What makes a good smartphone camera?

Its funny how the best camera changes. Most of my photos used to be nature or random trinkets throughout life. Now nearly all my photos are of my little girl.

I care way less about strict objective/subjective quality in comparisons and more about which one chooses the fastest shutter speed. You can have the best sensor, colour science and dynamic range in the world but if there is movement blur its unusable.

My pixel has been okay at this but I'm apprehensive about how to find good comparisons when I need to replace this phone.

It's possible to save RAW files (mostly) unprocessed with iPhones, either via built-in functionality (Pros) or via apps like Halide.

But the aggressiveness of the de-noising in the native JPG/HEIF images otherwise is really unfortunate if you want to look at the images on a screen larger than the phone's screen. The amount of detail lost (other than in areas like people's faces where the phone knows to specialise) can be very considerable.

I'd really like a way to dial that aggressiveness down a fair bit, even at the cost of more noise/grain and larger file size (through less compression due to the extra noise).

Another thing is the amount of lens flare you can get when shooting at the sun for sunsets/rises, etc or other large bright light sources. With very small lens elements, from a physics perspective it's understandable that suppressing the reflections and inter-reflections is very difficult on such a small surface area (even with special coatings to reduce the fresnel reflection ratios), but if you care about image quality and wanting to look at images on screen larger than the phone which took them, larger format cameras still have some benefit despite their larger and heavier size and therefore inconvenience (looks at 5D Mk IV on shelf).

Lens for image quality and sensor size and density for resolution, but we hit pretty hard limits on those a long time ago. Software on top of that has been the major differentiator for quite some time. Exposure stacking and intelligent detail control produce more improvement for less investment than a super-complex lens assembly or exotic sensor. Though it brings its own risks.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/22/the-future-of-photography-...

Not to say there is no movement on the other fronts. Glass was pushing for a crazy anamorphic lens and far larger sensor that would have been a serious improvement, but I don't know if it went anywhere.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/22/glass-rethinks-the-smartph...

The part he didn't mention is interpolation at the low end "specs are mere suggestions" end of things. I have a backup Android phone - a true "brand X" type of thing, vanilla android, bought at a garage sale. Nice enough phone, but claims a 40MP camera. The merest glance at a picture taken by it shows it has an ordinary-for-its-time 13MP camera in it and the pictures are interpolated to 40MP.

Hopefully the camera doesn't upscale and then downscale again if told so save at its actual native-ish resolution.

To expand on the HDR example: There’s this interesting lecture series about computational photography by Marc Levoy, who worked on the earlier Pixel cameras: https://youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc

From what I remember, the core thesis is “take a lot of pictures and take the best parts”, which works for a surprising number of cases.

I sometimes use the 200MP mode on my phone - it does render more detail in images and sometimes that's what I want.

To counter the unnatural look of noise reduction I often add a film grain effect.

> in the darkness, your camera will need to use a longer shutter speed

the alternative, which many smartphone cameras do now, is to capture a burst of many photos of a short shutter speed and then combine them in software. For static things, this is equivalent to a longer shutter speed (with the additional advantage of not blowing out the highlights), and for moving things, we can filter in software to avoid smearing them out.

the main issue is when you blow the image up, the details in the highlights and shadows don't hold up, you need to study Chroma subsampling to understand this. Sensor size is still important, but they're getting closer

All that really matters is that it exists. If you really care about the quality of your camera, you're going to want to get a dedicated camera. For everyone else (i.e. basically everybody except photographers), literally any phone camera is as good as another.

“The best camera in the world is the one you have with you”

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One that I can physically turn off with a switch.