Cell Phone Pictures…

…are universally pretty bad. I went out of my way to get something a bit better than the standard 640×480 res on my phone, but still anything that’s dark comes out grainy. Still, I find I capture many more moments now that I have the camera as part of my phone (which means it’s usually with me).

I read about a program called GREYCstoration on Digg.. but 30 seconds of playing with it’s CLI options left me with nothing. Still, the idea of removing “grain” (?) from pictures, especially dark ones, was interesting. So I downloaded a free version of Neat Image. Here’s before(left)-and-after(right) pictures of my friend Iain hailing us a subway on a recent trip to New York (click for full-res versions):

Nice improvement, no? I wonder if it’s cheaper for a manufacturer to put better optics in a phone, or to give it a bit more CPU horsepower to do this kind of filtering in the phone on-the-fly? Maybe the better question is if people who are happy just to be able to take pics on their phone are “discerning” enough to care and pay for the extra quality? Maybe not… 

Two more samples of the filtering: a Korean grill dinner with friends in downtown Toronto: