Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Slightly tangential: I use my phone for the exact same things as you and I usually upgrade every 2-3 years to a high end model for a top camera.

Me and my girlfriend both own the Sony Xperia Z3, which had a cutting edge camera when it was new.

I upgraded to the Galaxy S9 a few months ago, she still has her Z3. The advancement in photos is striking. It's incredibly noticeable, especially the reaction time after pressing the button and the low light performance. To a point we explicitly use my phone to reshoot images we already did on the old phone, if we like the motive. I upgraded mostly because 16GB internal space wasn't enough for me anymore and Android keeps bloating. But if I had experienced the camera difference before, it would have been enough to make me upgrade.

From my non-professional perspective the only thing lacking to a real camera is optical zoom. Otherwise I'm positive many shots of the S9 turn out on par or even better than mid-level Canon/Nikon reflex camera shots, if taken at the right distance.

The camera market is getting more and more redudant for non-professional use cases.

I really doubt the camera is nearly as good as my DLSR, which is a few years old at this point, if nothing else because the lens is so much smaller in a phone. Second I have several (well two) lenses without optical zoom (40 and 50mm), which can achieve really low f-stops.

I wouldn't be surprised if a phone is better at reaction time, and possible for compensating for shaky hand moments. In the first case a DSLR has a mirror that has to be moved mechanically, in the second case the smart phone has much more processor power (and presumably better sensors).

And you definitely right that a better phone tend to mean a better camera.

You're wrong. The s9 photos can be passable in optimal light on a screen, but they're a mushy mess even at base iso (which is under 50). You can't make a big print, while you surely can with a midrange dslr.

I'm not a professional and not even an enthusiast, so my subjective impression might contradict objective measures.

But who is actually making big prints? I've never done a singe one and likely won't do anything bigger than a photobook page. That's exactly my point about dslr's becoming redundant for more and more users.

I own a 500€ low end dslr and it feels worse than my 500€ phone that I carry with me anyway.

This is somewhat strange. I mean, low end dslrs generally have good image quality (the d3xxx series from Nikon is excellent technically) but bad haptics (the controls are too modal, terrible menu systems, etc.) - I still think that they feel nicer than grasping a phone to take pictures, but it's debatable. The auto modes on the phone are better but they have a lot less to work with.

I used the example of big prints (big here means bigger than A4) because it's the most immediate demanding application that I could mention. With a phone you also don't have the resolution to spare to apply perspective correction to photos of buildings, dynamic range to deal with less than gentle, bright scenes, etc.

> The auto modes on the phone are better but they have a lot less to work with.

That's probably the basis for my impression. I basically only use auto and am not educated enough in photography to use manual mode in most cases.

You don't need to be especially sophisticated to enjoy some basic advantages of DSLRs - eg aperture priority (you tell the camera what aperture size you want, it works out exposure time and ISO) is an easy first step. (This controls, essentially, what bits are in focus for your shot.) Plus it's a feature few phones offer, or indeed can do much with, as they have such a tiny aperture (5mm of glass to let light in, say).

Increasingly I'm happy enough with a phone (giggle pixel 1 which has a halfway decent camera + software support) for walkabout use, but the benefits of a small DSLRs for holidays or other special events is hard to beat.

What phones do have, is heavy post processing. You can make DSLR photo look much better than for a phone, but you need to spend some time in photoshop. Phones are now doing photoshopping for you, so out of the box they tend to often look more attractive.

Mirrorless cameras fixed most of the dSLR haptics. A newish Panasonic with a Leica or fixed Lumix lens will take better photos than any phone. The disadvantage is that you might not have it on you. Heck, my old Ricoh GRD3 takes better photos than the phone.

Depends; I don't like single-dial ones. The Sony fullframe ones are decent (but I prefer directly coupled mechanical focus and real aperture rings, most FE lenses don't have those, sadly) and have exp. comp. dials, which I find useful.

Leica M rangefinders still have the best controls for non-action photos, which is a bit sad for a design from the early fifties.

The sensor itself is great, but they come with budget lenses. Not just optically mediocre, but they're slow, usually starting at f/4, so you're throwing a lot of that sensor advantage away compared to a phone with f/1.8.

I have a 3 year old print on my wall of my kids, taken with an iPhone 5, cropped from a horizontal framing to vertical, and then printed at 11x14". I did a bit of post-processing on it to sharpen it up, and it looks fantastic (until you look at it from less than a foot away). I need to repeat the process with the X's camera. ;)

>Not just optically mediocre,

Modern kit lenses are optical marvels. A couple of decades ago you couldn't buy a lens with the quality and versatility of Nikon's 18-55mm kit lens.

Wow, is that really necessary? It almost hurts physically to read that strong of a statement directed at another person.

You aren't even really disagreeing with the OP. You could have said: "You're right about the 99% of non professional use cases (sharing on social media and the occasional small print), but not the 1% case of big prints.

I said that op was wrong, not a bad person for being wrong or something like that. There is a significant measurable technical gulf between the capabilities of a current phone and a last gen midrange dslr.

Where did OP say they were making large prints? Who does that these days?

And for what it's worth, I made a photo book from Google photos with pictures all taken from the pixel 2. It looked great.

We probably have different standards for what makes a "great" print. Mine, which are of course very subjective and distinct from the artistic quality of the content, involve having a file that outresolves the printing method to the far corners precisely resampled to what the drivers expect (200 or 400 ppi for Lamdba c-prints, 360 or 720 for Epson inkjets, etc.). This would result in very small prints with a phone, even disregarding other more subtle issues.

Most people however probably view images on a screen, 4k is only 8Mpx.

> 4k is only 8Mpx.

It should be noted this is only true if you don't zoom in at all, since no phone camera has optical zoom :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com