Stow Lake
I decided to get a new phone since my Moto G5 has been acting up the last few months, requiring me to restart it every now and then to get the camera working. Its fussiness put me under the mistaken impression that it was quite a bit older than it actually is. I only just now checked my files to realize that the earliest images were from July 2018.
Anyway, I replaced the G5 with another $300 phone, the Moto G Stylus, which is advertised as having 48 megapixels, but which actually delivers a 12-megapixel image. In fact, the Stylus images are just a tad smaller than the G5 images (12 vs 12.2 megapixels). The Stylus does a slightly better job of processing those megapixels into an image, but it's not much to blog about.
I took a picture with both cameras at Stow Lake, and pixel-peeping shows basically no difference in the image resolution.
Moto G5 Crop
Moto G Stylus Crop
If it isn't false advertising for Motorola to claim the Stylus has 48 megapixels, it probably ought to be. What the company actually delivers is 48 "quad pixels."
I find this disappointing, but life goes on. It takes nice pictures for a $270 smartphone, and it also has a 2-megapixel "macro" lens, which is more like a wide angle lens that lets you get really close to your subject, which I do appreciate since the G5 was useless for close-ups.
Close-up with Moto G Stylus
The other thing the new smartphone has, as its name implies, is a stylus. I didn't really care about this feature, but I somehow got the false impression that the Stylus made 48-megapixel images! (I also don't understand why several reviews of the Stylus state, incorrectly, that it has a 16MP camera.)
Stylus Action
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