Smartphone cameras have come a long way

I recently got a new Samsung Galaxy S10, and have been playing with its three rear cameras.

If you follow smartphones, or cameras, you probably have seen comparison and demo pix taken by professional reviewers to show the capabilities of the new crop of smartphone cameras.

You’ve also probably seen the studio-quality promotional shots taken by manufacturers, where every detail is carefully/artfully managed to show the camera optics and software to best effect. Those are best-case shots, where the ambient conditions are in the camera’s sweet spot, resulting in great images.

These photos aren’t that. 🙂

Rather, while I recently was at Mystic Lakes tracking herring for a local environmental group, I took four quick snapshots of the main lake — click-click-click-click, handheld, no setup — using my new phone, just to see what the baseline results were.

Here are the uncorrected and unedited shots, stored as camera-processed jpgs (not raw).

I love the optical zoom, which gives you enlargement without the smearing or loss of detail that always accompanies digital enlargement.

But what the hell: I tried a fourth shot, starting with the same 2x optical zoom, and adding in 5x of digital zoom on top, for 10x zoom total.

That’s a pretty promising start.

Oh, yes, there are obvious flaws: human (not holding the camera level… d’oh); optical (barrel distortion in the wide angle pix); and digital (digital zoom always loses detail). But most of those issues can be avoided or minimized with more care in the setup, and some editing afterwards. As I get to know the cameras better, my shots should improve.

But all in all, that’s not too shabby for point-and-shoot snapshots!

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