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Comment by utopcell | Hacker News Reader

If that were true, they wouldn't have faked the picture.

Professional cameras are easier to use, and the shallow DoF looks more professional (especially to inexperienced photographers).

I completely agree with you with regard to professional cameras and real DoF vs synthetic DoF that some of the nicer phones are doing these days.... but it sounds like you don't view using a DSLR here as misrepresenting the product in the advertisement?

If we have to have "*enlarged to show texture" on cereal boxes so that people know they aren't buying a box full of 6"-wide Wheaties or say "professional driver on a closed course" when that new Audi on the TV does a 360 on the salt flat, surely there would be some expectation that there would be a disclaimer that the photo of the actor who was pretending to take a selfie with this hot new phone wasn't actually using the product being promoted?

>it sounds like you don't view using a DSLR here as misrepresenting the product in the advertisement?

Not really. I'm saying that it's already largely misrepresented through 99% other factors. The use of the DSLR is such a small factor that no one should really care whether it is used or the phone camera.

Fair enough, yeah - proper lighting even with a smartphone on a tripod would go a long way

This is terrible logic. You are acting as if the statement was the quality of the camera and if a similar enough picture could in theory have been taken it is almost true to the extent that if an identical image could have been taken it would magically transform into a truth. The actual statement was that particular image had been taken by that device which was 100% false. In fact it rarely makes sense to talk about degrees of truth people are either misleading you and nothing they have to say is worth anything or they are being truthful.

"Misrepresenting the product" means to fabricate a result that misleads potential customers to think that they will get a similar result when using the product. If (for the sake of argument) a DSLR and phone camera produced identical results, they would not be misrepresenting the product because customers will happily get the results they saw on TV. The implication or direct statement that the result is actually produced from the phone is a lie, but it's harmless to the customer. It is harmful if the result is vastly different than the normal circumstances of operating a phone camera because of lighting, photographer's skill, and hours of editing. What I am claiming is that DSLRs and phone cameras are in fact very identical, so this (in itself) is not misrepresenting the product.

I insist on the truth you are satisfied as long as its "truthy"

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-onlanguage...

I would pay extra for a smartphone that let me do aperture/shutter control so that I could get the DoF I wanted. People say there's no point in compact cameras anymore and that's mostly true as far as pointing and shooting, but I can still take more interesting photos with my 5-year-old compact that gives me those controls than I can on my phone, even if my phone has more megapixels.

Chances are, a smartphone isn't going to give you the DoF you want (except by "faking it" using post-processing). There's a direct relationship between aperture for a given focal length and the front diameter of the lens. With a tiny lens and a low f-number, you're going to have a small focal length and therefore a wide DoF.

The controls don't matter - you can't get shallow DoF on a camera with a lens/sensor the size of the one in your phone. This is why the new iPhones mock it in software.

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