comparing light for
iPhone 7 Plus and iPhone X
telephoto lens
Toronto. When I first bought a Sony F-828 camera at the end of its production and marketing, I bought my wife a thin, pocket sized Sony point and shoot T7 with a 3:1 Zeiss zoom lens and a 3.3 megapixel sensor. The F-828 had an 8 megapixel sensor and a beautiful Zeiss zoom lens. The camera was massive and heavy. Both took jpeg files and used different batteries and chargers.
The recently announced Apple smartphones (caution: the linked Macworld site has a ton of annoying ads) have a higher pixel rating, two lenses and stabilizing circuitry, plus automatic colour balance, exposure, aperture and speed settings. The camera in the iPhone X is 12 megapixel – twice the size of my decade-plus old F-828 and nearly 4x that in my wife’s T7, The two lenses are about equivalent to a 28mm and 56mm camera lens.
The clever aspect is this: The wide-angle has a larger aperture so if the light is dim and the telephoto is selected, the camera uses a cropped version of an image taken with the wide-angle lens instead!
And anyone who owns a smartphone usually has it with him, ready to snap a family or even a news-worthy photo. So the question is, with smartphones, “who needs a camera today”?
You can learn more on family photos by hearing our December speaker, Dr Jennifer Orpana of the ROM who will speak on Family Photo Archives!
