Hands-On Photography 147 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
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Ant Pruitt  (00:00):
Today on hands on photography. We're gonna look at that new hotness, the iPhone 14 in those camera capabilities. You know what? You're getting 48 megapixels on these cameras. Woo. That sounds good. Right? That's stay tune

Leo Laporte (00:18):
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Leo Laporte (00:23):
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Ant Pruitt  (00:58):
What is happening to everybody? I'm Ant Pruitt , and this is hands on photography here on Twitter TV. Hey, I hope y'all are doing well. I am unbelievable as always. I'd love to sit down with you fine folks, each and every Thursday to share different tips and tricks that are gonna help make you a better photographer as well as a better post processor. And from time to time, I actually like to sit down and go through some of your feedback. Yes, you send in emails and social media posts and all that good stuff. Just sharing your feedback, sharing your images and this week, that's what we're gonna get into bit of feedback that I got from one of our loyal listeners. And I thought that yeah, let's share that because it may be beneficial for everybody else here in the hands on photography community. So without a further ado, let's go ahead and get started with this week's episode.

Ant Pruitt  (01:47):
So allow me to switch my screen here and take a look at this bit of feedback. All right. This comes from John. It says, hi, John, here a club TWI slash discord member. Woo. First off, Hey, hold up, Mr. John, look here. Let me say thank you to you for being a club TWI member. Appreciate that support. Really do. Okay. Back to the email. <laugh> this is I'm currently in new Orleans. I was able to get my new iPhone 14 pro max. Oh, bragging. Huh? Good for you. Nice. Got his iPhone 14 pro mats last Friday on day one, by going to my local apple store, I just wanted to show threes of the Mississippi river. One is at raw 48. Megapixels. One is at raw 12 megapixels and the other is a panoramic shot. Zoom all the way in on all three shots. Okay.

Ant Pruitt  (02:45):
And the message continues. No. When you zoom in all the way, none of the three shots are going to be rock solid, clear. Okay. Fair enough. But consider how far you are zooming in and consider what you can see. Fair enough. That's the real, amazing thing. Especially zoom to the left side of the panel shot and look for the American flag. You may show and use my picks. These have not been touched up also in the two normal picks zoom in on the name, on the boat. On the other side of the river, I think either way, just a little further away. You'll see how much better the 48 megapixel sensor and lens is. And look at the X of data. I know what lens I'm shooting with. Sign John Gerard. All right. So iPhone 14 boy, that's the new hotness here in the smartphone market.

Ant Pruitt  (03:40):
And by golly. Yeah, they have earned it. Apple tends to do an amazing job with this iPhone hardware. I am clearly on record with state and you know what I do not like iOS never have. I don't know if I ever will. I haven't tried out this latest version of iOS. I believe it's iOS 16 right now, as at the time of recording this we'll see maybe one day I'll get to try it out. But previous iterations of iOS have not been my jam, but from a hardware perspective, I've always really enjoyed and just dig the apple hardware. I love the iPhones. I love the MacBook and just, they're good. They're rock solid and really just premium devices. I get that, but I could never really get it together with the software working up with the hardware. But anyway, so yeah, the new iPhone 14 is boasting as usual, a much improved camera on the smartphones because Hey, that's why people buy phones.

Ant Pruitt  (04:42):
Now. They never really buy phones to use 'em as a telephone. They buy 'em for messaging and they buy 'em for the cameras. The thing, the problem quotes problem that I have with the iPhone is a matter of fact with not only the iPhone and even my pixel six pro is the marketing behind how these cameras are presented to the masses. Apple has said, this is a 48 megapixel camera. Let me say that again with quotes 48 megapixel camera and yeah, I guess it is in theory, but it's a lot going on when it comes to these smartphone cameras versus the cameras that you'll use such as the DSLR that's back behind me, that's on a APSC sensor or four frame sensor, or a heck, even a medium format. Everything is gonna be different when it comes to the math to figure out those megapixels.

Ant Pruitt  (05:40):
So let's take a quick look at let's just the site here called GSM arena because I wanted to break down. What's called the Bayer filter, which is a filter on top of the image sensor. That's gonna break down the whole aspect of RGB, the colors that we're going to see for our photographs. Cuz if that sensor wasn't there, we would end up with just black and white images. So what's going on with the Bayer sensor, Bayer filter on these sensors is a bit different in these newer smartphones in particular, the iPhone 14, the pixel six pro even the latest Samsung, all of these camera phones that are offering these higher resolution, higher resolution megapixel cameras. They don't have a bear filter on them. They have what's called a quad bearer filter. So what's the difference on that. I'm gonna try to keep this brief and not too technical, but when you're looking at a Bayer filter, you have the RGB pixels there and you get two pixels for green because our eyes are gonna see green are more sensitive to green and you're gonna get one pixel for red and one pixel for blue.

