Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know why most consumers would need a phone with a camera more than 8 MP, when most users will only ever display it on a 1080p (~2 MP) screen.

(1) Many computers, TVs, tablets, smartphones, and laptops now have screens with greater than 1080p resolution ("Quad HD" 2560x1440 is particularly common), so I don't thinks it true that most will only ever display pictures on a 1080p screen, heck, many of them will be taking pictures on devices with greater than a 1080p screen.

(2) Often pictures, after being taken, will be cropped; so the image that will be viewed on a screen (of whatever size) will be some subset of the full picture taken.

View on HN

(1) That's beside the point. Even if a phone has a 4k display, they still don't need a camera of more than about 8MP to display it on screen.

(2) Yeah, I get this use case, and I understand why there are DSLRs that big. But how many cameraphone users are actually cropping their images so extremely that they need 41 megapixels? Phone makers don't put 41 MP sensors for the niche market of users who need cameras that good but don't have a DSLR; they do it because the majority of their customer base thinks "the more pixels the better".

> But how many cameraphone users are actually cropping their images so extremely that they need 41 megapixels? Phone makers don't put 41 MP sensors for the niche market of users who need cameras that good but don't have a DSLR; they do it because the majority of their customer base thinks "the more pixels the better".

Actually, the Nokia 41MP sensor is sold as enabling high-power digital zoom, which is the feature (with the associated benefit of taking clear pictures from much further away than with other phones) of the phone most heavily touted in the TV ads for the phones with the sensor. And digital zoom is exactly the same thing as cropping.

So, no, I don't think the actual marketing of the phone supports the idea that 41MP sensor is targeted at people using MP as a quality metric disconnected from any concrete utility, its targeted at selling a very specific benefit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com