Hp Nokia - Vanjoki, general manager of the cellphone giant, predicted Tuesday that camera phone technology would “in the very near future” render system DSLR cameras obsolete and that “those heavy lenses” would no longer be necessary. While we always welcome the possibility of lighter equipment, Vanjoki’s projection would be a very tall order.
Consider the current state of the art in system DSLRs: 24-plus megapixels on 24x36mm sensors, ISOs higher than 100,000, burst rates to 10 fps at highest quality. You’re not going to pack that many pixels onto a tiny camera phone sensor any time soon, let alone that kind of processing power. The smallest system cameras today, Micro Four Thirds, go no higher than 12 megapixels, using a sensor more than 10 times the area of a small compact’s. Image quality goes progressively south as sensor size goes down, primarily due to image noise.
This is okay for snapshooters, but not okay for serious amateurs and pros who demand better than good-enough. As our Technical Editor Phil Ryan notes, “It’s akin to recorded music. People are willing to put up with inferior audio quality in return for being able to have a ton of music on their iPods. But the sound quality can’t compare to a full stereo system.”
And “those heavy lenses” are the other essential for the best photo quality. While tiny lenses can be made to cover a fairly wide zoom range, they can’t provide the edge-to-edge sharpness and speed (f/2.8 and brighter) of today’s DSLR lenses.
Vanjoki’s other prediction that camera phones will have HD video recording within a year is technically feasible; 1080p HD video requires only 2 megapixels. But that still leaves the problem of those little teeny pixels. “What he’s saying is, we can give you the dots,” Ryan says. “But what those dots will look like is another matter. Camera-phone still imaging and video rely heavily on fixing all the problems that those sensors have, and they do an amazing job. But, in essence, you get what the camera phone thinks you were shooting, since it has to make decisions about what to do to the image to make it look decent. If cell phones could soon replace DSLRs, photographers would all have been happy shooting interpolated 1MP images on Sony Mavicas. They weren’t.”
-- Dan Richards
Consider the current state of the art in system DSLRs: 24-plus megapixels on 24x36mm sensors, ISOs higher than 100,000, burst rates to 10 fps at highest quality. You’re not going to pack that many pixels onto a tiny camera phone sensor any time soon, let alone that kind of processing power. The smallest system cameras today, Micro Four Thirds, go no higher than 12 megapixels, using a sensor more than 10 times the area of a small compact’s. Image quality goes progressively south as sensor size goes down, primarily due to image noise.
This is okay for snapshooters, but not okay for serious amateurs and pros who demand better than good-enough. As our Technical Editor Phil Ryan notes, “It’s akin to recorded music. People are willing to put up with inferior audio quality in return for being able to have a ton of music on their iPods. But the sound quality can’t compare to a full stereo system.”
And “those heavy lenses” are the other essential for the best photo quality. While tiny lenses can be made to cover a fairly wide zoom range, they can’t provide the edge-to-edge sharpness and speed (f/2.8 and brighter) of today’s DSLR lenses.
Vanjoki’s other prediction that camera phones will have HD video recording within a year is technically feasible; 1080p HD video requires only 2 megapixels. But that still leaves the problem of those little teeny pixels. “What he’s saying is, we can give you the dots,” Ryan says. “But what those dots will look like is another matter. Camera-phone still imaging and video rely heavily on fixing all the problems that those sensors have, and they do an amazing job. But, in essence, you get what the camera phone thinks you were shooting, since it has to make decisions about what to do to the image to make it look decent. If cell phones could soon replace DSLRs, photographers would all have been happy shooting interpolated 1MP images on Sony Mavicas. They weren’t.”
-- Dan Richards
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