Camera quality is garbage when zooming

[Jackhklee]

Here's a photo of me taking a photo of my friend's spanish paper that was homework standing a foot and a half away and it comes out in terrible quality. I zoomed around 60%. Photo size (rear) 4:3 (12M) 4032x3024.

 

[mj0528]

Yea, any zoom is crap it seems

 

[chanchan05]

Zooming on a digital camera does nothing to improve quality. It's just basically cropping the photo then blowing up the pixels. You need optical zoom which only I think the Note 8 has for Samsung phones.

Point is, never use zoom unless there's no other choice. You may also have to alter manual settings to get clear pictures when zooming.

 

[Mr_Spencer]

Ur expectations obviously exceed the capabilities of digital zoom on a smartphone camera. Zooming without a telephoto lens/optical zoom actually causes lesser quality pics.

 

[jeffmd]

Looks like a photography starter course should be in your curriculum in the future.

#1a indoors is considered low light, you may not realise it but your ISO is real high, this introduced noise.

#1b . however the camera app doesn't want to look like complete crap so it balances the ISO setting with a longer shutter time. This adds considerable fuzzyness for photos taken by hand.

#2 you are taking the picture at an angle, not only does this needlessly distort the text but light reflecting off the lead washes out the handwriting. overall you have alot of wasted space here.

 

[anon(7901790)]

That's because the S8/S8+ and many other phones use digital zoom, which just crops the image. Most phones don't have optical zoom.

 

[HULKchampion]

To be fair. Majority, if not all digital zoom is crap quality on smart phone devices.

 

[chanchan05]

To be fair. Majority, if not all digital zoom is crap quality on smart phone devices.

Meh. Even actual digital cameras have crap digital zoom. I got a 14mp Sony Cybershot here to prove that.

 

[Jackhklee]

I never had this issue with my IPhone 5s surprisingly.. I always zoom, that's how I give and transfer answers to help others with notes.

 

[chanchan05]

I never had this issue with my IPhone 5s surprisingly.. I always zoom, that's how I give and transfer answers to help others with notes.

If you're doing digital zoom, you may want to adjust focus and your distance. There's a lot of different factors at play here and there's also the difference in fixed focal length of the cameras of the 5s and your current phone. That means you can't just do the same things without a little adjustment in terms of either your distance from the object or the software tweaks to get the same image quality. There's also how the digital zoom is processed. Different cameras have different default software presets. iPhone camera software tend to have higher contrast by default so text is clearer in software processing. Of course you can always toggle this in settings, or use a dedicated app for taking pictures of text.

Samsung's cameras used to have a text mode, but they removed it and launched an app in the Galaxy Store called Optical Reader. It's settings are specifically for taking pictures of text and has options to convert multiple pictures into one pdf file. It's got nice capabilities but I find it clunky where after taking pictures you have to deliberately choose to export it as either jpg or pdf before exiting the app, or else you lose all the pics you took.

 

[matther22xdroid]

I never had this issue with my IPhone 5s surprisingly.. I always zoom, that's how I give and transfer answers to help others with notes.

Use something like this to achieve what you are trying to do.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intsig.camscanner&hl=en
or
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.photos.scanner&hl=en

Zoom is crap on every phone, believe it or not even on your iPhone zoom is crap.

 

[Jackhklee]

Thanks guy for the information

 

[Wiggum333]

If we're talking about taking pics of documents, then another option instead of the Optical Reader app is one of the PDF apps like Tiny Scanner. This app allows you to take pics of documents within the app and turn them into PDF's instantly. The app removes all shadows/shade from the white part of the paper, and then clears up all the text and makes it look like you basically scanned the document with a real scanner. You can also use a pic from your phone and convert it to a PDF, so you'll have both options (the pic and the PDF) to use depending on how you want to send the file to someone.

 

[PowrDroid]

If we're talking about taking pics of documents, then another option instead of the Optical Reader app is one of the PDF apps like Tiny Scanner. This app allows you to take pics of documents within the app and turn them into PDF's instantly. The app removes all shadows/shade from the white part of the paper, and then clears up all the text and makes it look like you basically scanned the document with a real scanner. You can also use a pic from your phone and convert it to a PDF, so you'll have both options (the pic and the PDF) to use depending on how you want to send the file to someone.

This function is built into Google Drive. Open Drive, tap the plus button in the lower right corner, tap scan, center the page in the viewfinder, take the picture. If it looks good, save it. Sometimes the auto crop function cuts off part of the page. In that case retake the scan from slightly further away.

 

[accursedvenom]

Here's a picture I just took using pro mode on my S8. Zoomed in and adjusted iso, shutter speed, and white balance.

 

[Jackhklee]

Haha TWD, great show.. I think my problem was the lighting, maybe... When I zoom, it gets all fuzzy too quickly... My iPhone 5s got fuzzy after I zoomed in a lot more.. All I really care about is the ability to zoom in on a worksheet with writing on it and take a photo of it in less than 3 seconds (That's what I do in school, I do half of the homework and my partner does half of it and we give each other answers). I think the lead of the pencil on the paper is the issue..