cameras/phones

Great idea.

The sensor size has a lot to do with that as well, the bigger the pixel in the sensor the more detail/clarity.

Here is a nice Youtube video on hints and tips for Model Railroad Photography from our own Joey Ricard of Trackside Scenery.

Chris, thanks for the youtube as it was very helpfull but I am guessing his phone is somewhat special. Many megapixels? good lens. and features. movie, telephoto etc?

Have tl look into a better phone than the flip I do have.

I have an iPhone 5. I wanted to shoot a POV video, but the phone was too big to fit through a Lionel shed. If I have the budget I might pick up a GoPro video camera around the holidays. They seem very compact and easy to work with.

Check out these OGR member's POVs -- both shot with a GoPro:

Cell phones, regardless of the megapixels, can be hit or miss. I had a Droid Razar Maxxx and it sucked for photos. My wife has a Samsung Galaxy S3 and its great. My new Samsung Note 3 is fabulous. Microsoft was advertising a phone that took the best pictures of any phone out there.... but my question was who buys a phone with picture taking the priority.... obviously some people do  

I've taken some test shots with my iPhone 5 and there are some problems with how the sensor renders the pictures.  Cameras in phones are a selling feature/gimmick.  Like "Laidoffsick" said, its hit or miss.  Squeezing great camera technology into a small space is a stretch.

I have a Nikon D50 DSLR that is rated at 6 megapixels. My cell phone is a Motorola with 10 megs. If the light is good, it really takes a pretty good photo. With the Nikn I can "play" with the exposure more than the phone. There have been times when I wished I had the camera but the cell phone works really well in a crunch.

Dick

I may be wrong, but a photogragher told me that the cell phone and the DSLR pixals are NOT the same. The pixs in the cell phone are smaller than a DSLR camera. To publish in a magazine and enlarge photos a minimum of 10 megapixals is needed. A cell phone would just be to grainy. As long as a cell phone photo is small, as shone above, a cell phone is fine. Stephen

I just recently upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy S4, the photo capability is stunning.

Megapixels mean little or nothing for model railroad photography unless you intend to publish in a quality periodical.

A great stereo source run through two tiny Bluetooth wireless speakers sounds like two tiny speakers. Forget the number of megapixels. It's all about two things, the sensor and the glass. 

if the lens is good and the sensor records all the information accurately with regard to sharpness and color, the number of megapixels needed for a good quality print suitable for a magazine will not exceed 18. If you're blowing it up for Times Square billboards, that is another story. Modern phones can have 40 megapixels. The photos they make cannot compare to a quality DSLR.

Scrapiron: It does matter in model photograghy. Watch the videos or enlarge them to full screen and see how poor and grainy they are. They are not fun to watch enlarged!

Stephen

Keep in mind that there are several levels to the gopro cameras.  The less expensive ones cheap out on the sensor and don't do well indoors.  The top of the line ones are capable of some spectacular video, especially outdoors.

The difference in cell phone cameras verses a DSLR brings to mind the old hot rod axiom, "there's no replacement for displacement."  if you have two cameras with the same megapixel count, the one from a DSLR will have less electronic noise and artifacts than the phone camera.  Bigger is better!

I just got lucky and was able to get a free upgrade + acttivation to a Samsung Galaxy S5. It's got the best picture quality of any of my cameras including my Sony Camcorder and Nikon Coolpix.

The only disadvantage it has is in it's lack of remote operation mounted on a tripod.

nw2124,

You will never need more than 18 megapixels for model railroad photography under any circumstances if all you are doing is print for magazine and certainly not for online photography. In most cases, 6 megapixels are more than enough for online work. If you shoot in RAW, use a tripod with the lens stopped down, proper lighting, and good focus technique, megapixels mean very little. The photos are poor if the technique is poor or if the ISO has been raised and no "noise" is filtered out.

The entire megapixel frenzy is totally misleading. the photo below was shot using a camera with 18 megapixels and 6 would have been enough.

Don't fall for megapixel hype. Simply put, think of a light sensor as a bucket . The one in your cell phone is a very small bucket compared to the one in your DSLR. Each bucket can hold only so much light regardless of how many pixels it's divided into. A 10 megapixel cellphone image doesn't contain the same amount of light captured by a 10 megapixel DSLR image.