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Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. Another article by someone with no background in the subject he's covering. 12-megapixel lenses eh? That's a lot of pixels for a lens. Professionals call "digital negatives" DNGs, do they? I wonder what professionals call raw... I love the social commentary and analysis in the New Yorker but they should probably steer clear of tech.

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The article is liberal with its language, but makes good points backed up by facts. The point and shoot market was killed by the smart phone. The camera market has become the smart phone and the DSLR. DSLRs may be safe for awhile because they provide advanced features that are hard to match in a phone sized device, but as a non-professional photographer I find myself reaching for my phone more often than my DSLR.

I love using my DSLR, but I hate dealing with the workflow. If I take a picture with my DSLR I have to put the SD card in my computer, load up Lightroom, edit, export, and finally upload/share the picture.

I agree that the smartphone killed the point and shoot industry, but I think it's pretty far overboard to say that Apple is revolutionizing the camera industry with the iPhone 7. They added another lens, which is certainly nice but not revolutionary, and they added some depth of field effects, which are nice but look pretty bad compared to actual shallow depth of field.

Edit: Also, you definitely don't need to fire up Lightroom to share photos from your DSLR; I think practically any DSLR can shoot JPG. Many DSLRs can also share photos to phones via wifi or Bluetooth these days. Mine didn't come with such a feature, but Nikon sells a $20-30 adapter that adds that capability.

It's not going to kill professional photography, but the folks who buy a DSLR for the bokeh might not have a reason to buy that camera. Might shrink the market for DSLRs.

Google's camera app has had the ability to generate a depth-map to add bokeh for a couple of years now: https://research.googleblog.com/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-goo...

It actually works surprisingly well, but I've not traded in my SLR. Being able to do something similar with a second lens -- or even using Project Tango sensors -- to avoid the post-exposure motion would make it more useful, but I suspect still not as versatile (and even with my SLR, the difference between my relatively cheap lenses and borrowing someone's more expensive lenses, on the same body, is quite obvious).

I don't doubt that the iPhone will shrink the market for DSLRs eventually, but I don't think it's going to do it to a significant extent just yet (not much more than it already has been). I'm skeptical that people buy DSLRs just for the bokeh, and anyways the samples that they showed look nowhere near as good as real bokeh from a nice lens. I think non-photographers buy DSLRs because they still take better pictures than smartphones in certain situations, particularly when an optical zoom would be desired (e.g. A kid's performance or graduation). The new iPhone comes a step closer to potentially addressing some of those situations, but it's still limited; 56mm full-frame equivalent is not really all that zoomed in, and AFAIK there isn't yet any way to zoom between the 28mm lens and 56mm lens any better than traditional digital zoom (i.e. cropping and rescaling).

I'm curious to know how well the bokeh/shallow depth works on the 7+. By the looks of it they use facial recognition and machine learning to determine what not to blur.

This means objects and figures that aren't faces might not be tuned too well.

I don't think it's that complicated; more of a diff between two focus points from the lenses.

did you see the presentation?

Like this adapter?

https://www.amazon.com/Nikon-Wireless-Mobile-Adapter-Digital...

Many of the reviews say it is not very good, but I have not tried it personally.

Then there is Geo tagging.

https://www.amazon.com/Nikon-GP-1A-Unit-Cameras-27034/dp/B00...

Again, reviews are pretty poor.

Like I said, I love my DSLR, but the phone workflow is just so much easier/nicer.

Even if you are shooting JPG, you still have to move the SD card to the computer, find the file, then share it.

With a phone, you just tap the share button on the picture you just took, tap the icon for whatever you want to share it to and you're done.

A growing number of cameras have wifi and/or bluetooth so you can just tap to share a picture.

Do you keep all your pictures that you ever took on your phone?

I surely don't and do exactly the same workflow with my phones as I do with my cameras.

Pretty much. https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ngl1l6mr8u218w/File%2010-09-2016%... Doesn't everyone?

Not people that care about privacy.

We don't all have the same priorities.

Yeah, my pictures will only be seen by me and my circle of trust.

Other priorities might be ok to have their pictures known to the world.

Funny you mention that.

I am moving all my photos from the last few decades into Photos/iCloud which will then appear on my phone.

While being available to the whole world to see, the next time an hacker attack success happens or any bored Apple employee decides to search for "interesting" pictures.

Please don't imply random employees have access to an iCloud users data. There is ample proof in security architecture documents posted by Apple that would indicate your comment is ridiculous.

My comment is based on real life experience on how companies of comparable size handle their security, specially in outsourced projects.

iPhone isn't a competitor for DSLR.

It's a competitor for high end P&S e.g. Sony RX100 and mirrorless e.g. Fuji X100.

