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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  A guide to smartphone camera jargon
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A guide to smartphone camera jargon

Unable to understand smartphone camera specifications? Here's a primer

Elements like megapixel and sensor are crucial for quality photographs. Photo: Shutterstock/IndiapicturePremium
Elements like megapixel and sensor are crucial for quality photographs. Photo: Shutterstock/Indiapicture

NEW DELHI :

They say that with greater technology in our lives comes greater terminology. That has certainly been the case with cameras. Once considered the preserve of professional photographers and the friendly neighbourhood studio, cameras are now omnipresent, thanks to the smartphone revolution—it has turned almost everyone capable of using a mobile phone into a photographer. As phone manufacturers try to convince consumers that their phone cameras are the best, they end up using a lot of technical jargon.

If you have been rolling your eyes at all the terms associated with photography, here is a primer.

Megapixel (MP)

This is perhaps the most used term to describe a camera in a phone. It is always assumed that the higher the megapixel count, the better the camera.

The images captured by a camera are made up of tiny units called pixels, and a megapixel is simply a million pixels. The more the megapixels in a camera, the more the pixels in the picture—logically, this should result not just in a richer picture, but also give you the ability to print or reproduce it in a bigger size without compromising on quality. In a smartphone camera, however, more megapixels do not always guarantee a better picture, for post-image processing has a great bearing on the final quality of the photo.

As a buyer, then, you should not just look at megapixel number.

The most recent example is that of the Sony Xperia X’s 23-megapixel camera, which does not even come close to the sort of accurate photography performance we get from the Apple iPhone 6s Plus and the Samsung Galaxy S7’s camera—both the cameras are 12 megapixels.

Sensor

We keep hearing about the different varieties of “sensors" in cameras (Carl Zeiss, Exmor, etc.). Well, remember the film in old cameras, on which images used to be captured? The sensor is just that. The lens opens, light comes in and the image is formed on the sensor. Of course, the quality of the sensor can affect the quality of the photographs you take, and the size of the sensor can make a difference—the larger a sensor, the less chance of there being “noise" (those grainy bits you see) in your photographs. In smartphone cameras, the sensor has seen the maximum evolution.

The recent Sony IMX298 (1/2.8-inch) sensor, which the OnePlus 3 and the Xiaomi Mi 5 use, performs significantly better than last year’s 1/2.6-inch Omnivision sensor in the OnePlus 2 and the 1/2.6-inch Sony IMX230 sensor in the Moto X Style.

ISO

The ISO is a reflection of how sensitive your camera sensor is to light. A simple rule of thumb—the darker the light conditions, the higher you should tweak the ISO setting, and vice versa. The problem with a lot of smartphone cameras, though, is that selecting too high an ISO setting would result in the images becoming grainy, so you have to decide which setting works best for you through trial and error. ISO, incidentally, stands for International Organization for Standardization, which standardizes sensitivity settings for cameras. A combination of the sensor size and pixel size that a smartphone camera packs in will determine how high you can push the ISO setting in low-light conditions.

The HTC 10’s UltraPixel technology (10-megapixel camera), with each pixel measuring 1.55µm, will have a much better chance of capturing and reproducing brighter and detailed low-light photos than the Moto X Force’s 21-megapixel camera (1.4µm pixel size).

Aperture

In simple terms, an aperture is a hole through which light travels into the camera. It is normally expressed in what are called f/stops—these are expressed in terms like f/1.4, f/2 and so on, indicating the maximum light that can pass through on to the lens and on to the camera sensor. The lower the number, the larger the aperture or the hole, and the more the light that comes in. This has a direct bearing on the overall richness, detailing and contrast of the photograph. The aperture determines how sharp your image is. In camera settings, if you select a low f/stop number, the subject of the picture will be in sharp focus while the background will be relatively blurred. On the other hand, if the f/stop is high, the background will also be sharp.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 (f/1.7; 12 megapixels) camera will, in most cases, be able to capture more light than the Sony Xperia X (f/2.0; 23 megapixels) and the Xiaomi Mi 5 (f/2.0; 16 megapixels).

Depth of field

Depth of field is the area of an image that is in sharp focus or is clearly visible. In most cases, people like to have as much as possible of an image in focus, but sometimes, particularly in close-ups, there is a tendency to try and keep the subject in focus and blur out the background (a technique also referred to as “bokeh"). An image with a low depth of field will have a blurry background and a sharp subject, while that with a high depth of field will have a sharp and more detailed background. Since smartphones use much smaller sensors than digital cameras, the depth of field is usually quite shallow. While there are many restrictions on the physical size of the sensor and lens in smartphone cameras, many phone makers are switching to the dual-camera set-up in their phones.

The LG G5 and Huawei P9 are two recent examples, where one camera can focus on the subject, while the other camera can add the missing depth.

White balance

This is basically how your camera handles colours. You might have noticed that sometimes your pictures have a yellowish or pinkish tint—well, in most cases, the reason for this is that the white balance setting is inaccurate. This setting is available in all smartphone camera apps, including the app installed by default on your phone. Just go to your camera’s settings and select the one that works best for you (there are generally options like auto, cloudy, daylight, fluorescent and others).

Shutter speed

Also referred to as the “exposure time", this is the time a camera’s shutter is open to allow light in to the sensor. Fast shutter speed is necessary when you are trying to capture a quick-moving object, say, a bird or a car. In the case of something that is relatively static, however, you don’t need to be that fast. In some cases, people even use slow shutter speeds to give an impression of movement by adding blur to the shot (of waterfalls, for instance). Shutter speeds are mentioned in terms of fractions of a second—1/250 means one-250th parts of a second. This is also available in the settings menu in the camera app.

OIS

Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) is a technology that is used to compensate for those times when your hand shakes while taking a photograph or shooting a video. This is done through a combination of motors and gyroscopes installed in the phone, which will compensate for any camera movement detected to ensure that any potential blur in the photo is eliminated to some extent. The presence of OIS does not eliminate the effect of shaking altogether, but it does minimize its impact, leading to better low-light photography.

Almost all the recent smartphones now include OIS as a default feature, while the likes of the OnePlus 3 go a step further and add Electronic Image Stabilization as an additional aid for OIS.

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Published: 12 Jul 2016, 09:02 PM IST
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