Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech wiki click the subscribe button then enable notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos all cameras big and small work on the same fundamental principle light going through the lens and hitting a sensor where it gets processed and converted into the image you see on your screen with more light generally meaning better image quality that's why bulky DSLR and mirrorless cameras with their big interchangeable lenses and their larger sensors are the weapon of choice for professional photographers so given that the sensors inside smartphone cameras haven't actually increased much in size since they were debuted by sharp almost two decades ago how can their image quality be so much better today than it was then well one big improvement is in the number of receptor sites on the sensor which is typically measured in millions of pixels or megapixels improvements in microscale manufacturing have allowed manufacturers to cram many times more of these onto your camera's sensor and the more of them you have the more light samples can be collected giving you a finer image there are at least two a point as you can learn more about in this episode adding more megapixels stops helping and can even hinder image quality past a certain point so there's got to be more to it and there is from our previous episode explaining aperture you might know that every lens has a rating or a range of rating in f-stops the lower the f-stop the wider it can open up and the more light can pass through this will improve image quality especially in situations where there isn't much ambient light like in the club but another aspect of the lens that isn't so easy to read off of a spec sheet is its composition in the early days of cell phone cameras cheap plastic or composite lenses were used not only were they less clear and more likely to distort the light passing through them blurring the image they were much more prone to scratching even against the materials in your pocket meaning that over time your camera's performance would degrade modern lenses by contrast are engineering marvels crafted from exotic materials like sapphire glass with multiple carefully engineered elements in them for much better clarity and with some extra tricks as well back to our club shop for a minute one of the ways to get around low-light conditions is to simply leave the shutter open for longer allowing it to capture more of those precious photons but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's tried to quickly snap a pic of something dark only to realize that it's crazy blurry well one trick of modern lenses to compensate for handshake under darker conditions is to use gyroscopes data combined with electromagnets around the lens to help your phone camera stay still this is called optical image stabilization of course no one would want a crystal-clear image if it looked like this let's talk about dynamic range in a nutshell if your dynamic range is poor it will cause bright areas to be blown out and dark areas to lose detail or crush some newer smartphones compensate for this though by saving multiple frames at different exposure levels every time you press the shutter button then they can analyze these frames and average them in a way that minimizes blur and noise algorithmically a little like mixing strong and weak coffee to make something that's drinkable of course that leads us perfectly into another improvement faster processors modern phone s o C's not only have better CPUs and GPUs in them allowing them to quickly perform the functions I just mentioned and provide further assistance to optically stabilized lenses even at high speed in burst modes or while recording slow motion video but some of them even have specialized Hardware usually branded as a neural processor or AI processor that can be trained to identify the subject of the video or photo adjusting the color processing to best capture the shooters intent which leads us perfectly then to focus we've all seen it a gorgeous detailed shot of the wall behind your friend traditional phone cameras relied on the contrast detection to directly focus on the subject of a photo which means that they used brightness differences in the scene to determine where to focus this is an inexact science at best more advanced modern phones can use the phase detection a technique which analyzes how the left and right sides of the lens see slightly different images to decide on the focus with some of them also using infrared lasers that fire at the object of a photo to determine the distance similar to a police radar gap on the subject of depth detection to an increasing number of phones recently are using two cameras or even more with at least one of them being equipped with a wider lens not only does this allow for otherwise impossible wide-angle shots because at this point anyway you can't change out the lens on a smartphone but it also enables much easier depth sensing meaning that these phones can simulate depth of field or bokeh effects for an artistic and dramatic blurred background cool then right so with all this technology jam-packed into our phones why even buy a separate digital camera well because it's important to remember that some of the awesome results that you see with smartphone cameras are due to approximations for example the depth of field effect on a modern smartphone is applied in software at the point where the phone thinks the focus should change that means that under anything but ideal conditions your mileage may vary significantly also since the sensors inside phones are still quite small they continue to struggle in low-light because they simply can't see enough photons to make a good looking image in many cases combine that with the inability to put even a decent optical zoom on a phone without making it quite a bit fatter and it suddenly all makes sense why professionals still use traditional cameras even so though for things like casual shots of your kids and drone footage phone cameras have become an incredibly powerful and versatile tool especially important for the your era speaking of tinder do you ever find yourself not trying to find a date but trying to figure out your accounting well FreshBooks is the cloud-based accounting software that's designed for you it's the simplest and easiest way to be more productive more organized and perhaps most importantly get paid quickly you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds you can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster you can see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games and you can take the whole experience with you on the go with their iOS and Android apps freshbooks is offering a 30-day unrestricted free trial to our viewers so to claim it just go to freshbooks comm slash tech quickie and enter tech quickie and the how did you hear about us section we're gonna link that down below so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future fast as possible and don't forget to subscribe don't forget to subscribe don't forget to subscribe yet don't forget to subscribe meanwhile people be like yeah I didn't forget yo