By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
ebw on 12 December 2012
Edit Thread
famousringo said:
ebw said:
famousringo said:
Euphoria14 said:

Galaxy S3 has a better camera from my experience. Zooming in with the iPhone makes the pictures looks terrible and blurry. I don't zoom much however so the pictures I frequently take while spending time with my daughter still look great.


The S3 has a better low-light mode. Zoom won't have anything to do with it. Neither of these phones are big enough for an optical zoom, and digital zooming is really just cropping off pixels, hence the reduced quality. There's really no point in a digital zoom unless you'd rather not edit the image later.


True for RAW images but wouldn't you say that's an exaggeration for JPEG-compressed images, which are pretty typical?


Sounds like you maybe know more about cameras than I do (I'm not that into them), but I don't see what image format would have to do with it. WIth a digital zoom, because the optics are fixed, you're just telling the camera to ignore some of the sensor's pixels, so a 2x zoom turns your 8 MP image into a 2MP image. What format you save that image in won't change the fact that you threw away 6 million pixels right off the bat.

Actually I know next to nothing about cameras, but I do know image formats.  JPEG compression means you are throwing away even more information than is captured by the sensors.  It is the nature of lossy compression that it tries to preserve the most important (most noticeable) parts of the image: in a continuous tone image, no one will notice that this pixel's brightness is not exactly halfway between that of its neighbours.  Most consumer cameras use this as it is an easy way to get more images to fit into the same amount of memory by sacrificing quality that many people will not care about.

Now compare two scenarios, an 8MP image with 2x digital zoom (which only used 2MP of sensor data), and an unzoomed image which uses all the sensor data. When the camera compresses the unzoomed image, it is wasting bits trying to preserve the highlights of the 6MP that you don't care about, and will thus sacrifice even more of those 2MP that you do care about.  If it is digital zoomed, then at compression time all the precious bits are devoted to just the area of interest.  You'll still lose quality compared to RAW, but more of the image detail will survive the compression.