You know that feeling when you finally upgrade a piece of technology you have been using for years, and suddenly you realize you have been living in the dark ages? It is like the world just snapped into focus. That seems to be exactly where Daniel is at right now. Today’s prompt from Daniel is about his new OnePlus Nord three five G, and it has clearly opened up a whole new world for him, especially regarding the camera and speech to text capabilities. It is funny, Herman, because we often focus on the thousand dollar flagships, but for many people, a solid mid-ranger like the Nord is the first time they actually see what modern silicon can do.
Herman Poppleberry here, and I have to say, the Nord three is a fascinating choice for early twenty twenty six. Even though it has been out for a while, it represents that perfect "sweet spot" in the market. It is a solid mid-ranger that punches way above its weight class in certain areas, particularly because it used a flagship-grade sensor from the previous generation. But what really struck me about Daniel’s prompt was how he is using the camera. He is not just taking family photos of little Ezra, though he mentioned he is doing plenty of that. He is using the zoom and macro capabilities to assist with tech repairs, looking at circuit board traces he cannot even see with his own eyes. That is a perfect example of a tool becoming an extension of our biological senses. It is the "cybernetic eye" we were promised in science fiction, just tucked into a pocketable slab of glass and aluminum.
It is brilliant. And now he is even contributing to Pexels. It is amazing how the line between a consumer smartphone and a professional tool for stock photography has basically vanished for most use cases. If you have the right lighting and a steady hand, a modern phone can produce an image that is indistinguishable from a dedicated D-S-L-R on a digital screen. But Daniel is already looking ahead. He has caught the bug, Herman. He has seen what a three hundred or four hundred dollar phone can do, and now he wants to know what the absolute ceiling looks like. If he stays in the Android ecosystem and wants the ultimate photography experience, what does he need to look for on those dense spec sheets? He wants to go from "very good" to "world class."
This is where it gets really fun, Corn. Because in the high end Android market right now, in February of twenty twenty six, we are seeing a literal arms race between manufacturers like Samsung, Google, Xiaomi, and Vivo. If Daniel wants to move from a very good mid-range experience to a top tier, world class mobile photography setup, we have to talk about physics. We can talk about A-I and software all day, but at the end of the day, photography is the art of capturing photons. To do that better, you need a bigger net. Specifically, we have to talk about sensor size.
Right, because everyone always talks about megapixels. Daniel mentioned his Nord has a fifty megapixel main sensor. To the average person, fifty million pixels sounds like a lot. It sounds like it should be enough to print a billboard. But you have always told me that the megapixel count is often the least important number on the sheet, or at least, it is the most misleading one.
High megapixel counts can even be a disadvantage if the sensor itself is tiny. Think of a camera sensor like a bucket trying to catch rain. If you have fifty tiny thimbles spread out over a square foot, you might get a lot of individual measurements, but you are not catching much total water because of the gaps and the surface tension. If you have one giant bucket covering that same area, you are catching way more light, which means less noise, better color accuracy, and significantly better dynamic range. For a high end experience in twenty twenty six, Daniel should be looking for what we call a "one inch type" sensor.
A full inch? That sounds massive for a phone. I mean, the phone itself is only a few inches wide. How do they even fit that in there without it looking like a cyclops?
It is a massive engineering challenge, which is why the "camera bump" on the back of phones has become a "camera mountain." But it is the gold standard right now. We are looking at sensors like the Sony I-M-X nine eighty nine or the newer L-Y-T nine hundred series. When you see a spec sheet that says "one inch type sensor," you are getting a physical area that allows for much better natural bokeh. That is that beautiful, blurry background effect that separates the subject from the environment. On a small sensor, you have to fake that with A-I, which often messes up the hair or the edges of glasses. On a one inch sensor, the physics of the lens and the sensor size create that blur naturally. It also means Daniel’s night shots will be significantly cleaner. He mentioned the Nord struggles a bit at night, and that is simply because those smaller pixels are starving for light. They are trying to amplify a very weak signal, which creates "digital noise" or graininess.
So, step one for Daniel is looking at the physical size of the sensor, usually expressed in fractions of an inch or the size of the individual pixels in microns. What is a good micron size to aim for if he is looking at the raw specs?
For a main sensor, you want to see something around one point six microns for the individual pixels, or even larger. Now, many manufacturers use a technique called "pixel binning," where they combine four or even eight pixels into one large "super pixel." So a fifty megapixel sensor might effectively act like a twelve point five megapixel sensor, but with three point two micron pixels. That is where the magic happens for low light. But we also need to talk about the glass. You can have the best sensor in the world, but if the lens in front of it is low quality, it doesn't matter. The aperture is huge.
