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Comment by foobar1962 | Hacker News Reader

foobar1962

While pixel density is good, there is no substitute for pixel size ie, larger sensors. Hence the full-frame 35mm and larger sensors will always produce better images. I have a Sony RX100 and its images are superb for a pocket camera -- a combination of the 1 inch sensor and fine Weiss glass.

I studied photography before digital and the same was true then: larger formats equalled higher quality particularly for landscape and scenes with specular reflections. The reason was explained to me like this: there is a tree with shiny leaves and these leaves have specular reflections (reflecting the sun directly) so there are extremely small but very bright points of light. These specular reflections hit the film/sensor and spread around a bit. If the grains/pixels are small the highlights will spill into adjacent grains/pixels and reduce sharpness.

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Weiss glass? Zeiss glass? :-)

With 'Better images' people often mean today less noise and higher dynamic range.

While this is true, the returns are diminishing.

10y ago a 35mm sensor was 1 stop better than APSC, today a 35mm sensor is 1 stop better than APSC [1]. The difference is that 10y ago an APSC sensor was usable at 800 iso and 35mm at 1600iso, while today an APSC sensor is usable at 6400iso and 35mm at 12800iso. The usable range today for the smaller sensor is 7 stops (starting at iso 100) and 35mm is 8 stops, while it was 4 stops and 5 stops 10y ago. 35mm will always be 1 stop better for the same generation [2], but the increase of 1 stop in relation to the usable range (1/5 vs. 1/8) is going down. Same for dynamic range.

[1] Due to 35mm sensor being double the size of APSC and iso being log2

[2] And manufacturer

They have all but diminished. Almost nobody can tell what equipment was used by looking at the end product, even if they zoom to 200%.

Of course you can for best of category products. Most people just don't care about the difference.

Perhaps if you have the 'same' image shot with different cameras side by side you could point out some minor differences. Sure. But if I showed you (or anyone) a shot with no context and background information you wouldn't have a clue. And that's a good thing. Equipment shouldn't matter, and now the playing field is more level than ever.

I think the thing to remember is that modern DSLRs are going to continue to produce decent images across challenging lighting conditions. A DSLR buys you more usable shots to select from later.

You are correct, On a sunny day both types of device will produce similar looking 1000 pixel wide web-ready exterior landscape shots. Now take them into a dark cathedral with high stained-glass windows, try for a quick portrait of a priest walking by holding a candle, and the DSLR will still get the shot, and it will look great. Smartphones cannot do this...yet.

That's not been my experience...

I shoot pics of my kid with a $3500 35mm dSLR and constantly save pictures to my phone. Whenever I show people the pics on my phone, they almost immediately say how amazing the photos are and ask what kind of phone this is.

I'm not some distinguished photographer, but with the right camera and lens, the color, contrast, bokeh, light, some minimal composition (not in that order) all come together very nicely.

Same holds true for video as well.

My point is, this comes up again and again, without any context that the pics weren't taken with the phone.

It's not the $3500 35mm dDSL but the better lens. Cheap lenses on 35mm look worse than an iPhone X. People see shallow DoF, creamy bokeh or flat faces (taken with 85mm++ lenses) and wonder why they didn't see this on other phones. So they ask about the phone.

"Same holds true for video as well."

Which is the reason everyone seems to shoot with a GH5S and no longer with 5DMXs.

You're absolutely right... I was just trying to keep my comment short, and saying $3500 implied a similar level lens as well.

Also, and I think we agree on this, "better lens" doesn't need to mean "expensive", I can get very similar results from a cheap 40mm f/2.8 vs. and a 10x cost 50mm f/1.2 when the lighting is difficult and I can use a very high ISO.

As for the video part of your comment, let's agree to disagree.

I was trying to say that I get people commenting on how good my videos are because they're used to seeing video shot on mobile phones.

However, I'll take Canon color and 1.74x crop 4k over a 2x crop any day...shit 500mbps Canon codec be dammed.

