Just the outsole is not enough. Take stock of the mobile phone imaging knowledge that manufacturers will not tell you.
In order to bring better imaging performance, today’s smartphones use materials in the lens every year. It can be said that there is no best, only better. But for novice photographers like us, who mostly use lenses to pay for things, the biggest feeling is watching manufacturers advertise that sensors are getting bigger, pixels are getting higher, and there are more lenses. In a sense, even my hobby of taking pictures has been inexplicably involved in the image involution in the mobile phone industry.
Especially the one-inch IMX989 sensor that was officially announced before the recent release of Xiaomi 12S Ultra. For a time, the entire digital industry was in turmoil. There were mixed opinions about whether the big camera was useless or whether Apple's iPhone's computational photography was a god.
Now let me share with you some photography knowledge about outsole and pixels, to ensure that you will not be fooled by the manufacturer's pixel war, nor will you become digitally anxious by the half-filled comment section.
First: Pixels are secondary, and the bottom area is more important.
Many people were led astray by the previous pixel war in the mobile phone industry. Especially after mobile phone photography entered the era of 100 million pixels, the pixel-only theory has subsided. First, the pixels are rolled to the end and it is difficult to add more. Then there are some thousand-yuan phones that claim to have 100 million pixels. In fact, the photo effects are just like that. They are still at the level of being able to log into WeChat on a computer. What's more, there are and apple , which are outliers that never judge images based on pixels.
In fact, the so-called pixels are actually the number of pixels drawn on the sensor. The more points and the smaller, the higher the pixels. However, the higher the pixels, the less light will enter per unit area, so noise will occur, especially in night scenes. The performance is very obvious. Therefore, large pixels generally need to be matched with outsole sensors to be useful, and now video platforms generally compress the image quality. 100 million pixels may allow your platform to use a 4-in-1 algorithm to compress the image to about 27 million pixels, so Combining pixels is one of the most thankless methods today.
A good mobile phone main camera will have a ratio problem between the pixels and the outsole. For example, Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra, recognized as the king of camera cameras last year, is equipped with Samsung GN2, which is close to one inch and 1/1.12, but the pixels are 50 million, not the current highest 100 million in the industry. Similarly, the one-inch imx989 sensor in this year's Xiaomi 12S Ultra should also use 50 million pixels.
Second: The algorithm determines the lower limit of a mobile phone.
sensors can be used by every manufacturer, but the specific imaging effects are different. This is the contribution of the algorithm. For example, although Apple uses a 10,000-year-old 20-megapixel main camera, due to algorithm optimization, Apple's imaging has always been as good as a bunch of large-sole high-pixel imaging flagships in Android. Of course, it is also because of over-reliance on algorithms that Apple’s telephoto and night scene have always been poor. After all, night scene requires more hardware configuration.
Xiaomi officials also said that this one-inch imx989 will be opened to the industry after Xiaomi 12S Ultra has been used for a period of time. By then, all domestic manufacturers will be able to use one-inch outsoles. In this case, how to win in terms of imaging will depend on the optimization of their own algorithms. For example, Xiaomi has the Night Owl algorithm for night scenes, which can improve the brightness and clarity of dark details. Xiaomi Mi 12 series’ “Everything Focus” can improve the speed of night shots and the ability to lock the focus of objects on mobile phones. It can be said that what most affects the shooting experience is not the internal hardware, but the algorithm software that optimizes the feel when shooting.
Third: Anti-shake configuration and secondary camera experience
Anti-shake The most well-known anti-shake should be ois optical anti-shake . It is generally known that the larger the bottom, the higher the sensitivity to shake, so the general outsole sensor It has to be cut.Xiaomi 12S Ultra claims not to crop this time, so it should have high-standard materials in terms of physical anti-shake of the lens. Maybe it is related to the speed lens jointly developed by and Leica ?
What I said before is based on the main camera’s photo effects. In practice, the telephoto, wide-angle, periscope and other secondary cameras used as secondary cameras are also a major focus of the experience, especially in the first half of the year. The ignored telephoto lens of is . The market is now looking forward to a new telephoto lens phone with lossless optical magnification at 5x and 10x. Otherwise, the vitality of Xiaomi 11U equipped with Snapdragon 888 would not be so strong from March last year to now.
summary : How to correctly choose a good imaging phone, first look at the sensor, and choose according to the ladder diagram I put above. Generally speaking, the flagship ones are at least imx766 level. Then the secondary camera mainly depends on the pixels. Those 2-megapixel and 8-megapixel telephoto, periscope, black and white, and macro lenses are basically just make-up lenses to drive up the price difference. The last step is to look at the night scene performance. This scene requires the most cooperation between the mobile phone algorithm and hardware. The quality of the night scene basically determines the overall image performance of a mobile phone.
