Whenever you walk into electronics store and try to look for a digital camera, the first thing they will want you to notice is the megapixel count. The same case applies to smartphones. More often than not, the only information about the camera of a particular smartphone model, is the number of megapixels. And they reach ridiculous numbers. Meizu MX4 costs 79€ and its camera's resolution is whopping 27 megapixels. However, the quality of photos it produces, is inferior to some 8 mpx cameras. How is that possible?
The answer is fairly straightforward. The number of megapixels simply means how many pixels (1 by 1 dots) make up the image. If you are reading this blog on pretty much any consumer-grade smartphone or monitor, its resolution is 'Full HD 1080p'. It means that there are 1920 pixels horizontally and 1080 pixels vertically. 1920 multiplied by 1080 gives us 2073600 pixels. Sounds like a lot, but as you may remember from your math or physics classes, the 'mega' suffix means 1 million (1 000 000). Therefore Full HD image that consists of just over 2 millions of pixels, is a 2 megapixel image. If you have had too much money and bought yourself any device with 4K display, your image is just over 8 megapixels. That's still much less than pretty much any modern smartphone camera.
Those pixel counts mattered 15 years ago, in the age of upgrading from 0.3 mpx to 1 mpx camera. Nowadays it's just marketing. Different parameters of the smartphone camera, such as aperture, focal length and especially image sensor are far more important than megapixel count.
So, is there any way to be able to determine quality of any smartphone camera without spending most of your life doing that?
To some extent yes. The most differentiating factor in modern smartphones is the image sensor (a part that gathers the light from other optics and transforms it into actual picture). In most cases, I would recommend avoiding unbranded image sensors, and checking reviews of the branded ones.
Apart from that, there are also rankings based on independent tests, such as those performed by https://dxomark.com/category/mobile-reviews/
However, the only way to really assess the image quality of any particular phone, is to have a look at sample pictures. Obviously from independent sources (such as GSM Arena or Kimovil), NOT from marketing materials prepared by the manufacturer. And the best way to compare image quality between 2 smartphone cameras, is just typing into YouTube something along the lines of 'Redmi Note 5 vs Huawei Mate 10 Lite camera'.
But at least you don't have to watch every comparison videos for every single device. If you want to compare a smartphone with unbranded image sensor (that is not featured in any rankings) against the smartphone with Sony IMX sensor that scored third place in dxomark ranking, you can save yourself the trouble and make a very good presumption which one is better. Just don't base this presumption on megapixel count.
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