My post was in response to someone comparing APSC and Full Frame cameras and that's what I was comparing.

I'm totally aware of the difference in quality between a decent camera and a phone.

My bad... I misread this thread on my phone.

An APS-C camera in capable hands is just as good as full frame.

Depends on the style of photography. I tend to go for hyperfocal-distance landscapes using a 36 megapixel FF sensor. If you want to call that an edge case then I'd agree.

I'm not too hung up on shallow DoF - it looks nice for a portrait or picture of your meal but I think there's always room for higher resolution sensors capturing a world of visual information (provided they can produce great dynamic range which a lot of recent/new high resolution FF sensors do).

APS-C, similar to M4/3's 16-20 megapixel sweet spot, seems to be stuck at 24 megapixels for good dynamic range results.

That's where you're talking about sensitivity-related quality - noise, colour rendition, dynamic range.

There's other quality issues in an image though, edge definition and depth of field for example. All things being equal a larger sensor with equivalent glass will always provide better edge definition, and having both 35mm and m43 chip bodies I would say the difference is noticeable. And for depth of field it depends what you want. I can isolate a subject much better with a large chip camera, but that's no use for a macro image where the small chip camera is better.

This depends on the quality of the lens more than on the sensor.

Bad lens, bad image, a larger sensor doesn't help in any way. Good lens, good image, a smaller sensor isn't worse.

If you want shallow DoF, you can get plenty of m43 and APSC (16/1.4, 56/1.2, 90/2) lenses for shallow DoF. If you want razor thin DoF - nose sharp, eyes blurred - you need <=1.4 35mm glass.

If you want full body portrait with blurred near background you need medium format lenses (or far away background).

Larger sensors allow for shallower depth of field and higher resolution + dynamic range but generally slower readout.

Faster lenses help up to a point but since f stops of under 1 aren't really a thing, you're not going to replicate a large sensor with a fast lense with a smaller sensor.

Shallower DoF, yes, if you need something razor thin like 1.4 or 2.8 zooms are sharp enough for you.

Higher Resolution, yes if you need 50mp because 24mp is not enough to print 3m x 2m.

The lens drives these concerns, yes, but the pixel size still has significant impact.

If I build a lens that will cover a hypothetical 16MP sensor with good quality over the whole sensor, it will also cover a hypothetical 16MP sensor of half the dimensions. However the smaller sensor demands a higher optical resolution (line pairs / mm) than does the larger to resolve those 16MP with the same clarity, and so the smaller sensor will deliver lower effective output resolution (again, in terms of resolvable line pairs) than will the larger sensor given the same glass.

And if I'm searching for shallow depth of field, again the larger sensor has inherent advantages. Physics isn't your friend once you start trying to build arbitrarily fast small sensor lenses to replicate what's easy with a larger sensor lens.

I'd be delighted if these concerns weren't true; my m43 camera is much lighter to cart around than my FX one :) And yes, we can now get DR and noise performance from a smaller chip that we used to not be able to with a larger chip - but there are definite advantages still to the larger chip that won't go away.

I have a 10 year old Canon 40D and I can take better looking photos with it than my iPhone X. However, the latter is far more convenient.

The main difference would be the selection of lenses, but even with similar DOF/FOV, the 40D still produces better images IMHO.

Is it really true that larger pixels are better, or is it really only true that sensing more photons is better?

Specifically, what is the reason multiple sensors with smaller pixels could not perform as well or better if their combine total sensor area was larger?

The L16 is an example. It had issues, but they mostly seemed like implementation problems rather than inherent limitations.

After all their challenges seeing that they still apparently raised 100MM in capital, it would seem to suggest something better is possible. https://spot.light.co

Also they have bigger hardware that today’s smartphones would want, but in principal I’ve never understood why smaller pixels are inherently worse as opposed to total photons collected.

