I know dslr cameras have a lot of customization options but other than that how are they better? Also I would be appreciated if someone explains “megapixels” to me in this sense.
Edit : Thank you all for the great answers, cheers!
In: Other
I think the new battleground for smartphone cameras is in the software & algorithms, like night mode. It’s amazing what an iPhone 11 or any Google Pixel phone can do in low light.
The smartphones sort of hit their peak with megapixels because phones only have so much room for camera sensor size. So if you see a smartphone manufacturer boasting about pixels nowadays, I’d guess that’s not a good thing. It means they’re run out of things to do to improve their camera or their software/algorithms are a bit behind. And like they explained above, lots of small pixels doesn’t necessarily make for a better picture.
Sensor size, dslr or (mirrorless system camera) are mostly in full frame, apsc or m43 format (864mm2, 329mm2, 225mm2 Sensor area), while good phone sensor are around 1/2.3” (~30mm2). More area means more light captured and you need less software to reduce image noise, and with correct lens you get a very shallow depth of field (lot of bokeh, portrait mode simulates it with multiple lens on phone).
Another difference is that you can swap lens on the fly, and you have optical zoom, it’s more versatile. But a good lens can cost more than most phones..
Megapixels is just how many light sensitive dots are on the sensor of the camera. In the early days of camera development, more dots meant your image would have better resolution, which made it look better.
Nowadays, pixels are getting so small that we can cram 100 million of them onto a sensor the size of a fingernail. The issue with this approach is that the sensor can only receive so much light at once, and obviously a small sensor receives less light than a big one.
If a small sensor like you’d see in a phone has loads of pixels, then each individual pixel gets a smaller share of the total light for the sensor.
Contrast that to a DSLR, with a sensor of 24/35mm, that has only 24MP for example. The sensor itself is much bigger, and the light is being shared by fewer pixels. This means that each pixel sees a lot more light.
Practically this has a few benefits, namely that your camera works better in lower light, and the sensitivity can be turned down, resulting in better noise performance.
There are additionao benefits like being able to install large glass lenses with very good optical quality and low focal lengths that allow bokeh to be generated naturally, whereas smartphones tend to (attempt) to add this in software
Megapixel is the (approximate/rounded) amount of pixels used to capture the image.
5000*5000 pixel in a square would be 25 megapixel.
One pixel is (simplified) a single dot with a certain colour/brightness.
The more dots you use, the sharper you can make the image.
But: a lot of other factors also determine the quality of the image. Everything above 5-15 megapixel is more than sharp enough to make images that look good. More megapixel only help if you enlarge a tiny portion of that image or want to put the photo on poster size.
The most important quality is size – size of the individual pixels and size of the lens – as a bigger lens will simply let more light into the camera, which makes it easier to get the accurate color.
So DSLR will have a better quality in almost all situations. (If you want to enlarge a specific portion of the picture, with a DSLR you can attach the correct lens, and the lens will enlarge it.
Current smartphones show a incredible quality though, and are up to the task for many situations.
Noise, depth of field and optical character make things different. Better is a matter of taste.
Noise: as others have said…the first limit to noise is physics. All sensors have a background noise level. When a sensor pit is lit, it creates a signal. The combination of signal and background noise is what gets read. The smaller the pit, the weaker the signal, the smaller the difference between signal and noise. In practical terms, all other things being equal, low light shots on a small sensor will be more noisy. One way some phones try to fix this is by taking multiple images (more than one camera or a bunch of images in series) and using comparison between images to eliminate noise. This works because noise is random and signal is not. Such image stacking is how backyard astronomy is getting really amazing these days.
depth of field: large sensor cameras often have lenses that support shooting at reasonable distances with a shallow depth of field. That blurring is very useful when composition does not make your subject ‘pop’. There are a number of software solutions to this one…but often natural depth of field just looks better. This is the whole insanity about bokeh.
character: when shooting with large sensor cameras, particularly with vintage optics, it is possible to get different character. Some lenses resolve far more detail in the centre than they do the edges at wide apertures…this is bad, unless you are trying to bring your subject out. Some will vignette…the same. Some treat colours a bit differently…and there is a great deal of discussion about the relative merits of leica, zeiss, fuji, nikon, and olympus glass. These sorts of character are often part of filters in cell phones…but they don’t get it quite right. That said, cell phones have their own ‘look’. Apple phones, for instance, do a great deal of computational manipulation of images that produces a predictable and desired look (heavy saturation, high micro-contrast, exaggerated shadows) that is just as much a ‘look’ as is the now desired soft focus portra look that you can get out of filters in software like capture one.
megapixels have been explained. For screen use, when you are not cropping, even 5mp is overkill. The rest is useful for software zoom.
Even DSLR cameras get into issues of being limited by the lens. There is only so much detail a lens can cram into the image, and this mainly depends on the lens size, so it’s more or less completely impossible to make a tiny lens that has very high resolution. Physics just doesn’t allow that.
Latest Answers