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Comment by starky | Hacker News Reader

Maybe because this is something very close to my wheelhouse, but this article seems to be overly wordy for something obvious.

Smartphones are simply more convenient than a standalone camera can ever be. Add on top of that the incredible computational imaging capabilities that have been developed over the past few years and the quality of images you can get from the size of optics and pixels that these devices have is amazing and more than good enough for 99% of people. There is nothing that the camera industry can do to access this market in any meaningful way.

The standalone photographic camera industry is going to be reduced to professionals and enthusiasts that need/want things like reliability and ruggedness, long focal lengths, creative control, and the process of taking a photograph.

Sony and Fuji are really the only two companies that really get the current camera market IMO. Sony is putting out technologically amazing cameras that are bringing smart auto-focus systems, high resolutions, video, etc. that catch the eyes of tech enthusiast photographers and professionals alike. Fuji is selling a whole experience of the art of photography. Canon and Nikon are selling to... Canon and Nikon users.

At the same time, these companies also obviously don't get it. I still can't figure out why someone hasn't added computational photography and a smartphone-like user interface for the enthusiast crowd (Why are you still not listening Sony? Your cameras were literally built on Android!). Why do we still have to mess about with camera tethering when it should be seamless to have photos transfer to a device for professional shoots, or to your smartphone for posting to social media?

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I think the problem is that there are two nearly polar opposite desires for UI and processing, that require totally different approaches to a camera.

One is the smartphone user who desires good quality for whatever the situation, who just wants a photo uploaded to Instagram or whatever, NOW. They don't want to learn how to adjust exposure compensation to expose-to-the-right for optimal raw image quality.

This user wants lots of R&D spent on computational photography, lots of processing power on the phone, and a simplified UI that just gets out of the way.

The other is the enthusiast photographer who shoots for either pleasure or maximum quality.

This user wants all the control, all of the time: they've invested time and effort into nailing exposure, mastering autofocus, all while composing beautiful shots. A smartphone interface is not what you want: the best images are often captured in difficult environments where a touchscreen just gets in the way and you must have hard control points.

As far as processing goes, they don't really need any of it; they'll often just process in post. Just gimme the raw data and that's all I need.

Can any manufacturer manage both? Much less in the same camera? For a competitive price?

I'm not sure.

I think Sony could realistically do both in one product. They already make flagship smartphones that are hardware-competitive with everyone else's flagships. They supply the camera sensors for everyone's flagship product. They have the best DSLM and reasonably competitive lenses.

Just take their current flagship smartphone, double the thickness to fit a halfway-between-smartphone-and-full-frame sensor, an SD card slot, ability to export RAWs, and a compact zoom lens, and sell it for like $2000. For extra credit, make a standard lens mount and make it swappable and now you have the manufacturer lock-in that keeping Nikon alive. The margins on the camera business plus the refresh cycle of the phone business might actually save both those divisions.

Instead Sony's camera division and smartphone division are too busy trying to not step on each other's feet and both are suffering for it.

The Sony smartphone I used to have put its low-light noise reduction behind DRM keys and if you unlocked the bootloader it irreversibly turned the camera into a piece of shit. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I buy another smartphone from them, especially for anything camera related.

Plus the built-in camera app was awful to use, but 3rd party camera apps had awful image quality. I don’t know if that was Sony’s fault or related to general Android fragmentation. Either way, I got the impression they weren’t trying very hard.

After the rootkit debacle I'm surprised that anybody on the tech side would still buy Sony gear. As a brand they're burned for me and I used to be quite the fan.

I should add that I do own a pair of Sony headphones that I like quite well. But there's an app for configuring some settings, meaning they're starting to border on "smart" gadget enough that Sony could find a way to screw it up if they tried hard enough. Definitely wouldn't have bought them without thoroughly checking reviews for anything dumb.

Same here. Never bought anything Sony again.

I also remember the poor kid who had a portable CD player almost red hot trying to play the Columbia/Sony music CD he had bought - riddled with purposeful errors to avoid PC copies.

Making war on customers, indeed ...

> Just take their current flagship smartphone, double the thickness to fit a halfway-between-smartphone-and-full-frame sensor, an SD card slot, ability to export RAWs, and a compact zoom lens, and sell it for like $2000.

And no one will buy it. It has been tried before, by Nokia.

Yeah just like nobody would want a social network because MySpace and Friendster tried it. And nobody would want a tablet, Apple already tried that with the Newton.

