What the companies don’t tell you about your smartphone camera

You most likely use your smartphone camera for all sorts of situations. Heck, chances are that it’s your primary photo and video device. It’s convenient and likely rather decent. Even cheaper phones are coming out with pretty capable cameras attached to them. Companies like Google, Apple, Samsung, and others make it obvious that their cameras are the best on the market, and they’re supposed to do that. As such, it’s common for them to glorify some details of their cameras while ignoring others. Here are some of the things that companies don’t tell you about your smartphone cameras.

These are some details that companies just “conveniently” overlook when they’re on stage talking up their devices. It’s important to know information about these devices and how they affect the overall experience. This especially goes for people who want to make mobile photography a hobby or career.

Your “High-res” cameras don’t take pictures as high-res as you think

This is an issue that’s been going on for years, and most smartphone users are none the wiser. We’ve become accustomed to seeing phones with absurdly pixel-packed camera sensors. It’s not uncommon to see a phone with a 50MP, 64MP, 108MP, or even 200MP camera. Considering that just 10 years ago, a phone with a 16MP camera was considered top-of-the-line, this is pretty significant.

So, you must be thinking, “Wow! A camera with a 200MP sensor must produce some extremely sharp images!” Well here’s the thing that companies aren’t telling you, those high-resolution cameras don’t take pictures as sharp as you think they do. If you fire up a 200MP camera and take a picture, the image it produces will have a much lower pixel count. This is because of something called “Pixel binning”. You may have heard of this technology before. It’s nothing new. In fact, there were phones using it as far back as 2012.

Pixel binning

So, what is pixel binning? In a nutshell, it’s when a phone’s camera “combines” multiple pixels into one. To see what that means, let’s take a quick look at a camera sensor first. If you take a sensor and put it under a microscope, you’ll see a grid of tiny compartments. These are called “photosites”, and each one’s job is to collect light data when you take a picture or video. Each photosite represents one pixel in the final image.

Let’s use a 200MP camera with 4X pixel binning as an example. This phone will take the light data from multiple pixels and combine it into one pixel. One photosite is only able to absorb so much light. However, if a camera takes the light data from four photosites, that’s four times the amount of light. However, this means that, instead of every photosite representing a pixel, every four photosites will represent a pixel. This divides the resulting resolution by four, resulting in a 50MP image.

Different cameras use different types of pixel binning. There are some cameras that combine nine pixels into one, and some that do far less. For example, the 48MP camera in the iPhone 16e combines the light data from two pixels into one.

So, when a company advertises a high pixel count with its camera, just know that you’re not getting that full resolution. Well, you won’t if you don’t manually enable it. Most camera interfaces let you enable a high-res mode that will use all of the advertised megapixels.

Night photography isn’t a magical solution for low-light photography

We’ve seen all of the fancy advertisements on websites and during keynotes showing how great a phone’s low-light performance is. They show off the before-and-after results of shots with their night modes activated, and they look great. However, you know that you shouldn’t trust everything that companies show you.

While night modes are useful (we’re not trying to discourage you from using them! Use them all you like), companies don’t tell you the common pitfalls of using a night mode. You don’t hear that using night mode isn’t the best when it comes to capturing motion. So, don’t believe it when companies show cameras boosting the brightness of busy nighttime scenes. You’re actually supposed to remain still while taking the picture to let more light into the sensor. The darker the image, the longer you’ll need to hold the phone still. If you happen to move your hand while it’s capturing the image, then you could end up with a blurry picture.

Even though the sensor is exposed to more light, there’s still some image processing that happens. This means that the quality of your image will depend on how the phone can process that image. There are cameras that struggle to process the finished picture. So, if you buy a phone on the promise of great low-light performance, you’ll need to be aware that it might not be perfect. There are phones that produce rather blurry low-light images, and there are other phones that produce noisy images.

The video codec you use can have a massive effect on your experience

It seems that companies only want to talk about resolution when they talk about their cameras. We get it, 4K is sharp! Most phones on the market can record in 4K, and this includes sub-$300 phones. However, something that companies should fixate on is how your phone stores those video files.

The codec that your phone uses has an effect on your experience. Unfortunately, many phones don’t give you the ability to choose which codec it uses, but more phones are coming with that option, and it’s important to know if you’re a person who likes to record or edit videos.

Without digging too far into the technical details, two common codecs you can choose are H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC. If your phone has the ability to switch the codec, then you’ll want to know which one produces which results.

Using H.265/HEVC is better for people who want to store a ton of videos on their phones. That’s important in this age when phones are dropping the SD card slot. The “HEVC” in the name stands for “High-Efficiency Video coding”, so it’s in the name.

However, videos recorded with this codec aren’t the best for video editing. For starters, it’s not very widely supported, so you’ll need to see if your video editor supports it. Next, this format is rather compressed, so your computer will need to decompress the file as it plays it. This could make it a nightmare to edit with, as you won’t get smooth playback.

H.264/AVC

The other format mentioned, H.264/AVC stands for “Advanced Video Coding.” This codec does not compress the video files, which comes with its benefits and drawbacks. Since the video files don’t need to be decompressed, they’ll be much better for video editing. However, H.264/AVC video files take up much more of your device’s storage.

This is the kind of information that companies should tell users before they start taking videos.