Marco.org

The decision to focus on cellular cameras in particular is a smart move for the I3A. Camera quality in such devices tends to be hit-or-miss (usually miss), and manufacturers appear to have put much more emphasis on megapixels than on image quality.

Trying to make an effective quality measurement is a noble effort, but I don’t think the manufacturers are ever going to willingly make themselves look worse.

You can cram as many pixels into those tiny sensors as possible, but their plastic fixed-focus pinhole lenses still can’t deliver reasonable sharpness or contrast — and they let in such little light that the sensitivity still needs to be cranked far beyond “noisy”.

Good photography requires good optics and as large of a sensor as possible. Both require far more space, power, and expense than are allocated to the camera in any mobile phone.