Cameras have become a trend lately. Manufacturers tend to focus not on performance or screen, but on the smartphone camera. Many people joke about this, saying that today smartphones are not a phone with a camera function, but a camera with a phone function. Indeed, if you look at the number of main cameras in modern devices and the number of megapixels of the main modules, you get just such an impression. However, let's still deal with the issue of the importance of the size of pixels and their number.
Which is more important: the size of the camera pixels or their number?
What is more important – the size of the camera pixels or their number?
In fact, both are important. The more pixels and the more their number, the better, but this does not happen and you always have to choose between them – to look for a middle ground. Let's remember which smartphone first got a camera with a large pixel size. It was HTC One M7. It was equipped with a 4MP UltraPixel camera with a pixel size of 2 microns. If we take, for example, modern Android smartphones with 48-megapixel cameras, the pixel size in this case is 0.8 microns, which is significantly less.
Let's take a look at how the camera HTC One M7 shoots:
Sample photo HTC One M7
Sample photo HTC One M7
Sample photo HTC One M7
Currently on the market Xiaomi Mi Note 10 with a 108MP camera. According to rumors, the Galaxy S20 will also receive a similar 108MP module. The Mi Note 10 uses pixel binning technology that combines 9 pixels into one. This allows you to get more light and information in the frame. It is because of this that the Mi Note 10 in low light copes with photography even better than the Google Pixel 4 in Night Sight mode.
However Huawei has different views on this issue. She believes that the size of pixels is more important than their number:
At 100 million pixels, it is difficult to achieve a size greater than 0.8 microns. Sony and all of us believe that pixel sizes of 1 micron and above can guarantee flagship sensitivity and camera quality requirements. In 2020, our company will firmly choose the path to higher pixel size.
Speaking of size, OmniVision recently introduced a 48-megapixel module with a pixel size of 1.2 microns. In low light, the camera is able to produce excellent results by binning four adjacent pixels, resulting in a frame corresponding to a pixel size of 2.4 microns. We propose to discuss the new module in Telegram.
Modern professional cameras have matrices with pixels as small as 8.4 microns, so smartphones certainly have room to grow.
Manufacturers use a large number of pixels mainly in order to use binning technology to increase the size of pixels in the final image, so the only question is, how much can you increase the pixels if you don't try to increase their number? What happens if Huawei tries to focus only on pixel size, presenting a flagship with a 12-megapixel module and a pixel size of 4 microns, for example. This is quite possible, and in this case, we will get truly amazing image quality. In the future, all other manufacturers will also, in my opinion, stop chasing megapixels, focusing on their size.
Several years ago we compared smartphone cameras, where the main task was to understand whether the number of pixels is important. At that time, the compared devices were HTC One M9 with a 20-megapixel module and iPhone 6 with an 8-megapixel camera. Then there was no particular benefit from 20 megapixel, today the difference, of course, is visible if we compare the sharpness of 64-megapixel photos of a cheap Xiaomi with a 12-megapixel camera iPhone, but it is not so obvious and does not match the megapixel difference on paper.
It is interesting to know the opinion of the readers. Do you think the number of pixels in a camera is not as important as their size? Share your opinion in the comments.