[Edward Kirk]

One of the things Steve didn't announce at WWDC that many people were hoping for were more megapixels in that camera. It would seem to be a logical decision, right? After all, 2 megapixels isn't very many, and some of the iPhone's biggest competitors have better ones, like the N95 and it's 5 megapixel camera. That means the iPhone should get more, right? Not necessarily. Ars Technica took a look at some reasons why the iPhone's picture quality wouldn't improve from more megapixels, but could actually get worse.

One of the things that a phone's camera needs to be able to do is to capture a sharp image, regardless of how close or far it is from the thing it's taking the picture of. There are a few ways to do this. You can either make a smaller opening for light to pass through in front of the camera, or you can change what is considered "sharp".

Because the iPhone's camera uses a 2 megapixel sensor, the image it captures only needs to be sharp enough to seem sharp for that size. So, for a 2 megapixel camera, it does pretty well at a wide range of distances and light conditions.

If they were to take a 5mp sensor and put it in the same camera, then two problems would arise. First, since the camera makes higher resolution images, differences in distance would be much more noticeable. The N95 gets around that by having an autofocusing lens, but as a result, it's nearly twice as thick as the iPhone 3G. The iPhone's camera doesn't have an autofocus (hence this crazy contraption.)

Also, in order to fit more of those sensors into the camera, they often shrink them down to a smaller size. As a result, each of those little sensors is getting a smaller amount of light. If you're familiar with photography, then you probably realize that less light that gets to the sensors, the more you risk having some sensors underdeveloped, especially in low light conditions like at night.

[via Ars Technica]

wow, that's actually really interesting. i didn't realize it was that complicated to put in a larger sensor. it's still too bad though. as soon as the iPhone hits 5 megapixels, i'll be able to leave my point-n-shoot at home.

This is funny. I keep seeing this.

Yes it's true if you don't upgrade all the camera hardware when you add pizels, all you'll get is a worse picture. That's like saying if you get a bad artist to paint on a bigger canvas, all you get is a bad big picture. Or if you get a bad cook to cook for 1000 you'll get a lot of bad food. Duh!

Why is it so important to use so many words to state the obvious?

[Pearldrm7]

That answers one of the major questions I had about Steve's keynote. Thanks!

Although, no one can answer the cut/copy/paste or the MMS questions. I can't fathom that they haven't even addressed this yet.

[dark_coupon]

Originally Posted by rckstwrz

wow, that's actually really interesting. i didn't realize it was that complicated to put in a larger sensor. it's still too bad though. as soon as the iPhone hits 5 megapixels, i'll be able to leave my point-n-shoot at home.

They wouldn't make the size of the sensor larger, there would just be 5 million photosites in a sensor thats the same size as the 2mp sensor...so the photosites, which are the light-sensitive "pixels" in a digital camera sensor, would be much smaller, which means they would individually collect less light and the result would be a noisy, grainy photo. Its like a digital SLR camera compared to point and shoot cameras. Any 5mp digital SLR will take much, much higher quality photos than a 10mp point and shoot simply because the sensor is so much larger and the photosites are bigger...on top of having better processing hardware. All you get out of a 5mp camera phone is a larger picture with lower quality.

[Kuma]

finally... some common sense about cameras drips through...

Im happy with 2MP in a camera phone... I just wish it did video

Originally Posted by Kuma

finally... some common sense about cameras drips through...

Im happy with 2MP in a camera phone... I just wish it did video

How about a flash too...

[steve101]

i think 2mp is good, because iphone is also an ipod, snapping too many hi-res photos would take up space that should be for music and movies.

Apple is missing a pretty decent percentage of the corporate market by having a camera in the phone. They need to generate some sort of path for removal of the camera in order to capture many Government, R&D and even Fitness Center employees who'd love to have an iPhone, but can't bring it in to work with them.

[imagine engine]

It still doesn't explain why Apple didn't improve on the product by adding a LED Flash for low light conditions or even adding a front camera for video calling or iChat AV conversations. I would like to know if the iPhone 3G allows video recording for podcasting?