Don’t leave your phone in the sun. Aside from the devastating heat, it’ll also burn your camera out just like it will your eyes.
Don’t leave your phone in the sun. Aside from the devastating heat, it’ll also burn your camera out just like it will your eyes.
I’m not convinced by this post really, I’m sure pointing your camera at the sun with it on will cause damage. But I don’t believe that smartphone cameras are as susceptible as photography cameras. If they were they’d have a physical shutter.
But they don’t so either the sensor is harder to damage while it’s off, or the smartphone lens just isn’t big enough (or focused enough) to be an issue. Not to mention they have uv and infraded filters too.
Another other explanation I can think of is that sun isn’t likely to be barreling down a smartphone lens often enough to be a problem.
Where I live in north america, the sun never resides directly overhead, so maybe that minimizes damge.
Or maybe it just requires a lot more exposure that its not likely to be a problem for the life of the device.
Either way, unless you are an optical engineer for a smartphone company, I remain unconvinced. It seems to be a rather rare problem that most users shouldn’t worry about.
I literally owned a phone for like 4 years that I just so happened to find on the side of the highway, laying out in direct sunlight. Every single image the camera ever took had a black spot in the middle of the upper left quadrant of the image, which covered somewhere around 20 or so pixels.
Every. Single. Image. The camera’s sensor was damaged by the focused sunlight. Even if the photos hadn’t been tagged by the phone’s camera software, that damaged spot in the images could be used as something of a camera fingerprint.
Also, I’ve already made a point to emphasize this, I didn’t say you can’t briefly point it at the sun, I said don’t leave it in the sun.
BTW, that phone ended up dying due to overheating, and it wasn’t even in the sun, it was just a really hot day and I was using the phone while also charging it. If a phone can die like that, I’m pretty sure that ought to be another clue that you shouldn’t leave your electronics out in the sunlight.