If you don’t want to open the camera app, you can also take photos directly with WhatsApp – which is not a good idea, as the TECHBOOK test shows.
Take a quick picture and send it to friends and family – you can use camera software that is directly integrated into WhatsApp. But if there are important details in the photo, then the popular messenger turns out to be a flop.
TECHBOOK makes the photo comparison
The result of the TECHBOOK test confirms the differences in quality. The WhatsApp camera clearly swallows the details of our snapshot. It gets blurry very quickly. In a direct comparison, we also noticed that WhatsApp zooms in a bit when taking a photo. Since WhatsApp only uses the main camera (and not the telephoto lens) of a smartphone, you have to zoom digitally, which means that quality is already lost.
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Why WhatsApp photos have poor quality
The WhatsApp camera software sometimes differs greatly from the app of the respective smartphone manufacturer, which you otherwise use for photos. WhatsApp takes photos in a different format, which is a bit more elongated than those taken with the camera app to make use of the phone’s elongated screen. A “normal” photo sent via WhatsApp has a resolution of 1242 x 2688 pixels. A WhatsApp photo, on the other hand, has a resolution of 901 x 1600 pixels (16:9 format) and is therefore often almost 100 kilobytes (KB) smaller. The lower resolutions come about because photos are compressed again when they are sent.
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So there are several factors that contribute to the fact that the quality of WhatsApp photos is poor. Due to the compression when sending, you should not only not take important photos with WhatsApp, but also not send them via it. It doesn’t matter whether they were recorded with WhatsApp or the camera app. So if you want to send a photo in the best possible quality, you should always do it via email, AirDrop or a data service.