I remember the old Nokias that made 320×240 pixel photos. Phones since are made thinner, which would afaik result in more problematic focus points for lenses. Yet quality has improved significantly.
How is this possible? And is there a technical limit of how detailed digital photos can get? As opposed to traditional lenses, where the size of the lens can be as big as you want to make it.
Tagged as technology, but I guess this question borders physics.
In: Technology
Phone cameras haven’t really improved and a decent camera with optical zoom will almost always deliver a better picture than even the best phone camera. Especially in low light.
It’s “putting lipstick on a pig”. There’s really not a ton they can do. But if they don’t come up with slight changes, people will realize the new phone isn’t much better than the old one.
The Nokia 3310 was released a quarter century ago. That’s plenty of time to get thing smaller, better, and more efficient. But again, there’s not much more they can do with phone camera’s physical limitations. On the digital side, there’s always room for improvement.
Much of the improvement comes from improving the actual image-capture side of things, not the lenses. In fact, many phone cameras today have inferior lenses compared to what they had a decade ago, specifically because those things have been sacrificed to make thinner phones. Have you noticed, for example, that many phones stop “optical” zoom pretty early, but still allow you to zoom in further? That’s because you aren’t doing actual zooming anymore, you’re just *cutting down the image.*
Nowadays the top models essential have multiple cameras per phone. So one camera dedicated to say zoom will have a higher power lens which can be combined with a smaller sensor since the user probably doesn’t care about FOV too much when zooming in on something.
Other big advancements are with software allowing it to remove blur caused by hands shaking and iso noise (noise from amplifying the signal when it is dark) on the fly
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