[Galaxy Note 3 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] p51d007:
One of my gripes

One of my gripes with smartphones is now they are engaging in the same race the "regular" camera makers are engaging in.

The "megapixel" race. More megapixels mean it must be a better photo, after all, according to those commercials

that have the 6 year olds around a table, when the adult says which is better, more or less, they all say MORE!

Well, not in the case of a camera sensor. The problem you run into is NOISE. The more pixels you cram into such

a tiny area, you run into a problem called scatter, along with Signal to NOISE ratio. With more tightly packed sensors,

it's possible for some light to scatter between the elements, and, with that many elements packed into such a tiny

space, the electrical signals from one pixel, may interfere with the next pixel. Unless designed properly, you run the

risk of noise on photos, especially with low light conditions.

From this example below, you can see the relative size of sensors, versus what they fit into. Notice the small one

in the corner? That's pretty much what is inside most cell phones.

Now, given that graph, here is a real size look at the sensor in question, you can see by the scale, how TINY

these things are, and how close together the elements are. That's one of the root causes of NOISE.

Most smartphone makers will then use software to help reduce the noise, but, there is only so much you can do with a

JPEG photo, which is why a lot of people like me use RAW when shooting using a dSLR camera.

Instead of the software compression of a JPEG photo, then trying to fix it with software after the photo is "developed"

from the camera, using a 3rd party solution, a lot of people use lightroom or photoshop (in my case) to take the raw image

from the camera lens, with no processing, and "develop" it, having complete control over all aspects of the image. Given the

size of a smart device, just isn't enough room to do that, and 99% of the people aren't as picky as someone who would go to

the expense and learning curve of something like photoshop or lightroom.

The only "real" so to speak, good something around 41megapixels (you know which device that is) in a pinhole camera

(pretty much any cameraphone) is good for, is cropping the photo. If you have seen the Nokia commercial, that girl takes

a photo of a band, from the nose bleed section, then zooms into the stage cropping it, and emailing it out, and the people

receiving the photo, think she was sitting on the front row. THAT is what more megapixels pretty much mean for something

like a pinhole camera. As far as megapixels relate to file size, or print size, a pretty good picture, say 300dpi, a lowly 4megapixel

will print a 6"x8" photo, or at 200dpi (unless you get nose to nose this is a good photo) will print 12x18. Who prints that

large? Most people aren't printing photos anymore, they facebook, twitter, blog. In other words, they are usually scaled down

to 1024x768 or smaller, usually 800x600.

Heck, my dSLR is only a 14megapixel camera, but it has a HUGE sensor, compared to what is inside cameraphones.

People complain about the image quality of smartphones, but to me, I'm surprised they work as well as they do! The

companies deserve a lot of credit for the software tricks they use to get as good of a photo out of something smaller

than the nail on your pinky finger! I've even noticed a few are starting to play around with image stabilization, which is

a great thing to have, as long as it is an optical stabilization, not done through software.

I know it is a manufacturing thing, the "megapixel" race, but I would love to see a manufacturer put some REAL glass into

these with a larger sensor, with less noise. A couple (Sony I think?) are taking small steps toward this, but until they put

some sort of OPTICAL zoom with some real good glass, increasing the megapixel size is just going to cause more pain

than it is worth, with sub-light photos coming out looking like someone sprinkled pixie dust in the air, just before the photo

was taken.

Whoops...sorry to get so long winded...been shooting photos most of my 53 years, not professionally, but I hate to see

consumers hood-winked by the same "megapixel" myth as they did with the "megahertz" problem years ago with computers.