I forgot the specific term that describes this, but basically each pixel on a sensor is going to have a threshold for whether it activates (much like a neuron's action potential). Say its 20 photons. If it gets less than that, it is unable to see anything at all. Meanwhile a larger pixel will see something because it will be able to capture more than 20 photons in a given unit of time. On the other hand, the aggregate of several smaller pixels across many sensors will each fail to reach that threshold and thus see nothing.

The L16 has some low light and dynamic range problems, I believe owing to this very situation.

I believe the term you're looking for is reciprocity failure[1] (or schwarzschild effect), though apparently it doesn't happen with digital sensors - only film. Noise becomes an issue in similar situations, but it's not affected by the number of photons hitting the sensor.

Correction: Shot noise[2] is related to the number of photons hitting the sensor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(photography)#Reci...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_noise

You might be referring to the dark current, which is the noise floor for any signal coming out of the CCD. There doesn't need to be an activation threshold of a particular number of photons (maybe there is, though?) for the dark current to reduce your signal to noise ratio.

Years back more smaller sensor were worse than one larger sensor was due to on sensor circuits. With BSI the difference decreased significantly.

There are fundamental physical limits at play. Smaller sensors, with smaller pixel size are diffraction limited more quickly. This new sensor has a pixel pitch about one eighth of what a modern APS-C DSLR has. That sensor would be diffraction limited at around f1.4. Most camera systems are more limited by lens resolution than diffraction. Fast lenses like those found on smart phones often have issues with optical aberrations. The lens quality issue is both a financial and technological one. It is possible to create a lens that is diffraction limited, but even for a small sensor it is very expensive in practice.

The difficulty is actually more with maxing it flat, so the phone can be thin. If you have length to spare and only a chip to record, you can get awesome f/2 optics (diffraction limited) with only a Schmidt corrector and otherwise two spherical surfaces and 3 flat ones (not counting the flat front outside facing of the Schmidt plate) with a field-flattened Schmidt camera. The only strong downside apart from the limit on FOV at around 4 degrees for this simple design (slight better designs should allow for up to about 30 degrees) is that it's twice as long as the focal length. It should still allow ultra-tele shots by resting the tube on the shoulder, without anything to actively compensate rotation shake.

I also wonder if having a small sensor, that you focus a lot of light upon could work just as well as a big sensor.

The issue is that not all noise scales linear with area. Specifically, a larger pixel can hold more electrons, which means you have more dynamic range. Compare e.g. the CMOSIS CMV12000 with the CMV50000. They are pretty much the same, except that the latter has slightly smaller pixels to fit them all inside the chip. The well depth is lower for the latter, without the readout noise compensating fully. The 12 bit of ADC resolution are not sufficient to handle the full well depth of the CMV12000 though, which means that at base ISO of the sensor, i.e. using the maximum photon capacity of the pixels, you have nearly no noise in the image with the CMV12000. Once you activate the iirc 3x analogue gain, you only have a third of the maximum photon capacity left to use, as the rest just reads out full brightness, but you have about 1 LSB per electron (2^12 == 4096, 15k electrons / 3 == 5000 electrons ~ 4096). So, this means that you have a little noise in the last few bits, not much though. These sensors are awesome btw, the smaller one can actually handle an about equally expensive (if you count a device to handle the datarate) catadioptic, i.e. using both lens(es) and mirror(s), in this case a spherical mirror, a spherical lens, a non-curved circle of glass, and a slightly wavy ground pane of glass to correct the distortions caused by the spherical surfaces, with a 400mm focal length (about 600mm 35mm film equivalent) and f/2 as far as DOF goes, with a little bit light loss and some slight mirror-optics bokeh due to the sensor being in the middle of the 900 mm long tube, 200mm inner diameter. This is a design that does not work well without being able to mount the sensor right in the middle of the tube, and any alternatives are really hard to handle. Oh, and yes, this design is _sharp_. The geometric error due to the not perfectly compensated spherical surfaces is about 4 micrometer circle, and the diffraction circle of confusion is about the same, so combined there is a sharpness about perfect if you were to use a bayer filter to get color images. The thing would weight about 2 to 3kg, not including power supply, but including all that is needed to provide the raw pixel data 12MP@10bit@300fps via QSFP.

