The Smartphone Camera's Little Lies

Adverts may fool you into thinking smartphone cameras are as good as those from dedicated DSLRs. Professional photographer Dave Stevenson shows how to look beyond the misleading specs.

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Put the spec sheet of your smartphone’s camera side-by-side with that of the latest DSLRs and you may struggle to see the difference. Massively high megapixel counts, f/1.2 lenses, RAW image shooting… the similarities are striking.

Manufacturers have been quick to capitalise on rapid improvements in sensor tech, while boosts in processing power mean phones are capable of doing the sort of image editing on-the-fly that would have had Photoshop users watching the egg-timer cursor not long ago.

But just how good are smartphone cameras? If the manufacturers are tobe believed, the days of DSLRs are well and truly numbered, and the marketing blurb coming from smartphone makers is as hyperbolic as ever. We reveal why the hype doesn’t quite match the facts.

SENSORY PERCEPTION

Can you fairly compare the sensors inside phones and DSLRs? In a direct sense, yes. Camera phone sensors and DSLR sensors work the same way, splitting light into component colours (red, green and blue) and turning them into a digital signal that can be recorded as a compressed (normally a JPEG) or lossless file (RAW files).

The biggest difference between a DSLR sensor and a camera phone sensor is size. Consumer DSLRs – such as the Nikon D5600 – have APS-C sensors. The exact size varies a little by manufacturer, but an APS-C sensor is roughly 23.5 x 15.6mm. Spend more, on a camera such as the Sony A9, for example, and you’ll get a full-frame sensor. These have roughly the same dimensions as a frame of 35mm film – about 35.6mm wide and 23.8mm tall.

You just can’t fit a component of that size in a smartphone, so image sensors in phones are way, way smaller. The iPhone 8, for example, has an image sensor 50 times smaller than a full-frame DSLR sensor by area, at only 4.8 x 3.6mm.