Exploring the Megapixel Myth

Of possible interest to this, there is an article about 8mp camera phones in todays metro

I so wish that Nokia would just 'go for it' and come out with a camera phone focused on optics and processing. Part of the marketing campaign could be that they don't even mention the mega pixel count, just take images shot using the phone and print them in magazines at full A4 size - let the images speak for themselves.

I can take a 2mp still image from the video of my Canon HD camcorder and it'll look way better than most 5 mp camera phones. This alone is proof to me that the optics are way more important than the pixel count.

James @ Nokia Creative.

nice article.
so what do YOU thinks going to happen in the following two years?
will nokia make 8mp their standar resolution too??
or will they just stick to 5mp?
and WHEN are we getting better video quality, and alternate recording formats in the N Series?? who DOESNT love divx??

Would have been nice to see the test including the E90 which has 3.2MP and Autofocus but lacks the fine optics of the N93.

Tim

I used to have a Nokia N70, wich had a 2mp camera. 50% of the pictures where perfect (same quality as the N93,...) but the other pictures where bad because it had no focus. Now I'm waiting until next week to buy a new (smart)phone. The Nokia N96 comes out on saturday and the Samsung Innov8 on wednesday. Wich one should I buy? I'm going to America for a few months next year and I want to take good quality pics. And what about the update and other services? Wich smartphone is the best from all perspectives? The price doesn't mather...

Cheers, decent article. Optics is everything really as you point out. That and focus speed - which was another killer on camera phones until the latest crop. I would suggest that what you call "good colours" on the samsung is actually some filter they apply to enhance the colours after the shot - they seem alien to me. I've never seen grass so green - and is your hair really so yellow?? 😉 The other phones seem to have it better, especially the N82, with some of the others seeming a little over exposed.

Is it just me, or do the shots from the Samsung appear a little too brilliant - almost unreal. Personally I just want a camera that takes-it-as-it-is...I don't want pictures 'enhanced' in any way. Looking at the 3 & 5 mp versions of the photos, the colours do seem more realistic.

What bugs me though, is why there are still very few phones with optical zoom. I had this feature on my old Sharp 902 many years ago and it really made a difference. Given that most phones have digital zoom only, then there is an argument for more megapixels if you regularly use the zoom feature.

would have been nice to see a comparison including the SE K800/810 but i guess they weren't included since they aren't smart phones. I am surprised the n82 colours look so washed out, I think the colours for the i8510 is a little too much, kinda unrealistic but i could be wrong

This has been a great series of articles Steve. I particularly enjoyed the one on the scratched lenses. It just goes to back-up my own personal experience. I have a "generic" windows mobile with 3.2MP auto-focus and get some wonderful pictures from it. In fact, having just printed a series out at 6X4 via Kodak's on-line printing service, there was no descernable difference between my camera phone pics and similar shots taken on my Dad's Nikon D60 DSLR - also printed through Kodak at 6X4.

Now, it wasn't using same conditions, same lighting in the way you have done here (and the megapixel count was certainly different!) so I won't make any rash claims. I'd just be interested to see you do a piece to back up your "it has to be Carl Zeiss optics" claims.

I would expect to see a difference, but I'd be very interested to see how MUCH difference "name brand" optics really make. After all, iPod is the leading MP3 player brand but no-one with ears would ever claim an iPod sounds better than, say, a Sansa Fuze if both are playing reasonable quality MP3's through the same headphones.

A lot of this "Carl Zeiss" stuff is nothing more than martketing hype. Are the lenses actually glass? Are they actually any better quality plastic than the <insert other photographic company name> branded lenses in Motorola, SonyEricsson or Samsung phones?

And what's the difference between a Nokia *with* Carl Zeiss lens and one without, when using the same camera module?

These are the questions which really matter...

Judging from the way friends buy cameraphones, I think the main reason megapixels are treated so highly is precisely because they're a number. Someone I know heard about the N95 and said "Got to have that, 5 megapixels on a phone!". Tech fans seem to love numbers, they love exact measurements of how "good" a gadget is.

So many phone buyers, especially at the high end of the market, have this "top trumps" approach to buying equipment. They don't really care whether they need an 8mp cameraphone or not, they don't even care if they can tell the difference between that and a 3mp one, all they seem to care about is whether it has the highest possible raw spec. It's like car buyers who want a fast "0 to 60" time or a high top speed, neither of which is any use on ordinary roads.

