Camera is the one thing that has me on the edge of should I get a new one.
Everything else...could probably rock my 7+ for another year or two. Maybe do a battery replacement.
Everything else...could probably rock my 7+ for another year or two. Maybe do a battery replacement.
The iPhone 11 pro blew me away with the night mode photography, and the simulated bokeh that can be modified in post because of the depth camera is downright genius. And the most important feature, it’s always with me, unlike the DSLR.
I’ve been using my wife’s hand-me-down phones for a decade now. This was the first phone I bought for myself, and really it was a camera that has a phone feature, not the other way around.
After comparing them, I'm convinced that it's only a matter of time until phones are going to catch up to full frame cameras. Software these days is more important than the raw hardware it seems...
What could a DSLR with iPhone-level software achieve?
The problems for camera manufacturers around this, though are:
1. Their market is incredibly, loudly regressive about a lot of this stuff. A noisy chunk of the photography market is really hostile to workflows that don't mimic hundred year old darkroom processes. Doing in-camera is an abomination. Automation is an abomination, etc.
2. Building the compute in to the camera is non-trivial. You've already got a lot of compute power focusing on running the complexities of things like continuous AF tracking (e.g. on top-end Olympus that's 4 of the 8 cores available). A lot of compute budget is used for things phone cameras are rubbish at. At some point things like heat become a problem.
3. Data volumes are hard: Olympus are "only" dealing with a 20 MPix image. Sony are dealing with 24 - 60 MPix images. Olympus do that at up to 60 frames/s (20 with AF), and to read the data within the constraints of shutter speeds of 1/16000 s. That is... a lot of data compared to the relatively modest rates on an iPhone. Oh, and while iPhone users are generally OK with a bit of lag, DSLR users get really pissy if you're making them wait for that. Latency needs to be very low.
4. Physics is hard: A Sony sensor is a 24 x 35 mm hunk of silicon. Quite apart from the challenges of the data volume, reading a chunk of CMOS that large has been a challenge. Sony have done a lot of clever things to work around those limits, but still... (Olympus have been able to do high frame rates longer than anyone else in part because their sensors are smaller)
I do really love the iPhone when I just need to take a quick shot, though. All the computational stuff means that I'm almost always guaranteed to get a usable photo out of it in any condition.
Having recently purchased both the latest RX100 and the 11 pro, I both agree and disagree. For auto mode in certain conditions, when viewed at significantly scaled down resolutions, yes. To if you're posting to instagram or facebook or whatever, this is probably true.
Manual mode on the RX100 vs the 11 pro, even when using custom apps that expose a lot more of the camera settings, the RX100 starts to pull away. If you're doing any work with larger image sizes (and by larger I mean using a computer or TV screen instead of a phone), even more so. They're honestly not even close at that point.
Meanwhile, on the full frame side of things, the A7 line of cameras has been advancing picture quality at a rate as fast as anything in the iPhone, and just absolutely clobbers it. There's physics in play here, and I'm skeptical that software or processing power is going to increase the picture quality that much, and I have no idea how you would match things like super telephoto lenses in a smartphone form factor.
And, if I ever need zoom (like in nature photography), phones just can't compete with a 300mm lens.
2014: https://ai.googleblog.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and-high-dyn...
2017: https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-pho...
Really makes you wonder what could be achieved by combining Google's computational photography algorithms with a bigger sensor and high quality optics. I'm probably not going to buy another high end camera, until I see something like that on the market.
But indeed, camera manufacturers are way way way behind. The best they can do at the moment is find faces on a picture (and still, not that well except on Sony cameras). This is disappointing to say the least.
The Zeiss ZX1 runs Android, but I don't know how much computational photography it provides, since all the reviews about it only emphasize the fact that it can run Lightroom (which sounds completely useless).
If you have a Canon camera, check out the CHDK
Now if they can just make it smaller next year.
EDIT - I should mention that the UWB radios might be cool once there's a significant feature using it. In terms of future-proofness, it's a handy thing to get even if it didn't launch with any important functionality.
On my S10 I now have a cheap $5 charging pad at the office, and I never really think about charging anymore when I get home.
Only on vacation trips I still have to budget my battery.
With 11 Pro Max, I charge once every 1.5-2 days with regular usage. This is truly amazing to me, because I never have to worry about my battery dying midway through the day, and it feels extremely freeing.
But, if you are taking lots of pictures or about 15 mins of video, the battery seems to drain quickly, by about 45% as I was doing today.
The fast charge with the 18 W adapter is also very helpful.
The 11 Pro's camera is so much better. The edge detection in Portrait Mode is better on the 11 Pro (I think it's the hardware, not just iOS 13). Night Mode is unbelievable. Video has improved also (I think this was mostly due to XS upgrades, but there are other 11 Pro benefits that I mostly won't use, like simultaneously capturing video from multiple cameras). I haven't done the .2 update yet, but the deep fusion stuff is pretty cool from what I'm seeing others post online.
I think folks like Brian X. Chen (NYT), who say this is an optional upgrade if your iPhone is less than 5 years old have it wrong. I can definitely see skipping this if you're on an XS or X. But 8 or older? It's a very noticeable upgrade. And if you're not on a Plus (i.e., capable of Portrait Mode), it's a huge upgrade if you use your camera much. And that's before getting to all the other features like wireless charging and the UWB chip for enhanced tracking. Oh, and the battery is noticeably better than my 7+, which had great battery life (and was warranty-swapped by Apple a year or two ago, so the battery was not a full 3 years old when I upgraded to the 11 Pro). The 11 Pro is the first iPhone I've had that I do not need to charge overnight. I just charge it periodically during the day, once every 36-48 hrs.
My work iPhone is a 6, so it's LED, and even though I keep its screen on eight hours a day, there's no burn-in.
Where do you see burn in? Light or dark screens?
Any time there is an area of flat color, or gradient color it really shows.