Not saying you are wrong but “Nokia tried it” is not any kind of marker.

I was under the impression the Nokia that did this failed because it ran Windows Phone and not Android.

I'd sooner get a pocket-sized camera like a Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II or Sony RX100 VII for half the price (although like the iPhone, still out of my price range).

As a semi-enthusiast I really really like the photos my Canon takes. It would be beyond amazing if I could get them on my phone immediately without having to faff around with a weird wifi tether or waiting until I'm at a computer to mess about with SD Card transfers.

edit: Yes even when I just post to instagram you can immediately tell the difference between a DSLR photo and a phone photo. Even with all the computational power of an iPhone X, the DSLR's optics and bigger sensor win hands down despite being a 2015 model. (Rebel T6i)

Well, I can transfer images from my A7ii to my phone in a few seconds. It's been done.

The camera makers would be wise to just implement an API over Bluetooth or adhoc WiFi to pair with phones/tablets/laptops and offload RAWs and JPEGs.

Lightroom mobile, etc., could then have the images swiftly processed and uploaded, and could probably be implemented with minimal changes to the newest models of camera.

They all have some form of Wifi-to-phone, but I don't think anyone has made it reality enjoyable yet. I only know the Sony side of things which is probably the worst of the bunch, but it's so full of the arbitrary limitations and unpleasantries that others can be twice as good and still suck. It all seems to be merely an afterthought feature that is just there to get a feature checkbox checked.

The only reasonable implementation however would be something like a permanent BTLE connection that wakes up wifi whenever there are unsynced files on the camera. Just push that while I'm shooting, keep it alive until synced (or until permanent connection loss) when the power button is pressed, leave the phone side UI of what to do with all that data to the phone. (OTOH I'm not even sure if phone OS still allowed an app to do that, idle on background BTLE, then fire up the WiFi without user interaction. OYAH this would be the perfect crossover feature for Sony, because a hardware manufacturer could definitely include it in their Android - but even then, if they did it they'd certainly botch it with sticking to their proprietary raw format instead of opening up to Snapseed by going .DNG)

I don’t need my images so bad that I want to process them on my phone. I’ll get to them in my laptop when I have the time.

When my phone is involved, I don’t want to do any processing, except maaaaybe Instagram-like filters. Those photos are not for print or anything like that. When I want good photos not meant to be consumed just on 5” screens I want control.

I would much rather have a reliable rugged camera with manual only mode, weather sealing, huge battery, huge sensor, and cheap glass, than a smart camera.

Canon and Nikon and I'm sure others already have a WiFi adapter you can plug into the SD card slot that does exactly this.

You don't even need an adapter anymore, it's been native for years on many bodies.

But the software and connection process are terrible, and have been for years.

I have a Nikon D1000 and the process is fairly painless - I use an app on my iPad to review the pictures and select the ones I want to download from the camera and once I do that they are treated like any other picture and uploaded to iCloud etc.

Pretty seamless on Sony. Just select "upload to smartphone", enter the password that's displayed on the camera into the Android app, done.

At least on my Sony RX10 IV, the authentication was only necessary the first time (by NFS or QR code scan).

Since then, I

- Open the Sony app, press "receive"

- View the picture I want to transfer, press "transfer" (physical button), select "confirm" (or select further pictures).

The UI could perhaps be slightly nicer, but it's not really a barrier here.

But you can only get JPEGs that way. No way to grab RAWs from the camera. But most android apps I use to finalize images do support RAW now. Google Photos supports RAW etc., etc.

Also, I almost always seem have to restart the app once or twice until my camera shows up. This is on three different android phones that I've gone through since I bought my a7II.

The only DSLR with WiFi hardware I've tried was the Nikon D750. Yeah, it was bad to the point where I think I'd rather have an EyeFi.

Indeed, getting them to connect is always a few minutes of frustration that sometimes makes them connect.

That’s already too complicated. My phone uploads photos to the cloud (which my computer is hooked up to) automatically. Needing to attach a piece of hardware to my camera to achieve the same thing is arcane and absurd.

While current DSLRs typically have baked-in WiFi functionality, the idea of having them auto upload "to the cloud" seems a bit absurd to me. You're looking at ~50 MB per image if you're shooting raw. While you may want to auto backup the images to a nearby device it's unlikely you'd want to wait for that much data to be sent out over the internet.

