iPhone XS: Why It’s a Whole New Camera | Hacker News Reader

iPhone XS: Why It’s a Whole New Camera

blog.halide.cam

66 pointsdalbin17 comments

This is a really good review of the new camera including why the facial smoothing happens.. needs more visibility!

The images processed with SmartRaw look absolutely incredible. It's kind of shocking that some of the images out of the stock camera look as smooth and noisy as they do.

Good job Halide!

Interesting. To be honest, I'm a little bit surprised it took so long for computational photography to come to market in smartphones, but it's nice to see it, I definitely agree that it's pretty much one of the only ways to improve imaging in such constrained conditions.

Is anyone using Halide right now? Is it worth the $6? I've never purchased any sort of camera app before.

Depends on whether you think the differences in results shown in the closing sections of the article are worth that cost.

I’m using it, it’s a beautiful app and the guys building it seem to know a lot about what they do. It’s also an app purely focused on taking pictures, there are no filters and instead they just provide an easy way to hand things over to Darkroom app.

I usually use it when I think I want to edit the photo later on and want to grab a RAW file.

Author must not have been aware that the Pixel has been doing this for years already. This is just Apple copying Google. Reading "Apple is smart." makes me cringe.

By that measure the original Pixel copied the iPhone 6 that arrived two years before since it had HDR. What's the point of this game?

I think parent is taking issue with the weird "Apple is smart!" opening narrative, which seems to imply that Apple came up with computational photography, as opposed to it simply being a general industry trend.

The point is that author is doing the same thing as lot of Apple fans do: tries to rewrite history to show that Apple invented something.

The author doesn’t state anywhere that Apple invented it, but we all interpret things with our own biases.

I used to care, but I appreciate how Apple doesn't just cram everyone onto a PCB just because it is possible.

Android phones consistently have features that won't be seen on Apple devices for 2-5 years, or never. When Apple announces something as if it is new, what they are announcing is a new integration into an ecosystem.

Iphone XS' image format will be usable, editable and parseable in OSX's default photo viewer.

It will inherit the live photo technology.

It will be transferrable without internet in short range wireless tech that actually works reliably and without any additional apps.

Thats what Apple announces when they don't pay homage to prior implementations of an existing technology.

> short range wireless tech that actually works reliably

I suppose you’re talking about AirDrop, which for me happens to not be that reliable, especially when sending files from/to Macs. Bluetooth worked much more reliably back on Symbian and OS X Leopard, but we know Apple likes proprietary solutions.

Current tests show that XS is just catching up and not surpassing the year old Pixel 2 camera quality though.

> It will be transferrable without internet in short range wireless tech that actually works reliably and without any additional apps.

I'm genuinely curious if you've tried Android Beam. It works very smoothly in my experience and much more fun to use with a tap between two phones, but if I recall correctly it transfers over Bluetooth so is not as fast as AirDrop. That being said, it can be used in many more situations to transfer URLs between browsers, map directions, etc.

The last I attempted to try it was in 2014. I might have been too early.

Unfortunately the fragmentation of android hasn't been solved, and my current experience with android users is on vacation in places where none of us have signal, but the iphone users are able to share everything and the android users take amazing photos but aren't able to share it and their phone explodes in the heat before anyone can get it. Hard. Pass.

According to Vic Gundotra the Apple team is ahead.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/ex-google-svp-vic-gundotra-pra...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com