Samsung announces first 108MP phone camera sensor, starts production this month

mrk · 19 Aug 2019 at 19:58

Doesn't matter on the phone side of things. We've already seen what it's (software + hardware working together) capable of in producing clean low light images and the new sensor will only improve on that with the new hardware components working alongside it.

You are saying the new camera won't make any difference over current flagship cameras. It will make a noticeable difference over them actually.

Energize · 20 Aug 2019 at 19:11

mrk said:
Doesn't matter on the phone side of things. We've already seen what it's (software + hardware working together) capable of in producing clean low light images and the new sensor will only improve on that with the new hardware components working alongside it.

You are saying the new camera won't make any difference over current flagship cameras. It will make a noticeable difference over them actually.

I'm not saying that at all, there is not sufficient information in the article you linked to make any meaningful statement about this particular phone's camera.

At the end of the day software is quite frankly irrelevant to the extent that you can use lightroom or photoshop to process any images taken on any phone. I can remove 100% of noise if I want to on even the worst phone, so the only thing worth focusing on is hardware if you are serious about photography, and having a larger sensor doesn't improve ISO performance at all if the lens reduces in aperture.

One of the most elementary things every photographer knows is that glass is king, and without any information about the lens you can't make any meaningful extrapolations about image quality.

mrk · 20 Aug 2019 at 19:18

The lens aperture isn't reduced, the spec of the camera and aperture is already known. Plus the software and hardware work together to take multiple shots at the same time to merge together. Night Sights use up to 12 shots to create their results and currently takes a few seconds to process them. If software wasn't important then Night Sight wouldn't exist, neither would seamless HDR.

Just wait a couple of months and you'll see when Xiaomi release the new Mi using the same module. Software does matter a lot actually as well, out of the box quality is important because it means you get even better results once you apply any changes in LR/PS etc. If the base image is rubbish, the edited image will be a better version of rubbish. Not everyone shoots in RAW as well, and you can't shoot with all lenses in RAW mode anyway and RAW shots are only available in Pro mode on most phones. This means JPEG is the best all round mode to use so having a better quality JPEG out of the box makes things better in every other area.

I know what you are trying to say, but it doesn't apply in this context. There are no drawbacks to this new sensor, only improvements in all areas.

Energize · 20 Aug 2019 at 19:39

It just seems futile to be bothered about image quality when you then use JPEG which throws most of the image data away.

Sure built in software is important if you don't shoot raw, but then what photographer does that?! With lightroom I can combine 100 shots together to get a noise free or HDR image on any phone if I wanted to.

I'm not saying there are drawbacks (other than massively disproportionate filesize for the image quality), I'm asking whether there are actually any objective benefits that aren't software related.

What actually is the specification of the lens? Are there any objective tests of resolution, distortion, vignetting, contrast, or CA?

And is there any focal length trickery going on as I often see when manufacturers give a 35mm equivalent focal length but not a 35mm equivalent aperture in order to inflate the aperture size?