How important is the high megapixel count that your fancy new smartphone’s camera boasts? Is it something you should factor in when making a buying decision for a new phone? In this article, we’ll dive into the world of megapixels and look at whether high megapixels really equals a better camera experience.
Megapixels in Smartphone Camera Explained!
Megapixels, or pixels in general, are the most important thing in cameras. They are responsible for taking in light and then using said light to make a digital image of the scene. A million sub pixels come together to make a single pixel. And the bigger the individual pixels in a camera, the more light it can take in. Also, the more light a sensor can take in, the more it affects image quality, especially in low-light conditions.
Megapixel counts are just a count of the sensor’s resolution. The higher the megapixel count, the higher the resolution, and the higher the resolution, the more details the sensor can capture in a picture. Hence the recent push for high-megapixel cameras in the smartphone industry. But the biggest downside of high megapixel counts on camera sensors is the fact that more Megapixels in a sensor leads to smaller space for individual pixels. So in order to achieve a high megapixel count on a sensor, the individual pixel size would have to be reduced–and smaller individual pixels mean less light.
So why are smartphone brands like Samsung chasing high megapixel counts instead of bigger sensor sizes and individual pixels?
Why Smartphone Brands Want More Megapixels
In hindsight, it might look like they’re doing this just for the sake of marketing, but that’s not the full story. The resolution of our eyes, put into MP, sits somewhere around 576 MP. And for smartphone brands like Samsung, that’s the goal: to make a smartphone sensor that can capture as much detail as our eyes. This is not just me speculating; they said it themselves in a press conference a few years ago.
How do brands circumvent it?
There are two ways smartphone sensors with high resolution reduce the effects of smaller pixels.
Computational Photography
Smartphone sensors with high megapixel counts and even smartphone sensors in general have turned to AI and image processing to circumvent the drawbacks of small individual pixels. Now, they don’t just rely on what the pixel captures. They take what the pixels have captured and run it through complex algorithms that try to recognize what has been captured and process the image to increase its quality and make it more appealing.
So smartphone brands use AI to greatly reduce the effects of small pixels. This has led to another major development that nearly all smartphone brands use to work past the issue of small pixels, called Pixel Binning.
Pixel Binning
Pixel binning is a technique used in digital image processing, particularly in digital cameras and smartphones, to increase the sensitivity of the camera’s sensor to light. It combines pixels in a sensor to form a “superpixel”. Thereby increasing the size of each individual pixel (meaning more light) and reducing the resolution of the sensor.
The process of pixel binning is complex. It works by grouping adjacent pixels together and adding their individual signal values together to produce a single “binned” pixel. These new binned pixels now possess a higher signal level. For example, in the HP2 sensor on the Samsung S23 Ultra with a 200-megapixel count, pixel binning is used to combine 16 groups of adjacent pixels into one superpixel, effectively producing a 12.5-megapixel image with larger pixels that capture more light.
Conclusion
When it comes to smartphone cameras, sensor size and individual pixel size are undoubtedly the most important factors for capturing quality images. But that doesn’t make resolution (having high megapixel count) unimportant or unnecessary.
So if smartphone companies can get the advantages of all three without any drawbacks, then that’s the way to go.
