One thing that holds them back are the tiny image sensors, which simply have a harder time recording as much information as larger ones in dedicated cameras.Īnother is the correspondingly small lenses that must be built to tight manufacturing tolerances but that also must be inexpensive enough for high-volume markets with very thin profit margins.īut as the saying has gone in photography circles since the days of film, the best camera is the one you have with you, and people always bring their mobile phones.Īdding to that is another fact: as Internet connectivity increasingly is built into phones, those photos are more likely to escape the phone via e-mail, Facebook, or other means. Mobile-phone cameras suffer poor image quality compared even to inexpensive compact cameras, much less to increasingly popular SLRs. "However, as a consumer, it's probably a good idea." Most people will tell you that summarizing the quality of a camera to just one number is quite risky or isn't what you would like to do as a scientist," he said in his speech. There's a bit more, though: a chart that shows how well the camera fares with increasingly demanding tasks - mobile-phone sharing to a print mounted on the wall, for example - and showing different uses such as portraits, sports, and landscape photography. Of course, reducing image quality to a single five-star rating scale can oversimplify a complicated situation. Now the group is tackling image noise, white balance, sensitivity, blur, and other attributes. First came basics such as sharpness, color uniformity, and lens distortion. The score is based on measurements of a variety of factors. He said phone buyers could start seeing the quality score as early as a year from now, but realistically two years is more likely. Touchard represents DxO in the consortium. "As gets to older people, it will get more important," said Nicholas Touchard, vice president of marketing for image quality evaluation at the French company DxO Labs, after a speech at the Image Sensor Europe conference here. That means viewing them on bigger screens, printing them, and saving them for more than a fleeting moment. Once upon a time, mobile-phone cameras didn't see much use beyond teenagers mugging for the camera and maybe sending each other the photos for viewing on another mobile phone.īut now mobile-phone cameras are getting good enough to store precious memories, too.
That's because the nature of mobile-phone photography is changing dramatically. It may seem like a simple idea, but it's pretty important. That's because the International Imaging Industry Association, a consortium involving more than 30 companies, is working on a test that will use a five-star rating and a basic accompanying chart to judge image quality. You might be able to make a better choice this time.
Now let's say it's 2012 and you're trying to decide whether to buy an Apple iPhone 4GS or a Google Nexus Three. The Google Nexus One's 5-megapixel camera has 56 percent more pixels than the iPhone 3GS's 3.2 megapixels, but it's clear the camera isn't 56 percent better.
( CNET) - Let's say you're trying to decide whether to buy a new mobile phone and you like taking photos.