Nikon and Canon have also been stuck in a rut in recent years. Sony is coming out with all these new ideas (TLRs, the A7 series), while Canon and Nikon keep on churning out pretty much the same stuff they always have. Not only are they facing competition from smart phones, but on the higher end, Ricoh/Pentax now offers a full frame DSLR at 1/2 the price of similar Canon/Nikon models. The Pentax has some warts, but still, that's got to hurt Canon and Nikon a little.

I know pentax is trying to compete with the D800 level of SLR with their K-1, but the price is a few hundred more than the entry level nikon, canon & sony full frame cameras, and that is what they are competing with.

The entry level Canon and Nikon FF cameras do not have most of the higher end features the K-1 has. It competes pretty well with D810 and has some features the D810 lacks such as a GPS, wifi, a screen that can be moved or flipped up and possibly most importantly, in-camera 5-axis image stabilization.

Yet it has weather sealing, GPS, astrotracer, WiFi and other features that the entry level full frame offerings from Canon and Nikon don't. Sony has abandoned DSLRs in favour of mirrorless and fixed miror cameras.

Right, but no-one will switch because no-one wants to start their lens collection again.

Agreed on the workflow problem. The pain of using a DSLR has less to do with the form factor (size and weight) and more to do with the fact that the post-shot work is stuck a decade in the past.

And I think that's true even if you're a professional - as a professional, your shots should use your phone's cellular connection to upload the shots to Adobe Creative Cloud (or competing cloud) as you take them, so that when you open your machine to do post-processing work, your shots are all already there. Why should anybody be bothering with CF or SD cards anymore? Just store everything on your smartphone (did you hear the iPhone 7 will now have a 256 GB option?), which in and of itself is a buffer for your work before it gets transferred to the cloud.

Modular backs a la Moto Z are interesting because there's a lot of potential now for making "big glass" relevant again for prosumers. Make a modular back with a large sensor and a Micro Four-Thirds or F mount. The only real problem is getting OEMs to agree on a common standard that they would stick to for years, because nobody wants to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a camera back they won't be able to use next year when they upgrade their phone, and yes that's actually a really big problem, but leadership from Google (in the Nexus/Pixel lines) can really help here.

Don't forget about the Electronic Viewfinder Interchangable Lens cameras! Though "mirrorless" has caught on as a name more than EVILs.

I hear very good things about Sony's A6000 series and some Micro 4/3 cameras.

Almost all DSLRs nowadays have wireless capabilities.

Transfer it to your phone and do whatever you would have done otherwise.

Yeah, but I would like to move those to my Dropbox, so I can get access to those files on both my desktop as well as my phone, and do it automatically for all the photos, so I don't have to have another manual step to move those files.

Or at least just move those files to my desktop only. But what I see is that Canon doesn't allow that (copy all files in the background to e.g. an ftp server), it has to have a phone or some strange proprietary Canon app.

For me it beats the purpose of having a wifi in a DSLR, I might as well just use SD card it the photos are not moved automatically where I would like.

You're exaggerating. Wifi still adds a lot of convenience, even without your desired feature.

Most full frame DSLRs don't have wireless.

Buy a sd card withwifi like the flashair and you are good to go.

"Almost all" might have been exaggerating...but I maintain wireless DSLRs are common. At the very least, the option is available enough that anyone that cares about it can have it.

Random Google Search: of Techradar's top 10 list of full-frame DSLRs, 7 have Wi-Fi.

http://www.techradar.com/news/photography-video-capture/came...

The cameras on the list you linked to with built in wifi are the Nikon D750, Nikon D5, Pentax K-1, Canon 6D. That's 4/10, which is better than I expected, but still pretty poor.

It's getting there, though.. give it a couple more years. Especially with things like Nikon's Snapbridge, which is very buggy right now, but the direction is right.

The author, Om Malik[0], is a well-known technology blogger, not a social critic. He just happened to publish this piece in the New Yorker.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_Malik

Yeah he's definitely not a social commentator, but there's still a big problem if you're writing about digital cameras and you don't know the difference between a lens and a sensor.

Tech bloggers usually dont know all aspects of all techs well.

I didn't say they did. I said that if there's something wrong with this article, it's not because of a misguided attempt by the New Yorker to branch out into tech.

Interesting. I overreacted. Still, there are some telling errors in this article. I admit I didn't read the whole thing, and my quick scan happened to hit the worst parts. Still, the article misses the main question -- are large sensors still required for high quality images?

The most significant thing you get from a large sensor is image fidelity. That is, the pixel data you get out of it is more true to the actual scene captured. Smaller sensors start to experience limitations in physics, of which noise is a major component.

I think large sensors are the only thing required for high quality images. Capture enough light data and we can do everything in software - no lenses. Focus on this this and that, Bokeh blur algorithm #5 here and there - voila.

Lenses are needed to capture light.

Sensors capture light. Lenses can be entirely virtualized in software. Whenever very large sensors become cost effective I'm sure smartphone cameras will all be "lightfield" cameras and there will be no more lense bulge. Post processing will also become way more interesting: https://pictures.lytro.com/charmingtoad/pictures/795243/embe...

