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Are Smartphone Camera's okay for Taking Snapshots and Printing Them?
A lot of people these days avoid buying a digital camera, mainly because many of them have an iPhone 4 that can produce pictures as well. However, this raises the question of just how good is the camera on a smart phone. In particular the question that needs to be asked is will the quality of the pictures that you take with your smart phone camera be good enough that you will be able to print them?
As a general rule a smart phone camera will not produce pictures that are of a high enough quality that you are going to want to print them. Of course this will depend on your definition of what an acceptable quality is. If it is just a picture of you and some friends out on the town then it might be good enough. However if you are taking serious pictures, especially of things like landscapes the quality will be much lower and you are probably not going to want to print the picture.
The reason that smart phone cameras are not really up to the task of taking print quality pictures is actually two fold. There are a couple of major issues that phone makers have when they add a camera, these are space and cost. This really limits the quality of the camera that they can put on the phone. Over the years the cameras included in phones have improved dramatically but so has the quality of digital cameras. The result is that the gap between the two in terms of picture quality has remained about the same.
The space issue when it comes cameras in phones should be pretty obvious if you hold your smart phone up next to your digital camera. The digital camera is several times bigger than the phone and this is a problem for the phone makers. They obviously can't include everything that it is in your camera into the camera in the phone since they have to fit it into a much smaller space. The biggest sacrifice that has to be made in this regard is that the lens on the camera phone will normally be of a much lower quality. This is down largely to size.
The other issue that phone makers have when they are putting a camera into a smart phone is cost. A good quality digital camera will cost several hundred dollars at a minimum and in many cases several thousand dollars. Obviously nobody is going to build a smart phone that includes a camera that is that expensive since the whole phone normally has to sell for less than this. Naturally this means that the quality of the parts that are used on the phone are going to be cheaper. The result is a camera that produces pretty low quality pictures that you are probably not going to want to have printed.