Gadgetory

hey what is up guys MTV HD here so what makes a good smartphone camera it's just you know more megapixels is better right no no all right so the sensor the sensor is the most important piece of hardware when it comes to image quality there are good sensors there are bad sensors there are different types of sensors and there are large sensors there are small sensors and everything in between it's hard to tell a lot about an image sensor just by the name or the numbers but there's one thing that pretty much always rings true which is that when all other things are held constant a larger sensor can outperform a smaller one now the camera sensors and smartphones are pretty much always tiny not tiny enough to get rid of the camera bump that we still have in like 99% of smart phones these days but obviously a lot smaller than your normal point shoots so your smartphone cameras have to rely on their own tricks to make great pictures you might remember HTC's attempt at an ultra pixel camera back in 2013 a 4 megapixel camera that claimed to be much better at a lot of things including low-light here's why a sensor is a piece of hardware responsible for turning all the light that hits it into electrical signals and you can kind of think of it like a grid of pixels the larger the sensor obviously the larger the pixels and the more sensitive it can be to light but all these smart phone sensors are all pretty tiny so HTC instead went with way less pixels so that the individual pixels are much larger for better low-light performance now 4 megapixels is still enough to have a decent amount of detail if you don't zoom in at all but most of the time we see smartphones at the other end of the spectrum with 12 16 18 megapixel sensors which gives you a ton of detail but obviously they will suffer a little bit more in low-light alright so in front of the sensor is all the glass and all the lenses through which light has to pass to hit the sensor aside from the quality of the glass the speck that matters the most here is the aperture smartphone cameras are all fixed aperture lenses and generally the bigger the better because the more light you can let in so the best smartphone cameras now have F 2.0 sometimes even F 1.9 or F 1.8 apertures which is great for letting like I said a ton of light in and also getting a little bit of separation between your foreground and background or the shallow depth-of-field one thing that is hit or miss is stabilization so software stabilization or EIS is decent for correcting a little bit of minor handshake if you get a little bit of blur it's good at removing that and not having that in images but in video content to have a little bit of a jello effect but hardware stabilization or oh is is awesome pretty much all the time it's much better for having longer exposures and while having shaky hands can still produce very sharp images it's better for low-light and it can produce much much smoother video not every smartphone uses OIS and not every sensor is even compatible with it but when it is possible it's preferred now aside from that you don't really need to pay too much attention to like the number of lens elements that number has been boasted about before but doesn't really tell you too much about the quality of the camera and the flash design I wouldn't pay too much attention to that either sometimes you can get something interesting like a ring flash or a dual LED flash or even a xenon flash but for the most part I avoid using a flash with smart phone pictures in the first place anyway and from there it all comes down to processing every smartphone camera processes the images that come from that sensor a little bit differently some do a little bit more sharpening some do less some do a little bit more noise reduction and some do a little bit less some shift towards warmer colors some shift towards cooler colors some crank up the saturation others keep it pretty tame some favour a bright exposure some keep it a little bit underexposed but the one thing about photos is it's all subjective so you might have a smartphone that takes an objectively more accurate photo and then another one that takes a little bit less accurate but also more pleasing to the eye photo like for example my buddy Casey nice tat on Twitter he did a blind test where he took the same photo with the Nexus 6p and the iPhone 6s the Nexus 6p gave you know much cooler colors and a much brighter some might even say overexposed image but it won the popular vote because it just kind of looked a little better to people despite being less accurate than the shot from the iPhone so final word it's really hard to tell how good a smartphone camera will be just by the numbers just kind of like it's hard to tell how well a car will drive by the spec's on paper you don't really know until you actually drive it you can get a good idea and a reviewer can tell you how accurate the photos will be and whether there are certain tendencies in processing but that stuff can be changed with a software update anyway so at the end of the day it's you who will tell how good a smartphone camera is just based on how much you like the picture so that's basically it thank you for watching hopefully this gives you a better idea of what I'm talking about when I go deep into camera quality and the phone reviews and are more reviews right around the corner so thank you for watching this one I'll talk to you guys in the next video peace