Canon cameras implemented cloud functions a while back, and I guess it's the same for others. Unfortunately, being just another small feature and not the main function, works like crap (and it seems to be related to the server's bandwidth). Combine a low upload speed with a 30-40MB photo and the capability of getting 10 of these photos per second and you realize it's faster to get the card out and read it on a PC.

Canon and Nikon and I'm sure others already have a WiFi adapter you can plug into the SD card slot that does exactly this.

You're probably thinking of an EyeFi, which is a third party product. First party WiFi support is typically either baked into the body itself or a dongle you'd clip to the side of the camera or flash shoe.

Agreed, I know that personally I would like a camera that offered me both paradigms depending on the scenario. Not having used or looked into it much at all, something like the Hasselblad X1D seems to tread that line between dial control and a touchscreen interface in a way that is much closer to what I'm thinking.

What I would really like to see from a camera is the ability to take a photo, say when travelling, and having it automatically end up on your phone with computational imaging already applied. Then with a tap, be able to pull the RAW for more in depth processing if required. I know that I do most of my processing in DxO Photolab precisely because it takes a guess at the editing for a photo before I even touch it, and therefore I spend less time post processing.

>This user wants all the control, all of the time: they've invested time and effort into nailing exposure, mastering autofocus, all while composing beautiful shots. A smartphone interface is not what you want: the best images are often captured in difficult environments where a touchscreen just gets in the way and you must have hard control points.

You'd be surprised.

Enthusiast users clamor for good autofocus, want automatic HDR and bracketing, and lots of other things...

I've got some complaints when it comes to my a7r 3s interface, and I assume the 4 hasn't changed much, so I'm probably in the group you're talking about, but...

Having better autofocus, automatic HDR and bracketing, etc., to me, has nothing to do with having a smartphone like interface or computational photography.

I do want those things (or, kind of - I want better autofocus across the board, and I want the option of automatic hdr and bracketing) but I don't want an iPhone or Android style camera interface. That's damn near the opposite of what I want.

>I've got some complaints when it comes to my a7r 3s interface, and I assume the 4 hasn't changed much, so I'm probably in the group you're talking about, but...

A7R III is already another crowd, there are tons of people like simpler DSLR (e.g. Nikon D3500), simpler mirroless (e.g. Olympus PEN) and compacts (tons of models). Those could all use a "smartphone like interface" and "computational photography".

Now, for more hardcore enthusiasts:

>I do want those things (or, kind of - I want better autofocus across the board, and I want the option of automatic hdr and bracketing) but I don't want an iPhone or Android style camera interface.

Well, I'm a pro photographer (or have been, more into dev now, with a side of video), but I absolutely could use all that things.

Though by iPhone or Android camera interface I don't mean seeing the same thing in your mirrorless screen.

I mean more like the ability to download/write apps, advanced functionality made simple, things to automatically update/sync/post images, etc.

Think more like Magic Lantern -- and the ability to write or download stuff like that with an official API.

>I mean more like the ability to download/write apps, advanced functionality made simple, things to automatically update/sync/post images, etc.

I guess? I dunno. Perhaps it's my lack of ability, but it's only a small fraction of my shots that I want to do anything with, and I usually do at least some post processing on them before I do anything with them. I can't imagine wanting to do much of anything with any photo I take without doing at least some basic work in lightroom first.

Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User.

My treatment largely focuses on software, but if you consider SW a mechanism for delivering interface and output, it applies to a physical + controls system such as cameras. Previous iterations of this phenomenon include audio equipment and bicycles.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

> Smartphones are simply more convenient than a standalone camera can ever be.

This, and as the old adage goes: "The best cameras is the one you have with you". I, for one, have taken technically superior photos with my camera - unsurprisingly - but certainly the more interesting photos with my smartphone. Now you can argue what is better, but I'd say interesting beats technical superior any day.

> Sony and Fuji are really the only two companies that really get the current camera market IMO.

So much this, and if you compare the two: Sony is so much ahead of Fuji that they play in a different league in my opinion. As much as I hate Sony, I think they nailed it. In some sense I'm tempted to add Leica, because I think the Q and Q2 show that they get the current market too, but considering the price, the price/performance ratio, comparing that to Sony and then comparing it to my smartphone ... just nay.

Another interesting data point is that younger artists, like Eric Kim, don't have a problem to add smartphone photos to their portfolio.

