I initially wrote son, but then realized I was being sexist since I had no clue to your gender. There are plenty of tough geeky females on this forum and I didn't want to get into trouble by guessing wrong.
P.S. The term "tough geeky females" is meant as good thing!
*jumping up and down with hand raised*
ooh
ooh
ooh
That's me!
Except, I prefer 'sassy' as opposed to 'tough'.
But, I'm a 'lawn-guy-land' girl, so toughness certainly applies!
Are there any trustworthy reviews on the camera? I am a little skittish about the possibility of a drop to 5mp (I have the DINC, and am at 8). I do actually take pics with my DINC that I then print (5x7 mostly, sometimes larger). I'm a pretty heavy user of the camera (I'm a Mom, and like to travel light). Granted, I don't print very many pictures, and rarely an 8x10....but it is important to me.
From what I've read, the sensor is as important as the megapixels....and the Galaxy has a great sensor (and zero shutter lag!)....but, can anyone verify this technology?
Are their any camera reviews from people that are fairly particular about such things that anyone can point me to?
That is for *uncompressed* raw images - and we don't get that with a jpeg, a jpeg is, by defintion, uncompressed.
So, when you print full-res with an enlargement, ideally, you'd get a lovely 1-to-1 pixel mapping and things will always look top-notch. And for top digital cameras, that's totally true, and each pixel maps to a printable point.
Here - not so much. The sensor (the thing with the MPs we're discussing) has some other quality specs in addition to MP - and the biggest one is its signal to noise ratio. In other words, how much light coming in gets transfered into each little pixel cleanly vs. how much light scattering and light interference happened while gathering the image into those ever-so-tiny pixels.
Ok, that's some physics with even more fancy buzzwords. Whenever we get into that neighborhood, I like to work with what we call models.
Here's the model I want you to consider -
I want you to think of a screen for one of your windows. And we are going to call each opening a pixel - and right now, your window has X megapixels for the screen. Now I want you to double the screen mesh. Then again. Then again. After a point, you'll see more and more screen and less and less outside the window.
Think of the screen mesh as the noise.
So - when we say that megapixels don't matter as much as noise, think of the camera opening as a very tiny window and that is exactly what we mean - as you increase the megapixels, the pixels are smaller, but the boundaries around each pixel can only go far.
I have an old 3 MP Olympus camera, it was big on MP for its day, yet still blows away any cell phone camera - because of the nice big sensor, able to take in lots of light without much noise.
And it has a great lens compared to a cell phone. Since the light has to pass through the lens, the sensor only sees what the lens sees - and garbage in, garbage out is the rule here.
Next, let's consider video (while not your question, it's really helpful) -
Consider a 1080p HDTV - mine is 52"
That is an excellent model of a camera sensor in reverse, if you think about it. Digital stuff goes in and light comes out. Way bigger than an 8x10 and if you put up a nice, high quality, digital camera image (courtesy of the TV and camera both having USB ports) it looks pretty great.
And a 1080p HDTV is 1920x1080 pixels = just over 2.07 megapixels.
So - for video or even great pictures, if the quality is there, you can get by with 2 or 3 megapixels.
Anything after that is just part of the magic of trying to make a good sensor.
It is common sense to think that detail comes from raw resolution, and for text and line graphics, that is true.
For images, our visual cortex comes into play and counter-intuitively, that is not true - for that, believe it or not, resolution is the last thing we process.
We first process color (accuracy), contrast, saturation and then, finally, resolution when we see details.
Here are three images - tell me which one was made with the highest resolution -
Image 2 -
Image 3 -
Study the three images for detail, decide which has the highest details and highest megapixels.
Pay particular attention to the outline of his arm, the board, the pattern on the board and sharpness of the water drops.
Please don't click this next button until you do.
Answer:
All three images were made with the exact same resolution - the differences in details that you are seeing are strictly a function of color adjustments.
Point is - on a teeny tiny phone camera sensor, both 5 and 8 MP fall into the class of "high megapixel" and that's really the whole story.
All of the phone camera comparisons on the web discussing megapixels are in violation of physics and metrology - two things I do for a living, so I know this for a fact.
There are overall quality comparisons of complete camera systems, no more and no less.
Finally - I went from an 8 MP camera on my HTC Evo 4G to a 5 MP camera on my HTC Evo 3D - and have had zero detail complaints.
That point I made earlier about how we get jpegs that seemed so out of place?
Regardless of the megapixels on the sensor, we don't even get that - we get a jpeg and jpeg processing adds noise on top of everything else.
Anything not real = noise. That's the definition we all really mean when we talk about this.
That is for *uncompressed* raw images - and we don't get that with a jpeg, a jpeg is, by defintion, uncompressed.
So, when you print full-res with an enlargement, ideally, you'd get a lovely 1-to-1 pixel mapping and things will always look top-notch. And for top digital cameras, that's totally true, and each pixel maps to a printable point.
Here - not so much. The sensor (the thing with the MPs we're discussing) has some other quality specs in addition to MP - and the biggest one is its signal to noise ratio. In other words, how much light coming in gets transfered into each little pixel cleanly vs. how much light scattering and light interference happened while gathering the image into those ever-so-tiny pixels.
