Why Can’t My Phone…

Why can’t my phone take detailed pictures of the moon when my eyes can see the details clearly?

The reason is that human eye can take in a wider range of light intensity from light to dark than a camera can, about 20 stops. A ‘stop’ is a doubling of light intensity. So that’s a range from zero (black) to about a million times brighter until we reach white.

A top of the range camera has a dynamic range of about 14 stops. If you took a photo of the moon with such a camera it would compress the range of light somewhat but it would make a good representation of what you can see with your eyes.

And that brings us to the camera in most phones. While there are one or two models with one inch sensors, most have much smaller sensors.

And the dynamic range of a phone is limited by the small size of the sensor.

The sensor on a good camera is many times that of the area of the sensor on a phone.

But there is one thing that a phone has going for it, and that is computational power. It can use it to process the image that the sensor receives, and do so much more cleverly than any camera can do.

So with careful exposure, you might well get a picture of the moon that shows detail. What it cannot do produce an image that can be printed to produce a large detailed photograph. Just don’t expect that from a phone. Cameras with bigger sensors still have the edge there.

Well yes, but modern phones can do amazing things, even in low light.

Taken on 20 December 2023 at 16:06.