48mp is bad

[Darkabaz]

Hello all, after a few test flights I come to the conclusion that the 48mp mode gives really bad images. It's okay when you film something up close, but as soon as you make a real cityscape from above, the details are really bad. And that's what (I buy my) drone for. What is your opinion on the 48mp function? For example, if you put walls on a photo, the details are almost not recognizable. Curious about your opinion on this quad bayer lens

 

[Phantomrain.org]

Hello all, after a few test flights I come to the conclusion that the 48mp mode gives really bad images. It's okay when you film something up close, but as soon as you make a real cityscape from above, the details are really bad. And that's what (I buy my) drone for. What is your opinion on the 48mp function? For example, if you put walls on a photo, the details are almost not recognizable. Curious about your opinion on this quad bayer lens

Can you post example , will compare to other 48 mx Pics I have.

Phantomrain.org
Gear to fly in the Rain. Float on the Water.

 

[wco81]

Is there a native mode, just 12 Mp or whatever the native resolution of the main camera?

What is it doing with 48 Mp, making one giant photo from several shot or binning/stacking several of them together, like phones are doing?

BTW, does this drone even output RAW images or do they reserve RAW for more pricey drones?

 

[miemo]

Hello all, after a few test flights I come to the conclusion that the 48mp mode gives really bad images. It's okay when you film something up close, but as soon as you make a real cityscape from above, the details are really bad. And that's what (I buy my) drone for. What is your opinion on the 48mp function? For example, if you put walls on a photo, the details are almost not recognizable. Curious about your opinion on this quad bayer lens

Not my experience at all, esp. Air 3 looks much better than Mini 3 Pro in this regard and even on Mini 3 the 48MP had much more real detail than 12MP (granted, with some artifacts esp. in certain situations - but nothing that would qualify saying “details almost not recognizable”).

 

[waynorth]

I am not suprised that 48 MP can look bad. Photos from the Mini 3 Pro has shown that 48 MP photos can give unpredictable results, with colour artifacts and muddy details. This is because of the quad bayer technology and the interpolation required to get a 48 MP image. Sometimes, in certain conditions, the 48 MP photos can give more details than a 12 MP, but it is unpredictable, and therefore useless.
And note that 12 MP is enough for prints up to 8x10". If you want a larger print some good software for enlarging photos would probably give better results than 48 MP from the camera.

You should post two example photos of the same scene, one 48MP and one 12MP, it would be interesting to see the differences. And please make the raw-files available for download.

 

[Droning on and on...]

In contrast, I was blown away by the detail and artifact-free examples posted here by @miemo in this post (stills), and this post (video).

Pinch-zooming in on my phone, the detail in the shipping cranes is amazing.

Here's one of his images... try zooming in on those cranes yourself:

Look at the detail in the bridge tressles (I cropped and enlarged the above photo):



Perhaps you've got some settings wrong.

 

[Phantomrain.org]

That blue tint is not so good , I hope that is not the case.

Phantomrain.org
Gear to fly in the Rain. Float on the Water and Run Away from Blue tints in Photos.

 

[Droning on and on...]

That blue tint is not so good , I hope that is not the case.

Phantomrain.org
Gear to fly in the Rain. Float on the Water and Run Away from Blue tints in Photos.

@miemo says they were RAW, corrected with his usual workflow in LR.

So I'm sure there's plenty of room to work with in post.

 

[Darkabaz]

In contrast, I was blown away by the detail and artifact-free examples posted here by @miemo in this post (stills), and this post (video).

Pinch-zooming in on my phone, the detail in the shipping cranes is amazing.

Here's one of his images... try zooming in on those cranes yourself:

Look at the detail in the bridge tressles (I cropped and enlarged the above photo):

View attachment 166588

Perhaps you've got some settings wrong.

Which settings? I have sharpness and denoise both to 0.

 

[Droning on and on...]

Which settings? I have sharpness and denoise both to 0.

I have no idea. I don't have an Air 3 yet.

Just tossing out an idea, as others have captured spectacular results, stills and video. Not just @miemo.

 

[Ridgeback65]

Which settings? I have sharpness and denoise both to 0

Please post samples. All I have seen seem to be exceptional (but bummed they are only 12mp native).

 

[HoozierDroneDaddy]

Original Dobo has some good testing on the video and photos. You should check his YT videos.

 

[Droning on and on...]

Original Dobo has some good testing on the video and photos. You should check his YT videos.

His images and DC Rainmaker's were some of the first I saw and they blew me away.

