Taking and sharing impossible photographs, breathtaking snapshots without being a photographer. And maybe post on Instagram a photo of the Moon with a very high wow effect for many likes in the form of red hearts, which in the end (useless to deny it) are a lot of pleasure. A supermoon, big. Just as it appears before our eyes and do it by getting out of the car to seize the moment with point and click. Look, shoot and share, even the detail of a window in a building. Now you can do it with a smartphone, without a tripod, without tinkering with settings that are incomprehensible to most or to all those who don’t care about things like focal length, color temperature and exposure and don’t want to know about SLRs and compact cameras. You don’t need the artistic photo, the masterpiece. They, indeed we, want to share to excite and communicate. Also on Whatsapp. This is the intrinsic meaning of the new top-of-the-range 2021 model year smartphones (and more).
It is now obvious that mobile phones have been taking decent photos for some years now. On the other hand, it is the stratospheric level reached now. Thanks to lenses and multiple sensors (quite cumbersome, to be honest) they definitively refute the derogatory sentence: “Eh but it’s a photo taken with a smartphone, what do you want to expect?”. How many times have we heard it! Here with the new models is just a memory. And this thanks not only to optics and sensors up to 108 megapixels (even too many) but above all to the artificial intelligence of computational photography that allows you to take photos that with a traditional camera would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to do.
Loading…
And so smartphones are overtaking reflex and compact cameras. Photography purists will be horrified, a bit like the audio Taliban who are sick just hearing about Spotify (and a little bit right). But the reality is this: the new flagships allow us to share images, which may not be really realistic and correct, but certainly convey many more emotions. And they amaze for detail and colors.
The level of sophistication is in fact such that smartphones are often used by professionals. For example, the new Oppo Find X3 Pro was used for the “Out of This World Colors” project by National Geographic and the famous photographer Keith Ladzinski. A video-photo reportage in the Mojave Desert that aims to be hyper-realistic thanks to a 10-bit color management system and a display capable of reproducing a billion colors, when it usually stops at 16 million. Obviously there is a lot of techno marketing in this: all manufacturers are scrambling to develop devices that exhibit crazy performances with exceptional performance displays, also because the super photos taken need screens up to the situation (in the end we see the photos on the display). The password is now 120 Hz, that is, the image updates 120 times per second (against the canons 60) and this means smoother screens.
In the most performing smartphones such as Samsung S21 Ultra, the latest flasghip of the Korean house, the 6.8-inch 120 Hz display offers a resolution of 3,200 x 1,440 (the technicians call it (Wqhd +) and everything is combined with a photographic behavior that leverages a quadruple rear camera with sensors such as the 108MP wide angle and zoom up to 100x to photograph the Moon. Speaking of shots of the Moon, the primacy belongs to Huawei which, however, has been demolished by the Trump administration. The optics are stabilized (in this field the Apple iPhone 12 Pro excels, which has the stabilized sensor to avoid blurred photos and shaky shots). Then there are also those who exaggerate: Oppo for example has even introduced the microscope. It really works, the usefulness is doubtful but in the world of sharing on social networks there is room for everyone.