Ok, that's some physics with even more fancy buzzwords. Whenever we get into that neighborhood, I like to work with what we call models.
Here's the model I want you to consider -
I want you to think of a screen for one of your windows. And we are going to call each opening a pixel - and right now, your window has X megapixels for the screen. Now I want you to double the screen mesh. Then again. Then again. After a point, you'll see more and more screen and less and less outside the window.
Think of the screen mesh as the noise.
So - when we say that megapixels don't matter as much as noise, think of the camera opening as a very tiny window and that is exactly what we mean - as you increase the megapixels, the pixels are smaller, but the boundaries around each pixel can only go far.
I have an old 3 MP Olympus camera, it was big on MP for its day, yet still blows away any cell phone camera - because of the nice big sensor, able to take in lots of light without much noise.
And it has a great lens compared to a cell phone. Since the light has to pass through the lens, the sensor only sees what the lens sees - and garbage in, garbage out is the rule here.
Next, let's consider video (while not your question, it's really helpful) -
Consider a 1080p HDTV - mine is 52"
That is an excellent model of a camera sensor in reverse, if you think about it. Digital stuff goes in and light comes out. Way bigger than an 8x10 and if you put up a nice, high quality, digital camera image (courtesy of the TV and camera both having USB ports) it looks pretty great.
And a 1080p HDTV is 1920x1080 pixels = just over 2.07 megapixels.
So - for video or even great pictures, if the quality is there, you can get by with 2 or 3 megapixels.
Anything after that is just part of the magic of trying to make a good sensor.
It is common sense to think that detail comes from raw resolution, and for text and line graphics, that is true.
For images, our visual cortex comes into play and counter-intuitively, that is not true - for that, believe it or not, resolution is the last thing we process.
We first process color (accuracy), contrast, saturation and then, finally, resolution when we see details.
Here are three images - tell me which one was made with the highest resolution -
Image 2 -
Image 3 -
Study the three images for detail, decide which has the highest details and highest megapixels.
Pay particular attention to the outline of his arm, the board, the pattern on the board and sharpness of the water drops.
Please don't click this next button until you do.
Answer:
All three images were made with the exact same resolution - the differences in detail that you are seeing is strictly a function of color adjustments.
Point is - on a teeny tiny phone camera sensor, both 5 and 8 MP fall into the class of "high megapixel" and that's really the whole story.
All of the phone camera comparisons on the web discussing megapixels are in violation of physics and metrology - two things I do for a living, so I know this for a fact.
There are overall quality comparisons of complete camera systems, no more and no less.
Finally - I went from an 8 MP camera on my HTC Evo 4G to a 5 MP camera on my HTC Evo 3D - and have had zero detail complaints.
That point I made earlier about how we get jpegs that seemed so out of place?
Regardless of the megapixels on the sensor, we don't even get that - we get a jpeg and jpeg processing adds noise on top of everything else.
Anything not real = noise. That's the definition we all really mean when we talk about this.
Oh.
My.
God.
I frikkin' TOTALLY GET IT!!!!
My ex-husband is a photographer, and was NEVER able to explain the whole sensor/ megapixel thing!!!
(Maybe that's one of the reasons why he's my ex!)
Your screen analogy is GENIUS!!!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
Oh.
My.
God.
I frikkin' TOTALLY GET IT!!!!
My ex-husband is a photographer, and was NEVER able to explain the whole sensor/ megapixel thing!!!
(Maybe that's one of the reasons why he's my ex!)
Your screen analogy is GENIUS!!!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
My math is sound (well, from my point of view anyway). Since today is the 13th and I don't count today, and since Nexus (supposedly) comes out the 17th, that leaves the 14th, 15th & 16th. Ergo, we have 3 days to wait.
Today kind of flew by - heck, it's half over - and the next 3 days will fly by too. And as I stated: even if Nexus doesn't LAUNCH on the 17th, we should have firm launch info by then.
Question my math as you will, but my "stoked" meter is pegged!
Operator O2 put that to rest on Friday, though, with a brief message on its Google+ account that "we'll be on sale on the 17th." It's still not clear exactly when Verizon will follow suit in the US
My math is sound (well, from my point of view anyway). Since today is the 13th and I don't count today, and since Nexus (supposedly) comes out the 17th, that leaves the 14th, 15th & 16th. Ergo, we have 3 days to wait.
Today kind of flew by - heck, it's half over - and the next 3 days will fly by too. And as I stated: even if Nexus doesn't LAUNCH on the 17th, we should have firm launch info by then.