That is the f-stop number, right? Like f one point eight or f one point seven? I always get confused—is a smaller number better or worse?
In this case, smaller is "wider," which is better for letting in light. Think of it like a window. A smaller f-number means a bigger window. In twenty twenty six, we are seeing flagship phones with variable apertures, meaning the phone can physically open and close the iris of the lens. This is huge for Daniel’s tech repairs. If he is doing macro work on a circuit board, a wide open aperture like f one point four gives him a very shallow depth of field. That means only a tiny sliver of the board is in focus, while the rest is blurry. That might be great for an artistic shot of a flower, but for a repair, it is frustrating. Being able to "stop down" the lens to f four point zero allows him to get the whole board in focus while still having that high end sensor quality. It gives him the flexibility of a real camera.
That is a great point. I remember when we talked about the quest for vanilla Android in episode seven hundred seventy four, we touched on how software bloat can sometimes get in the way of the camera app’s performance. If the software is sluggish, you miss the shot of little Ezra doing something cute. But Daniel’s interest in stock photography means he probably cares about the raw output as much as the instant capture. He is probably doing some post-processing, right?
Oh, absolutely. If he is serious about Pexels and high end work, he needs to look for "Ultra R-A-W" or "Pro R-A-W" support. This allows him to bypass the heavy handed processing—the sharpening, the saturation, the noise reduction—that some manufacturers like Samsung or Xiaomi sometimes apply too aggressively. He gets the raw data from that one inch sensor and can edit it in Lightroom or Capture One. It is the difference between buying a pre-baked cake and getting the high quality ingredients to bake it yourself. You have much more control over the shadows, the highlights, and the white balance. For stock photography, that is essential because buyers want a clean, natural image they can color grade themselves.
I like that analogy. Now, Daniel specifically mentioned zoom and macro. The Nord three is doing a good job for him now with its digital zoom and that dedicated macro lens, but how does a high end Android phone take that to the next level? Is it just more digital cropping, or is there something more mechanical going on?
No, and this is where the price goes up significantly. He needs to look for a "periscope telephoto" lens. In a standard camera, the lens moves forward and back to zoom. You can't really do that in a thin phone without a giant snout sticking out. So, engineers use a prism. The light comes in, hits a prism at a ninety-degree angle, and travels sideways down the body of the phone through a series of lenses to a sensor tucked away in the chassis. This allows for five times, ten times, or even "lossless" thirty times zoom without making the phone three inches thick. If he is looking at a spec sheet, he should check the "focal length equivalent." Anything over one hundred millimeters is getting into serious telephoto territory. For his tech repairs, this means he can stand back, have plenty of light on the board, and still see the microscopic serial number on a chip.
And for his circuit boards? He mentioned he uses the macro a lot.
That is usually handled by the ultra wide lens on high end phones. On mid-range phones like the Nord, they often throw in a dedicated "two megapixel macro lens" just to pad the spec sheet so they can say it has a "triple camera system." But those two megapixel sensors are usually terrible. On high end phones, the ultra wide lens has auto focus, which allows it to act as a macro lens. The quality difference between a dedicated two megapixel macro lens and a fifty megapixel ultra wide used for macro is night and day.
It sounds like the Nord three has one of those two megapixel macros Daniel mentioned, an array of three. Fifty plus eight plus two. So that two megapixel one is probably what he is using for his repairs, and he is already impressed. Imagine what he would think of a fifty megapixel macro with a high-end I-S-P.
It would blow his mind, Corn. He would be seeing the individual microscopic solder spheres and microscopic cracks in the traces that are invisible to the naked eye. It is a completely different level of fidelity. He could practically do forensic engineering with it.
We should probably talk about the specific models that are leading the pack right now in early twenty twenty six. But before we get into the heavy hitters like the S twenty six Ultra or the Pixel series...
Dorothy: Herman? Herman, are you there? Bubbeleh?
Oh... Mum? Mum, I am actually in the middle of recording the show right now. We are live-to-tape, remember?
Dorothy: I know, I know, I just wanted to remind you, I left that container of brisket in your fridge, but you have to return the Tupperware this time. The blue lid one. Not the green one, the blue one. It is part of a set, Herman. I can't have my sets getting all mixed up.
Hi Dorothy!
Dorothy: Oh, hello Corn! You look thin, are you eating enough? Herman, make sure he eats some of that brisket. It has the carrots you like. And don't forget the dentist on Tuesday, okay? You have that sensitive tooth. Love you, bye!
Love you too, Mum. Bye. Sorry about that, Corn. She... she still hasn't quite grasped how the live recording works. She thinks it is like a phone call that everyone happens to be listening to.