The trouble is that as Steve pointed out most of us almost certainly DON'T need anything above 3mp, and raw spec doesn't tell you anything about the actual picture quality.

What's needed is a numerical specification for quality, something to compete with the megapixel count but which concentrates on how good the picture is rather than how big it is.

If there was a "quality number" on phones as well as a MP count, people would begin to see that bigger isn't necessarily better. In the absence of such a quality number though, people will continue to think MP is the be all and end all. And if customers demand ever-higher MP cameras, then manufacturers will have to give it to them, whether there's any real point in it or not.

The Nokia N96 comes out on saturday and the Samsung Innov8 on wednesday. Wich one should I buy?

I would wait for more reviews to appear, there should be loads once they both launch properly.

OK guys, you wanted it, you've got it. Part 4 in this series will be 'Carl Zeiss' vs generic optics....

8-)

There's no getting away form the laws of physics, but almost without exception good optics are big optics. Certainly good optics at a reasonable price are big optics.

So, good optics and cameraphones are likely to stay an oxymoron as long as carry everywhere devices are pocketable.

If you want decent picture, buy a camera.

Tzer2 wrote:The trouble is that as Steve pointed out most of us almost certainly DON'T need anything above 3mp, and raw spec doesn't tell you anything about the actual picture quality.

I recently moved from a 6220 classic to an E66. Thats a 5mp CZ xenon flash to a generic 3.2mp with LED flash.

And let me tell you, the difference is strikingly obvious, even on the phone screen.

So much so in fact, I still have both phones. Currently still deciding, the E66 beats the 6220 in every other way, except the camera. However, as its my only camera, its rather important.

I want Nokia to wake up and realise E series users want good cameras too. AFAIK, there is not a single E series with anything more than a 3.2 cam.

Although I dont know about the upcoming E72 and E75.

If you want decent picture, buy a camera.

I suggest you look at some of the ones taken, there are some extremely good pictures out there taken by N95s/N82s etc.

However, the range is crying out for optical zoom.

I think its time to stop the MP race and start working on improving the camera quality. 5MP in my opinion is very decent from a cameraphone perspective. IF you want anything more, buy a standalone camera. Its unreasonable to demand a cameraphone to be 8MP, 12 MP, etc.

The next step in camera phones should be improving the camera. Try to pack in a bigger CMOS, build in optical zoom (not all cameras out there have lenses jumping out of the unit and they still manage optical zoom), give clicking options like widescreen, shutter speed, etc. I really dont remember the last time I have viewed an image at its actual size. Its always been 'fit-to-screen'

to me it looks like the i8510's colors are over saturated (unrealistic) whereas the n82/93 look more realistic (maybe slightly washed out)

"More megapixels is better - yes, but only up to about 3 or 5 megapixels."

That's bit of a oversimplification. Once you get better optics (and better focusing etc.) more pixels will start matter again.

5 megapixels is propably the sweetspot with the current optics in high-end cameras. Of course improving optics in smartphones is getting harder, because the physics of light and lights interaction with matter aren't things about to change. Unlike many other features in smartphones, it's not someting that can be programmed better or improved with more processing power. Demand for thinner phones is another thing makes improvements harder. E71 take pretty horrible pictures for a 3 megapixel camera, but I doubt that this is caused by Nokias drive to keep E- and N-series separate. It's just that E71's 10 millimetre thickness doesn't allow better lenses etc. to be fit inside it.

How do you keep the LED flash on the N78 constantly on while video recording, just as you demonstrated the N79's duel flash in the latest phone show. And also do you have any recommendation for a program which can rotate the N78's screen which actually works with feature pack 2.
Thanks in advance

slitchfield wrote:OK guys, you wanted it, you've got it. Part 4 in this series will be 'Carl Zeiss' vs generic optics....

8-)

Excellent. Cheers Steve. I'm looking forward to it already.

