DJI Mavic 3 v.s. Samsung S21 Ultra - tele camera image quality comparison

[SkywalkerFeng]

DJI Mavic 3 has a 7X tele camera, with 162mm lens, f/4.4 aperture, and 12MP, 1/2" sensor.

Samsung S21 Ultra has a 10X tele camera, with 240mm lens, f/4.9 aperture, and 10MP, 1/3.24" sensor. This is one of the best tele cameras to date on a mobile phone.

Samsung just released an Expert Raw tool, allowing user to save tele camera image as RAW files. Interestingly, the RAW files has the same resolution as Mavic 3's 7x tele camera (4000x3000, 12MP).

Sadly, Mavic 3's 7x tele camera can only produce JPG files, not RAW.

DJI's tele camera has a shorter focal length (162mm v.s. 240mm), but 62% bigger sensor (1/2" v.s. 1/3.24"). Both cameras have a stabilization system. The rest of the specs are very similar, if not the same.

Out of the curiosity, I tried shooting the same scene with both cameras, to see what are the differences between the two.

To make comparison easier to the eyes, I did some post-processing to Samsung's RAW file, to match the look and feel of DJI's JPG file.

Some key takeaway:

1) DJI's tele camera produces a sharper, more detailed image. This is probably the biggest surprise of this comparison.
2) DJI's tele camera image has a more neutral color presentation.
3) DJI's gimbal stabilization system did an amazing job, enable the tele camera to shoot sharp images at 162mm focal length with 1/15 sec exposure, in windy condition.

It is a real shame that DJI disabled the RAW image option for this tele camera, which could have so much more potential.

Full image:


100% zoom-in:

 

[wco81]

Not a terribly useful comparison.

Samsung has a smaller sensor, though I don't know if they're using Google or their own computational photography algorithms to compensate for the small sensor in low light.

 

[EsaT]

1) DJI's tele camera produces a sharper, more detailed image. This is probably the biggest surprise of this comparison.

Even if you had perfect (=impossible) aberration free optics that Samsung's flea sized sensor is simply horribly diffraction limited.
At f-ratio of that lens Airy disk's size is around 6.5-7 µm, while sensor's pixel size is 1.22µm.

Also at such slow f-ratio for sensor size pixels receive very little light, meaning their SNR sucks more than Hoover.
So no surprise that Samsung photo has also what looks like signs of strong noise removal, which also always washes details away.

 

[CanadaDrone]

Not a terribly useful comparison.

Samsung has a smaller sensor, though I don't know if they're using Google or their own computational photography algorithms to compensate for the small sensor in low light.

Samsung uses their own algorithms but they are all more/less a variation on the same principles Google uses. They all take multiple exposures and use them to create an HDR, lower noise (because noise occurs randomly, the more photos you stack, the lower the noise), and reduce blur.

The 1/2" sensor in the M3 has more than double the area of the sensor in the S21 Ultra's 10X tele camera. As someone already pointed out above, a 10MP 1/3.24" sensor at F4.9 is very much diffraction limited and isn't going to perform anywhere near its maximum potential.

 

[TnDronePilot]

Samsung's flea sized sensor