Why My New Professional War Camera Is a Cheap Chinese Knockoff | Hacker News Reader

Why My New Professional War Camera Is a Cheap Chinese Knockoff

outsideonline.com

33 pointssergeant330 comments

This article reads like an advertisement and is lacking the most important part: Sample pictures that the reporter actually took with the advertised phone.

Interesting that there is no discussion of time to start the camera app or the shutter lagging behind the capture button. I would have thought that these things would be the biggest negative of using a phone as a "war camera".

Perhaps the P10 is fast enough that he just never felt this problem.

Best message on this topic. Thanks.

What the old Leica of old did was the famous 'F8 and be there' -- basically at F8 with a mirrorless rangefinder there was enough DoF to shoot pretty much anything, at anytime (apart from pitch black) and still come out with a printable picture... Even a modern DSLR doesn't give you that, as the autofocus will take a bit of time, unless you disable it. Same with the u4/3 and other mirrorless.

I preferred digital carry-on is a Panasonic DMC-GM1 with a fixed 14mm lens. It's bigger than a mobile phone, but it's also considerably better, and the battery last weeks, not hours.

I also still shoot my 1947 leica IIIc, and the old leica M2, just because I love handling them!

The funny bit is that I can shoot anything and anyone anywhere with my old 35mm rangefinder, and people will look at you and smile at you even. Try that with a digital monster or a mobile phone and people will just close down like a clam.

> * And it can handle Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) files, which are vastly higher-quality than MP3s and more compressed than WAV.*

Why does a photographer care about this? And who seriously compares this sort of thing to MP3 these days anyway, when we've had better codecs for a long time?

One who shoots video and records audio segments as well??

That's why he mentions shooting 4K video and plugging in a Rode microphone later in the piece.

I'm not aware of any video format that uses FLAC.

Well, the video codec doesn't handle audio anyway, so neither am I.

The container format is what I suspect you mean, and Matroska can handle just about anything. There are others, but that was the first off the top of my head, and IMO the only one worth using these days whenever possible.

This wikipedia chart is useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_container_...

I don't think I've seen an .mkv in literally years. I didn't think video recorders recorded in that format either. .mp4 and .mpeg are still the video containers that I see 99% of the time (note: I don't use a WebM-capable browser, so I don't see WebM videos).

How can Nikon and Canon even exist now [Chinese brand smartphone] can take photos?

Oh, that's right, SLR's take much better pictures.

This reads like an ad.

I agree that the P&S cameras have been made obsolete by phones, yet it is all about the sensor size and the geometry and physical size limit the phones in that regard, unavoidably. The low light performance, zoom, etc will suffer. I think the DSLRs are outdated as well by the mirrorless, such as Sony and micro-four third cameras.

Not only sensor size but the ergonomics. I agree that in daylight my iPhone 6S is basically as good as my somewhat older Nikon, but the way you handle them both in order to take a photo really play into the final quality of the image.

The phone will always be like a tiny window to the world, while the camera is more of an extension of my eye. Might be a personal take, but for me it makes a lot of diference and it shows in my photos.

I'd love to see more journalistic photos taken by the phone. Anyway, the article mentioned something interesting though:

"The trick now is a low-profile, fast, connected tool that still allows the user to control image quality. What’s the best photo gear for this new age of real-time, run-and-gun, snap-and-post journalism?"

A smartphone can easily handle those. Image quality wise, probably it won't outclass your new shiny Fuji X or Leica M, but then again the major concern of photojournalism is capturing the "decisive moment" decently, and not about ISO performance or bokeh, for example.

Image quality is overvalued when everybody use tricks to post-process their images.

Behind "allows the user to control image quality" we could have brighter dawns + extra aeroplane (that wasn't here), changing clothes tones to corporate colors, putting more red in blood or more sad in faces, eliminating objects or people, adding either perfect skin or a frown and eye bags in the face of a politic, etc, etc...

The "decisive moment" currently is not recorded, is created from scratch.

Historic or journalistic value on the other hand is not necessarily about image quality.

No matter how much you "tweak" your photos, you are not getting the quality of a DSLR.

You are not getting the focal distance and zoom of a 70-200.

Am I overly paranoid to remember that Huawei phones were found to be phoning home to China and spying in the past?

any source of this? from what i remember those were phones from shady resellers who installed there all kind of spyware, not if you buy Huawei out of the box, it's pretty clean

I stopped reading when he said Huawei is knockoff for 400$. This guy knows maybe about photography, but has zero idea about smartphone brands.

I wondered years ago how long it would take for the single function camera to be extinct. My answer is fast coming into focus.

