a great picture happens to be right in front of your eyes.
And another thing about small cameras (and to some extent, cameraphones): You don't look like a freaking dork when you're shooting. Unless you're God's gift to hospitality, getting a candid, relaxed environmental portrait while trying to light the place like Yusef Karsh is a recipe for disaster. Learning how to slow down and get to know my subjects before I picked up a camera made a bigger difference in my work than anything I bought at a camera store.
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Did they *look* at their own images? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [cnet.co.uk]. 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 [cnet.co.uk], 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.
Re:It's possible. (Score:5, Insightful)
Another possibility is that the tester used some crappy kit lens. For example the one that came with my EOS 300D a few years back is plain awful, and the first thing was to get a proper lens.
Re:It's possible. (Score:4, Interesting)
I somewhat agree about the 300D lens. It's a LOT better than most of the smaller cameras I've seen, but it pales compared to the same camera with a nicer lens. I found that out when I borrowed a prime lens from one of my coworkers while my lens was malfunctioning. Wow.
I now have a much nicer lens and only use the stock lens when I'm in a high risk situation (e.g. the beach). :-)
When I saw the flash photos fo the D95, the word "cartoony" came to mind. Anybody else think so?
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Yes, it's entirely possible. I think that, for a lot of us, we just want a point-and-shoot camera with very few settings, but which will take passable pictures under many conditions. People with expensive cameras, assuming they have expensive cameras for good reason, have paid that amount of money to have a camera with lots of settings that enable them to take the best picture possible under any condition if the settings are tweaked just so.
It's true that some small cameras (and camera phones) just have c
Re:It's possible. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Good pictures" start with accuracy. That's the entire point of a camera, and that's what separates good cameras from bad cameras. Even in the pre-digital days, sure, different films and different settings would give you different results, but photographers paid the big bucks for cameras that would given them a reliable baseline of accuracy - that meant being capable of things like high shutter speeds for daylight photos, low shutter speeds for night photos, high quality light metering, and lenses capable of high resolutions, high color accuracy and low distortion. What a photographer chooses to do artistically is another matter, but the point is photographers don't rely on their cameras to be the artists; that's the photographer's job, not the camera's.
So I don't even need to look at the article to know what the word "vibrant" means with regard to the Nokia photos - it means "artificially jacked colors". In other words, not at all accurate, in other words crap.
I mean, look. I have a 2mp cell phone camera and I have an 8mp DSLR. I use my cell phone camera when I'm just out and about and don't care about quality. But there is a huge difference in color accuracy, noise and detail between even the best cell phone cameras and the worst dslr's. And that difference is not going away.
So I guess you can consider me one of your "defensive" dslr owners - but hopefully, there will always be defenders of the truth out there.
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Unfortunately "megapixels" are the "megahertz" of digicam marketing (same goes for lower reaction times in LCDs, often achieved at the cost of image quality and colour accuracy), and people don't realise that, for screen viewing, they're unlikely to ever need more than 3MP.
Also, cameras with "angled" light paths (ultra-compacts without lens extensi
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Other than using a camera phone as an artists tool (similar to small toy fish eye cameras.) They're obviously not useful as a dSLR replacement as the images
Re:It's possible. (Score:4, Insightful)
The dynamic range on my sensor, is an order of magnitude better than the sensor on my high-end point-and-shoot, not to mention my camera phone.
When i shoot pictures in daylight conditions with the camera phone, they are absolutely terrible. Sun-light highlights are either totally blown out, leaving a glowing halo on everyone's forehead, or they are adjusted for and everything else goes dark, making the scene look like a shot on the back of the moon.
As a professional, I learned to find lighting that does not have sharp high contrast definitions, but your average consumer does not practice this technique, so dynamic range is even MORE important for a consumer than for a pro in some cases.
That's all
Stewed
Defensive? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would agree with this statement, but your statement differs significantly from the submitter's claim:
That claim, of course, is total bunk.
As both a dSLR and a camera phone owner, do you really think that I lug around that big camera for my health? Do you really think that I have spent thousands of dollars on camera equipment becaus
Where to Start? (Score:5, Insightful)
And camera phones take pictures as good as a dSLR? You can be 80% blind and still tell that camera phones take inferior pictures.
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puleeeeze! (Score:4, Insightful)
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What would be good is if Fujifilm's high sensitivity CCD (as in the F30) was integrated into phones. That is perfect for the kind of low-light photos camera-phones get used for.
