You could have 100 zillion gabillion pixels and it won't make a good photo if you don't have optics good enough to take a shot that's any better at that resolution. How are they going to fit (and pay for) a lens of sufficient quality in a cell phone to make 41 megapixels any better than 6-8MP?? Typical geek think -- improving the specs on the digital electronic stuff will somehow make a better product without thinking about the mechanical, real-world, meat-space parts of the equation.
Perhaps, but I’m thinking that if the electronics are capable, the mechanics will follow.
Exactly. After a threshold, the quality and size of the lens the dominant factor in picture quality.
Their real problem in comparison to other phones isn’t the optics, but the sensors. The smaller the sensor cells get, the more noise they produce. That Canon they use for comparison has a 36×24mm sensor size, about the size of good-old 35mm film. High-end phone cameras like the iPhone have around 4.5x3.4mm sensors, less than 1/50th the sensor area of that 21 MP DSLR. Nokia is packing twice the sensor cells in that tiny area, unless a huge chunk of the phone’s space is dedicated to the camera sensor.
Some of the best digital photos I ever took were with an old Sony Mavica that used a floppy disk for storage. Could take only 14 pictures per disk on high-res, so obviously the images were about 100k.
But some were very good indeed, even when projected.