>>4465777>So in low light situations, the f/1.7 (Pixel 10 Pro) is better.Ehh kind of. We're missing a whole lot of the story. I'll try and keep it simple but I wouldn't want you to join the team of morons on /p/ who think physics acts differently becuase it would make their favourite camera appear better.
Alright so, that f/stop number is exactly the focal length of a lens divide by the diameter of the aperture opening. So a 50mm lens with a 25mm aperture opening is f/2 (50 divide by 2 is 25). If the aperture was only 10mm wide it would be f/5. etc. Same concept with the phone lens, but it's ACTUAL focal length is probably something like 4mm. You might hear it get called "equivalent 24mm" which is the marketing way of saying: "This phone camera has a similar Field of View as a real camera with a full-frame sensor has, when IT uses a 24mm focal length lens." But that sounds like shit, so just call it a 24mm f/2 lens on the phone, horray.
Anyway, let's say the phone has a 4mm lens. To achieve f/2 you need an aperture 2mm wide. Not hard to achieve in a phone. Congrats your phone lens is f/2, but this doesn't mean it has the same light gathering capability of a full-frame camera with an f/2 lens. Not at all. Because the REAL light gathering metric is the aperture diameter. A 2mm wide aperture is capturing fuck all light compared to 25mm in the real camera. This combines with the size of the sensor your camera uses, which surprise, on a phone is tiny compared to a real camera.
So, the fact your phone has an f/1.7 aperture is good... compared to other phones that have f/2.5 or f/3 etc, but it's pathetic compared to cameras with larger sensors and bigger lens aperture diameters (also called 'pupil entrance size')
There's a bunch of math you can do to figure out specifically how it performs against larger sensor cameras, but just don't delude yourself into somehow thinking a phone camera destroys a big modern DSLR/MILC.