Larger sensors are better in respects other than megapixels: diffraction limits hit at much higher f/stops, there is higher dynamic range and less noise, much better microcontrast as a result.

With smaller sensors and ND filters you don't need higher f/stops because of larger DoF from sensor size - more is sharp with smaller f/stops. One reason I wish more cameras had builtin ND filters though.

Yup. The RX100 is an amazing little thing - Fits in my pocket but packs a huge punch. People are always surprised (almost put off) when they see me shooting with a tiny point and shoot.

Shameless plug, but every single photo on my Instagram was taken with the camera: https://www.instagram.com/mabunday/

It really is awesome and when friends ask for camera recommendations I always recommend something small because it's the only thing they'll carry around (and thus use) consistently. I know so many people that bought a DSLR as their starter camera that now permanently sits as a house decoration because "it's too heavy."

There's another essential factor that people just don't seem to be talking about - the decline of print. You don't need 40 megapixels of useful resolution if your photos will be viewed on a 2mp iPhone screen. You don't need a sensor with 14 stops of dynamic range if your images will be displayed on a screen with 6 stops of dynamic range.

Sensor quality matters much less than it did at the beginning of the DSLR revolution, because the bottleneck in the image chain lies elsewhere. The vast majority of photographers rarely if ever print their images, so most of the advantages of a large sensor are rendered moot.

Actually, it's the opposite.

A 4x6 print didn't have crazy high resolution. They usually use 1800x1200px as input resolution (~2.2MP). Your iPhone X is actually slightly more detailed (2436x1125=2.7MP). And if you're talking about stops of dynamic range, print has always been less than a screen.

But if you want a photo to look crystal-clear on your iMac's slide show screen saver? That's 5120x2800px=14.3MP. It allows for stunning detail which consumers just never had access to before. (Even the iPad Pro is 5.6MP, more than double a traditional photo.)

But the real advantage, of course, in both megapixels and dynamic range is in post-processing: you can crop to the quarter of the photo that's interesting and bring out the detail in the shadows and it's still high-quality enough to use as an eye-catching retina-resolution header for your Medium post. Remember, phones don't have deep optical zoom lenses, so megapixels have to do that job instead.

>A 4x6 print didn't have crazy high resolution.

Which is why most consumers used fairly crummy fixed-lens cameras with fast film and were perfectly happy with digital cameras with ~4MP effective resolution. You do need a whole bunch of resolution if you're printing to double-page magazine spreads, large-format fine art prints or billboards, which is why professional photographers (other than photojournalists) were relatively late adopters of digital cameras.

>And if you're talking about stops of dynamic range, print has always been less than a screen.

At your local photomat, yes. A good giclée print has about 11 stops of dynamic range. A normal 8-bit LCD has about six stops of dynamic range and a really good OLED has about ten stops under ideal viewing conditions.

My broader point is that pretty much all modern cameras are more than good enough for 99% of users. It's a tiny minority who will actually see the benefit of better cameras in the images they produce. Most people will only ever notice an improvement in resolution if they're pixel-peeping in Lightroom and will only notice an extra stop of dynamic range on the histogram. If you go out and buy an entry-level DSLR with a kit lens, you probably won't get noticeably better results than just using your iPhone. That's a good thing for consumers, but a bad thing for camera manufacturers.

This is not entirely accurate. While many people do view their photos at small sizes on pretty poor screens, the dynamic range of the entire analog processing chain was typically much less than what even entry-level digital cameras offer today.

See for example: http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/dynamicrange2/

Also, for any print that is intended to fit in an album or a frame, there is little benefit over 3 MP. For really, really big prints? Maybe 8, to err on the safe side. Like most analog reproduction media, prints tend to be very forgiving.

Someone viewing their 12 MP photos on a 500 ppi HDR mobile screen is pretty much getting the best comparable experience since the dawn of image capture.

