Credit: Jim Richardson
Yesterday we highlighted Apple engineer Mark Zimmer blog post, in which he argues the case of bigger pixels over more megapixels in a smartphone camera.
Mark Zimmer said:
“Apple and others have shown that cameras can be smaller and smaller, such as the excellent camera in the iPhone 5S, which has great low-light capabilities and a two-color flash for better chromatic adaptation. Nokia has shown that a high-resolution sensor can be placed in bigger-thicker-heavier phones that has the flexibility for binning and better optics that push the smartphone cameras ever closer to human-eye capabilities…
So is it bigger pixels or simply more of them? No, the answer is better pixels.”
Jim Richardson, a photographer for National Geographic Magazine and a contributing photographer for National Geographic Traveler magazine, used his iPhone 5s to take photos on a trip to Scotland with amazing results.
Jim Richardson:
With intense use (I’ve made about 4,000 pictures in the last four days) I’ve discovered that the iPhone 5S is a very capable camera. The color and exposures are amazingly good, the HDR exposure feature does a stunningly good job in touch situations, the panorama feature is nothing short of amazing—seeing a panorama sweeping across the screen in real time is just intoxicating. Best of all it shoots square pictures natively, a real plus for me since I wanted to shoot for Instagram posting.
Once I figured out what the camera could do well I began to forget all the things it couldn’t do at all. Hiking up to Ben A’an, a popular Sunday hike for hearty Scottish families, I found that it was really quite capable of doing nice macro shots of mushrooms in the woods. And up on top, overlooking Loch Katrine, the scenes of the children perched on the bobby peak were ready-made for simple, unfussy images.