I remember reading an interview with a famous photojournalist (wish I was informed enough to remember his name), and he talked about snapping a photo that became very famous. He said he saw a bunch of stuff happening in a crowd, lifted his camera above his head, and pressed the shutter release. As far as capturing action, yeah it did that. As far as composing a shot, it was like any cell phone shot of people running in a crowd. It was messy, poorly framed, etc. I believe it hit the news just the right way to become famous, but if he had a cell phone, a video would have been better, or just a ton of shots instead of the one.

and how many people did you show your interesting photos too? are they of any interest of anyone else? would they standout in one of the imageboards available everywhere?

Most certain the answer is no, which leads to the question why you felt the necessity to take this picture at all?

Given the abundance of photographic material available today, I came to the conclusion that I'd prefer quality over quantity (your old adage basically just leads to more pictures you'll never do anything with). I can get a mediocre picture of nearly everything interesting in a matter of seconds on the net, but I'll have trouble finding a picture which I can use on my 32" 4K-desktop or print as a poster. And while I might eventually (today, quality isn't there yet...) have more choice when taking pictures with a smartphone, my real wall capacity is limited and it's definitely a lot cheaper to go smartphone shopping with the camera falling right off any priorities list.

> and how many people did you show your interesting photos too? are they of any interest of anyone else? would they standout in one of the imageboards available everywhere?

I take photos to capture memories, not to post on social media. I greatly value being able to look back at my old photos, because they trigger memories that I'd long forgotten. Sometimes I share my photos, but most of the time I keep them to myself. In this case, smartphone-quality is fine.

I also take photos because the process is enjoyable. I enjoy the technical side of it, finding that perfect angle, then editing it to use as a perfect desktop background. That's what I use my standalone Sony for. I don't bring my standalone camera with me wherever I go, so my phone gets taken out a lot more often.

The best cameras is the one you have with you

Also expressed as "F/8 and be there".

Numerous online references, one at random:

https://www.lightstalking.com/quick-look-philosophy-f8/

> Why do we still have to mess about with camera tethering when it should be seamless to have photos transfer to a device for professional shoots, or to your smartphone for posting to social media?

I think this is the real answer for the standalone cameras: treat it as an extension of the smartphone.

It's embarassing that in 2019 it's _still_ not possible to wirelessly transfer RAW files from a camera to a phone. I haven't seen a single camera that can do this. iOS is perfectly ready for it too: there's platform-level support for RAW images and processing and plenty of apps take advantage of it, including the built-in Photos app.

Related: does anyone know why cameras typically have horrendously slow wireless transfer speeds? My iPhone can easily reach 600Mbps over WiFi yet even third-party devices made solely for the purpose of quickly transferring photos can only manage ~60Mbps.

This is a real pain. And the fact camera OS are mostly proprietary walled gardens means others can't add these simple features either.

For Sony cameras, the fact they can run android .apk's allows some workarounds for jpg/raw WiFi transfer, see http://www.stg-uploader.xyz/

You can backup via WiFi to Google photos or FTP, then open from there with mobile Lightroom on your phone/tablet

> For Sony cameras, the fact they can run android .apk's allows some workarounds for jpg/raw WiFi transfer, see http://www.stg-uploader.xyz/

That only works for the older ones unfortunately. They dropped the installable app thing a few years ago.

I can transfer RAW photos from my camera to my phone (either through Wi-Fi or by plugging in a USB cable), then edit them in Adobe Lightroom. But I don't do it very often because the files transfer very slowly, and editing on a phone is cumbersome.

Ran into this problem pretty recently actually. We've got a machine that was set up 10 years ago to use a canon DSLR camera to take scaled images we can use to program with. After ten years the body and lens are dying. We replaced the lens about a month ago after it refused to take pictures due to focussing issues. We wasted half a day recalibrating the grid used to scale the image. It worked well until last week when we started getting focus problems again. We're going to replace the body this time and likely the lens too just to be sure.

There is zero reason a DSLR camera is needed for this setup. Ten years ago it was the best option, but for our application we really don't need it. Sadly, the software we use is 10 years old, usupported and half written in German. Calibrating was a fucking nightmare, more than half the variables in the configuration file were German and the machine support people stopped supporti.g it years ago and don't have any staff familiar with it any more. Anyway tangent aside, a high quality cell phone cameram that's easy to interface with and doesn't have the problems associated with a ten year old DSLR camera would be so much of an improvement.

