The main issue, as far as I understand it, is that the tiny sensor and tiny lens at some point just end up limiting the effective resolution. You can capture more pixels, but you never really increase the actual effective resolution of the end product. At that point you're not accomplishing much more than scaling up a lower resolution picture.
The "computational photography" usually ends up just vastly over-doing the sharpening and creating artifacts, and leaving weirdly smooth gaps where there was nothing to sharpen but the camera completely failed to pick up detail.
Just a couple random photos I grabbed from a day I took my kid to the park, but not necessarily like... scientific-paper worthy examples: https://imgur.com/a/7bn8W5S
One's taken with my iPhone 12 Pro, one with a Nikon D70.
Mainly, though, I base this off of trying to print any of the photos I've taken, and maybe someone else can hop in and explain this for me. I could be way off base here.
Printing photos from my iPhone at 4x6 they all look like someone took a really soft or slightly out-of-focus photo, applied way too much sharpening, and printed it. Printing a photo from my D70 generally still looks crisp and natural. Even if I blow it up beyond the actual resolution, it looks pixelated... not soft and then sharpened. This is even though the iPhone has twice the resolution of the D70.
Maybe we should measure resolution in TV lines per image height instead of pixels. It sounds like an archaic measurement but then all the clever processing tricks and dodgy pixel counting wouldn't hide the true resolution.
The main issue, as far as I understand it, is that the tiny sensor and tiny lens at some point just end up limiting the effective resolution. You can capture more pixels, but you never really increase the actual effective resolution of the end product. At that point you're not accomplishing much more than scaling up a lower resolution picture.
The "computational photography" usually ends up just vastly over-doing the sharpening and creating artifacts, and leaving weirdly smooth gaps where there was nothing to sharpen but the camera completely failed to pick up detail.
Just a couple random photos I grabbed from a day I took my kid to the park, but not necessarily like... scientific-paper worthy examples: https://imgur.com/a/7bn8W5S
One's taken with my iPhone 12 Pro, one with a Nikon D70.
Mainly, though, I base this off of trying to print any of the photos I've taken, and maybe someone else can hop in and explain this for me. I could be way off base here.
Printing photos from my iPhone at 4x6 they all look like someone took a really soft or slightly out-of-focus photo, applied way too much sharpening, and printed it. Printing a photo from my D70 generally still looks crisp and natural. Even if I blow it up beyond the actual resolution, it looks pixelated... not soft and then sharpened. This is even though the iPhone has twice the resolution of the D70.