Oh, I dunno. When is a phone going to do this:

    http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/2016-hawk/2.html

or this:

    http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/fog.jpg

or this:

    http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/hockey-portraits/104.html

I love that phone tech is getting better but I'll take my 1DX & the 200mm f2.0 over a phone a 100x. Phone is handy as heck because it's always with you but there are some things you just can't do without a great sensor and great big honking chunk of glass.

For the first and third picture, the important part seems to be the use of bokeh, right? iPhone 7 Plus can do bokeh. And for the second picture, that just looks like an HDR photo to me, which phones have been able to do for a while.

Saying the iPhone 7 Plus can do bokeh is like saying the iPhone 7 Plus can do zoom: Technically accurate, but it's completely and utterly outclassed by a real camera.

Scroll down to the bokeh section on https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/mini-shootout-can-ip... for example.

Speaking of zoom, if you think the only thing interesting about the 1st and 3rd pictures is bokeh, then you're not noticing just how much zoom is used on them. The new zoom lens on the iPhone is a 56mm equivalent - just slightly more than a quarter of the lens used for those pictures. The iPhone does not have anything on it that makes it capable for the same sort of shots a real camera with a telephoto lens offers.

What he said. And some more details: all of those pictures (and all of my pictures to date) are jpeg right off the camera. No post processing, no HDR (which is why I'm proud of that fog picture. That's a freaking jpeg shot straight into the sun and I've got details in the shadows).

And the hawk stuff is usually a 600mm f4 lens. A touch different than a 56mm equiv. And one of those was on a 7D II, so 1.6x crop factor, so 960mm equiv.

Don't get me wrong, I'll probably buy that phone because the best camera is the one you have and you always have your phone. But it's never gonna replace that 200mm f2.0 lens with that yummy yummy bokeh. I'll happily be the dinosaur that is carrying around that heavy stuff as long as I can lift it. Makes me happy.

I have a handful of rather nice images, photos taken of the Moon, rainbows, or crepuscular rays. As I said, they're rather nice, but as you suggest, I really wish I had my Nikon on me at the time. They wouldn't just be "rather nice," they could be incredible.

Yeah, the phone is awesome because you have it and you can capture images. I'm not going to haul my pro body and a huge ass lens everywhere I go.

But when I have that stuff your point that they go from nice to incredible is spot on.

Look at this (warning 9MB download):

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/2017-carrizo-plain/2017-04-15-10.08....

and don't look at the shrunk size your browser shows you, click on it and see the full size and scroll around. That's a jpeg right off the 1dx. It's insanely sharp and detailed.

If you're impressed by these photos, then try my suggestion and get a film camera, since you already have Canon gear, get a Canon AE-1 for like $120 used on Amazon (or cheaper on ebay), it will work with all your existing lenses, and try Porta 400 film taking similar photos like these.

The reason why I say this because it seems like you've reached a local maxima for DSLRs and by trying your hand in analog you'd see what's really missing in your pics.

Dude, I started on a Canon AE-1. Well that was my first personal SLR, I really started on a Pentax K1000 (didn't we all?).

I've done a _lot_ of film. I think before I went back to that I'd try post processing. I'm of two minds on post processing, I know it can make things "pop" but I like pictures to be realistic. Sometimes that makes them look worse than you might like but they are real.

That said, I am sure a ton of my keepers would benefit from post.

See my profile if you want to try and convince me in email, I'm a total nerd about photography stuff. Not great at it, I've got a shitty eye for composition, but still love it.

Well I came from a poor country, so due to leap frog effect, I directly got into digital photography, and eventually I went into analog.

The things I have learned about digital and post processing (and I did that a LOT) is:

* Always shoot in RAW mode, why ruin you images by making the stock software by Canon to convert them into dumpy JPEG format.

* Always underexpose digital photos. Digital sensors these days have pretty good exposure latitude (almost as good as analog some even say). When you shoot in RAW and underexpose, you can recover almost everything. Digital sensors are HORRIBLE in capturing highlights. You're commenting on how proud you are at your camera in capturing the shadows of the fog scene, but the highlights of the photo are completely butchered.

* While post-processing, invest in a good monitor calibrator. Granted they can be expensive, the cheaper version of that is to at least do your work in middle brightness of the monitor (irrespective of the actual brightness level you work in) and then crank it up all the way and see how it looks, and crank it all the way down and make adjustments.

* For actual software, I prefer lightroom, because you can create all sorts of presets for it and see immediately how any photo will look in it. You can also buy presets (like VSCO has some good ones) from third parties to expand your collection.

* Discard more shots. That (i.e. being more selective) makes a HUGE difference between a good photographer and an average one.

Finally, I'd say you should try your hand in Medium format analog. Nearly nothing I did in digital came close to a single Medium format shot I've taken.

I'm curious as to what digital bodies you have tried? The medium format comment is interesting.

Totally not an ad!

When he says that the P10 camera is the same thing as the iPhone 7 Plus...

Was that an ad?

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