Mark Lyn­der­say

Let's face it. Your cell­phone was nev­er de­signed to be a cam­era. The things that make it a good phone are the ex­act op­po­site to the at­trib­ut­es tra­di­tion­al­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with a use­ful pho­to­graph­ic in­stru­ment.

Peo­ple us­ing a mo­bile phone gen­er­al­ly want some­thing small, flat and light while pho­tog­ra­phers want some­thing hefty and ro­bust that they can grip com­fort­ably.

Where these two in­ter­ests meet, com­pro­mis­es abound, as any­one try­ing to hold a cell­phone steady in low light al­ready knows.

But the biggest is­sue fac­ing any­one tak­ing pic­tures with a cell­phone is the size of the im­age gath­er­ing sen­sors used in such de­vices.

At 4.69 * 3.53 mm, the sen­sor in a Galaxy S4 is on­ly about 60 per cent of the size of the sen­sor in the Canon S100, a pop­u­lar pock­etable dig­i­tal cam­era.

Both sen­sors cap­ture rough­ly the same num­ber of megapix­els worth of light in­for­ma­tion, but the S4 (and sim­i­lar mo­bile phones) us­es small­er pho­to­sites to trans­late light in­to bits of da­ta.

The small­er the pho­to­sites are, the less ac­cu­rate the light gath­er­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties of the sen­sor.

That's why pro­fes­sion­als still buy bulky medi­um for­mat cam­eras and pay a stag­ger­ing sum for the priv­i­lege. You can see a size com­par­i­son of sen­sors here and do your own com­par­isons: http://ow.ly/mE8ms.

Mo­bile phone pho­tog­ra­phy didn't re­al­ly take off un­til some­one rather clev­er­ly turned the fail­ings of the small sen­sors used in phones from a prob­lem in­to a virtue.

Tools like In­sta­gram changed the con­ver­sa­tion about pic­tures on a mo­bile phone from an aes­thet­ic of vi­su­al fi­deli­ty to an ef­fects laden ex­trav­a­gan­za that's more Hol­ga than Has­sel­blad.

A cell­phone is now ex­pect­ed to pro­duce grit­ty lo-fi im­ages in­stead of the type of pho­tographs that we've come to ex­pect from more for­mal im­age­mak­ing gear.

Over time, and dri­ven by the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the fil­ter in­fused soft­ware In­sta­gram, such cap­tures have come to be de­scribed as "In­sta­grammed."

Amer­i­can rap­per Rick Ross has a very rude song about the sub­ject, so it's of­fi­cial­ly a part of youth cul­ture.

Be­yond In­sta­gram, which is re­al­ly a whole ecosys­tem for shar­ing these heav­i­ly-styled pho­tographs ef­fort­less­ly, vir­tu­al­ly all the good soft­ware for work­ing with im­ages was to be found on the iPhone.

Among the of­fer­ings on the iOS plat­form are tools that al­low you to cap­ture the un­com­pressed RAW da­ta from the de­vice's sen­sor (http://jag.gr/645pro/) and cre­ate DNG files from the da­ta (http://dig­i­tal­neg­a­tiveapp.com/).

For any­one who's used to the rich­ness of raw sen­sor da­ta from a DSLR, this is pret­ty huge.

The sen­sors in smart­phones are tiny things and pret­ty lim­it­ed in what they can cap­ture, so be­ing able to har­vest all the qual­i­ty they can of­fer is a ma­jor step for­ward in mak­ing these de­vices feel more like tra­di­tion­al im­age cap­ture de­vices.

These ad­vance­ments are hap­pen­ing ex­act­ly when the qual­i­ty of mod­ern cam­era sen­sors has moved be­yond mar­gin­al to pro­fes­sion­al­ly ac­cept­able.

The im­ages I get off an S4, for ex­am­ple, are bet­ter than those that I get off a pro­fes­sion­al full-frame DSLR made a decade ago.

This year's crop of mo­bile phones in par­tic­u­lar make it pos­si­ble to take ex­cel­lent pho­tographs, some of which ri­val those from more pro­fes­sion­al equip­ment in good light.

The sen­sor sizes on to­day's cam­era phones are rough­ly equal, if still ir­ri­tat­ing­ly tiny, so which de­vices are best for pure pho­tog­ra­phy in a mo­bile phone form fac­tor?

?Next week: A com­par­i­son and Pho­to­shop for mo­bile phones.