What is Night Mode? How does it work and on what phones?

Recently, Apple has introduced Night Mode photography mode on its iPhone 11 series. This feature is already quite familiar to Android users. So what’s so special about this mode? Read the article below to answer this question!

What is Night Mode?

Phone cameras work on sensors, most sensors in smartphones today are 1/1.7 inch or 1/2.3 inch . Raising the larger sensor is one of the solutions for night photography with good light and less noise.

Night mode was born from the operating principle of this camera sensor. Night mode on many smartphones is also known as “Night Sight”, “Bright Night”.

Why take pictures with Night Mode?

Taking photos in low light is always a real challenge for phone users. Night Mode is a photography mode used by phone manufacturers to improve the quality of images captured in low light conditions.

Instead of having to increase the ISO speed causing the image to become too dark or too noisy, or taking long exposure photos that require the user to hold the phone steady for a period of time (by using a tripod), then Night Mode combines both of these.

Users only need to hold the phone for a few seconds and the software will take care of the rest.

Limitations of Night Mode?

Although it is a very effective improvement mode for nighttime image quality, Night Mode still has unavoidable limitations.

In particular, it must be mentioned that this mode works poorly with moving subjects.

To capture moving subjects without blur or completely erased, users of Night Mode have to shoot many times. Therefore Night Mode is ideal only when shooting still images.

Besides, shooting Night Mode also takes longer than other modes.

How Night Mode works

Essentially, these modes work similarly to the HDR mode. HDR is an acronym for High Dynamic Range technology, which is used to balance light across the entire image.

HDR is accomplished by taking multiple images at different exposures (usually just changing the shutter speed). The images are then stitched together to bring out more detail and sharpness.

Night mode is used by Bracketing application similar to HDR above. This is the technique of taking the same image with different settings, and then combining these images using specialized software.

Night mode uses AI to analyze the scene the user wants to capture and calculate factors such as light, the movement of the phone and the movement of the subject.

The camera then takes a series of images at different exposures and uses Bracketing to combine them, resulting in the final image with the most detail.

Night Mode is available on which phones?

Night mode is equipped on most high-end phones today with many different names such as Night Sight of Google Pixel 3 / Pixel 3 XL, Huawei P30 Pro, Bright Night of Samsung Galaxy S10 / S10+ or Nightscape of the OnePlus 6T.

In addition, in the mid-range segment, this mode also appears on Realme 3 Pro or Hornor 10 Lite phones. So users can also experience this cool photography mode even without spending too much money.

Above is an article explaining what Night mode is? How does it work and on what phones? Hopefully from the useful information in the article, you can better understand this interesting photography mode!