Question my math as you will, but my "stoked" meter is pegged!
not sure id this will help at all but i've been noticing a lot of people posting their experiences with pulling information from vzw reps about our sexy Nexi. i went into my local verizon corporate store and poked my nose around for info. they played dumb....very dumb....even stating they had no idea when the HTC Rezound would be released(we all know tomorrow to be the date) they also only mentioned "holiday season" for the Nexi. i called another store for some more info and was told the Rezound would be released tomorrow, but that if the nexus would be released this coming week they would have heard something about it by now. my final call was to a verizon store inside costco which revealed little information that we dont already know. tried my best, hopefully we get official news tomorrow or the next day. (sorry for any spelling errors, typed this all up from my Droid 3.
earlymon, everything you wrote out makes sense in theory. And you can't judge the res on those pics at these tiny sizes. However, my experience has been that as I bought higher mp cameras over the years, the quality got better too. That flew in the face of all the theory that said that 2 mp is perfectly fine for 5x6 prints.
but, all of them sucked for low light performance. For that, sensor size is king.
so in practice, more mp relates to better pics for whatever reason.
earlymon, everything you wrote out makes sense in theory. And you can't judge the res on those pics at these tiny sizes. However, my experience has been that as I bought higher mp cameras over the years, the quality got better too. That flew in the face of all the theory that said that 2 mp is perfectly fine for 5x6 prints.
but, all of them sucked for low light performance. For that, sensor size is king.
so in practice, more mp relates to better pics for whatever reason.
It's just Google's answer to Facebook and Twitter. You don't need to sign up for it unless you feel like trying it out. It's certainly not required for any Android phone, GNex included.
Welcome to the forum. That's just further confirmation that the GNex will be out on the 17th, because Google stated that they'd release the source code as soon as the ICS launch device (GNex) was available to consumers. Nice find!
It's just Google's answer to Facebook and Twitter. You don't need to sign up for it unless you feel like trying it out. It's certainly not required for any Android phone, GNex included.
Thank you very much. For now, I'll pass. Between doing report cards, parent conferences, Modern Warfare 3 and this phone time is a premium, haha. Thanks you again.
earlymon, everything you wrote out makes sense in theory. And you can't judge the res on those pics at these tiny sizes. However, my experience has been that as I bought higher mp cameras over the years, the quality got better too. That flew in the face of all the theory that said that 2 mp is perfectly fine for 5x6 prints.
but, all of them sucked for low light performance. For that, sensor size is king.
so in practice, more mp relates to better pics for whatever reason.
I never argue with experience, but I will add that in solving problems we have a saying - one equation, one unknown (meaning you can't solve an equation if it has many variables).
My example had one unknown - megapixels today (and I would assert that pretty much any of the camera sensors from within the last year+ are of a day, give or take very little).
Your example has two variables - camera megapixels over the years.
Let's take a quick look at not too many years.
Early digital cameras were of one sensor type - CCD. There, each little pixel is captured by a device that holds charge, and it's charge level is read off and turning into a digital value after the image is "exposed." Trouble there - heat flow within the chip would change the charge levels in the pixels from the time of the exposure to the time of the read-off - and that would happen unevenly over the chip.
That all varied by CCD tech and chip manufacturing, which improved over time.
Then came the newer CMOS sensors - different way of skinning the same cat for converting light to digits and lots of extreme improvements in manufacturing that tech since introduced.
And what was the actual sensor size for those cameras you've bought over time? That has changed a lot over the years, from my understanding.
So - was the quality difference you saw a function of megapixels or it was it a function of simple tech improvement over time and they added megapixels because they could without harm? How can we be sure?
How about the image processing software built-in to those cameras? All the same jpeg standard? Maybe so. Did they all feature raw image outputs?
How about the accuracy of the ASIC processors? Maybe equivalent.
And how about the lens? We ought assume for fairness that you didn't buy any big changes there. Do we know? Lens are rated in lines of resolution. Did they use less capable lenses to keep costs down on the earlier cameras you owned? I won't go there, you can decide yourself if my assumption that they were equal is up to you, since you didn't say one way or the other.
I'll just stick with the sensor tech changes over time as too great for any of us to know at a glance - but generally, the physics will always favor the sensor quality over the raw MPs.
Hope that helps!
PS - You can click to enlarge my sample pics to their approximately HD resolution size.
PPS - Yes, once you hit the top in the other quality metrics, resolution then counts. I know a guy who photographs for the Smithsonian and National Geographic and his stuff is mind-blowing in detail - as are his image file sizes!
So - not saying that MP never matters - just saying it matters less than the other metrics before it.
Am saying I doubt it matters at all on a sensor this size if you have more MP compared to the noise specs.
It's just Google's answer to Facebook and Twitter. You don't need to sign up for it unless you feel like trying it out. It's certainly not required for any Android phone, GNex included.
Thank you very much. For now, I'll pass. Between doing report cards, parent conferences, Modern Warfare 3 and this phone time is a premium, haha. Thanks you again.
Actually, that is the easy answer. Google+ is far from a Facebook or Twitter "answer." I have been on G+ from the start and it is not a social network in the term most of us think. It is a tool for sharing information. Articles, photos, blogs, etc. It is a lot like Google Reader or blogs on steroids. The discussions on G+ are deep and poignant. It is nothing like Facebook. Much more like Twitter as far as sharing information but without the 140 character limit so content is more in-depth.
But this isn't a thread on G+ so to bring it back on topic, no you don't need it to get your GNex to work properly (though Samsung does promote that G+ is fully integrated - whatever that means). I am sure video chat and messaging on the GNex will run through Google+. You also no longer need to sign up for Google+. If you have a Google Account (which every Android user has), you are in and you can circle me
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