I actually think our listeners love a Dorothy cameo. It adds a bit of flavor. And honestly, I could go for some brisket. But let's get back to Daniel’s camera quest. We were talking about the hardware, the glass, and the sensors, but we should probably touch on the computational side too. Because in twenty twenty six, a big sensor is great, but the brain behind the sensor matters just as much.
It really does. In twenty twenty six, the I-S-P, or Image Signal Processor, is often integrated directly into the main chip, like the Snapdragon eight Gen five or the latest Google Tensor G-five. For Daniel, who mentioned he is originally from Ireland but now in Jerusalem, he is probably dealing with some very harsh, bright light during the day and deep, complex shadows in the Old City at night. He needs a phone with incredible H-D-R processing.
High Dynamic Range. We talk about this a lot with T-Vs, but it is even more critical for a camera, right?
It is the ability to take a photo where the bright Jerusalem sun hitting a white stone wall doesn't "blow out" into a pure white blob, while the dark alleyway next to it isn't just a black void. Google is still the king of this with their H-D-R plus algorithms. They take a burst of photos at different exposures and stitch them together in milliseconds. If Daniel wants that "point and shoot and it always looks perfect" feel, the Pixel Pro series is hard to beat. Their semantic segmentation is incredible.
Explain that for the folks at home. Semantic segmentation. It sounds like something out of a linguistics textbook.
It is the phone’s ability to recognize exactly what is in the frame. It sees a face, it sees the sky, it sees a circuit board, and it applies different processing to each part of the image simultaneously. It might sharpen the text on a microchip for Daniel’s repair work while simultaneously softening the skin tones on a photo of little Ezra and enhancing the blue of the sky. It is doing thousands of calculations per millisecond to make sure every part of the photo is optimized.
That connects back to what we discussed in episode six hundred eighty two about the microphones in smartphones being better than people think because of the processing. It is the same thing with the cameras. The hardware is the foundation, but the A-I is the architect. Daniel mentioned he is a big fan of the speech to text on his Nord, using the Futo keyboard. That suggests he values on-device processing and privacy. He doesn't want his data being shipped off to a cloud server just to turn his voice into text.
Which is a great point. If he wants to stay in that lane, he should look at how much of the photo processing is happening on the device versus the cloud. Google does a lot of heavy lifting on their Tensor chips now, which is very fast. But manufacturers like Sony, with their Xperia one Mark seven line—which should be out or announced right about now—take a much more traditional approach. They give you the raw tools and stay out of your way.
Sony is an interesting one. They are basically the ones making the sensors for everyone else, right? They are the arms dealer in this camera war.
They are. But their own phones are built for people who want a "real camera" experience. They have a physical shutter button with a half-press for focus. For someone like Daniel, who is doing stock photography for Pexels, that might actually be very appealing. It feels less like a computer and more like a precision instrument. The downside is that Sony’s computational "magic" isn't as aggressive as Google’s or Samsung’s, so you have to work a bit harder for the shot. You have to understand ISO and shutter speed.
Let's talk about the manufacturers and the damage to the wallet. If Daniel wants to stay Android, his big three options for elite photography are Samsung, Google, and the high-end Chinese imports like Xiaomi or Vivo, though those can be harder to get depending on local availability in Israel.
Samsung’s Galaxy S twenty six Ultra is the "everything" phone. It has the two hundred megapixel main sensor, which uses incredible pixel binning to create amazing detail even in low light. It has two different telephoto lenses, usually a three times and a five times or ten times. It is the Swiss Army knife. If Daniel wants to be able to zoom in from the back of a room to see a serial number on a device, the Samsung is the winner. The price range there is usually between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred dollars.
And the Pixel?
The Pixel ten Pro or eleven Pro is the king of "vibe." It captures motion better than anyone else. If little Ezra is running around, the Pixel is the least likely to give you a blurry face because it uses a feature called "Face Unblur" that uses data from multiple cameras. It is also, in my opinion, the best at skin tones. But it doesn't always have the raw hardware muscle—the giant sensors—of the Samsung or the Chinese flagships. You are looking at around a thousand to twelve hundred dollars there.
Then you have the "Ultra" phones from China. The Xiaomi sixteen Ultra or the Vivo X one hundred Pro plus. These are the ones that actually put those one inch sensors in. They often partner with legendary camera brands like Leica or Zeiss.
Those are the ones that really excite me as a nerd. When you see that Zeiss logo on a Vivo phone, it is not just branding. They are using T-star coating on the lenses to reduce flare. If Daniel is taking photos in Jerusalem with those bright streetlights and dark shadows, that coating makes a massive difference. It prevents those weird ghosting artifacts you see on cheaper lenses. These phones are often in the twelve hundred to sixteen hundred dollar range, but they are essentially professional cameras that happen to make phone calls.
