Sooo … there is a rumor that men are not good about reading instructions. There might be some truth about that, but you did not hear it from me.

This is what the Sphinx Moth picture taken on my Samsung Galaxy A14 phone should have looked like. The photo still has too much processing, but it is far more detail than the one on the previous blog post.

The problem is that the phone has three cameras – 50 Megapixel (MP) primary camera, 2 MP depth finder, and 2 MP macro camera. The depth finder camera is used to determine how far away objects are; it does not appear to be used to take pictures. The 50 MP primary camera can be used at 50 MP or 12 MP. It sounds like it just aggregates blocks of 4 pixels to make a super pixel, so it is really (50 / 4) 12.5 MP. The macro camera is only 2 MP, which is lower resolution than my cheap digital camera from 15 years ago. 2 MP is not enough resolution to be useful for anything.

Click on the images below to see how the three settings look taking the same picture. Unfortunately, the 50 MP image is 4x the size of the 12 MP image, but the image quality is about the same. (Only click the 50 MP image when connected to high speed internet.)

The picture in the last post was from the 2 MP macro camera with a 9:16 aspect ratio. The native sensor appears to be 3:4, so it crops pixels off the left and right to make it 9:16. This makes the picture 1.5 MP, which is even worse. Sadly, the macro lens on the phone is pretty much useless. On the positive side, I know now the sensor is 3:4, so there is no reason to take a picture with any other aspect ratio. It is better to crop a photo manually than have the phone do it.

Today’s post has a moral – Consider reading the instructions, especially if you are male.