I also learned because of all of this, cabin cameras have a finite internal memory because of the way pictures are stored internally on the camera's storage and the only way to get more than 10,000 pictures, even if the pictures aren't being stored on the camera is it insertt an SD card which will work once to reset the camera's interal counter which should give you another 10,000 pictures.

Is there a reason why a DSLR was chosen over something like a machine vision camera even 10 years ago? Talking about grids and scaling makes it seem like something that would be right in that product space.

I have no idea why it was chosen. I was wondering this myself as I was lifted up 20 ft in the air on a forklift change the lens. The grid was configured manually. We laid out 3 plastic sheets over the machine table with 10"x10" squares. We took a picture and manually dragged points on a grid over the software to match the grid on the table. Then the scale and offset and stuff had to be adjusted. The software was somewhat crude. Once you took a calibration picture, it overrode the original and there was no way to make a backup and as I.said before all the scaling and.offset information was input into a configuration file that was almost entirely written in German.

Interesting. Any budget to build something new? Give me shout.

Sony does offer a bunch of over priced, buggy, bad UX, not fun to use on the camera "apps", at least on some series of cameras.

https://www.playmemoriescameraapps.com/portal/

They are almost universally features you can get on your phone cheaper or even free with much better UX. Maybe at the resolution or raw area or some other dimension they might be better. You can also tether to your phone but why would you? It's just too tedious.

I don't think anything is going to save cameras. I keep one which I pretty much only use for super telephoto (400-800mm) and for ultra wide/fisheye. If a phone optically offered both of those things built in I'd stop using that camera completely.

Note: A snap-on 3rd party lens system would not get me to switch but a built in mount might (if Apple or Google or Samsung, ideally Apple, designed some kind of mount for lens I'd totally by them). In fact I'm a little surprised Apple hasn't already done this. I can imagine 2 or 3 tiny notches or mag-divits or something in the back or edge of the case near the lens that external lenses attach to. Apple could offer 2 or 4 lenses and maybe a ring light and easily pull in another billion a year as all the instagrammers go buy them all.

Camera companies are user hostile and the people buy them are used to it. Terribly menus and interfaces, and they don't even care. Even their key features, like video recording are reduced to a 29 minute limit due to an old expired regulation (hello Sony A7iii). USB-C ports for data transfer that can't be used for charging. The list goes on.

> Even their key features, like video recording are reduced to a 29 minute limit due to an old expired regulation

That's not entirely true. The usual excuse is that transcoding generates significant heat and without sufficient cooling the cameras will be damaged. To some extent this is true.

It tends to depend on the bitrate; 4k will get hotter faster than 1080, and 480 will go for long enough to not be a problem generally.

If you stream to an external transcoder/recorder, you can typically record indefinitely with most modern bodies.

That's entirely true. There was a tax regulation that said that any camera that could record over 30 minutes was a "video" camera and was taxed higher.

For an example of idiocy that's not government-enforced, see the arbitrary 30 second limit exposures on a lot of cameras. If you want to take a 5 minute long exposure, most companies will make you go buy a shutter release cable, which is just the most idiotic thing I've ever seen.

I'd love to see basic camera control from a decent iPhone app over Bluetooth LE, but nope... gotta buy a cable like it's the 1980s.

Check out the Nikon app: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/wireless-mobile-utility/id5541...

WiFi only, so it'll eat your battery, and the review score is 2.2 out of 5!

The overheating thing is also just an excuse. Video encoding is not that power hungry, as long as they're using modern chips with an efficient process such as 7nm or 10nm. Most cameras are made with a legacy stepping size on the order of 22nm or larger to save money. That's why they can't fit in a bunch of formats, can't do 10-bit, and can't do 60 fps. Because they're saving $15 of parts on a $4,000 camera.

I bought a brand new mirrorless in California last month and it records indefinitely and infinite duration exposures ("bulb") out of the box. Maybe the camera was taxed higher but I seriously doubt it. A major selling point of many mirrorless bodies these days is recording and streaming video. Even if there is a tax, it's insignificant to me as a consumer.

> Terribly menus and interfaces

Well there is a bit of something you know. Think of it like vi or emacs. I know the Nikon menu system. It's easy for me to move around and do what I want. My wife has a Sony mirrorless camera and I curse every time I have to go into the menu system because it's foreign to me.

Sony is clearly listening. Their range of mirrorless cameras (NEX before, and A6??? now) seem to cater exactly this segment.