Which of course doesn't mean that the tiny, faded black and white print from a hundred years ago you find in your grandpa's old wallet doesn't convey much more emotion.

Edit: Too slow, crazygringo beat me to it.

I got a Samsung S9 from work. Holy shit those images are sharp.

Yeah at night the software cheats like hell but still.

And while my mobile phone has tones of great features (super slow etc.) my DSLR is heavy and autofocus is okayisch.

I really expect something good from Canons upcoming 90D otherwise i'm not sure how long hobby people will keep using DSLRs.

Of course there are differences in bokey, low light performance, macro, tele etc. but i was very impressed what a Samsung S9 can do now already. I can't imagine that they will stop and you can do a lot with software.

I have an S8, and I actually stopped using my aging Canon 450D as the pictures it takes are so good (and I'm only taking family pics these days). As long as you don't need to zoom, the quality of the images modern phones can take really is incredible.

I looked at the S8 recently; how do you find the curved glass at the edges in use? I found the distortion distracting, and thought the colour was shifting.

Apart from that, loved the phone.

I don't have the 'edge' version. It cost extra money for what I saw as a purely aesthetic feature that I also didn't like.

Here in the UK the edge version of the S8 is all you can get.

Ah, my mistake - it's an S7! Still, it takes amazing photos.

In my costly experience - the curves make it guaranteed to crack the glass if dropped from above 40 cm if not using a bulky case. Mine vibrated itself off a low coffee table and onto hardwood floor, cracking three corners. Because of the curves, the cracked glass would fall off over the span of a few weeks, leaving razor sharp shards in my pockets. And don't get me started with the non-existent palm/grip rejection. It takes "you're holding it wrong" to a new level.

Panasonic CM1 Android smartphone also has the same 1" inch sensor from Sony along with f/2.8 28mm lens.

>While pixel density is good, there is no substitute for pixel size ie, larger sensors.

Actually, there is: improved sensor technology. A sensor is not just a passive collector of photons (which would make size the only thing that matters).

All other things being equal, newer sensors usually improve on thermal noise, dynamic range, etc over older sensors. When things are not equal, a 5-6 generations older sensor might still have worse low light than a smaller one.

There is not much room to improve sensor technology. Photon shot noise is already the dominant factor. There is a bit of improvement available by modifying the bayer filter to filter less. But other than that, you just need more photons, which means a bigger sensor or a bigger aperture, both of which imply more glass. Or a longer exposure. Higher framerates and computational photography help make longer exposures an acceptable option.

Specifically, something like 200+ fps pipelined global shutter. That means you loose less than 1% time between exposures at these high frame rates. But maybe rolling shutter at similar speeds might be able to handle it too... It seems that is mostly trouble if shooting at fast shutter speeds, with a non-stationary scene/camera, due to the wobble e.g. periodic roll shake causes.

Here's a good explanation, it's due to sensor size, not pixel size: https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-s...

One other problem with high mp cameras with small pixels vs lower mp cameras with larger pixels is that they needlessly need to process those extra pixels and they also need to do a lot more work just to get to the same quality. That translates to needing more processing power and less battery life.

Can't we have a combined (computational) approach, where we use a slower shutter-speed to get rid of noise, while at the same time we use a fast shutter-speed to avoid motion blur? Or use several pictures taken with a fast shutter-speed to reduce noise?

Of course. I seem to recall this is built-in into the default Pixel 2 camera app.

Any references to papers describing this technique?

You can have smaller sensor sites (pixels) and downsample to a lower resolution in order to average away most of the noise. That's one approach with, for example, cameras like RED's new 8k film camera.

But our eyes are much smaller and better performing. Surely a large sensor is not a fundamental requirement with the exception of depth of field.

Our eyes are not really that good, a lot of your visual experience is due to the processing in your visual system.

Aren't eyes actually quite bad and most the brain is doing the heavy lifting? We all have a huge blind spot yet we don't perceive it.

