Hacker News Reader

> for the average picture taker none of it is a big deal; what they have is already quite good, certainly good enough

So many photos are all about edge cases. If one phone’s sunset or lightning or eclipse photos are more beautiful, people will notice—virally. We’re not at the marketable limit of miniature camera technology. Even if we hit perfect reality —> digital image compression, a smaller camera module, in line with the chassis, would still have a marketable advantage. We’re far from peak camera; gains shouldn’t be dismissed.

> for the average picture taker none of it is a big deal

I think this is a pretty cynical view. OK, maybe the majority don't give a damn, but quite a few people obviously do. Someone's buying iPhones, and S8s, etc. It's pretty dark to assume that all of them are just brainwashed by marketing. Certainly I would say 50%+ of the smartphone owners I personally know were at least influenced by the camera quality.

> what they have is already quite good, certainly good enough

Well, the reason what they have might be "good enough" is because of this relentless "drag to quality" that Apple et al are orchestrating.

> for the real photographers the equipment is secondary

And yet all the "real photographers" have tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear. Funny, that. Look, there's a truth to it - no gear on earth will help you if you don't have an eye for framing, light, etc. But gear does matter and it's ridiculous to pretend otherwise. Direct me to your nearest pro/awarded/exhibited tog who wields a $100 point and shoot and I'll eat my words.

Here's one photographer using cheap point-and-shoot that comes quickly to mind: is Magnum photographer Alex Majoli good enough for you? He preferred to work with an Olympus C5050 point-and-shoot, which was cheap back then and you can pick up for $50 or less on ebay right now:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/multi_page8c1c.html?cid=7-6468-7...

Seriously, photography is probably best example of a subculture full of amateurs who obsess over gear and think throwing more money at gear is going to give them a better end product (although there are many similar subcultures). Crap is crap, however good the gear is that's used to make it.

Here you can read another article about a professional photographer's use of cheaper cameras:

https://blog.mingthein.com/2012/04/12/professional-photograp...

and, e.g., a discussion by serious photographers here:

https://www.seriouscompacts.com/threads/great-photographers-...

.. and this page is also interesting, "13 Digital-point-and-shoots used by the pros":

https://blog.photoshelter.com/2011/11/digital-point-and-shoo...

.. or this one, some beautiful photos by photojournalist who paid $70 for the camera (way back in 2011) ...

http://www.zoriah.net/blog/2011/04/photojournalism-with-a-po...

Buyers do want significantly better quality, but phones are delivering only marginally better quality and marketing the hell out of it.

I say this as someone who used and tested the 5s, 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Nexus 5x and Google Pixel. Every year brings a marginal improvement. Unless you have a many year old phone, upgrading won’t produce noticeably better photos.

> If you, someone experienced with "real" camera gear, were "astonished" by the iphone 7+ pictures and thought they were taken by "five grand worth of gear", then for the average person further gains are going to be unremarkable.

I take issue with this, but even granting it as true for the sake of argument: most people aren't upgrading from a 7+ to an 8+... they're upgrading from a 5S, or a 6, and the difference is massive. Portrait Mode alone is giant leap forward for normal people taking pictures of kids or pets.

The original claim (GP of the comment you quoted) was:

> I think we're getting to the point where the incremental gains we're seeing with each new phone cycle are almost unnoticeable to the average user

That's why the comparison between phones of successive years was made. That being said, I'm not disagreeing with your claim that most people will upgrade from older devices.

The difference between 10 and 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch.

I won't argue with you on the first number. 10 years ago good photographers took beautiful images with the Canon 1Ds Mk III or the Nikon D300.

However, 20 years ago you were stuck with modified film bodies like the Kodak DCS520, shooting 2 megapixel images of questionable quality[0] for the bargain price of $15,000[1]

It is only fairly recently that any digital camera off the shelf is capable of producing "good" images with a good photographer, and we're now getting to the point where computational photography and incredible smartphone sensors will produce good images with a total novice at the helm. That's what makes this all so exciting.

0: https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/kodakdcs520/7 1: https://www.shutterbug.com/content/classic-digital-camerasbr...

Yes, you're right, I felt the 20 years was a little bit of a stretch, but it sounded better.

