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Samsung Galaxy S11 Said to Boast 108-Megapixel Camera and 5x Telephoto Lens
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This comes down to a couple of things, from what I understand, over in Androidville. The 1st one is Qualcomm doesn't give updated kernal / driver support beyond 3 years (I believe) for their CPU's which are at the heart of virtually all U.S. Android devices. Then nearly all U.S. smartphone sales are still out of carrier stores with the carriers having custom Android OS loads for each phone they sell (updates from say Samsung go to them then they get to choose whether to integrate that update and deploy it or not)...normally 2 years of updates (extra costs for the carriers) is the tops for them. Very ugly compared to iOS.
Guessing we'd need govt regulation demanding supplier and provider support for all smartphones and components for x number of years to break this logjam, but with lobbyists firmly in control of all non social issue legislation in the U.S. at the Federal Level (either party), such a thing doesn't seem likely.
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Not interested even if Samsung will make the best looking/best hardware, problem is, it runs android.
A photon only has a certain quantum amount of energy. It's pretty much understood, and fixed, and doesn't change, or care what brand or material it hits - whether it's carbon based, silica, germanium or from the planet Vulcan.
When you pack more and more sensors on a fixed area, you run the gamut of background switching noise of nearby sensors, creating "ghosts" on nearby sensors - if you make them too sensitive. So, too sensitive of a sensor is "bad".
A sensor that is not sensitive, won't work well in dim lighting - this is bad too.
You have a limited surface area, to pack as many sensors as you can; so you are faced with the quandry of size vs sensitivity of the sensor array vs sensor density.
That's why you see 12Megapixels are a common consumer number, but SLR's using MUCH larger arrays and bumping the resolution into the 20+ Megapixel range. Remember about 7 years ago, when everyone else was at 12 Megapixels and the Windows Phone launched with 42 Megapixels? The immediate assumption was ~4x more pixels means ~4x better photo; but the result was generally a worse camera experience.
What do you imagine jumping from 16 Megapixels to 100 Megapixels will be? I'm going to predict - minor, if any improvement at all.
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When you pack more and more sensors on a fixed area, you run the gamut of background switching noise of nearby sensors, creating "ghosts" on nearby sensors - if you make them too sensitive. So, too sensitive of a sensor is "bad".
A sensor that is not sensitive, won't work well in dim lighting - this is bad too.
You have a limited surface area, to pack as many sensors as you can; so you are faced with the quandry of size vs sensitivity of the sensor array vs sensor density.
That's why you see 12Megapixels are a common consumer number, but SLR's using MUCH larger arrays and bumping the resolution into the 20+ Megapixel range. Remember about 7 years ago, when everyone else was at 12 Megapixels and the Windows Phone launched with 42 Megapixels? The immediate assumption was ~4x more pixels means ~4x better photo; but the result was generally a worse camera experience.
What do you imagine jumping from 16 Megapixels to 100 Megapixels will be? I'm going to predict - minor, if any improvement at all.
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All I will say is that we should all consider ourselves lucky that we have multiple companies trying to push forward and create better products (camera's) for us, the customers.
Whoever does it, you should be happy.
If someone comes up with something that works better than what we already have and is successful due to it, then this will be copied in some way by other companies raising the standard for everyone to enjoy.
Just think how bad phones would be today, if only 1 company made them with no competition.
I look forward to all improvements, and so should we all.
Whoever does it, you should be happy.
If someone comes up with something that works better than what we already have and is successful due to it, then this will be copied in some way by other companies raising the standard for everyone to enjoy.
Just think how bad phones would be today, if only 1 company made them with no competition.
I look forward to all improvements, and so should we all.
Makes me wonder how many apple fanboys actually still exist in the world relative to the install base of apple products globally.
Does it even use HEIC format or is it stuck with JPEG? I’m curious how big those picture files are going to be. On my iPhone XS, pictures are typically 1.5MB to 2.5MB, using HEIC format.
I have tried to make the switch. I’ve gotten close on a couple of phones. At most I can only get as far as keeping two phones on two lines and one large Note 10+ on WiFi as sort of a portable desktop and home entertainment setup.
iOS has some key features that I can’t part with. The ease of connecting with fellow iPhone users and sharing photos and videos with them in iMessage is hard to give up.
I like many aspects of Android better. The level of customization and versatility, on my Note especially, adds an ease to my day I don’t quite get on iOS. But it is an OS that puts marketing as a centerpiece to what it does. I’m not always comfortable with that.
Right now Android is a bit more stable overall as an OS but the individual apps are not. On iOS I find the overall OS still needs a lot of work but the individual apps that I use are generally of higher quality and stability.
If I can have only one, it would still be iOS and I do think very highly of my iPhone 11 Pro. I’m actually really content with it, to a level I haven’t been with a phone since my 2 years on an iPhone 4. I may actually stick with this one for 2 years. The photos I’m getting are already exactly the quality I’ve been wanting for years.
I wonder if it's truly a 108 megapixel sensor or like a pixel shift/stitch from multiple sensor to provide a combined amount of data. I have an A7R IV and have taken a few 240 MP photos and they really are something remarkable. Not for everyone at all but I have to imagine that's what Samsung is going to be doing with this phone. I'm definitely intrigued either way.
Does this article mean 18 megapixels, because 108 will be so much memory per photo that a user who regularly takes photos would need a 1 terabyte SD card
What? A Samsung feature that's just a gimmick? That can’t be right...
PS That’s an awesome camera bump. Or does everyone here on MR still hate them?
Remember, Samsung phones have more storage than iPhones (they can take memory cards up to 1TB).
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In 27MP mode, the sensor uses four sensor pixels to calculate one image pixel. Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro, that uses this sensor, currently has the best DXO score in smartphone category (for what it's worth).
To paraphrase an Apple keynote speaker (I don't remember who... probably Phil Schiller): It's not about the quantity of pixels, but the quality.
If all the pixels are bleeding into each other because you tried to cram a 108 megapixel camera into such a small space, then it's not going to look much better than 12 megapixel.
I found one site posting full size 27MP JPEG pictures taken with the CC9 Pro, they’re around 12MB each. iPhone 12MP HEIC pictures are around 2MB. If your pictures take up 6x more space, I wonder what capacity will make sense? 512GB minimum? It will be interesting to see pricing on that.
The 5x telephoto lens seems cool to me.
I don’t care about the gazillion megapixels. That game has been tried already and didn’t really catch on.
I don’t care about the gazillion megapixels. That game has been tried already and didn’t really catch on.
Not sure how this plays into services. So let’s take social networking, uploaded media is scaled down significantly reducing the advantage of crazy resolutions. With that out of the way now examine cloud archiving. More android (and possibly some iPhone) users rely on Google Photos. The free version scales back to 16MP. Although file sizes haven’t been announced anything 100MP will be incredibly large before compression. If you’re willing to start compressing your images now you’re back down to 16MP quality. So unless you pay for cloud storage or direct connect your device to a traditional computer the advantage is lost. Yes, the same could be said for iOS but our images are 12MP, which is under the scaling limit of most free cloud services. Just seems like a wasted spec to tout.
Reading about future augmented reality possibilities is like reading about future Apple TV+ shows
Will probably come with the option to downscale to save time saving to memory and make handling easier. Standard toogle in preferences will be 10.8 MP... (and Photos will look quite the same ?)
But you could, you could - and that counts... ?
But you could, you could - and that counts... ?