Wed, 17 May 2006

This picture illustrates the limitations of camera phones pretty well.
It's a picture of an electric snake, after we finished unclogging the sewer. You can see that the coils of the snake are in pretty sharp focus, but just above that, the handle is blurry. My first thought was that this means the camera has a very shallow depth of field. But lots of pictures that I take closer come out fine, like portraits and small group shots. So it may be that the snake is just at the edge of the depth of field. I guess a good way to confirm that would be to recreate the photo, but have a person standing in front of the snake, closer to the camera, and see if the person is in focus.

This confirms what I pretty much knew all along: the resolution of the camera is not as important as the lens. This camera is a 1.3 megapixel, but most of the pixels are blurry. I would be a lot better of with a VGA camera (640 x 480) that has a decent lens. But then I would be carrying one more object in my pocket, and the benefit of the camera phone is that I always have the phone, thus I always have a camera. I'll see if I can bring myself to carry another device with me.

posted at: 17:00 | permalink |