We read a lot about how great the cameras in phones have gotten. When we take pictures with our phones and look at them on our phones, they do, indeed, look fantastic. Here is one that I shot yesterday. The only postprocessing that I did was to crop it and boost the vibrancy.
I encourage you to click on that so that you can see it large. Looks great, right?
But if I crop in on just the cow on the left, you can see the problem.
The software inside the camera prioritized the cow’s face so that is pretty sharp. But it did a horrible job with the cow’s body and back.
You might think that this is a focus problem but there is more going on than just focus. Look at the cow’s face. The forehead is pretty sharp but the top-knot is blurry (farther away from the camera) and the nose is also blurry (closer to the camera). Also look at the grass between the front legs; it is sharp. The grass between the hind legs is blurry.
I titled this post “Hidden Problems…” because, as long as you are viewing the photos on a small screen (phone or reduced in size on a computer screen), the problems are not seen. But if you enlarge the image… hoo boy are you in for a surprise. Which is a long winded way to say that if your intention is pictures that are viewed small, a phone camera is a fantastic solution. But if your intention is pictures that will be enlarged, you may want to use a different tool.