I shot Sony since the NEX series came out, starting with the 5000R. Paired with a fixed Zeiss 24mm this camera took absolutely astounding images. Pair a Sony with a smartphone and you get easy upload to social media. What's missing, exactly?

Incidentally I sold all my Sony gear last year. The UI and handling of these cameras is just as ugly as any smartphone can be. It takes seconds to start. The animated/touch UI is just fancy, but slows any operation down. Most modern cameras have humongous menus which are hard to navigate and make little sense as dozen of features get added, but Sony is really on the worst end when it comes to placement and behavior of all the functionality they pack into their cameras, which is sad.

Their "app" store is the most useless thing I've ever seen, including stuff which should be bundled in the camera but when used precludes the functionality of the camera itself.

I'm lucky I always had a great group of friends from which we exchanged cameras and I was able to use most of the others you mention too. If you pick any Nikon, Canon or Fuji camera and start taking pictures you immediately realize why menus are placed in a certain way, the UI is intentionally minimal, and why the body is shaped the way it is. It's a night and day experience if you know what you're doing. No operation takes more than half a second to perform. It's form-follows-function. These cameras cater to pros _first_. You don't need to upload to social media and/or you basically never want to have smartphone-like post-processing in camera because the normal workflow is to either take the built-in jpeg because it's already good enough, or process the raw yourself. Transferring the image via wifi/ble/nfc is decent enough in most 2017+ mirrorless cameras.

Granted, Sony made _huge_ steps forward since the NEX line, but you can definitely see how the camera is influenced by the smartphone market. Sony even released the QX1, which essentially is a camera _for_ the smartphone.

Somehow I have the impression that smartphones themselves will eat away all the middle market as the small optics keep improving. If you want images for instagram you'll probably never care about the improvement in image due to a larger sensor anyway. But a pro will definitely seek superior handling and behavior in a camera, and that is almost tangential to how a smartphone operates.

To continue, as the smartphone market will erode the middle segment, I see the Sony line of compact cameras (A* and RX100 in detail) to become _less_ smartphone like, instead of the opposite.

This has been certainly true in the alpha series. The A6300 handles definitely more like a DSLR than it's predecessors.

> The standalone photographic camera industry is going to be reduced to professionals and enthusiasts that need/want things like reliability and ruggedness, long focal lengths, creative control, and the process of taking a photograph.

I'll take that one step further (and with a family member in professional photography it's a painful conclusion): the convergence between photography and mobile communications devices will make the photographic camera industry disappear because the numbers won't be there to make the devices economical enough. It's basically a continuum between 'doesn't work at all' to 'works for almost all cases'.

System cameras will at some point be as rare as hole through CPUs.

I’ve been a Canon user forever and have a 5Diii that I use mostly when I want the lenses and/or am doing real action photography. But I don’t use it a lot (also have a smaller Fujifilm system) and I doubt I’d make the investment if I were starting from scratch today.

It’s a good camera but it’s frustrating in some ways. No GPS. No easy way to transfer pics to my phone. I probably care less about in camera processing but one has to believe Canon and Nikon could do far more interesting things in camera than they do given the hardware resources and glass they have to work with.

And yeah. Even if I have my DSLR with me I find myself shooting pics on my phone so I can share them now and not in a month when I get around to processing the ones in my camera.

I know “easy” is relative here, but I carry a lightning SD reader around in my camera bag and find it pretty easy to import photos into my phone wherever I happen to be. I’ve also switched to shooting JPEG after many years of shooting RAW because they require much less processing. Mirrorless cameras have made this much more feasible because what you see in the EVF is basically what you get.

I usually write to both CF and SD as Raw and JPG. I got into the habit because I sometimes need photos right at an event I’m shooting.

no GPS is relative. Most phones have AGPS - while this works fine in a city, have fun finding, where you took that picture in a remote forest. Actual, independent GPS devices still cost a lot of money (and need power).

AGPS devices are still GPS devices. They just fast-load the ephemera/almanac data from the cell network instead of waiting to get it from the GPS signal. I know there are options for offloading the GPS signal analysis to other devices, but I wasn't aware of any main-stream cellphones that can't use GPS without the network.

I’ve definitely used my iPhones at any rate as GOS receivers where no cell signal was available. It just takes longer to get a lock.

I have a rugged point and shoot that has just GPS. It takes a bit to find a lock and does run down it’s smoothly with no cellular. But there’s definitely GPS in cheap devices. For that matter you can get $100 standalone GPS receivers.

