Cell Phone Cameras
The quality of modern cell phone cameras is a far cry from the murky images produced by phone cameras only a few years ago. These days, phone cameras can produce images that rival small point and shoot cameras. Camera phone images can be easily copied to a computer and printed at home or at a professional printer. I want to take a look at some of the features to look out for, and what they all mean.
Sensors and megapixels
Digital photographs are captured by a sensor inside the camera, which sits behind the lens. This sensor is made up of millions of tiny pixels, which combine to form the final image that you capture. A megapixel is one million of these pixels, and a camera sensor is usually described by how many megapixels it has. More megapixels gives you an image with higher resolution, but that doesn’t always equate to higher quality. Camera phones with lots of megapixels are often a marketing gimmick only,. Having less pixels, but better quality ones, will often give you a better overall image and also work better in lower light. 5 or 6 megapixels should be plenty for normal camera phone use, and should be able to make good quality prints up to 8 x 10 size at least.
Optical Zoom vs Digital Zoom
Digital zoom is a more common option than optical zoom. Digital zoom is a process the camera uses to enlarge part of an image, giving the effect of ‘zooming in’. Unfortunately this process reduces image quality significantly, to the point that it is not a useful feature for any serious photos. Effectively, digital zoom crops out a small portion of the image and enlarges it. Optical zoom, on the other hand, uses a series of lenses inside the phone camera that are moved mechanically to actually enlarge the image before it is captured by the camera sensor. This means that the sensor captures a magnified image using all of it’s available resolution. Optical zoom is not a cheap option in a camera phone, because of the miniature parts required. However it is becoming more common, and is worth looking out for if you use your phone camera a lot.
LED flash vs Xenon
Many camera phones have no flash at all. More common is an LED flash, which is a small bright light that goes on when a picture is taken. More sophisticated cameras have a xenon flash, which works just like a real flash on your camera. These may use up your cell phones batteries more quickly, so charge up if you plan on taking lots of pictures!