For about a year now, I've been taking photo's with my N95, ranging from 3M to 5M pixels, and in lots of weather conditions (albeit mostly dry, since I prefer staying indoors when it rains).
I've found the quality of these photo's to be comparable to the quality of my Canon Ixus v3 (2M/3x optical zoom), except for 2 conditions:
1) The optical zoom really makes a difference, and 5Mpixels can not compensate for that (possibly due to a bad digital zoom implementation). Cropping a photo can not completely solve
this since you want to take into account the lighting conditions as well.
2) Low light photo's are a lot better on the Canon.
In practice though, I rarely use the Canon anymore.

When choosing a new model, I don't think Mpixels will be an issue anymore, I agree that 3M-5M
is more than enough, and I certainly expect any new model to have at least 3M.
What would really help is an industry index for optical performance (taking into account zoom and light conditions). Then buyers, sellers and producers would not be focussed only on the megapixels anymore.

Demand for thinner phones is another thing makes improvements harder. E71 take pretty horrible pictures for a 3 megapixel camera, but I doubt that this is caused by Nokias drive to keep E- and N-series separate. It's just that E71's 10 millimetre thickness doesn't allow better lenses etc. to be fit inside it.

Hmm... very very interesting point.

So thin phones may actually be causing harm to the cameraphone world? Popular models like the RAZR, iPhone and E71 are inherently bad as cameraphones because of their physical thickness?

Looks like photography is on a collision course with fashion...

Steve, All,

I'd be interested to hear your views regarding the relationship between megapixels and the dreaded digital zoom. In my view, using the digital zoom is just a different, more convenient way of cropping a section from an image. So a camera with lots of megapixels enables at least some use of a digital zoom. But it's not exactly the same thing as cropping because I imagine there's a fair bit of processing going on to fill in the gaps... upsampling or whatever.

Digital zoom is usually FAR worse than taking the photo at 1:1 and cropping later. The zoomed image may look ok on the phone's screen, but the end result will be horrible.

What is the reason behind N82's photos being dull in colour(Same with my N95 8GB)??

Tzer2 wrote:Hmm... very very interesting point.

So thin phones may actually be causing harm to the cameraphone world? Popular models like the RAZR, iPhone and E71 are inherently bad as cameraphones because of their physical thickness?

Looks like photography is on a collision course with fashion...

I reckon so, my E66 is also dire for a 3.2mp.

I wonder if its the same for my girlfriends 6210N. Its thicker, but also has a 3.2 cam.

She got it yesterday, will take a few comparision shots at some point.

it's not about how the image can appear on a computer screen - for that 1.3mp is plenty for most uses (no cropping, lots of light, etc).

mp count gets you better printability and digital zooming (cropping). nothing more. and where does larger mp hurt you? when it comes at the expense of sensor pixel size: the large each individual pixel of the sensor, the more light it can capture and so the less noise in the image (raw, pre-processing).

that's it. if i gave you a tiny sensor with 8mp, versus a large sensor with only 1.3mp, the 1.3mp sensor would prove superior in almost all uncropped results when viewed on-screen (like this website). but in print? it'd be a toss-up based on the amount of light available to the sensors at the time the image was captured.

by the way, i think the i8510 images all have horrible color. they're over saturated and artificial looking in my opinion. if you like that effect, apply a filter to attain it - i prefer the natural colors of the n82 and n93.

-bit

Where did you get your 'Boris Johnson' esque hair cut?

First of all, without the original images this comparison means nothing. You've just stripped away the variables affected by MP count and then state that amount of MPs don't matter. Nice comparison indeed. Take lots of pictures under different lightning conditions and environments and then show us what differences in them (besides the physical size) are affected by MP count. The MP count alone does not matter, but it is a real factor and really should not be omitted if you're going to take lots of pictures with your phone.

Also, what on earth has happened to the N93 picture of the second picture set? It looks like there's some serious lense distortion there O_o

It is interesting how much interest there is in this series of articles.

Is a good camera on your phone one of the most important things? I think that for most people it is. If thats the case why are there not more phones with Xenon flashes and optical zooms? It seems to me that the market would love them - more so that things like ovi. So why is Nokia putting so much effort into ovi etc when people want a good camera on their phone? Do consumers really control the direction of the market....

the saturation on the i8510 is horrible! I also agree with the posters who have commented that whilst MP is not as important as decent optics etc when phones get decent optics then more MP will be a good thing - certainly there is nothing wrong with MP but of course at the moment there are more important things to deal with.