Ant Pruitt  (06:54):
So that's the total of four pixels. Now on a quad bearer sensor, you're going to get, instead of one pixel for red, you're gonna get four instead of one for blue, you're gonna get four instead of one for green. Well, for two for green, you're going to get eight. So it's quadruple in it, making it more, giving you a little bit more photo sites to work with when it comes to capturing your images, the problem. Okay. So let's look at this picture. The problem is these actual sensors that, and the pixel sizes of these smartphone cameras have typically a half inch sensor. And that's being very, very generous is usually a little bit smaller than that. That's not very big. So the pixels on side of that on the inside of that sensor, they're gonna be really D gum small. Okay. So just think how much light can you really capture on a half inch of surface space?

Ant Pruitt  (07:59):
It's not a lot. So you're going to see the manufacturers trying to do whatever they can to boost up the pixel density on these images to try to capture more for those low light scenarios. Hence while we have the quad bear in the pixel bending. So you're in theory, you're taking essentially a 12 megapixel sensor because that's pretty much about all you're gonna get out of a half inch sensor and turning it into a 48 because of the quad bearer layer. And all of that sounds fine and dandy from a marketing standpoint because everybody says, woo, I got a 12 megapixel camera versus a 48 megapixel camera. Give me that 48 megapixel camera because it's bigger and better. It's not always the case.

Ant Pruitt  (08:47):
So again is I hate the promotion behind it because it's not necessarily giving people the truth. You're essentially getting a 12 megapixel camera on these smartphones. That's what you're getting. I don't care what phone it is. That's pretty much what you're getting because of the sensor size on these things. They're not the same as an a seven S mark three, which is a video camera, but it's not that they don't even have the biggest megapixel count from a still standpoint. And it's definitely not a Sony, a one or Canon R five. That's gonna give you 40 50 megapixel images on a full frame sensor. Okay? Because the micron or pixel size, the microns of micron size of each pixel on these smartphones are ranging anywhere between 0.8 micron up to about 1.6, depending on the pixel bending after everything is put together as four, compared that to a regular camera, you're going to get pixel pitch of roughly three microns, sometimes almost five, depending on the camera.

Ant Pruitt  (09:59):
So a lot more light coming into the photo sites. Okay. All right. I'm done with that. I'll leave a link in the show notes. That's further explaining the Bayer filter and the quad Bayer filter that's being used on these smartphones today. But I just wanted to get that out of the way, because I think people are just being sold. <laugh> when they see those numbers from Google and apple and Samsung. But yeah, we have come a long way. So let's pull up his images here. I'm going to switch my screen, got his images here. And actually I have a couple images of mine. So these are my images from the pixel six pro yeah, I love this phone. It might defined hardware. And this is the standard one X zoom. This is two X and this is four X. And I believe this was 10 X and granite.

Ant Pruitt  (10:52):
I know what I'm doing with a camera. I know how to lock, focus and locking exposure. But you notice what's happened here is this isn't necessarily giving me all of those juicy megapixels that the camera allegedly has. Notice how much softer this image has gotten. The details are sort of hit or miss on it. And the computational photography will eventually kick in to make it look a little bit better, but these are raw files. So this is what I'm getting straight out of the camera unprocessed. And as you get these super duper zooms that apple or Samsung or Google is trying to push off, it's not gonna do as well. That really, really high zoom. But if you go back at say the two X or the four X, it is taking that data from that quote 48 megapixel sensor, and basically giving you a cropped view from the sensor and not necessarily doing a digital zoom.

Ant Pruitt  (11:55):
This is creating more of a optical zoom because it's cropped down on the sensor and not doing any type of computation. So it is gonna look a little bit sharper at those particular focal lens. And I just wanted to show that because both apple and <laugh> and Google are doing the same dagum thing. So let's get to his images. This is the pan panoramic image that Mr. Gerard was sharing with me to use this reference. And then we have these other ones here. So we got image right here. Let me pull up the develop module here so we can see more of the information. All right. So this is image one. And then this one is image two. So again, you said one was the 12 megapixel and one was the 48 megapixel. And if you look at the two, notice this one image two seems like it's cropped in a little bit more.