The original computational photography.

I thought this was interesting

"One reason for the saccadic movement of the human eye is that the central part of the retina—known as the fovea—which provides the high-resolution portion of vision is very small in humans, only about 1–2 degrees of vision, but it plays a critical role in resolving objects.[citation needed] By moving the eye so that small parts of a scene can be sensed with greater resolution, body resources can be used more efficiently. " from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

The human eye is enormous compared to a smartphone camera, and the retina is still larger than the 1 inch squared sensor he mentioned. What exactly are you talking about?

That eye size difference is mostly due to much wider field of view and adaptability to pretty close macro cases.

100MP IIRC - so not that enormous anymore compared with this sensor.

The nerves that connect to brain are impressive tho, the thickest in our body.

Yes. it is dissapointing to ses so few large digital sensors on the market. Its all focusing on mobile phone sensors right now...

There’s no shortage of large sensors, they just don’t make sense in a phone unless you want it to be huge. In fact there’s a migration upwards in camera sensor sizes owing to the decreasing size of the support electronics, e.g. you can now get a Hasselblad medium format camera that’s smaller than a DSLR. Of course the lenses are huge.

I for one would love for Apple or Samsung or whoever to release a photographer’s smartphone with a micro 4/3 mount (it’s the only multi firm properly documented lens mount system and also seems to be the sweet spot for trading off image quality, sensor readout speed, and size) BUT the phone would be at minimum 20mm thick.

No shortage? Are you kidding? There is only Sony and Canon who make full frame sensors right now at mass market level (nikon is supplied by Sony), and the amount of cameras available with not-really-medium-format size, you can count on one hand. This is a far cry from the situation of film cameras where you had at least at least several dozens of medium format cameras available for purchase at once.

What about CMOSIS, well, to be fair, the CMV50000 is still just sampling without bayer, but it's a really nice sensor, and you can't really say that it's brother the CMV12000 is bad.

Are you talking about sensors or film? Kodak and Fuji dominated film, and today Sony and Canon dominate sensors (Samsung had a pretty solid go of it and simply gave up). Lots of other companies make sensors but they aren’t competitive with Sony.

There are plenty of camera companies, mostly using Sony sensors or Sony fabs.

The lack of manufacturing diversity isn’t a shortage. It’s a different problem. Is there a shortage of cpus?

I wouldn't quite agree with your statement about there being no substitute for pixel size. The trade-offs between pixel size, dynamic range, and noise, when making fair comparisons is complex. Not to mention that today it seems that every phone is taking advantage of computational image processing in order to give a more "DSLR like" image, while ILC cameras aren't implementing this at all. I'm sure in many cases a cellphone camera will shoot a better image than something like your RX100 due to this.

No, when you have a bigger pixel size you have also a better dynamic range and s/n ratio. There is no substitute for pixel size in sensors with the same technology. If you compare different sensors technologies, like front-illuminated vs back-illuminated than at the same pixel size the back illuminated has clear advantages. The computational image processing can be applied also to bigger sensors, so it doesn’t make any sense to compare the raw capacity of a big sensor camera with the processed output of a phone camera. I don’t really think that you have ever seen the output of an RX-100 if you judge it inferior to cellphone cameras.

The reasons I say it is complex is because depending on the sensor technology, resolution, image pipeline, etc. there are many different ways you could compare image quality. If you compare extremely different sensors, like a 1/3" and full frame, then of course the larger sensor will be better, but comparing say a 1/2" sensor with a 1" sensor is less clear.

The smaller pixel sensor will have a better resolution in lp/mm for example, if downscaled to the same resolution as a lower resolution sensor, in many cases you will end up with an image with better detail and less noise (due to averaging out the noise). This is why cameras like the Sony A7iii take a 6K readout and downsample it to 4K for video output.

