I disagree, it's just Galaxy A50 being Galaxy A50. I have some old photos from Note 3 Neo and they look way superior than what A50 could ever shit out. Here they are:
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I don't think that lacking detail is excusable by poor sensor, it's post processing. Note 3 Neo takes way more detailed, more natural looking and just superior images. That's 2014 phone. A50 just doesn't have a valid excuse to take photos worse than old Note. Even more so, when both phones costs same 300 Euros. Skimping on sensor? Nah, it's just that Samsung has awful post-processing. In fact, even S10 had noticeably the same shit processing and pictures from it have similar flaws as in A50. S10 obviously had somewhat better dynamic range and some other good features, but not processing.
First off, I think your comparison is inherently problematic: while comparing old v. new is perfectly fine, comparing old semi-flagship (well, cut-down flagship) with new(ish) midranger is more problematic. Also, the A50 is from 2019, which is around the time when pixel-binning and heavier processing was starting to trickle down to lower end models. That's pretty much a worst case scenario, as it's essentially a first-gen attempt at "how can we do these new things, but really cheaply?"
Secondly, all of those shots are significantly simpler scenes than the landscape you posted previously though - sharper contrasts, larger details, fewer areas of minute texture/pattern, less dynamic range. It's clear that the Note has less processing done, but whether that's better? That's debatable. Some more examples:
- There's clear processing in that GPU shot - look how much sharper the text is than the SMDs in the same focal plane (directly to the left or the lower right of the die). That tells us that this camera likely has a selective sharpening algorithm that prioritizes text and clear lines, but skips over shapes it's not as sure of (or the camera has a lens with a very tight sweet spot for sharpness).
- The shell/mussel shot also has some very heavy-handed noise reduction leading to a lot of detail loss - the intersecting twigs and the dark leaves beneath them at the lower left of the shell are a smudgy mess, for example.
- The branches of the background trees in the left of your snowy landscape are essentially reduced to grey-brown clouds.
- At the same time, there are clear oversharpening artefacts in-between the twigs and branches elsewhere, they're just harder to spot as the natural contrast there is higher to begin with.
Of course, all of this requires zooming in to really spot - but that is again at least in part down to these being far less challenging scenes. The smudgy greens in the A50 landscape are highly visible because they are large fields, centrally placed in the image, in bright colours.There are also some pretty fundamental differences between the cameras:
- 25mp (binned 2x1 to 12.2mp) vs. 8mp, with the 8mp also having the benefit of a less wide lens. I.e. the A50 can likely capture more detail, but will be noisier. (Sadly I can't find any info on the sensor or its size for the Note 3 Neo.) Noise+small pixels+early binning algorithms = higher need for noise reduction, and that noise reduction is more likely to erase detail.
- f2.6 v. f1.7 apertures - the latter lets in more light, but the former is likely to result in sharper images (though depending on sensor size it might also be small enough to cause diffraction issues - small sensors mean a small usable range of apertures).
- The Note 3 Neo being a premium (if cut-down, not quite flagship) phone vs. the A50 being a lower midrange model likely says something about the quality of the lenses for the cameras - the A50 might have plastic lenses, for example. This is never published, so it's impossible to tell, but it's a possibility.
The A50 also has one clear quality: that landscape has impressive dynamic range, with only small portions of the clouds blown out, and there being an impressive amount of visible detail in the shadow beneath the bench.
I get where you're coming from - the Note 3 Neo shots have a less saturated, more naturalistic, less sharpened look to them, and I also prefer that look. In large part, the A50 is likely skewing towards an "overprocessed" look (i.e. more sharpening, more saturation) because of this being an aesthetic preference of most of its target market (a camera that takes "bright" or "colorful" pictures is a lot easier to sell than one that's "accurate" or "sharp"), but that's again largely down to the market segment. Look at higher end phones, and you'll find
far superior image quality to both of these phones, much sharper optics, more detail, accurate colors, etc. There's no such thing as a perfect phone camera, but some of them are pretty good - and certainly miles ahead of that Note.
As a downscaled example, here is a picture of the night sky at ISO 6400 and a 8s shutter speed at a full 1.8ƒ aperture with a 50mm lens. Try doing that with a phone. Mind you, I scaled this down from the original 6240x4160.
Oh, man, you're making me miss astrophotography. Need to get to somewhere with low light pollution on a clear night this winter. Gorgeous shot too, really shows off the value of that lower aperture - I've been using my f3.5 ultrawide zoom for some astro shots, and ... it's not very good
You actually made me realize I haven't done that with my new(ish) camera, last time around was all the way back in 2017 (using my then nearly 10-year-old Pentax K-x!). Kind of happy with this one, even if it is arguably a noisy and blurry mess and the composition got messed up (composing in -10 degrees in the dark with gloves on without live view? Not easy!)
Edit: wow, that comes out
a lot darker in Firefox than in Lightroom and Windows Photos. Weird. Loses pretty much all the shadow detail :/
I'm not a fan of it. Technically it's a flaw of lenses, but then sometimes it looks interesting, but then you have millions of people not understanding it and soiling its reputation, then you get phone companies scrambling to put random e-waste that they can find to make bokeh cheap, then it starts to look generally trashy and unpleasant, then you have MKBHD being judgmental about what is real bokeh and what is artificial bokeh, then people lose a sight of what is good looking bokeh and if it's even worth it at all... And the last bit is that many people actually liek whole scene in focus, because human eyes do bokeh naturally. It's such a can of worms. I don't usually like it, but when it is done in pleasant way, I have to admit that it looks good. But I wouldn't really seek gear that can pull it off as it barely matters to me. So eh.
