How Have Smartphone Cameras Gotten So Good?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
1,312 words · ~6 min read
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thanks for watching tech wiki click the subscribe button then enable
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notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos all cameras
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big and small work on the same fundamental principle light going
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through the lens and hitting a sensor where it gets processed and converted
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into the image you see on your screen with more light generally meaning better
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image quality that's why bulky DSLR and
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mirrorless cameras with their big interchangeable lenses and their larger
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sensors are the weapon of choice for professional photographers so given that
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the sensors inside smartphone cameras haven't actually increased much in size
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since they were debuted by sharp almost two decades ago how can their image
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quality be so much better today than it was then well one big improvement is in
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the number of receptor sites on the sensor which is typically measured in
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millions of pixels or megapixels improvements in microscale manufacturing
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have allowed manufacturers to cram many times more of these onto your camera's
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sensor and the more of them you have the more light samples can be collected
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giving you a finer image there are at least two a point as you can learn more
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about in this episode adding more megapixels stops helping and can even
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hinder image quality past a certain point so there's got to be more to it
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and there is from our previous episode
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explaining aperture you might know that every lens has a rating or a range of
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rating in f-stops the lower the f-stop
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the wider it can open up and the more light can pass through this will improve
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image quality especially in situations where there isn't much ambient light
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like in the club but another aspect of
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the lens that isn't so easy to read off of a spec sheet is its composition in
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the early days of cell phone cameras cheap plastic or composite lenses were
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used not only were they less clear and more likely to distort the light passing
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through them blurring the image they were much more prone to scratching even
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against the materials in your pocket meaning that over time your camera's
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performance would degrade modern lenses by contrast are engineering marvels
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crafted from exotic materials like sapphire glass with multiple carefully
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engineered elements in them for much better clarity and with some extra
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tricks as well back to our club shop for a minute one of the ways to get around
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low-light conditions is to simply leave the shutter open for longer allowing it
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to capture more of those precious photons but I'm sure I'm not the only
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one who's tried to quickly snap a pic of something dark only to realize that it's
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crazy blurry well one trick of modern lenses to compensate for handshake under
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darker conditions is to use gyroscopes data combined with electromagnets around
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the lens to help your phone camera stay still this is called optical image
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stabilization of course no one would
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want a crystal-clear image if it looked like this let's talk about dynamic range
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in a nutshell if your dynamic range is poor it will cause bright areas to be
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blown out and dark areas to lose detail
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or crush some newer smartphones compensate for this though by saving
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multiple frames at different exposure levels every time you press the shutter
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button then they can analyze these
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frames and average them in a way that minimizes blur and noise algorithmically
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a little like mixing strong and weak coffee to make something that's
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drinkable of course that leads us perfectly into another improvement
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faster processors modern phone s o C's
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not only have better CPUs and GPUs in them allowing them to quickly perform
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the functions I just mentioned and provide further assistance to optically
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stabilized lenses even at high speed in burst modes or while recording slow
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motion video but some of them even have specialized Hardware usually branded as
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a neural processor or AI processor that
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can be trained to identify the subject of the video or photo adjusting the
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color processing to best capture the shooters intent which leads us perfectly
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then to focus we've all seen it a gorgeous detailed shot of the wall
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behind your friend traditional phone cameras relied on the contrast detection
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to directly focus on the subject of a photo which means that they used
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brightness differences in the scene to determine where to focus this is an
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inexact science at best more advanced
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modern phones can use the phase detection a technique which analyzes how
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the left and right sides of the lens see
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slightly different images to decide on
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the focus with some of them also using infrared lasers that fire at the object
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of a photo to determine the distance similar to a police radar gap on the
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subject of depth detection to an increasing number of phones recently are
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using two cameras or even more with at
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least one of them being equipped with a wider lens not only does this allow for
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otherwise impossible wide-angle shots because at this point anyway you can't
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change out the lens on a smartphone but it also enables much easier depth
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sensing meaning that these phones can simulate depth of field or bokeh effects
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for an artistic and dramatic blurred background cool then right so with all
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this technology jam-packed into our phones why even buy a separate digital
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camera well because it's important to remember that some of the awesome
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results that you see with smartphone cameras are due to approximations for
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example the depth of field effect on a modern smartphone is applied in software
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at the point where the phone thinks the focus should change that means that
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under anything but ideal conditions your mileage may vary significantly
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also since the sensors inside phones are
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still quite small they continue to struggle in low-light because they
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simply can't see enough photons to make
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a good looking image in many cases combine that with the inability to put
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even a decent optical zoom on a phone without making it quite a bit fatter and
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it suddenly all makes sense why professionals still use traditional
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cameras even so though for things like casual shots of your kids and drone
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footage phone cameras have become an incredibly powerful and versatile tool
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