I do think at least 17 years is legit, though, back to release of Canon EOS D30 in 2000. D30 was only 3.3MP, but was used by a lot of professional photographers and made some great images (I still have one, taken by a photographer friend, that is one of my favorite pictures ever). I think it was priced around $3k.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_D30

You can read review by Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape, who called the D30 an "inflection point" and said it "changes the playing field forever". He took plenty of pictures with D30 and had multiple exhibits with gallery-size prints:

https://luminous-landscape.com/d30/

I'm pretty sure good photographers made great images with lesser digital cameras before that, but D30 was the camera that started people thinking that digital could really be as good as or better than film.

Ha, I actually didn't touch this part of the comment but yeah - 20 years ago, no. As part of my job at the time I had access to the very first sony mavica floppy disk digital camera, and a contemporary kodak I don't recall the model number of. Oh my god they were bad. They, in no way, shape or form, competed with film in quality. They were crap.

I'm not saying you can't see what the picture is of. Sure, you can. But nothing about it is pretty. Think about the lowest budget, crappiest webcam you can imagine - that's it.

"equipment is secondary" - buddy with that hardware you're taking "glitch in the matrix" digital dystopia pictures and basically nothing else. And hey I like that. But don't pretend it just needed a skilled hand. There were fundamental flaws and every photographer I knew back then swore they'd never forsake film, and who could blame them?

>> 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch

20 years ago, in 1997, I bought my first -consumer- digital camera, an Epson Photo PC500. It had a resolution of 640x480. If I'm not mistaken, I think I paid around 700 CAD at the time. And the photos weren't even as good as "questionable quality". So I would go even further and say 20 years ago is a huge stretch.

I think your post actually proves the point of the person you were disagreeing with.

If you, someone experienced with "real" camera gear, were "astonished" by the iphone 7+ pictures and thought they were taken by "five grand worth of gear", then for the average person further gains are going to be unremarkable.

That's kind of a strange argument, no? You're saying that if experienced photographers think the improvement is large, then average people can't tell the difference?

That's very strange.

Have a look at e.g. this paper from Google. http://www.hdrplusdata.org/hdrplus_preprint.pdf These changes certainly count as "astonishing" to me (let's say, an "enthusiastic amateaur" photog), and I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that this tech is insignificant to the average user.

Yeah it means that for the layman "great" is just "great" and "that's normal anyway technology always do great things". whereas as an expert you actually realize why it's hard to get to that point.

go explain to someone in high school why andrew wiles proof of fermat theorem is harder than galois theory... i'm bringin my pop corns

>> That's very strange.

Not really. A layperson takes stuff for granted because they don't know better (or what to look for). An expert knows better and can appreciate the differences.

A layperson might not know why one photo looks better than another, but they can certainly tell that it still looks better.

An expert might know why, and be able to pick out a few reasons more why one is superior to the other, but the layperson still has a pair of eyes.

>> they can certainly tell that it still looks better

The thing is that this is highly subjective and widely varies from person to person. Sometimes it's related to the content (subject) of the photo, sometimes it's the colors, sometimes it's the sharpness, etc.

And sometimes the reason why the photo is "better" has more to do with the photographer's camera settings or technical choices than how good the camera is on paper.

I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable of cameras, but I will consistently say that a high DOF iPhone portrait is better than a portrait with razor thin DOF with silky bokeh shot on a Sony A9, when the A9 is clearly the superior camera. That's because my definition of "looks better" is highly subjective and unique to my own tastes and biases.

> a high DOF iPhone portrait is better than a portrait with razor thin DOF with silky bokeh shot on a Sony A9

I agree completely. I appreciate the gear like anyone else, but it's all about the end result. A recent iphone plus in portrait mode can genuinely capture an amazing looking, high apparent DOF photo. Yes it's all computer trickery but who cares. It looks great. An expert with an A9, with the right lens, primed for the shot, might be able to do better but - and here's the important part - 99.9% of the time they're not there.

The argument is not that the recent improvement aren't noticeable. The argument is that there is a point of diminishing returns, and with such dramatic changes in the past few years we are closing in on them fast. Future changes are going to be harder and harder to notice.

I don't think your comment is logical.

> then for the average person further gains are going to be unremarkable

I'm the average person, I'm blown away by each iteration's improvement. I can already feel like the quality of the pictures I took with my previous phones were completely shitty whereas I did not noticed back then due to my lack of exposure with good quality pictures.

I have an iPhone 6S but I'm being tickled by the idea of upgrading just for the camera. Of course I won't, this is too expensive, but in a year or two I will.

Not really, there's always room for improvement. Look at all the times (starting with Mortal Kombat or so) people have said video game graphics can't get any noticeably better.