The Galaxy S9 and its older brother, the Galaxy S9 +, have a new radical camera with adjustable aperture, which is the first of a conventional smartphone. Note that this is not the first on a smartphone: This award goes to Samsung's own W2018, which was launched exclusively in China last year. Technically speaking, we could go back to the Panasonic Lumix DMC-CM1, launched in 2014, but mainly marketed as a camera rather than a smartphone.
So, what is an adjustable opening and what does it matter?
The opening of the lens is simply a hole through which the light passes through the lens and sensor of the camera. The bigger the hole, the more light it can go through. Aperture sizes are measured in diaphragms, and, possibly opposite, smaller numbers correspond to larger apertures and more passing light.
Like the W2018, the Galaxy S9 has a super-bright lens with an aperture of f / 1.5, the largest aperture on any smartphone. This provides a clear advantage in low-light situations where smartphone cameras often have trouble creating a clear picture.
When shooting in bright situations, such as in the middle of the day, many cameras have the opposite problem: too much light. This can overwhelm the sensor and produce a washed image.
The S9 camera tries to avoid this by using a variable size mechanical shutter that can switch between f / 1.5 and f / 2.4. The change to f / 2.4 reduces the amount of light by more than half compared to f / 1.5. The human eye does a similar trick by varying the size of the pupil according to the amount of light available.
Everything is fine, but electronic shutters in smartphones are usually able to alleviate excessively bright conditions by capturing light over a very short period of time. The sensor takes time to respond to incident light. Turning off early reduces the amount of light. For this reason, we do not hear many complaints from smartphone users that they can not take good pictures on sunny days.
Simply reducing the amount of light absorbed is not enough to implement something as complicated as a variable mechanical opening.
However, there are two other important effects that occur when you change the size of the opening. The first is an important difference in the appearance of large aperture images.
A larger aperture such as f / 1.5 causes a greater distinction between the focused or blurred portions of the image. This quality is often desirable in portraits where the subject "jumps" from the background.
However, smartphone lenses are so small that even a 1: 1.5 aperture does not give much of an emergent effect, except extreme close-ups. Here are two camera settings and artificially created effects such as the portrait mode of the iPhone into play.
Therefore, the variable aperture will not dramatically improve the "portrait" effect (although it may give a little more drive to software-based techniques).
As smartphone lens apertures become more prevalent through the use of low light shots, there is an increasing risk of compromising the quality of daytime photography by using an unnecessarily large aperture. This is where the Galaxy S9's variable iris is used to achieve the best possible image quality in a variety of lighting conditions.
We will have to wait for extensive testing before we know if a variable opening offers real improvements or just a marketing gimmick?
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