It feels like just the other day when we saw the first phones with 48MP cameras hit the market, but the smartphone industry has firmly embraced these ultra-high-resolution camera sensors. Nowadays, it’s not unheard of to find 48MP, 50MP, 64MP, 108MP, or even 200MP cameras on smartphones.
Have these 48MP+ smartphone cameras lived up to the hype, though? That’s the question we posed to you in a standalone poll article last week, and here’s what you said.
Have ultra-high-resolution cameras lived up to the hype?
Results
We posed this question earlier this month, and just over 1,100 votes were counted to date. It turns out that a massive 73.8% of respondents think ultra-high-resolution smartphone cameras haven’t lived up to the hype.
We can understand why some people might vote this way. After all, all high-resolution smartphone cameras shoot at a much lower resolution by default. That’s because many of these cameras have small sensors and tiny pixels, resulting in noisy full-resolution snaps. So these smartphones instead use a technique called pixel-binning to produce a much lower-resolution shot that’s cleaner and brighter than the full-resolution snap. In other words, your phone’s high-resolution camera works best at a much lower resolution.
Meanwhile, 26.18% of polled readers said high-resolution smartphone cameras have indeed lived up to the hype. For what it’s worth, phones like the Galaxy S23 Ultra indeed offer excellent detail when shooting at 200MP in ideal conditions. We’ve also seen several smartphones with 50MP one-inch cameras in 2023, and these sensors can deliver good results at full resolution too.
