Google focuses on a future of even better mobile cameras
Smartphone cameras are about to get even better.Peyman Milanfar, a Google software engineer who had worked in the computational photography group, posted a lengthy analysis about using a smartphone camera to shoot nighttime photos with the same quality of an expensive DSLR.Milanfar’s post chronicles his quest for high-quality nighttime images taken with a smartphone. DSLR cameras do well in this application, but smartphone cameras struggle. A DSLR can take good quality photos at night because it has a very large sensor that collects more light. The Nikon D500 DSLR boasts a 20.9 million pixel sensor with a pixel size of 4.2µm. The D500 sensor is enormous compared to the top ranked Google Pixel phone’s sensor with 12.3 million pixels that are 1.55µm. It also has a large, adjustable and precise lens that captures and focuses more light from the field of view on the sensor, reducing visual distortion, compared to the Pixel’s constrained, fixed camera lens assembly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here