Just found out my 35mm point and shoot from 1998 takes sharper photos than my phone camera in low light

I was digging through old prints at my parents place and compared a grainy night shot from my Olympus Stylus Epic to a digital one from last week and the film version actually holds more detail, has anyone else noticed this or am I just lucky with that lens?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade477d ago

Buy a cheap daylight-balanced LED panel from Amazon for like $30 and use it as a constant light source with your phone camera. I had the same issue with my Pixel taking soupy low-light shots, so I started using a small LED key light taped to a mini tripod, and now the phone's sharpness actually beats my old Canon point and shoot in dim rooms. Make sure you're manually setting the phone ISO to 100 or 200 too, otherwise the auto mode will jump to 3200 and ruin everything. Your Olympus has a fixed f/2.8 lens, right? That glass is just built different from the tiny plastic elements in a phone module. Have you tried using a desktop camera app that lets you shoot raw on your phone?

brianellis7d ago

Hold up, have you checked what ISO your phone was set to for that shot? I bet a lot of the difference comes down to the phone's aggressive noise reduction, which just smears detail, while the Olympus lets the grain be grain, you know, actual silver crystals rather than plastic-looking pixels. Also, were you maybe comparing a well-exposed film negative to an underexposed digital shot that got auto-brightened? Film has that beautiful latitude where it just holds onto highlights and shadows in its own weird way, something about the dye clouds versus a CMOS sensor struggling to gather photons. I'm curious if the sharpness holds up when you pixel-peep both at 100% on a monitor, or if it's more about that overall "look" and texture that feels more detailed even if it isn't technically resolving more lines.