Ant Pruitt  (12:55):
Now he didn't specify which file was, which, but I'm gonna guess this is the 48 megapixel because of how it's given me that cropped in view of the same shot versus the original one here. And then plus you can look at the resolution up here in upper left is telling me one's a smaller one versus the other one. Not by much, but it is smaller. And as I zoom in on this, yeah, this detail ain't bad. Just as you said, this detail is not bad. It ain't great <laugh> but it's not bad. Could this image be printed and put up on a wall somewhere? Yeah, it could. So could this one, this could be printed and put it up on a wall somewhere. Now, if you wanna pixel peep, I don't recommend that because it's not gonna look all that great. But up on a wall at a normal viewing distance, that's gonna look totally fine.

Ant Pruitt  (13:53):
Now this one I played around with it because Lightroom has what they call an enhanced AI algorithm in their software that basically will allow you to take your images and scale them up to a super resolution. And this one did this one, scaled it up to a quote 48 megapixel image here. And yeah, it ain't that great. <laugh> I zoom in. Then I zoom in on this image and it doesn't look oh, that great. It definitely gave me more resolution, but essentially what it did was took bad data and just really made it worse. So what's that old saying garbage and garbage out? No, I'm not saying your image is garbage, but what I'm saying is this is just, you can only expect so much from a half inch sensor on cameras. You can. I mean, it is what it is. I don't care how much Tim cook and the folks at apple tried to tell you that this thing is just the most wonderful and most greatest, you can only get so much out of a half inch sensor.

Ant Pruitt  (14:59):
It's just physics. That's all it is. Again, there's some other things involved check out that link in the show notes, just walking you through to the information regarding the Bayer sensor, cuz it's a lot of stuff. And then you have the fraction and it it's so much more, but in conclusion is the iPhone camera pretty? Daum good and badass. Yes it is. Most people are going to be able to pick up that camera and just snap some pretty cool images that are gonna be so great. You can print 'em out and hang them up somewhere and just Marvel on 'em every day. They're gonna be really, really good but my advice to everyone and that's not just for the iPhone 14 that's for next year's phone. That's for the phone after that and so forth, please do not buy to the mega megapixel count on these phones.

Ant Pruitt  (15:52):
Just stop doing that. Look at it, take those little stats with a grain of salt and just say, you know what? I can get pretty good images out of it, but I'm not gonna get a 48 megapixel that can compare to the 48 megapixels of a crop sensor, DSLR or crop sensor, mirrorless camera. It's just not gonna happen. Even in microphone thirds, all of those sensors are much bigger than the sensors in a phone camera. So it's gonna be much more light. You're gonna be able to capture photo sites are gonna be larger in size. A lot of factors. It's just gonna be different in most cases better. Okay. All right. I'm done. Rantin for this week's episode. I appreciate you all sending over to continuous support, email feedback, all that good stuff. It really does mean a lot. Hey, and again, just keep tagging me on the social medias.

Ant Pruitt  (16:50):
I'm on Twitter and I'm on Instagram. So over on Twitter, I am T underscore Pruit over on Instagram. I am T underscore Pruit. You can follow me on all of those platforms. Again. I still don't quite know if Instagram is doing right by my follower account, but follow me if you feel like it else, just tag me and share your images with me. I love checking them out. It's been fun. Seeing what people are shooting and sharing with me, cuz some of y'all are pretty, Daum good at this photography stuff and I love it. I Daum love it. And also if you have questions, comments, feedback, email to show hop, twit TV again, that's hop TWIT.tv. I answer pretty much all of them and I answer them as soon as I can. And again, folks, please take the time to share the show with other folks.

Ant Pruitt  (17:37):
I really do appreciate it. So after you've subscribed to the show, share the show out with other folks that may be interested. You can find all of the information about hands on photography on the website, go to TWI TV slash hop with.tv/o and you'll see that we're available on apple podcasts. We have a YouTube channel. We have a Spotify feed. All our different podcasts applications are available. So just check it out there on the website and tell somebody else about the show. Thank you to my man, Mr. Victor for making me look and sound good each and every week, even though I rumble and Stu stutter and just can't quite get my words out. <laugh> thank you Mr. Victor. I'm sorry for making it difficult on you. My man. All right, everybody. Hey safely, create it dominate and I will see y'all next time. Take care.

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