Increasingly, the 8-megapixel smartphones camera standard you thought you knew will soon fly up to 13 megapixels for high-end phones. Last February, Nokia 808 PureView was unveiled; equipped with a 41-megapixel phone camera, it was something the world has never seen. Yet even though the technology exists, most best-selling flagship phones are, for now anyway, sticking to 8 megapixels — like the Samsung Galaxy S3, the HTC Droid DNA, the BlackBerry Z10, and the iPhone 5. (Note: The Nokia Lumia 920 nudges its sensor up to 8.7 megapixels.)
However, it is still possible for an excellent 5-megapixel camera to produce photos you prefer over a 12-megapixel camera. It is a fact, that the megapixel number alone is no guarantee of heightened photographic performance.
Instead, the formula for fantastic photos comes down to the entire camera module that includes the size and material of the main camera lens, the light sensor, the image processing hardware, and the software that ties it all together.
- The Sensor
Most photographers will tell you that the most important part in the optical system is the sensor, because that is the part that captures the light. No light, no photo. Light goes through the camera lens, then to the camera sensor, which receives the information and then, translating it into an electronic signal. From there, the image processor creates the image and fine-tunes it to correct for a typical set of photographic flaws, like noise. The size of the sensor is extremely important. Overall, the larger the sensor, the larger your pixels, and the larger the pixels, the more light you can collect. The more light you can catch, the better you image can be. - Image Processing
Besides the size and quality of the lens and sensor, there’s also the image processor. Most modern high-end smartphone CPUs have dedicated graphics processors built into their chip, which, being hardware-accelerated and not just software-dependent, can quickly render images like photos, videos, and games without utilizing much of the main application processor. Algorithms and other logic are what create the final image output on the phone’s screen. This where the most subjective portion is – how one’s eye interprets the quality of color, the photo’s sharpness, and so on. The image processor is also what helps achieve zero shutter lag, when the camera captures the photo when you press the capture button, not a beat or two after.
You can start to see that cramming more pixels onto a sensor may not be the best way to increase pixel resolution. That hasn’t stopped the cell phone industry from doing just that.
The relationship between the number of pixels and the physical size of the sensor is why some 8-megapixel cameras can outperform some 12-, 13-, or even 16-megapixel smartphone cameras.
Then again, drastically shrunken pixel sizes aren’t always the case when you increase your megapixels. For example, the pixel size on the 16-megapixel Titan II measures 1.12 microns, whereas each of the One X’s 8 pixels measures a slightly larger 1.4 microns.
On Nokia’s end, however, it is interesting. Even though Nokia has engineered the 808 to capture up to 41 megapixels, most users will view photos as the 5-megapixels default.