Maybe... (Score:3, Informative)
Advances (Score:2)
Next article on CNet... (Score:5, Funny)
And, coming soon...
"Is DVCPRO HD actually better than VHS (after you resize it to 64x48 pixels)?"
"Is a dual-socket, quad-core workstation actually faster than a ZX Spectrum (when playing Space Invaders)?"
Re:Next article on CNet... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Next article on CNet... (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't think your criticism is fair. CNet isn't claiming that the cell phones are better cameras, but are comparing them to dedicated digital cameras in conditions that are common to point-and-shoot photographers. Default settings, medium/low light, point... and shoot. Resize to a reasonable size for e-mailing it, and see how it looks.
So it'd be like if someone discovered that simple photo work like resizing, rotating, and cropping gave better visual quality when using built-in OS tools than if you do t
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Most people dont need a dSLR. Its a high end camera for a reason.
You also wont find photographers going around with mobile phones.
Duh camera phones are better for point and click - thats all they can do.
A dSLR is for someone who is serious.
Re:Next article on CNet... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people (especially the ones with two X chromosomes) like to be able to print their pictures, and most camera phones can't really produce acceptable results above 15x10 cm (6x4"), regardless of their resolution. Their sensors are simply too small and too noisy. In fact, for the same sensor size, a 3MP sensor is likely to have better quality than a 5MP model.
Flickr? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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*Gee*, do you think? Look, I've been around here for a while (and so have you from the looks of your ID), but Slashdot has always been an online home to a subset of society that is rather technically inclined, so yeah... we are a bit detached from what *most* people (I'd say unwashed masses, but, well..... you
More vibrant = more artificial, but people like it (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Certain Fuji color reversal (slide) films from the 80s were oversaturated. Velvia, a popular Fuji slide film introduced in the 90s, was very saturated, yet very popular with professionals for it's color rendition.
that Kodak removed Ektachromee from the consumer space for everything but slide film despite it being a vastly superior film, leaving only the
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(and I dear cling to my small stock left in my fridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome [wikipedia.org]
"Vibrant" (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:"Vibrant" (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if the lighting in the room has a yellow tint to it.
I wonder how people would feel if they captured a picture by a campfire, only to have it turn out perfectly clear and white, looking like they are standing under massive lights...
Of course, I'm not being entirely honest, because HOW WHITE that ping pong ball should be is entirely debatable. In the N95 images, it certainly isn't pure white. Just open it up in your nearest image editor, and use the eraser tool on the ball...
What's more, anyone could easily increase the contrast of any picture to make it look even WHITER than white, and blacker than black. Cameras are supposed to capture a image as close to reality as possible... not blue-shift everything to play perceptual tricks on the viewer.
Re:"Vibrant" (Score:5, Funny)
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That's fine for this photo, but what happens when you take a photo out-doors, well-lit, with high contrast between colors, and simply quite saturated to begin with?
If it ends up like many amateur 35mm photos I've seen, that bright-red shirt will spill over, and give the rest of the photo a nasty red tint. Those kinds of photos, even just occasionally showing up, make a camera (or
dSLR Owner Here (Score:2)
Dynamic Range (Score:4, Informative)
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Exactly. C|Net wouldn't know how to do a real photographic "test" if Ansel Adams came back from the dead and held them by the hands while explaining the Zone System - which is still a great way to understand sensitometry.
Sensationalized (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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They don't address the simple fact that some people, like me [lazylightning.org], don't give a shit about what the mobile
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
It seems more a matter of knowing how to use it... (Score:2)
It seems to me from playing with several camera phones, several digital cameras, and a large variety of old mechanical cameras
It is the lens that counts (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
it's all about the camera's purpose (Score:2, Informative)
However, it's all abou
most people? (Score:2)
Most people? Could that possibly be true? Lets even grant that they meant "most photographers in the developed world" (and not most people on the planet.) Does anyone else think that most photographers do NOT use flickr? I've never used it, but I will grant that I am not representative of most people.
My Aunt Marge in Cleveland, she has always seemed the person I know who is most like "most people." She's like a one woman focus group on the
Rediculous (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Kind of a bizarre test (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't know what the colors ought to be. Nor do we know what kind of lighting is being used, although I'm guessing florescent office lights, given the color difference between the ambient lighting and flash pictures. Nor do we know what lighting mode the cameras were set to (sunlight, tungsten, fluorescent). Although many people many never learn to adjust their camera's lighting setting, they will also find results dramatically different under different lighting sources.
