iPhone 14 article Reasons to buy and skip …..”combine four pixels into a single one to produce brighter, more detailed shots”….
As an astrophotographer, who counts each photon I capture, something about that statement stands out. We call that “bin’ing”, when you bin 2x2 (4 pixels to act as 1, it is true that low light performance is increased because you have 4x the surface area to collect photons into a “single pixel well”, improving signal to noise ratio. However, the resolution of the sensor has just been reduced by a factor of 4, since you have every 4 pixels now acting as one, correct ? So what, (if anything) can be said about the difference in “detail”…? You’ve just lost 4 times the detail, right? It’s a good trade off, but you can’t get both at the same time, AFAIK. If there’s some new ADU magic to turn photons into electrical charge, I’d truly like to understand that. I know… always 1 critic in a crowd, but it caught my attention. I appreciate the article as a whole.