Another comparison of Nokia 808 with Samsung S6
On foliage – perhaps the hardest test of a camera – the 808 (left) wins by a big margin.
The colours aren’t comparable; I did a quick de-saturation on the S6 image. Straight out of the cameras, this is what you get
Both files were ~10MB.
I set my DSLR to minumum sharpening and do sharpening in the editing SW because the result is even better.
I wish Moore’s law was true for photographic sensors as well. But it appears not overly much has happened to photosensors for years now. Despite ultrapixels, pureview, 1.5μ pixels etc… they are only incremental steps and certainly not exponential.
The 6 micron pixels on a full frame sensor still catch ginormous amounts of extra light that the small pixels of a 1.5μ iPhone 6, or a 0.8μ Nokia 808 cannot get close to.
They use clever tricks such as the sharpening you picked up on, and noise reduction in software, but if the source (the sensor) is limited you can only go so far with software tricks. Flyer 59 is correct in stating that PC software is more powerful and thus more precise in performing software tricks compared to on-board phone software.
Still waiting for a breakthrough in sensor technology that allows my tiny sensor iPhone or compact camera to deliver stunning low-light performance………….
I think the quality of the most modern high-end phone cameras (e.g. the latest from Samsung, Apple, and probably others) is generally “good enough” these days. It’s certainly good enough, for me, that I don’t use a compact camera any longer, including the best mirrorless ones from Sony etc. And that’s from someone who likes buying cameras!
There are several things that make an SLR preferable for me – low light, long zooms, shallow depth of field, multi-strobe setups, and sometimes controllability. But the benefits of a camera which is always with you and allows some editing, that produces geo-tagged pictures which are instantly shareable outweighs anything else in situations where those things aren’t required.
Roughly speaking: Pictures for art = SLR, pictures for anything else = phone.
Apple are said to be succumbing to the pixel density race pressure with the next iPhone; I hope that’s not just for marketing purposes though I fear it might be. As @archie said, better low light performance would be very welcome. Pushing the boundary further, depth of field control would be interesting, as would something along these lines.
Nokia had a massive head start 4 years ago and since this is no rocket science I can only assume that Samsung and Apple etc etc have made a policy decision that cameras are not a priority in the facebook/twitter age, and a very thin phone sells more. I can believe that, but I don’t like it 
The best ever phone camera, and the second best phone camera:
I don’t use a compact camera any longer, including the best mirrorless ones from Sony etc. And that’s from someone who likes buying cameras!
I think generally a top end (say GBP 400) pocket camera still outperforms any phone by a big margin. But you have to pay that much. The 808 came closest and in favourable conditions (good light, landscape, no people) will produce a result which most non-pro photographers will think is as good – if they don’t need to manipulate it.
But cameras also do various things rather well:
I reckon that if phones ever reach present-day DSLR performance, there won’t be much point in having the present-day ~1kg DSLR. It will generate 100MB files which only an absolutely top-end gaming PC will be able to use for something mundane like a slide slow. One may then as well go for a micro 4/3 camera.
The huge advantage phones have is convergence i.e. everything in one device.
produces geo-tagged pictures
It is a mystery why cameras don’t have GPS and WIFI (with dropbox upload) as standard. I have GPS on my Pentax DSLR but it’s a 100 quid shoe device.
But the bottom line is that I would not have got the S6 if the 808 had a browser which worked properly. It has about 25x the CPU power of the 808 (eight 2GHz cores v. one 600MHz core) but 90% of that is wasted by running Java.
The s6 has a shutter delay much longer than 2 seconds? That’s awful. There is no perceptible delay at all on a modern iPhone.
I think apple care a great deal about the camera but yes they do tend to keep the phones very slim. I wish they were thicker and used the extra depth for more battery.
I have two camera apps on the S6. The stock one is under 1 second and the other (FV-5) is about 1 second. However the latter has a visible focus delay; if one sets the focus to e.g. infinity it is about 0.5 sec.
On the 808 one can half-press the shutter button to get focus and then the picture is taken almost immediately when it is pressed fully. Without a shutter button, Samsung don’t have that option – or at least I can’t see it anywhere. Maybe continuous focus is possible.
I think the challenge for the phone makers is to make the screen big (currently fashionable) while keeping it thin (currently fashionable). The 808 dates back to another era when phones were smaller and it is almost 2x fatter and that takes care of the camera size.
I just bought another Nikon Compact, looks like 8 cameras were not enough … But the S9900 really convinced me: 25-500 mm optical zoom with very good stabilization, WIFI and GPS and a 16.8 MP sensor with pretty good characteristics. And i think € 270 is not too expensive for that.
I might buy something like that too, if I can’t get used to the S6. That would be a massive step backwards, giving up a great camera just to get a browser on which I can do stuff like develop and file flight plans!
However, the S9900 doesn’t do RAW. I would never buy a camera (that isn’t a phone) which doesn’t do RAW. Most of the features in Lightroom are wasted. If I was getting something in that format I would maybe get a Canon G7X, though that costs a lot more than yours did.
