First off, I’m no super expert on cameras or optics but this is something that bugs me about all these ‘photographers’ that think their phone is a super camera.

These days just about every phone out there – even the cheapies, have some camera built in. The trouble is they are all pretty much useless for doing real photography. The reason is pretty simple – physics (or more specifically – optics).

You can have a super camera sensor but if the lens is not good the output picture will still be crappy. The opposite is you can have an average sensor with a good lens and your pictures should be good. Why? The reason is simple – a good picture requires more photons/light – plain and simple. The tiny lenses on all camera phones make it impossible to generate a really good picture. This is still one area in ‘life’ where bigger ‘is’ better. The bigger surface area you have to capture photons/light the better. Ask astronomers why they keep on building bigger and bigger telescopes despite all the progress in other areas of technology. You need to capture more light to get a better picture – especially if you want to zoom in and crop. Of course, the bigger the lens the more difficult it is to make it.

I still have an old Canon S3-IS which is ‘only’ a 6 megapixel camera but its pictures are still better than any of my modern camera phone pictures (which has something like 8MP sensor). As explained above the sensor size has little to do with the picture quality (within reason). The only real advantage of a phone camera is that I’m more likely to have tit close by most of the time – oppose to my bigger cameras.

The same basically applies to things like tablets – like the iPad and so on. Basically any device that has a ‘little’ peephole camera will have the same issue.

All I can do when I see one of these ‘modern day’ photographers is to smile…