 

[Cymruflyer]

Remember that 48MB are very large files and the more MB a file has in a photo, if shot in poor light, the more noise there will be, compared to say a 12 or 24MB file. You can't have it both ways in photography, unfortunately.

Larger files in MB gives more details yes and will make better enlarged images compared to a 12MB image but when in low light or not set up correctly for exposure, a large MB file will also give you more noise.

 

[Droning on and on...]

Remember that 48MB are very large files and the more MB a file has in a photo, if shot in poor light, the more noise there will be, compared to say a 12 or 24MB file. You can't have it both ways in photography, unfortunately.

Larger files in MB gives more details yes and will make better enlarged images compared to a 12MB image but when in low light or not set up correctly for exposure, a large MB file will also give you more noise.

As usual, it's quite a bit more complicated than that. Time for some droning on and on...

File size has nothing to do with noise. Nothing at all. I can take two low light images with the same camera, one floating shutter speed while adjusting ISO as low as possible, and another floating ISO and adjusting the shutter to be as long as possible, while keeping proper exposure.

The RAW output file size of both these captures will be identical, but the latter will be obviously much more noisy.

I think where you're confused is in compression to a format like JPG... a noisy image won't compress as well, so will be larger. It's not the file size and resolution that's resulting in noise, it's the noise resulting in poor compression, leading to a larger file.

File size also has nothing to do with image quality directly. In the case of RAW images, there is a direct, linear correlation between resolution – literally number or pixels – and file size. In fact it's directly proportional.

However for compressed formats size depends greatly on how compressible the image is. A night shot with a lit subject occupying 30% of the frame, the rest being black, will compress a lot more without any loss of quality and resolution than the same image framed the same shot at noon. The night shot might be less than half thr size and be clearer with more detail than the noon shot.

 

[waynorth]

Remember that 48MB are very large files and the more MB a file has in a photo, if shot in poor light, the more noise there will be, compared to say a 12 or 24MB file. You can't have it both ways in photography, unfortunately.

Larger files in MB gives more details yes and will make better enlarged images compared to a 12MB image but when in low light or not set up correctly for exposure, a large MB file will also give you more noise.

No, not necessarily.
To compare two files with different files sizes you need to equalize them, resample one of them down to the others file size, or upsample the other one to the larger size.
When you upsample the 12MP file to 48MP the noise will be coarser and far more visible.
And when you downsample a 48MP file to 12MP the noise will be smoother and less visible.
And there are many more variables at play. The same sensor size with 12 or 48MP will have vastly different light receiving characteristics. With 12MP each photodiode is much larger than the diodes in the 48MP. And larger photodiodes captures far more light than small ones.
Then there is the quad-Bayer design, turning a 48MP sensor into a 12MP with pixelbinning. Or using interpolation to make a 48MP image - which is not a "true" 48MP photo.
Sorry, but there is no simple answer to "what is best".

 

[Droning on and on...]

Or using interpolation to make a 48MP image - which is not a "true" 48MP photo.

You've referred to this "true" image/sensor before, and I've asked you to explain what that means, don't recall an answer. Could you explain what you mean by this?

Is it your understanding that interpolation is not used in constructing the image from a 48MP quad-Bayer sensor capturing in 12MP mode?

 

[waynorth]

You've referred to this "true" image/sensor before, and I've asked you to explain what that means, don't recall an answer. Could you explain what you mean by this?

Is it your understanding that interpolation is not used in constructing the image from a 48MP quad-Bayer sensor capturing in 12MP mode?

Yes, or at least another kind of interpolation. (there is always some interpolation going on in an image sensor).
A 48MP quad-Bayer sensor does indeed have 48 millions photodiodes, but the bayer filter in front of them looks like the filter on a 12MP sensor.
The Bayer filter in front of a 48MP sensor should have one colour in front of each photodiode to be a "true" 48MP sensor. But a quad-Bayer filter has one colour covering 4 photodiodes, in a 2x2 pattern. This gives a good quality 12MP photo, with 4 photodiodes capturing the same colour from the bayer filter. A very good idea.
But to make a 48MP photo it has to do some interpolation because one colour in the filter covers 4 photodiodes.
This is why we sometimes see colour artifacts or other strange colour patterns in 48MP photos from these sensors.

 

[Droning on and on...]

