When the Visualphone VP210 hit the market in 1999, it advertised a never-before-seen feature: a camera.
With only 0.11 megapixels and storage for 20 photos, the Visualphone is a relic compared to modern devices sporting three distinct cameras, each with up to 100 times more resolution.
But while this technology has improved dramatically in the 21st century, engineers are rapidly approaching a hard limit on phone camera quality.
To understand this limit, we first need to know how phone cameras work.
Just like any other digital camera, when your phone takes a picture, light enters through its lens.
This lens focuses the light onto an image sensor covered in a grid of photosites — microscopic light sensors roughly 100 times smaller than a grain of sand.
There are millions of these sensors, and each one is covered by a red, green, or blue filter, allowing it to measure how much of that color is in the light hitting its location.
Then these measurements are simplified, rounding them to less detailed numbers.
This step sacrifices some data, thus lowering the final images' quality, but it's essential for the camera's processor.
This computer can only handle so much information as it decrypts the three sets of color data to assemble a digital recreation of the image.
