Maybe you’ve heard of pixel binninga photographic technique used by recent mobile phones, especially in cameras with many megapixels of resolution. What is the pixel binning? Why are you interested in taking the best photos in bad lighting and environmental conditions?
We explain it to you in the easiest way possible.
What is the pixel binning
He pixel binning is a photographic technique that groups the pixels of your mobile camera four by four to take better photographs when conditions are not good. For example, when there is little light.
Why does pixel binning improve photos in low light conditions?
To understand why the pixel binning is becoming fashionable in mobile photography and why more and more phones include it, we have to explain a little what pixels are.
As you know, your mobile camera has megapixels. A megapixel is a thousand pixels and you may have heard that the more the camera has, the better. This is normally the case, although a good photo not only depends on the number of pixels, but also on the quality of the sensor and the other elements of the camera in general. Therefore, quality cameras, but with fewer megapixels, take better photos than others that have more.
These pixels are the points that determine the resolution of an image (the more, the better) and are physical elements of your camera sensor that capture light in the photograph. For this to be good, it needs that light and, The larger the sensor pixels, the more light they can capture.
That is to say, the ideal is to have many megapixels in the camera and, furthermore, for them to be large.
What happens on phones? That, since they are small sensors (to fit in the mobile), the pixels of the sensors must also be small. Nobody likes their phone’s camera to be gigantic like a type one. reflex.
Being smaller, these pixels capture less light. Thats why he pixel binning groups the pixels of your camera four by four, making them larger. What does this achieve? They capture more light and detail as they are larger, making better photos in dark conditions..
In this way, when the situation is not ideal, the pixel binning It allows you to take brighter images with less noise.
What are the disadvantages of pixel binning?
You have probably noticed a detail, if the pixels of your camera are grouped four by four with this technique to make them larger, how many pixels does the resolution remain? Well is reduced to a quarter.
That is, if you have a 32 megapixel camera, when using the pixel binning, your camera will be 8 megapixels. Captures more light in worse conditions, but It also lowers the resolution of the photograph.
Thats why he pixel binning It is appearing with new cameras of 48 megapixels or more, and manufacturers are introducing those kinds of sensors more often. Even if you use the pixel binningthe 48 mpx camera will remain at 12 mpx resolution, which is still quite good in many situations.
This technology has been working on Android for a while (Google uses it in its Pixel 3 phones, for example, just like Huawei or Samsung). In cameras with more megapixels you will find it more and more often, even in phones that are not very expensive, like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7.
In fact, some manufacturers give this technique other names (Samsung calls it Tetracellfor example, but it is pixel binning) and it will be something that, very soon, we will all use often.
So now you know, for those photos with a lot of noise and little detail at night, the solution is the pixel binning.
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