Digital Zooming

In six years with my previous smart phone I had used the camera no more than a dozen times. The experience had invariably been tedious, slow, error prone and frustrating.

I had been repeatedly assured that even average phone cameras (like the one in question) had improved out of sight and that it might well be time to see for myself. It can never be denied that the best camera is the one you have with you. It’d be great if the one I’ll have with ME could be genuinely useful. Hence this month’s experiment.

It must be acknowledged that I am really a klutz when it comes to phone cameras. Accordingly, at least some of what I shall complain about can safely be put down to my own incompetence. Keep that in mind.

Today’s activity was to experiment with digital zooming. The camera specs seemed unclear, to say the least but there was some mention of a 48mp sensor for the main camera setting, which would tend to suggest that useful digital zooming with reasonable final quality (don’t get your hopes up too much, hobbs) might be possible. While 48mp may have been theoretically available, none of the frames offered more than a 4000x3000 pixel (i.e. 12mp) size. It seems that the final image may always be interpolated down from an instantly discarded 48mp one, with more of the potential pixels applied (along with interpolation) to a specific crop when zoomed in, I guess. 

Anyway the image above shows a cleaner’s sign shot four times from exactly the same position, using different levels of digital zoom. I have included 800 pixel wide slices from each frame. The left most frame is the nominal (2mm) wide angle setting, the second is the standard (5mm) setting. The third is zoomed to approximately 4x, while the fourth is the 8x limit.

The first extra shows a similar treatment for a Katoomba street façade while the second extra documents a car wheel in a dim underground location. The big blow ups aren’t too bad, I suppose, but the low light carpark version suffered from a long, tortuous and poorly executed focus operation and also from a photographer who finds phone cameras very difficult to hold steadily, especially at high magnification.

I ran a light sharpening routine for everything. Colour temperature and exposure were matched where necessary. Unfortunately Snapseed had no hope of managing all this and so I resorted to the computer on this occasion.

I’d be interested in your observations. I am not sure what to think.