These night mode shots are seriously impressive. This might give DSLR manufacturers something to catch up with.
Also, for me personally, the next waypoint for the phones should be the development of compact telephoto lenses -- it seems only Huawei got that right with their P30Pro.
I know if I want a _great_ picture I
- shoot raw. - shoot on manual mode (often still with auto exposure). - put the photo into Lightroom.
With a huge sensor and a fast lens there’s no need for a lot of the computational photography phones are doing:
- “portrait mode” - unneeded when you have a fast lens and can get more real bokeh than you could ever need. - “night mode” - with modern sensors you can get usable images even at 6400/12800 ISO. This lets you get a solid image even at a reasonable, handheld shutter speed.
The real improvement other than sensor dynamic range and pixel count has been in autofocus. I still miss some some shots with my Canon because I didn’t react fast enough to nail my focus.
Panasonic 25mm f/1.7 (50mm f/3.5 equivalent full frame) is under $200 and is an excellent portrait lens.
With initial release of GH5 autofocus was pretty bad, but with the last firmware upgrade apparently it's quite good now.
I however cant yet justify upgrade from GH4, which doesn't have sensor stabilization.
As an amateur photographer I'd never take with me a mammoth gear that is some Canon 5D mk3 w/ 70-200 F/4, yet I'm somehow pretty sure that some good processing would allow a compact like Sony a6000 w/ 18-135 F/5.6 get close to its performance in 90% of cases.
The thing is, I sometimes can do that in Lr/Ps, but it's just much more work than I'd like to do for most of the photos.
Oh I'm sure they've recognized the potential all right. But these smartphone manufacturers have massive software development departments with heaps of funds poured into AI research for multiple reasons other than this specific field, which is now really starting to benefit them. It's a different culture.
And even if we assume a camera manufacturer would have the finances to build this culture on their home turf (a huge assumption to make), they then run into the next problem that their sensors are too big! They can't compete as strongly here because they capture much more information with their larger sensor sizes and even with tiny smartphone sizes, you need laptop level performance on a ~7-10 nm transistor scale and dedicated AI hardware to pull it off without destroying battery life. They're so far behind both in know how and difficulty of the problem that I'm not sure how they'll ever be able to do it in the foreseeable future at least with full frame cameras.
Another point in case is that one could implement more in-camera techniques for collecting raw data for further offline processing, like focus stacking or aperture simulation which today require external hardware and a decent amount of skill.
This totally applies to scenes. Portrait, sports, landscape, etc are all just different permutations of shutter speed, aperture and ISO.
Basically, make images that are currently possible on $3000+ hardware, on $600 hardware.
There's also such thing as perceptually correct image rendering, but that's a whole another can of worms (image appearance models and the like), it isn't scientifically ready just yet.
Basically most of the really "cool" applications center around using the electronic shutter which up to 2-3years ago none of the ILC-companies dared to offer for the masses because it has some shortcomings which the "hey I can finally shoot in the dark"-crowd might not notice/care about, but people buying an ILC will, even if they're not technical enough to understand that it's their own problem...
I think the Camera app is one of the pinnacles of Apple's software engineering, but sometimes shooting on my DSLR really makes me value how beneficial things like knobs and buttons.
Obviously this might require using a 3rd party app as well, but I would gladly pay several hundred dollars for such a device.
There are several third party solutions that offer just that, have been for years, e.g.:
https://icdn9.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/pictar-i...
http://blog.incipio.com/home/incipio-focal-wireless-bluetoot...
and even more mainstream brands...
For now, being able to quickly set one of these values depending on the scene is very important to me - so I keep the camera going for now...
It doesn't seem any more out-of-place for them as the HomePod, the idea of which is to have a bigger device just for listening because there's a physics limit to just using a tiny device for outputting sound. They then combine that with super advanced software for something unique. Doesn't sound different from photography, to me.
Why wouldn't Apple want to create the best camera in the world?
To create "the best camera in the world" you have to be really really good at optics, sensor design and signal processing. Apples core strength using very clever software tricks to make pictures that look really good on a computer screen despite bad bad optics and sensors (in an absolute sense).
Most of the "cool" iphone-pictures in non-optimal lighting are about 50% post-processing and they show (for example the linked pictures are about 1.5MP and while they have nicely matched colors, there's barely any texture left (it's the same for the ads on apple.com). This might be fine for viewing and even a small print but that's nothing a DSLR of yore couldn't do. And believe me, once you print a poster of the nice fisherman and compare image quality form the iPhone and a modern ILC you'll see that there's a lot to catch up for the iPhone.
I'd take a typical ILC for ~300 USD over a iPhone everyday from a technical point of view (and so would most photographers if there wasn't the ad-money)
Well obviously. The whole point here and the impressive part of the technology is that you get these results by simply pointing and shooting in full auto mode, no manual post processing and with tiny optics and sensors.
And actually I'm also not really impressed by image-improvement algorithms anymore, the likes of them have been pretty standard for some time now across vendors (it's not 2010 any more), yet picture quality isn't anywhere above snapshot-level.