Well, hey.. I'm a photographer and an electronics engineer... so I apply this, even to fun stuff like the DROID. I was a bit disappointed in the photo quality, too, even understanding the various details (lens limitations... the best you're usually going to find in a cell phone is a 4 element glass lens.. many use plastic, I have not found the specs on the DROID lens, other than the fact it's f2.8, which could be better, but it's horrible). So I dug in a bit.
It's good to understand which pieces effect which things. It's quite possible that a lens would not offer resolution enough to give you any practical difference between 5Mpixel and 2 or 3 Mpixel.. but the effect would be, they all look pretty much the same... the 5Mpixel photo would be just a blurry as the 2Mpixel photo. What we see, I think most agree, is a sharp photo with lots of noise. I'll add in that, in my experience, every once in awhile, I get a photo that's just uselessly noisy -- this is clearly some software bug, since this happened to me twice in situations where the photos before and after were in identical lighting conditions.
It's also true that every digital camera on the planet does image processing on the output of the sensor... noise reduction, color interpolation and balancing, etc. If I have the 5Mpixel sensor correct (this is one of those things I've found surfing the net, it could be wrong, but it was from a couple potentially independent sources), there's a bunch of "different" tech in there. I wonder how tightly coupled the Android people are from those elsewhere at Motorola using the same camera... could be there's a big improvement possible in software. We can hope! It's definite there's a small improvement possible in software.
Yeah, I looked at those, up close, compared to the DROID photos, and I believe it's at least possible. First of all, 5Mpixel camera sensors are rare at the moment.. and particularly one thin enough for the DROID. So this is a good match, even if I didn't have information claim this is it. Second, Motorola's already using it, so why go find a different one for the same job? As well, the nature of the digital noise in both was the same, though far more pronounced in the DROID photos. And that's a double-edged sword when you're doing DCT-type compression, since the overall quality of the photo in will be reduced, as the JPEG algorithm does its best to retain that noise. So, drop the noise just a bit, and the photo can be dramatically better looking in its final form.
Hopefully, they improve it next week!
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