The camera is passable, but it is quite mediocre compared to high-end smartphone cameras.
Thank you. This is very useful. It's kind of interesting how certain diagonals in the Cosmo photo gets a pronounced two-pixel stair-step effect. I've blown up a small fragment to 1000% percent here:
It's almost as if the Cosmo is shooting at half resolution and then stretches the image, which, roughly, might be akin to what's going on here...
Each photosite (sensing element) in a camera sensor usually sits behind a red, green OR blue filter in a 2x2 (Bayer) pattern (with two green, as human eyes are more green-sensitive). The raw image gets full spatial (detail) resolution, but about half the color resolution, so the camera demosaics it, by cleverly sharing color between neighboring pixels. Done right, it can preserve almost all the detail while just smearing the color a tad (and human eyes has much lower color resolution anyway, which is why JPEG often saves color at half resolution). Less clever (but fast) is to just clump pixels together 2x2, which might work with, say, a 60Mpixel "raw" resolution, giving 15Mpixel final images (such a camera could do a "2x zoom" by "properly" demosaicing 15Mpixel from the center of the sensor), but starting with 24Mpixel, that gives 6Mpixel final images, unless stretched back to 24Mpixel...
While the Cosmo might do something a tad more sophisticated, I scaled down the full image to 50% in Windows MS-Paint, because it's primitive scaling just throws away half the pixels, both ways, and got (to me) NO visible loss of detail, which, to me, suggests the 24Mpixel image only had 6Mpixes worth of details. To me, this suggests the Cosmo could, technically, create more detailed images, with better software, but as long as the firmware won't let us save raw images, basically straight from the sensor, we might be stuck with this demosaicing, especially if it's done in hardware. When the dust settles a bit, I think we should urge Planet Computers to, if at all possible, support saving raw images. If not possible, it might be better to, if
that's supported (is it?), shoot 6Mpixel images, which, usually, is enough, saves a bit of storage and makes on-device editing more feasible.