Google’s former camera chief isn’t a fan of high megapixel sensors
- Former Google camera director Marc Levoy conducted an interview in which he explains his views on camera technology and Adobe.
- He thinks high megapixel cameras are a bad idea and has been defending pixels with the same sensor for years.
- He said he left Google for Adobe after looking into “falling returns”.
Many phone manufacturers are eager to put more and more megapixels in their cameras, but don’t expect the former head of Google cameras, Marc Levoy, to be enthusiastic about the concept. The recent hiring of Adobe continued with The edge for an interview to explain his stance on cameras and apps, what the future of photography could be, and why he left Google.
Levoy isn’t a huge fan of high megapixel cameras as you might guess based on Pixel’s years of use of 12MP sensors. He is not convinced that it is a good idea “based on the laws of physics” – the denser the number of megapixels, the higher the signal-to-noise ratio. He was also skeptical of pixel binning, where a high-megapixel-resolution sensor combines multiple pixels to produce a lower-resolution shot. The approach makes it “more difficult” to de-mosaic the recording and can create aliasing artifacts such as “zippers,” said the engineer.
Accordingly, Levoy defended Google’s reluctance to switch sensors since the Pixel 3. He argued that the sensor business was “fairly mature” and that improvements were more likely to be “incremental”. In other words, the company couldn’t get much more out of constantly changing sensors.
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Other lenses are “potentially” useful, he said, pointing to the telephoto lens of the Pixel 4 and depth sensors on other phones. However, he emphasized that software was also important and that the two had to work “hand in hand”.
Why did Levoy leave Google? It was about “falling returns,” he said. Less progress has been made in high dynamic range (HDR) photography than in the past. At Adobe, the developer hopes that its universal camera app will give users more control over the output.
In the broader industry, Levoy saw video as the “next battleground.” Software processing is more difficult to use because of the additional computational requirements, and the engineer saw that phone manufacturers were heavily dependent on a range of hardware including processors, graphics systems, digital signal chips, and machine learning components. You may see great advances in getting rid of blown backgrounds and other video problems.
