Gadgetory

hello I'm Gary Simms and this is and authority now the galaxy s 9 and s 9 plus have been out for a little while and one of the interesting features that we're seeing on this phone that we don't see on other phones yet is this idea of a dual aperture and so the question I want to look at today is is the dual aperture feature a gimmick or is it actually really useful well please let me explain so let's start with the basics what is the aperture the aperture is the hole in front of the sensor that's part of the lens that determines how much light gets through to the sensor now on a bigger camera on a mirrorless camera or a DSLR camera there are many many different aperture setting you know 10 20 depending on the camera now it's measured in what they call F stops now f-stop is the ratio of the focal length and the aperture size and reason it's a ratio is because obviously if you've got different format cameras different sized sensors different types of lenses but you need a way of measuring that aperture relative to the rest of the set up in the camera so on a bigger camera a DSLR camera then if you've got a lens with kind of F 1.8 maybe f 1.4 then that is a really really fast lens and maybe the kit lens that comes with kind of standard with the camera might be a 3.5 f/4 something along those lines now as I said it's a ratio and the ratio works opposite to what you might think if something is f3 or f2 it means that the aperture is wide it means there's lots of light coming in and if the number is larger if a f-16 f-22 then it means the hole is smaller and less light is coming in now the galaxy s 9 has the ability to set the aperture to F 1.5 and F 2.4 now to compare that to other cameras you're kind of standard F number for a smartphone is around F 1.7 the Galaxy Note 8 has an F 1.7 the huawei mate 10 Pro has F 1.6 the pixel 2 has f 1.9 what they've done with the galaxy s nice I've managed to open up that aperture to F 1.5 but at the same time that added in a second one which is F 2.4 now when a camera takes a photo it plays around with three different settings to try to get the right exposure one is the shutter speed how long the shutter is open how long the light is exposed to the sensor the second is the ISO speed that's the sensitivity of the sensor how sensitive is it to light how quickly does it register the amounts of light coming in and thirdly naught the aperture now normally on a smartphone that aperture is fixed but on a bigger camera as I said earlier there are loads and those are different settings that you can use now on the s 9 the camera software now can choose not only between the ISO and the shutter speed it also has two aperture settings that it can choose between and the idea is it chooses the best one to give the best quality photo now the biggest problem is when cameras choose high ISO numbers lots of noise comes in and when they choose long shutter times that of course even minor handshakes just as you're holding the phone can actually bring blurred nurse or a lack of clarity to the photo so having that extra ability the idea is that it can produce better pictures I really hope you're enjoying this video if you are it like to remind you there is now a separate gary explained youtube channel and there i cover lots of technology outside of mobile so if you're interested go over to youtube.com slash gary explains and i'll see you there now there are two reasons you want a large aperture one is that you want more light to come in in low-light situations so indoor photography nighttime photography you want as big as aperture as possible and then on bigger cameras there's also you try to achieve this depth of field effect the bokeh effect but that's really quite hard to achieve on a smartphone even when you've got an F 1.5 aperture so we took some pictures with the galaxy s 9 some at F 1.5 summer f 2.4 to see what kind of differences we can see in the quality of the pictures that appear now as you look at these pictures here you'll see actually it's quite difficult to tell the difference in an F 1.5 picture and an F 2.4 picture they really isn't much call between them the only time you can really tell the difference is in a low light situation and this very last picture here is a kind of a picture we've made and we deliberately control the amount of light that was in this setup and if you zoom in here to this robots head and look at the color board behind it you can see that actually there is extra noise that comes in an extra processing that has to go on when you're using F 2.4 in this low-light situation so f 1.5 performs much better of course this is testing the two aperture settings on the s 9 F 1 point 5 and F 2 point 4 but on a phone let's say like the Note 8 it's already got F 1 point 7 so the difference here in the quality would be much much smaller it moves it is some scientific tests on these photos take them with these two different aperture settings and we found that actually photo taken F 2 point 4 have a bit of clarity in the middle but they do have less sharpness on the corners whereas the F 1.5 isn't quite so sharp in the center but it tends to keep that sharpness better across the whole photo so when you pull this together what have we got well we've got the Samsung Galaxy S none with the 2 aperture settings 1.5 and 2.4 compared to a normal smartphone which would have maybe one point 7 or even one point 6 now when you actually take some photographs with this what do you see well what you see is that in low-light F 1.5 can be a better help than F 1.7 or even F 1.9 and we can also see that there does seem to be some sharpness better at F 2 point 4 but does that make a huge difference well as you saw from the pictures I show not really so me personally when I'm looking at this now am I going to call it gimmick or feature I'm gonna call gimmick now I'm sure as soon as I've done that there's some were already typing down the comments saying you've been paid by wile where you've been paid by LG come on people grow up I've studied the photos I've looked at the technology and this is my opinion it's as simple as that okay my name is Gary Sims and this is Andrew authority I really do hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up you know what I'm going to ask please subscribe please become part of our notification squad please leave a comment below and well that's it I'll see you in the next one