give me the actual megapixels on my phone camera; or a thing about photography on mobile that almost nobody cares about
in the past few years android phones have been doing the megapixel race. these days, most brands have 50 megapixels and above as primary cameras even in their lower and mid range offerings.
this megapixel race kinda sorta coincided with google setting up standards and APIs for all android phones. this meant that you could theoretically have all the features of the cameras on any android device not be exclusively locked to their own proprietary apps. and that has been largely true. it has made it possible for google's nexus/pixel gcam app to be modified and run on other devices. this has granted the other devices some ocomputational photography and HDR stacking, same as on googles own phones and even some amount of customisation and control which was not present in the original app.
but my specific soapbox issue is about the actual resolution being exposed to the API versus what resolution is being used to advertise the camera. some brands are exposing the full sensor resolution to it. but most brands are using pixel binning to average out pixels and give access to only the reduced, pixel binned resolution through the API while locking full resolution exclusively to the brands own camera app. an example of this would be multiple brands prominently advertising their camera as 50 megapixels with "quad pixels" but the resolution accessible to the API is around 12 megapixels.
now i know this might read as a rant about something like "using the full speedometer that i paid for". but there have been at least 5 years of 50 megapixel cameras on android and phone processors have only grown more performant since then. the other part is that some phone brands are exposing the full sensor resolution to the API but a lot arent. this also seems independent of price range.
(i am just an observer and not an expert at any of the subjects mentioned. there might be errors/misconceptions/incompleteness in what i wrote.)
originally posted on cohost 2 september 2023