My comment about computational processing still stands though. While a RAW file will give you much more ability to process, complex computational processing just isn't used to nearly the same level in any raw processor I'm aware of (DxO Photolab is probably the most advanced at this, but still is relatively basic), which does make it a valid comparison at the moment. The simple fact is that small sensors these days have closed the gap with larger sensors significantly, while there are areas they are inadequate in, there are other shooting conditions where the differences are minimal which is a statement I would have scoffed at when I started working with cameras 6 years ago.

The sensor size has nothing to do with the image quality. Bigger sensors, at the same pixel count, have better quality only because their pixel are bigger. If you have a 100 mpx full frame it will have worse quality of a 1/2.3” at 8 mpx if they have the same technology.

> Not to mention that today it seems that every phone is taking advantage of computational image processing in order to give a more "DSLR like" image, while ILC cameras aren't implementing this at all.

When it comes to ILC cameras, the role of processing is fulfilled by the photographer's editing software (e.g. Lightroom, Capture One Pro, Photoshop, RawTherapee, Darktable etc.). Especially these days, with the camera market being decimated by smartphones, the kind of person who uses a dedicated camera usually wants control over the processing.

> I'm sure in many cases a cellphone camera will shoot a better image than something like your RX100 due to this.

The out of camera JPEG on a smartphone might look nicer than an out of camera JPEG on an RX100M6 but after a bit of processing with the right software, the RX100M6 will blow it away. The resolution, dynamic range and noise characteristics are all much better. The RX100M6 can even shoot 24fps RAW for quick HDR brackets if you need it to.

Smartphones will definitely produce a nice image easier than a real camera but a real camera in the end, with the right work, still produces a better image.

It's sad that these DSLRs can't yet use the real fast video-mode non-binned sensor readout to just buffer 3 wide bracketed exposures to RAM and then write them out slowly. One of those exposures will be rather long anyway... Shooting HDR quickly has the benefit that while you want something to reduce rotational shake, you don't need to be much longer in the position than the exposure time itself dictates. You can use the time you need to move to a new angle/direction to compress and store the RAWs, as barely anyone has hardware capable of yanking the camera to a new angle in a few milliseconds, just alone due to the power density needed to have something able to do this compact enough for casual handling. Imagine it like a much, much faster clockwork, with the purpose to deliver dozens of kilowatts for a few milliseconds to accelerate the camera and slow it right back down. Almost no one has such a thing that would keep the device steady during the exposure, but permit very short spacing between exposures that change the direction it is pointing by more than 20% FOV. If you were to rotate the camera that fast at over 50fps, good luck with the light you need (hint: your lens can't provide DOF at the aperture you need to do this even in full sunlight (sunny 16 rule)).

> It's sad that these DSLRs can't yet use the real fast video-mode non-binned sensor readout to just buffer 3 wide bracketed exposures to RAM and then write them out slowly.

They essentially can. The A7RIII and RX100M6 can both shoot RAW to their buffers at 24fps then write it out. A full bracket usually takes less than a second and works just fine handheld.

> Shooting HDR quickly has the benefit that while you want something to reduce rotational shake, you don't need to be much longer in the position than the exposure time itself dictates. You can use the time you need to move to a new angle/direction to compress and store the RAWs, as barely anyone has hardware capable of yanking the camera to a new angle in a few milliseconds, just alone due to the power density needed to have something able to do this compact enough for casual handling. Imagine it like a much, much faster clockwork, with the purpose to deliver dozens of kilowatts for a few milliseconds to accelerate the camera and slow it right back down. Almost no one has such a thing that would keep the device steady during the exposure, but permit very short spacing between exposures that change the direction it is pointing by more than 20% FOV. If you were to rotate the camera that fast at over 50fps, good luck with the light you need (hint: your lens can't provide DOF at the aperture you need to do this even in full sunlight (sunny 16 rule)).

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. It sounds like maybe you're after some kind of automtaed panorama bracketing or something?

Yes, a device for such fast rotating would allow for fast panorama capture, allowing things that are not possible without really fast capture of a high resolution panorama. E.g., things like high resolution 360 degree timelapses, etc.

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