>The standalone photographic camera industry is going to be reduced to professionals and enthusiasts that need/want things like reliability and ruggedness, long focal lengths, creative control, and the process of taking a photograph.

What breaks away is basically the customer base focused on documentary photography, not the artists. They may even gain more artists that get hooked through smartphone photography and convert into enthusiasts.

The documentary focused customers could be won back with 3D technology and virtual tourism in VR, "re-experience your photographed/scanned holiday shots".

Not everything can fit into smartphones, and I'm suprised that the camera industry isn't taking advantage of that.

> Add on top of that the incredible computational imaging capabilities that have been developed over the past few years and the quality of images you can get from the size of optics and pixels that these devices have is amazing and more than good enough for 99% of people.

These computational imaging capabilities are good enough for 99% of people because they're taking pictures on their phone and viewing them on their phone. They are NOT good enough for professional uses.

https://spectre.cam/full-res/Full%20Size%20Comparison%20for%... <--- this is from an 11 pro, and was posted on a related article several days ago. The left side has had contrast tweaked to make it more obvious, but on both you can see that the iPhone 11's computational photography is doing very weird things to the picture that become pretty obvious when you start to look at them closely. You'd never notice on a phone, but on a monitor, or if this were to be printed for display, you notice that they look almost more like photorealistic paintings than they do actual photographs.

This sort of thing would be completely unacceptable on a prosumer+ camera. There's some programs out there that can do similar things on your computer, like Luminar, that are significantly better at it - but are also using significantly more computing power to do it. Doing the same sort of processing in Luminar on a raw out of my a7r 3 takes 30-40 seconds to apply on an i7-7700k running at 5.2Ghz, and the results still sometimes come out looking similar to the iPhone shot.

The tech isn't nearly there for this to be used on standalone cameras. Maybe in 5-10 years, but certainly not today.

It took camera companies long enough to catch the digital wave.

I feel Sony are the only company to be looking far enough forward, catering well to the overall industry direction. But even the very best very smallest camera system doesn't fit in your pocket.

I have a bulky DSLR and a mirrorless that I use for bird photography. Most of the time, when not doing that specific task, the camera phone will be good enough if I didn't want to bring my other cameras. And mirrorless cameras are tiny! I can fit a professional quality camera system in a satchel no bigger than my cupped hands, yet the convenience of just keeping my phone on me is impossible to beat.

But isn't sensor sizes still a problem for smartphones. Their tiny sensors will generate noisy images compared with a camera with a full size sensor.

I was done with my standalone digital camera when I watched a friend take a snap with his phone and instantly text it.

My process was take a bunch of pix, wait till I got back to my hotel room, plug the camera's memory card into my laptop, transfer the pictures, open up email, attach pictures, email them.

Technically you can run any android APK on a Sony camera. It's just the supported API version is old and many things might not work

https://github.com/ma1co/Sony-PMCA-RE

>I still can't figure out why someone hasn't added computational photography and a smartphone-like user interface for the enthusiast crowd

This has been tried and it didn't sell well, see the samsung galaxy cameras, and the nikon coolpix s800c. Also smartphone cameras have gotten really good, and in practice a fully fledged cell phone with a good enough camera is not that much more

It's the same old story.

Computer + X = Computer

It doesn't matter if X is a screen, an audio system, a network terminal, a phone, a GPS locator, a fingerprint reader, a 3D scanner or a camera. What matters is the fact it's a computer, and the standalone thing will either retreat into a specialist niche or die. Even train tickets and credit cards are going the same way.

I can dig that. Somebody (was it Apple?) came up with the idea that a phone could be a camera as well. And that a phone is really a communicator so it must support email etc.

Now somebody should simply come up with the idea of a camera that is also a phone. I mean you did but somebody should make that idea a reality. Hey, my camera is ringing ...

It definitely wasn’t Apple that came up with the idea that a phone could be a useful “camera”.

The first iPhones compared very poorly with existing camera phones from the likes of Nokia. So much so that they de-emphasised the camera in importance almost as an after thought.

Cameras that are also phones is also very old. Nokia and others have tried it and failed.

Definitely not Apple. I remember cameras on phones way before the first iPhone came out. They were low res3, but nevertheless less, a camera on a phone.

If I ever need to think about who invented the first X, it's usually not Apple. They do a great job at making things better.

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