Cell phone cameras have gotten to be unbelievably good. Just a year ago my phone had a 1.3MP camera in it and now my HTC Inspire has a 8MP camera. That's almost as good as my 10.1 MP DSLR camera.
No... no it's not.
Unless it has a sensor and lens 10 times the size of any previous camera phone.
There is more to a camera then how many pixels they can pack onto a tiny weeny sensor. I could talk about pixel pitch and circles of confusion and airy discs and diffraction limitation and signal to noise ratio and other techno-jargon-mumbo-jumbo till you fall asleep. But what it all means basically is that 8mp on a tiny cell phone camera sensor serves only one purpose, MARKETING. In reality there is a limit to how tight you can pack pixels on a sensor (that's the pixel pitch thing I mentioned) before it will actually
hurt the image quality. Trust me HTC could get just as good or better images out of that camera phone with a 4mp sensor of the same size. They just use bigger numbers for marketing.
Bottom line is that when it comes to digital image sensors, SIZE does matters (just like with film) there is a reason why Ansel Adams shot 8x10 and not a Kodak 110. The sensor in your DSLR is probably 24mm wide, vs. I'm guessing 4-6mm wide in your phone.
The megapixel thing with consumer cameras is 90% marketing.
Think about this, HD tv to me is the opposite of megapixel marketing. "HD" tv at 1920x1080 is only 2mp (and 720 HD is less then 1mp). Isn't it funny how they market them as simply
"High Definition" displays instead of marketing them as 1 or 2 megapixel displays.
***P.S. Before some smarty-pants points it out and calls me stupid. Yes, I know TV resolution doesn't compare well to camera resolution because cameras use a Bayer filter, I was just making a point about silly marketing.***