Lytro cameras use lenses, too. In fact they use a huge number of micro lenses (in addition to larger traditional lenses) to capture the "light field".

"Very large sensors" also seems to means something different to you than it does to me. I would not want a full frame sensor (which I would only consider large, not even "very large") on my phone even if it were cost effective and didn't require a large lens.

Once our sensors are dense/sensitive enough (it doesn't necessarily have to be very large) physical lenses will not be necessary. The Lytro link is about interesting post processing. Today's lensless cameras are very new and very limited but the concept is sound and the technology will get there.

Eventually we will be reconstructing high quality photos from raw sensor data, applying all manner of algorithms to stabilize and accumulate brightness, stylized blur that isn't even optically possible, no shutter or lense or any moving parts really, and the whole thing will happen on your smartphone.

It's been a long time since I looked into this stuff in depth so I may have some details wrong. You are incorrect about the importance of sensor size. For a high quality image I'd prefer a larger sensor over a small sensor with more megapixels. For one example where small dense sensors are worse look at noise in the image. As the pixel density increases each pixel is getting hit by fewer photons. This reduces the true signal so your signal to noise ratio goes up.

Based on the use of Foveon sensors and light field tech from Lytro I wouldn't count on lens less cameras showing up in a phone in the next five years. A decade wouldn't surprise me but it's hard to predict tech trends that far out.

As Fredphophile pointed out, you're fundamentally wrong about sensor size importance. There are only so many photons hitting a given surface area unit. Smaller sensor size means more noise. You can't fight physics.

I'm not particularly bullish on lensless cameras either. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't expect those to meet modern quality standards in a small form factor for a long time.

Lenses collect a greater amount of light and direct it to the sensor. You will always need lenses regardless how good your software is.

difference between software and optical zoom is a good example when not everything can be virtualized.

Coming soon, Sony's 40MP pinhole camera: "Trust us, the software is there...."

That might be fine, if it had 40MP pinholes.

It'll work fine; you just need long exposure times.

Of course, taking pictures of something in motion will be harder.

for certain values of "fine" I suppose

http://www.abelardomorell.net/project/camera-obscura/

(He later added a lens, to simplify the process, but even without you get fairly good images with a pinhole.)

DNG is literally short for Digital Negative.

Yes but Malik still sounds like an idiot. A DNG is a specific file format that happens to mean digital negative, but he means RAW. DNG is a proprietary raw format from Adobe. And no we don't call our RAW files "digital negatives".

> DNG is a proprietary raw format

That's misleading. DNG is patented by Adobe, but it's also an open, specified format, i.e. it's not "proprietary" in the sense of "can only be opened/used if you pay Adobe money or use/buy their products" which is what people are generally implying when they use the term "proprietary".[0]

DNG is a lot like Adobe's PDF format: owned and managed by Adobe, but with an open specification than anyone can implement/use. They even offer a free license to the DNG "patent", should that deter anyone. That said, unlike PDF, it has not (yet) become an ISO standard, although Adobe has indicated that they would like to see that happen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Negative

It is a particular implementation of the RAW format, and specifically listed as "open, non-free". Which I would think most people would consider proprietary.

I could be wrong though. Can I write and sell software that reads and writes DNG format without having to sign an agreement or pay Adobe money?

> Can I write and sell software that reads and writes DNG format without having to sign an agreement or pay Adobe money?

I believe the answer is: yes, you can. The DNG patent license is here: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/digital-negative.html

You do not need to "sign anything" or "pay Adobe money" to make use of it. It's no different (in terms of usage) than someone open sourcing API documentation with an Apache license (or whatever).

Looking at the patent license, it applies "solely to permit the reading and writing of image files that comply with the DNG Specification". So if you try to create a derivative/modified format based on DNG for whatever reason, the patent license won't apply since the new format would not comply with the specification. (Though that doesn't necessarily mean there's actually a patent threat - hard to say without research what actual patents Adobe owns that apply to the specification, and when they expire or expired.) Also, the specification document itself is not under an open copyright license, so the spec for the modified format would have to be written from scratch (though it could refer to the original).

Not sure if there is much reason to fork the DNG spec in practice, but still the situation is fairly different from "open sourcing API documentation with an Apache license".

That seems fair though. When it comes to the DNG standard, you can use all this stuff freely. When it comes to another standard, make your own. I wouldn't call it proprietary.

I own both Canon and Nikon bodies and covert everything to DNG as a permanent storage format. Some cameras (Leica!) use DNG as their native format. If he's simplifying for the masses, its a simplification, but not much different from how I actually take photos.

He's not simplifying, he's trying to sound like he understands the material better than he does.

I know that, but it's just one particular brand of raw image format. arw, cr2, crw etc. are also raw formats. I don't hear photographers ever speak of "shooting digital negative" -- you say "shooting raw."

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