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Phone camera

drummerman

pfm Member
As you may know, I currently use my phone cam for all my pics. I do that almost I exclusively in manual mode and at 3.7mp rather than 12mp.

It usually looks decent on my phone and 13 inch laptop screen even when looking at native resolution.

However, yesterday I walked into a small local printing shop and had a few shots done at A3.

I was really disappointed. I don't think their printers are optimised photo printers but still, the lack of resolution and overall clarity was not good. Blacks look wasted out too.

I am sure I can't expect much more from a phone camera and 3mp setting but I have a feeling what I got on those prints are what some of you accomplished photographers see on your monitors when looking at my pics. I am a bit embarrassed.

I am looking at cameras so this will hopefully be a thing of the past soon.
 
At 3.7mp you are puttying out an image that is probably 2560 x 1440- pixels. Most people viewing on the internet are viewing at way below this resolution, so you don't have to worry on this account, your images have always looked fine to me.

But to get an A3 print at typical print quality of say 300dpi you need a resolution of 4960 x 3510, so your original image is being up sampled approx 2x, this will naturally start to pixelate as the print is trying to interpolate the value of the printed dots (pixels)

If the printer was at 600dpi then this will be even worse at 4x upsampling, effectively something akin to watching normal old style domestic tv on a 4K monitor, its not pretty close up, but from a distance may be acceptable.

I don't think you have anything to worry about, you've just discovered the limitations of your current cameras print output. If you view the output from a distance it should look ok, but that probably defeats the object of getting them printed at A3.

BTW don't call us accomplished photograhers, you are just as axccomplished as we are!!
 
Mr P says it best. All you are seeing is the limitation of a 3MP image when it comes to printing at A3. You have nothing to be embarrassed about - you clearly have a good eye for a photograph.I think the camera is holding you back!

Curious to know why you shoot at 3MP? The S7 camera is capable of 12MP pixel images which would be perfectly fine for making A3 prints.

Lefty
 
May I ask which phone you are using? I just recently bought a Samsung galaxy 7 edge and the camera is brilliant. This is even superior to iphone 6+ as well especially at night!
 
Ok I haven`t tried to print pics any greater then a5.
I tried the 4k slowmo in the summer and on a 55" 4k tv it is not so impressive as it do gets pixelly...

I have just bought a 200gb sd card for skiing in FEB ;) hope it lasts for a week.
 
Ok I haven`t tried to print pics any greater then a5.
I tried the 4k slowmo in the summer and on a 55" 4k tv it is not so impressive as it do gets pixelly...

I have just bought a 200gb sd card for skiing in FEB ;) hope it lasts for a week.

I haven't used the video mode much so can't comment unfortunately but the camera is probably not bad for a phone. I had an LG previously and could not have done half of what I did with the S7E. Great battery life too.

Hope it will serve you well on your skiing holiday :)
 
Cheers,

However i am not so pleased with the battery life compared to my previous note 4. But to overcome this i bought a nice extra cover which has a 5000mah charge option so it should last more than a day;)
 


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