So if Daniel is looking at a spec sheet, he wants to see: one inch sensor, f one point eight or wider aperture, periscope zoom with at least five times optical, and O-I-S.
O-I-S is mandatory. Optical Image Stabilization. Especially for his tech repairs. If he is holding the phone over a circuit board, his hands are going to shake a little bit, especially if he is trying to be precise. O-I-S physically moves the lens or the sensor to compensate for that shake. Without it, his macro shots will be blurry, no matter how many megapixels he has. He should check if all the lenses have O-I-S, not just the main one. Often, manufacturers cheap out and only put it on the primary sensor, leaving the zoom lens shaky and hard to use.
That is a sneaky detail. What about the front camera? Daniel mentioned his Nord has a sixteen megapixel front. Does that matter for his use case?
For tech repair, probably not. But for family stuff, he should look for a front camera with auto focus. Most front cameras have a "fixed focus," which is why your selfies look blurry if you hold the phone too close or too far. High end phones like the S-series or the Pixels have auto focus on the front now, which is a huge upgrade for video calls or photos with the family.
We should also mention the video side of things. Daniel didn't specifically ask about it, but if he is contributing to stock sites, high quality four K or even eight K video at sixty frames per second is a huge asset. And he should look for ten bit color depth.
Oh, good catch. Ten bit color means the phone can record over a billion different colors, compared to the sixteen point seven million colors in standard eight bit. This prevents "banding" in the sky or on smooth surfaces. It gives his stock photography and video a much more professional, cinematic look. It is something you don't realize you need until you see it side-by-side.
I remember back in episode five hundred ninety eight, we talked about audio engineering as prompt engineering. There is a similar logic here. If you give the A-I better "data," meaning a better sensor and better glass, the resulting "prompt" the phone processes is much higher quality. You can't A-I your way out of bad physics. You can't sharpen a blurry photo and expect it to look like a National Geographic cover.
You really can't. You can sharpen a blurry photo, but you can't recreate detail that was never captured by the sensor in the first place. That is why I always tell people to prioritize the primary sensor size over everything else. If the main sensor is huge, everything else follows. It is the foundation of the house.
So, for Daniel, the roadmap is clear. He has outgrown the mid range. He is doing professional level work with his phone, and he deserves professional level hardware. If he stays in the Android world, he is looking at that thousand dollar plus tier. It is a big jump from the Nord three, but based on how much value he is already getting out of a three hundred dollar phone, the return on investment for his repairs and his photography side hustle seems worth it.
I agree. And honestly, for someone living in a place as visually rich as Jerusalem, having a world class camera in your pocket is almost a necessity. Think of all the textures of the stone, the lighting in the markets, the history in every corner... he is going to have a field day with a one inch sensor. He might even find himself doing more photography than tech repair!
I'm actually a bit jealous. I'm still rocking a phone from two years ago, and hearing you talk about variable apertures and T-star coatings is making me want to go shopping.
You and me both, Corn. But I promised Mum I wouldn't spend any more money on "gadgets" until I fixed her printer and got her that new tablet she wants for her recipes.
Good luck with that. Fixing a printer is harder than any circuit board repair Daniel is doing. It is the final boss of tech support.
Tell me about it. I'd rather desolder a CPU than deal with a paper jam.
Alright, let's wrap this up with some concrete takeaways for Daniel. When you are looking at that next phone, do not just look at the megapixel count. Look for the sensor size in inches—aim for that one inch type. Look for periscope zoom if you want real distance. Make sure you have O-I-S on all your lenses. And if you are doing stock photography, make sure the phone supports a robust R-A-W format and ten bit color.
And don't forget to check the macro capabilities of the ultra wide lens. For your tech repairs, that is going to be your most used feature. Look for a phone that can focus at least as close as two or three centimeters. That is the difference between seeing a chip and seeing the serial number on the chip.
This has been a great deep dive. Daniel, thanks for the prompt. It is always great to hear how you are using technology in your daily life in Jerusalem. Give our best to Hannah and little Ezra. We hope the next phone captures some amazing memories for you.
And if you are listening and enjoying these deep dives into the weird and wonderful world of technology, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It really helps other people find the show and keeps us going.
It really does. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is myweirdprompts dot com, where you can find our full archive and a contact form if you want to send us a prompt of your own. You can also email us directly at show at myweirdprompts dot com.
And as always, a quick shout out to Suno for generating our show music. It is amazing what you can do with a few well placed prompts these days. It really sets the mood.
Alright Herman, I think it is time to go find that brisket Dorothy left. I can smell the carrots from here.
I'll race you to the fridge. But if you take the blue lid Tupperware, I'm telling Mum.
Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. We will see you in the next episode.
Bye everyone!
