Gadgetory

hey phone fans we recently released our real camera review on the Huawei p9 where during that review I made the following statement while we might be concerned to see the smaller f 2.2 apertures over competing phones on sensors this small the difference in depth of field blur between F 1.8 and F 2.2 is fairly minimal we still achieve a nice shallow blur to background wickets and is actually prompted a handful of comments from folks like this one apart from the ridiculous statement that aperture size differences are minimal on phones it was a quite nice review which got us thinking just how big a difference should we expect from such small camera sensors and we have some great subjects to compare the galaxy s7 has a 1 over 2.5 inch image sensor and we're assuming the p9 has something closer to a 1 over 2 point 6 inch sensor when looking at the pixel sizes between the two reasonably close for smartphone cameras the p9 has a 27 millimeter equivalent lens and the galaxy s7 is slightly wider a 26 millimeter field of view again pretty comparable now the galaxy s7 has an F 1.7 aperture while the p9 uses F 2.2 apertures in photography speak F 1.7 to f 2.2 is less than 1 . difference in terms of aperture size each stop represents a doubling of the amount of light a sensor can soak up through that aperture doing a little quick math and F 1.7 aperture would let in twice as much light as an f2 point for aperture so we're a little closer to a 2/3 of a stop difference the larger the aperture the easier it is to get light onto a sensor and it's easier to blur the background of your photos so with less than one stop difference in hardware we should expect to see less than one stop difference in background blur we performed a series of tests shooting photos of this baseball keeping a consistent distance between the Huawei and the galaxy looking at the backgrounds we do see that the s7 has a subtle advantage over the p9 in producing a softer background but how should we quantify this difference well we duplicate these distances and setups with a Samsung mirrorless camera with an aps-c sensor and a 24 millimeter equivalent lens a slightly wider field of view but still pretty close to these phones for our purposes now comparing everything the image is produced by the phone cameras fall somewhere in between the f10 and f/13 aperture shots from the mirrorless camera though it's a little easier to see a difference between the mirrorless shots than it is to see distinct differences between the blur produced by both of these phones the difference between f10 and f/13 is about two thirds of a stop which is almost the same as the difference between f 1.7 and f 2.2 it's about two-thirds of a stop but we don't see quite as much change from phone to phone there is a difference to be sure mostly noticeable when pixel keeping on super macro shots but it's tough to say that this is really a significant difference in performance and by significant we mean should this change in depth of field actually motivate someone to make a different purchasing decision and we don't think so plus it just reinforces that for as good as our phone cameras have gotten recently there are some situations where you just can't quite fight the physics of having a larger camera sensor like that tasty tasty mirrorless camera bouquet of course software is starting to catch up there too as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more test videos like these and hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos back now you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next video you