Very high quality shots, at least in terms of definition, without necessarily being (or becoming) experts in photography. Leaving aside the composition or expressiveness of the image, there are smartphones that have such technical requirements as to be able to completely replace a compact camera and offer functionality and performance not far from those of mid-range professional machines.
Phones with four lenses on board are no longer an exception, nor are stabilized sensors capable of offering up to 108 megapixels of resolution. From the first cameraphone (early 2000s) to today, technology has made great strides and only in the last decade reached avant-gardes considered only futuristic. And not only. Because in favor of mobile phones there is the convenience of always carrying them with you and shooting at any time, a prerogative that is lacking with bridge and mirrorless cameras (without deliberately bothering the reflex cameras). The choice between the models with the right requirements to keep up with traditional cameras is quite large: if you want to draw up a grid of merit, you can fish among the top of the range of the usual Apple and Samsung (iPhone 13 Pro and Galaxy S22) , the best offered by Google (Pixel 6 Pro) and the flagships of Chinese vendors, from Xiaomi 12 Pro to Oppo Find X5 Pro, from OnePlus 10 Pro to Vivo X60 Pro 5G. What are the parameters to take into consideration most? Camera capabilities and lens features are obviously at the top of the list but just as important are storage space (which is sufficiently large), support for microSD memory cards (vital for storing 4K movies), battery life and obviously the software that governs the usability of the available hardware.
European technology for Chinese brands
Oppo (and One Plus) arm in arm with the Swedish Hasselblad, Vivo and the prolonged flirtation with the German Zeiss (with whom Sony also works) and lastly, in chronological order, the partnership between Xiaomi and Leica, which will shortly lead at the baptism of the first smartphone (the 12S or 12 Ultra series) jointly developed by the two companies. The alliances between Chinese manufacturers and European photography tech companies are a fact and reflect the former’s intention to reaffirm the concept that mobile innovation can be cultivated in the Far East. On the plate there is not only the attempt to strengthen the brand (a path that Huawei had also successfully followed, adopting Leica’s objectives in 2016) but also a precious piece of technological development that wants to open new frontiers of mobile imaging between lenses, sensors and algorithms. Let’s take Oppo’s example. In 2014, it introduced “pixel binning” technology to the market, whereby the signal collected from multiple pixels of the sensor was processed to obtain better images in low light conditions. In the summer of 2019 it announced “under-screen camera” technology and with it the support of a custom photo module capable of capturing more light, leveraging instructed machine learning algorithms to improve camera performance. A month ago, he unveiled MariSilicon X, a technology that opens the door to a new era of computational photography. What does it mean? That thanks to the first neural unit (Neural Processing Unit) and its ability to perform up to 18 trillion operations per second, the processing power necessary for next generation imaging is unlocked and the computerized vision algorithms that allow to understand how a smartphone camera should “think”. If today you can shoot (or shoot video) even in the absence of light, and a dynamic range and details comparable to night photos, the merit is certainly of the artificial intelligence but what often makes the difference is the quality and performance of sensors and optics. And at least the latter are still firmly in the hands of European producers.