If you are going to do one kind of test, then use human subjects under bright and indirect daylight. That way the readers have a clue as to what the subject should look like, and represents common conditions that anybody can reproduce.
Overall, this test is only valid if (a) you are taking pictures under florescent lighting and (b) color accuracy is not as important to you as color saturation and (c) you don't know how to adjust your camera's settings.
Phone camera? (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone call me when they make a "Phone Camera"
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http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/5092
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Camera phones are useful for people who want to take quick snapshots that they can MMS to their friends (or that they can show them on the phone in person later on), but little more. That doesn't mean that they're necessarily a bad idea, but they simply aren't the same as cameras, a
Canon 400D had white balance issues (?) (Score:2)
But sure looks to me like in the "medium" light pictures that the Rebel 400D had white-balance issues and provided a yellow cast over the shot. In fairness, s*it happens and it's an interesting side-by-side test.
In the low-light (with flash) examples, note how the shadows move quite a bit - they didn't make sure the camera was at the same spot ea
wrong comparison (Score:3)
people who use dSLR will take different shots then people who use a camera phone. People who are interested in taking good pictures will probably want to have much more functions then camera phone's simple point and click.. Those who use camera phones to take pictures will not care about about the aperture settings, ISO.. etc.
Apples are not oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
I see no point in a head-to-head comparison of products that are not actually competitive to each other. Am I missing something?
I have owned point-and-shoot digital cameras, but my best digital camera is a Canon Digital Rebel (aka 300D). I didn't buy it as a point-and-shoot camera, because that's not what it is (though it can do a pretty good imitation in fully automatic mode). What I did buy was the flexibility of an SLR: interchangeable lenses, full control over all functions. Plus the things digital is so good at: instant image review, image processing capability, zero reciprocity failure.
I can hook it up to a telescope and take first-rate astronomical pictures. I can use my wonderful Pentax M42 lenses and extension tubes to fill an entire frame with a single flower if I want.
This is not the sort of stuff you do with a point and shoot.
...laura
Baseless assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Why this will never be true (Score:5, Informative)
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? [clarkvision.com] 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.
Beyond film, sensor size (Score:3, Interesting)
Once we get into little-camera world (35mm-size SLRs and smaller), you make lots of sense. I *really* want to get heavily in
As a professional photograph (Score:4, Informative)
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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"Works well under average conditions." (Score:2)
And under non-average conditions?
Didn't think so.
The things I use my cheap DSLR for the most are:
1. Indoor photography where flash is not an option. (f/1.8, ASA 1600)
2. Photographing moving targets where shutter lag is not an option.
3. Long-exposure star trail or milky way type shots.
4. Rudimentary time-lapse intervalometry.
A phone that can take decently detailed pictures of nearby, still objects under good lighting is one thing. A phone that gives me the ability to do any of the four above would be
bad comparison (Score:2)
I want a camera phone not as a main camera but as an auxiliary I can carry around; I'm not overlooking the important features (most?) camera phones lack. Optical zoom is important; that 5 megapixel imager with a 2X digital zoom becomes the equivalent of 1.25 megapixels, and zooming further only makes it worse. Exposur
Canon Less "Vibrant" Intentionally (Score:4, Insightful)
The N95 is a great device (Score:3)
I have an N95. I'm really impressed with it. It's not going to take the best pics, but it's pretty damn good for a camera phone and, as someone else posted here, it's always with me so I can grab a shot when I see one easily.
The thing also has a great web browser, email, wifi, GPS with mapping and navigation and takes some decent videos.
I'm not a professional photographer. I'm not the best at picking out the best shots, composition, etc. I'm just some Joe taking pics of my life and stashing them somewhere.
I started out with a T610, then a Nokia 6600, N90, and now N95. The rapid advancement in quality these little phones put out is incredible. It's pretty neat stuff and lots of fun and that's all I really care about.
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I'm sick of all these do-it-all phones. All it does is make them bigger. It's getting harder to find a decent phone that is small enough to fit in my pocket. They all have cameras, video players, MP3 players, extra memory, web access, games, etc., etc. I don't want any of that bullshit. But I have little choice with my carrier (VWZ).
There is nothing wrong with wanting a basic phone. However, there is something to be said about all in one devices. The Nokia 6133 looks very attractive. Quadband, takes micro-xD cards for mp3s, and a crappy camera, all in a reasonable size.
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