While I agree that the megapixel count is pretty irrelevant. I'd say that the biggest advantage Apple have camera wise is a really good, really fast image processing pipeline.
The absolute best feature in a mobile camera is the time-to-capture. The faster it is, the faster you get the shot you want.
I'd also argue that the iPhone 5 default camera app/calibration/settings just produced better shots, faster, than the HTC One default camera.
This is absolutely true. Apple devices take the picture when you press the button. When you press the capture button an an Android device, it sits around for a random delay between half a second and five seconds, maybe takes some time to focus, and finally captures the image. By which time the shot you set up is most likely over. And you can't learn the delay and anticipate the timing, because it's not even consistent - it's random.
If anyone knows of an Android device that even comes close to the responsiveness of an Apple device, I'd love to know about it.
My Xiaomi Mi 4i on normal mode snaps the shot when you touch the button.
I discovered this accidentally by taking a series of 12 shots, expecting the normal Android screen freeze and thinking "damn, the camera app is broken", then noticing that the "gallery" kept changing slightly.
This is a lot of fun with Google Photos as once the photos auto-upload, Google will usually stitch them together into a sort of gif (could be a gif for all I know, I never checked the file type). So you can still have a "movie" even in occasions where you don't have time to get the camera out and switch it to movie mode.
biggest advantage Apple have camera wise is a really good, really fast image processing pipeline
And software to process it. Google announced Camera2 API only on IO2014 which would dramatically improve the postprocessing, but so far it hasn't been implemented much across vendors, who had their own technology already for years. They didn't even update their own Google Camera to include, which speaks enough about seriousness of Google caring about Android for consumers.
Comments
While I agree that the megapixel count is pretty irrelevant. I'd say that the biggest advantage Apple have camera wise is a really good, really fast image processing pipeline.
The absolute best feature in a mobile camera is the time-to-capture. The faster it is, the faster you get the shot you want.
I'd also argue that the iPhone 5 default camera app/calibration/settings just produced better shots, faster, than the HTC One default camera.
This is absolutely true. Apple devices take the picture when you press the button. When you press the capture button an an Android device, it sits around for a random delay between half a second and five seconds, maybe takes some time to focus, and finally captures the image. By which time the shot you set up is most likely over. And you can't learn the delay and anticipate the timing, because it's not even consistent - it's random.
If anyone knows of an Android device that even comes close to the responsiveness of an Apple device, I'd love to know about it.
My Xiaomi Mi 4i on normal mode snaps the shot when you touch the button.
I discovered this accidentally by taking a series of 12 shots, expecting the normal Android screen freeze and thinking "damn, the camera app is broken", then noticing that the "gallery" kept changing slightly.
This is a lot of fun with Google Photos as once the photos auto-upload, Google will usually stitch them together into a sort of gif (could be a gif for all I know, I never checked the file type). So you can still have a "movie" even in occasions where you don't have time to get the camera out and switch it to movie mode.
And software to process it. Google announced Camera2 API only on IO2014 which would dramatically improve the postprocessing, but so far it hasn't been implemented much across vendors, who had their own technology already for years. They didn't even update their own Google Camera to include, which speaks enough about seriousness of Google caring about Android for consumers.