I am seeing thread after thread trying to discuss photo quality on Windows Phones, most recently due to the Lumia Black changes, with a real lack of understanding as to where the 'issue' lies. Each thread often seems to think in terms bugs being the 'issue', but this is more of a conceptual problem and I'm going to try to explain some of the issues as well as I can here.
Firstly, we are talking about phones here. Phones, in general, have very small camera sensors due to their size. There is a certain Lumia exception, but even then the sensor size is not huge, it is just bigger then most other phones' have. Small sensors show more noise in low light situations than large sensors as they capture less light. That's physics. If you provide for less pixels on a given size of sensor then the noise reduces, thus a 6meg sensor of the same size as an 8meg sensor will be less noisy. One trick (initially pushed by Fuji EXR cameras) is to 'double up' the pixels, so my 10meg EXR camera when set to 5meg will still use the full sensor to grab a low noise 5meg image (a technique called pixel binning). I never shoot full res on an EXR camera for this reason. This effect does not work on most cameras, such as my Lumia 820, as halving from 8meg to 4meg just uses a smaller area of the sensor. Note that few people can see the detail difference between an 8meg picture and a 6meg picture at A4 size, and over 8meg is completely pointless unless printing at sizes over A4 or unless you are being very technical.
The result is that low light or high ISO (over 400 for most phone cameras) pics will be noisy. So, customers complain. The result is that companies add noise reduction before saving, which reduces sharpness and 'strategically' blurs and tweaks the colour to make the noise less obvious. This does, of course, reduce the overall sharpness and detail in the image. This is in addition to the usual loss of detail caused by jpeg compression if not saving in raw format on high level phone models. So, another set of customers complain that the image is now too blurry with lack of detail.
The usual resultant product pattern then goes:
1) Camera released by engineers who want to capture the best, most detailed pics they can.
2) After complaints about noise, the company adds aggressive noise reduction. Complaints then come in about lack of detail (as in Lumia Amber). A new cludge firmware (Black) comes out that sits in the middle and doesn't suit anyone.
The best option is to have noisy, NR free photos that can have NR added manually after being taken (many packages available to do this). Unfortunately customer moaning means we don't get this option. Oh well, you asked for it...
Firstly, we are talking about phones here. Phones, in general, have very small camera sensors due to their size. There is a certain Lumia exception, but even then the sensor size is not huge, it is just bigger then most other phones' have. Small sensors show more noise in low light situations than large sensors as they capture less light. That's physics. If you provide for less pixels on a given size of sensor then the noise reduces, thus a 6meg sensor of the same size as an 8meg sensor will be less noisy. One trick (initially pushed by Fuji EXR cameras) is to 'double up' the pixels, so my 10meg EXR camera when set to 5meg will still use the full sensor to grab a low noise 5meg image (a technique called pixel binning). I never shoot full res on an EXR camera for this reason. This effect does not work on most cameras, such as my Lumia 820, as halving from 8meg to 4meg just uses a smaller area of the sensor. Note that few people can see the detail difference between an 8meg picture and a 6meg picture at A4 size, and over 8meg is completely pointless unless printing at sizes over A4 or unless you are being very technical.
The result is that low light or high ISO (over 400 for most phone cameras) pics will be noisy. So, customers complain. The result is that companies add noise reduction before saving, which reduces sharpness and 'strategically' blurs and tweaks the colour to make the noise less obvious. This does, of course, reduce the overall sharpness and detail in the image. This is in addition to the usual loss of detail caused by jpeg compression if not saving in raw format on high level phone models. So, another set of customers complain that the image is now too blurry with lack of detail.
The usual resultant product pattern then goes:
1) Camera released by engineers who want to capture the best, most detailed pics they can.
2) After complaints about noise, the company adds aggressive noise reduction. Complaints then come in about lack of detail (as in Lumia Amber). A new cludge firmware (Black) comes out that sits in the middle and doesn't suit anyone.
The best option is to have noisy, NR free photos that can have NR added manually after being taken (many packages available to do this). Unfortunately customer moaning means we don't get this option. Oh well, you asked for it...
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