Are you one of those who complain about poor cameras on budget devices? Have you read gadget reviews in which the reviewer scores a budget device low because the camera doesn’t take stunning shots? To be honest, you should not be surprised. Budget phones are the wrong places to look for quality cameras.
For one, low-cost phones lack the advanced camera sensors found on high-end smartphones. Those advanced sensors cost more money than basic ones do. They also lack the processing power (CPU and GPU) required to utilize those advanced sensors. Again, those more powerful processors cost more money. To top it up, budget phones also lack the advanced lenses that high-end camera phones have. Of course, more advanced lenses cost more money. All of these extra expenses stack up and remove great cameras from within reach of budget smartphones. All you are left with are poor cameras.
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Budget Phones And Poor Cameras Are A Pair
Whether it is on smartphones or on drones or manned aircraft or on security towers, great cameras and budget do not mix. Wherever you see an outstanding camera, you are looking at something that has cost money to produce. It is like expecting a high octane performance engine in a budget city car. If you find one in there, it is placed there at great, extra cost.
Ignore The Megapixel Ratings
We have known for years that a camera’s quality is not all about its megapixels rating. There are a handful of factors that contribute to the quality of photos that a camera produces. As such, you can have an 8 megapixel camera on a $250 budget smartphone and an 8 megapixel camera on a $1200 flagship. But the camera in the flagship will produce much better images than the one in the budget phone ever can. It is more than the megapixels.
All The Best cameras Are On Flagships
Have you ever – at any point in time since smartphones were invented – found the best cameras on any device that is not a flagship? Run your web searches. Since the garden of Eden, every list of the best camera phones year after year have always featured the most expensive phones.
But What If…
But what if one manufacturer were to produce a phone that has budget specifications in every other area and then include a flagship grade camera on it? It would cost a bit more than the average budget phone. Perhaps its price would cross over into mid-tier territory. But I am wondering..a performance camera would require a really good processor too. Those glorious photos tend to be heavy too and will require lots of internal storage. Sigh. The price is going up gradually; right? Perhaps cloud storage can be used?
Anyway, you get the picture; right? Stop expecting anything other than poor cameras on low-cost smartphones. It costs quite a bit to produce a well refined camera that produces stunning photographs. Yes, once in a while, one phone brand or the other manages to squeeze a great camera into an upper mid-range smartphone. That is doable and happens.
But one you drop down into low-cost or entry-level territory, out goes any chances of having a great camera. This is not to say that entry-level phone cameras are so poor that they are useless. Not at all; you can take fairly good and usable photos with them (here is a video tutorial on how to take better photos with your phone camera), but you will be able to take much better photos with the cameras in high-end phones.