Apple’s dual camera phone will change photography as we know it | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s dual camera phone will change photography as we know it

medium.com

15 pointsshutterstock12 comments

I think fake bokeh is meh. It's right up there with the "Ken Burns effect".

Cell phone cameras aren't bad, given what they are, but the one lens I have for my DSLR is this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Canon-28mm-Wide-Angle-Cameras/dp/B000...

precisely because it opens very wide which means you don't just get bokeh but you also capture a lot of light which helps with low light, high speeds, etc. There is a physical limit to what you can achieve with a little tiny lens.

> the main difference between a camera with a proper lens and the tiny flat ones that you would find in any smartphone is a feature of a photo called depth of field.

This is highly reductionist and thus, misleading. Optical design of photography lenses is a very complex field whose main purpose is not "giving photos a DoF effect", but to provide control on aperture and focal length and boost the received light while keeping chromatic and geometrical aberrations to a minimum. The Wikipedia article on lens evolution is very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photographic_lens_d...

Because the two cameras have different focal length (28mm and 56mm), the main advantage will be to provide a limited optical zoom, and maybe some kind of subject isolation if the subject is in the center of the field.

The phone cameras have already changed photography as we know it by displacing consumer cameras - as evidenced by the dramatic drop in sales for camera manufacturers in the last five years.

However, DSLRs and enthusiast mirrorless cameras are doing fine, and this new iphone is no more threat than the previous one.

Mirroless cameras have progressed far from "enthusiast" at this point.

The huge point missed is the depth-mapping capability. While perhaps primitive compared to what we'll see later, it brings to a major device (sorry, Amazon Fire Phone and your four cameras) ability to start processing photos as 3D data. Imagine "live photos" which not only move, but adjust perceived/rendered angles to match the viewer's eye positions. Subtle, minimal, but likely very effective.

http://i.imgur.com/X3uDWSZ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/CnbNPWW.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Pj0cilp.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/eifHQp5.jpg

All from Galaxy Note 5. May Apple please grace us with its game changing Depth of Field. No other players in the game. Photography will never be the same.

Correct me if I am wrong but how is this different than the dual camera on my HTC M8? Is this revolutionary because it is Apple?

The article admits this (and is a 'top highlight').

>This isn’t the first time a camera manufacturer has put a dual camera system into a camera phone — but with Apple’s software app ecosystem behind it, I believe we will change photography forever starting September 7th.

Seems as though the author is saying that because Apple is doing it, that this will now become the norm. If true, I hate that this is true and Apple gets the credit.

>If true, I hate that this is true.

What's exactly to hate? In most fields it's not the first-comers that set trends, it's those that have significant market impact.

Especially if the first-comers have half-baked implementations, where the one with the more polished and market-ready one wins.

HTC puts a dual camera system in their phone and nobody uses it because it's a tiny subset of all Android phones. That's a lot of engineering effort for a consumer base that is largely oblivious to that feature.

Apple puts a dual camera system in their phone and everyone uses it because they know it'll be a popular product. People who appreciate photography will buy that phone specifically for the dual camera system. It's a positive reinforcement loop here.

If HTC had their own software ecosystem and they managed it as well as Apple does then you'd see the same thing, but that's not the case. They're just another Android phone in a market crowded with phones of all sorts. Their dual camera feature looks like a gimmick and for the most part is.

Meh, that was an overly dramatic way of saying the new iPhone will have more depth of field.

Actually it will have less.

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