Hello, I currently have a Treo 650 phone and am thinking about upgrading it. I know the VGA resolution on the 650 does not produce good pictures (even small ones for print), and was wondering if the Treo 750 with a 1.3 megapixel capibility would produce good (albiet small) pictures for printing.
Hello, I currently have a Treo 650 phone and am thinking about upgrading it. I know the VGA resolution on the 650 does not produce good pictures (even small ones for print), and was wondering if the Treo 750 with a 1.3 megapixel capibility would produce good (albiet small) pictures for printing.
Appreaciate any comments.
Thanks as always,
Bob
It all depends.. How small is small, and how decent is decent.
To me, 200 pixels per inch is good enough for 4×6 prints. To get this, you would need a camera which produces images which are 800 by 1200 pixels. This is about 1 megapixel.
‘decent’ is entirely subjective. You can always determine this yourself by taking any high resolution image (a scan, a picture from morguefile.com, etc) and scaling it in Photoshop to the dimensions offered by a potential camera. You can then be sure if it looks okay on screen or prints to your desired size.
Be sure to check the actual imageable area of the camera as defined by pixel height by pixel width. The megapixel rating on the box may be misleading.
Hello, I currently have a Treo 650 phone and am thinking about upgrading it. I know the VGA resolution on the 650 does not produce good pictures (even small ones for print), and was wondering if the Treo 750 with a 1.3 megapixel capibility would produce good (albiet small) pictures for printing.
Photographers spend thousands of dollars on professional quality lenses because that is where the picture is made. A good quality portrait lens for a digital SLR camera contains 3 to 15 pieces of optical quality glass, from 1" to 6" in diameter, precision ground for the sharpest image possible and will yield excellent images on a 6mp chip, and outstanding images on a 12mp chip. Conversely, a consumer quality plastic lens on a 12mp camera doesn’t take any better images than the light it transmits
One molded plastic lens, stuck as an afterthought into a phone as a consumer novelty designed only to sell phones will never take a print quality photograph. Ever. If you think it will, you haven’t put it next to a professionally shot image.
Given that, no matter the size of the sensor chip, you will need a minimum of 300 dpi resolution for print quality. So even if you could get a great lens on your phone, a 1.3mp chip will only yield a 3.8" printed image.
Besides the lens, another key difference between high, medium, and low-quality cameras is the sensor size. You can get an excellent image out of a sensor that is roughly one square inch, typical of digital SLRs, whether that image is 6, 8, or 12 megapixels. Smaller pixels are more challenging from an optical and engineering viewpoint, and will ordinarily produce higher noise levels in low light than larger pixels. Cameras using a sensor that is much smaller than one square inch, such as a camera phone, that still produce 6 or 8 megapixels will inherently produce a poorer quality image, because the pixels will be smaller and won’t get as much light.
This is because of the duality of light, if you remember your quantum physics. Simply put, light acts like a wave until you try to pin down its position, whereupon it acts like particles. If you have very weak light, and a dark area of your image gets 0.5 photons per pixel during the exposure, then when the exposure occurs each individual pixel gets no photons, or 1 or more photons, since there are no half photons. The dark area will have some pixels completely black, some that are one level up, and some that are multiple levels up. When viewed, this looks "noisy" or "grainy". Use bigger pixels — either by using a bigger sensor or fewer and larger pixels — and the photons even out better, causing less noise or graininess.
This is a practical application of the famous "Schroedinger’s cat" mind experiment (look it up in Wikipedia or google it) concerning the collapse of a probability function at the quantum level. Say a single quantum or photon (particle of light) has a 100% probability of hitting an area containing two light sensors (pixels), and precisely a 50% probability of hitting each of them. Until you check one or the other pixel sensor, you know only that each pixel effectively got one half photon. The cat in each pixel, so to speak, is half dead and half alive. Once you check, you will find that it hit one or the other 100%, but not both. One cat is dead, and one is alive.
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