Yes, or at least another kind of interpolation. (there is always some interpolation going on in an image sensor).
A 48MP quad-Bayer sensor does indeed have 48 millions photodiodes, but the bayer filter in front of them looks like the filter on a 12MP sensor.
The Bayer filter in front of a 48MP sensor should have one colour in front of each photodiode to be a "true" 48MP sensor. But a quad-Bayer filter has one colour covering 4 photodiodes, in a 2x2 pattern. This gives a good quality 12MP photo, with 4 photodiodes capturing the same colour from the bayer filter. A very good idea.
But to make a 48MP photo it has to do some interpolation because one colour in the filter covers 4 photodiodes.
This is why we sometimes see colour artifacts or other strange colour patterns in 48MP photos from these sensors.

Not bad, but here's where you're going astray. This is another installment of me droning on and on, but if you want to really understand this stuff, it'll be worth it.

A non-quad sensor still has a Bayer filter over the photodiodes, and each captures the light intensity of a single color, R, G, or B.

Each of these locations becomes an RGB pixel after the missing two channels are reconstructed by using neighboring pixels that captured that missing channel, via an interpolation algorithm. The simplest is nearest-neighbor averaging, and usually produces a decent result, but there are all manner of complications in the image that can defeat simple averaging and produce artifacts.

This is called demosaicing or debayering, and is a part of capturing images from all digital cameras (with some esoteric exceptions we'll ignore, as they're irrelevant to this discussion).

There are more sophisticated reconstruction algorithms that do a better job, some of the best being "content-aware", analyzing the content of the image and adjusting how it determines the 2 missing channels at each pixel.

I explain all this to make the following point: The recovered channels have an error range (error bars) that can be mathematically calculated. A non-quad image has errors at every pixel for the two reconstructed channels, just like the quad-Bayer capture does. The errors are just larger, and this is critically important – for the same demosaicing algorithm — than for the simple Bayer filter.

So you can see where the problem is with the idea of a "true" 48MP image... what does that mean? Error-free isn't possible. Is there a particular error threshold you have in mind? I'm sure you see the problem.

The idea of a "true 48MP image" gets even more meaningless if you allow for different demosaicing algorithms. Suppose you apply a very sophisticated, compute-intensive demosaicing algorithm to the 48MP quad-bayer capture, and the simplest nearest-neighbor algorithm to a capture from a theoretical camera with the only difference being an ordinary Bayer filter instead of a quad.

The error bars for the missing channels can be less for the quad image than for the non-quad, resulting in a higher resolution higher color fidelity result than the non-quad capture, if it uses a far more sophisticated demosaicing algorithm.

Which one is the "true" 48MP image?

When Sony introduced the quad-bayer in 2018, demosaicing algorithms were all designed for a 2x2 bayer pattern, so didn't do the greatest job minimizing errors. Hence the reputation quad-bayer sensors acquired, and deservedly so.

Fast forward to 2023. A lot of R&D has improved quad-bayer demosaicing – a lot. Computing power has advanced much too, making it possible to do much more than simple averaging in real time in GPUs, and even to some extent on-chip with some higher-end sensors. As we see with the new A3, quad-Bayer captures are getting nearly as good as simple Bayer captures, even better if they can be demosaiced by a sophisticated algorithm.

If we define "true" to mean a pixel where all 3 color channels are captured directly, with no reconstruction, the closest would be a 48MP sensor with a regular Bayer filter capturing in 12MP, a 2x2 cluster of photodiodes representing a single pixel but with the RGGB Bayer filter pattern over them. Then, red, green, and blue get directly captured for the "pixel" and there is no demosaicing. 48MP captures would still require demosaicing, but with the more typical error size for the reconstructed channels.

Why use a quad-Bayer filter then in the first place? Low-light performance, which sensor manufacturers have determined is a bigger gain than eliminating channel reconstruction errors, and can more easily be addressed computationally than data that simply isn't there at all in low light due to limited sensitivity and dynamic range of the sensor.

The other reason, sadly, is resolution wars.

 

[ShootingStills]

Hello all, after a few test flights I come to the conclusion that the 48mp mode gives really bad images. It's okay when you film something up close, but as soon as you make a real cityscape from above, the details are really bad. And that's what (I buy my) drone for. What is your opinion on the 48mp function? For example, if you put walls on a photo, the details are almost not recognizable. Curious about your opinion on this quad bayer lens

Hi there,

I am a photographer and currently use the Mini 3 Pro, and might buy the Air, I dont think the Mini 3 Pro is perfect but the images are definitely not 'bad'.

Here is one, unedited from a recent trip, put through Adobe 'Raw details and Denoise'

Hopefully you can see this, I had to save at 8/12 JPG quality to be able to upload.