Nikon's 300mm F/2

And, even considering 50% MTF, many professional lenses struggle to go beyond 3MP.

Today I travel with an iPhone 11 Pro and a Fuji X-T2. In the past it's been whatever current-gen iPhone and pocket cameras like the Sony RX-100Mk3, Canon S110, Canon S95, and DSLRs like a Nikon D3000 and D50.

It used to be, the photos looked better on the phone after shooting them, just because the screen was so much better, but once imported to the computer, the iPhone photos looked like an oil painting even compared to a upper midrange P+S pocket camera, let alone a DSLR. It wasn't even close.

These days, between the XT-2 and the iPhone 11 Pro, it's hard to tell which is which. Sometimes the iPhone looks better as-shot because of the image processing presets. Other times it's the Fuji. At 1:1 on a 5k display it's just not as obvious as it was when the pixels were blown up more.

Even in good light, yes, the sharpness on the Fuji is better, but not by leaps and bounds. Not in a way that would be immediately obvious to anyone walking by the computer as it used to be.

I've never bought high-end glass, and frankly, some of my earlier DSLR photos are pretty bad compared to what my iPhone returns these days.

Seriously, even a beat-up one from eBay, just try! Costs way less than a new flagship phone and the difference is still amazing. And nowadays it's not difficult at all to learn how to use them decently, don't be afraid!

Which is perfectly fine for everyone of course, but given that you have to buy high-end (my very own 150$ Android One device has no such camera) and a central theme of this high-end innovation is that you buy a new device every 2 years (nowadays mainly advertised through the camera) and then throw the old one away, I just decided to buy a small ILC (EOS M10 on sale) and use that for taking pictures until the shutter dies (at times where my main camera is too big (and thus most would use a mobile)). Works fine for me and with 12mm/2 and 22mm/2 lenses I can (the 2010ish sensor notwithstanding) still only grin at the nightmode of the newest iPhone or the star mode of Google...

  are able to convincingly fake something like an 85mm f/1.4,

I suspect in-camera processing though is a bit of a dead end for pro and prosumer cameras because your laptop/desktop is going to be able to do a much better job, and your camera just isn't going to have a good workflow for post-processing and organizing photos.

For phone camera use it makes more sense, because people are rarely doing much more than delete these two, crop this one a little and send it to mom.

Don't get me wrong, phone cameras are having a ton of effort put into them and have way more resources than conventional cameras - but the effort is almost entirely being put into making something small and light work pretty well under most circumstances, not into making something great.

What's more important is that most people don't care for most applications. More people use to buy "good" cameras because their other options were poor or nonexistent. A top of the line current phone camera may not be great, but it's good enough for most people.

I don't know what this means. It could well kill off the "prosumer" market and leave professional cameras an expensive niche product. It just likely won't be because phone cameras got as good at creating pictures.

Generally speaking I also haven't seen a phone picture yet, which beats my cams at sharpness (which is simple physics...). It's pixelpeeping ofc but I can happily look at my pictures right from the raw converter w/o any sharpening or AI-magic applied and they are sharp and crisp. Do that with you phone-raw or jpeg. You'll spot a difference even on a phone screen...

Also, I don't think that these things should be put in camera software as a feature (making them subject to obsolescense as phones...) but instead they should just add a very basic scripting API (=tool) so you can store all the things you need for postprocessing and control capture (like the lua-scripts on CDHK).

Also dynamic range, but that’s much easier to fake.

Anyways, smartphone cameras are and will be for a long time stuck because of their diffraction limited sensors due to low lens diameters.

Sony lenses, though? Not cheap.

Meh, they use a shit ton of glass _which introduces aberrations_ which needs more glass to correct.

I bought a 50mm 1.2 ai-s, and sent it back a few days later. The dof is unusable at f1.2 and after f2.8 it looks like any other quality 50mm lens. It vignets like crazy and edges aren't sharp until you stop down to regular apertures. So yeah sure you can shoot a bit better in low light, if you like blurry and soft pics.

> The trade-offs are often worth it.

For pros, maybe, for prosumers and consumers I highly doubt it.

Everywhere else, most lenses are sharped stopped down to the f/5.6–f/8 range, and depth-of-field is an entirely stylistic choice — e.g. shallow dof is popular with portraits, but largely undesirable for landscape photography.

At the end they compare budget lenses like the Canon 50mm f/0.95 and find that the SLR Magic 25mm T0.95, seems to work better in low light.

Canon tried a fresnel lenes there "DO" series. Not quite as good quality at about half the size and way more money. Its interesting technology.

You can see the lens size comparisons near the bottom of this article.

https://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-EF-400mm-f...

One of the main things driving larger optics/ is the amount of light the lens lets in. EG: max aperture (a lower f number) means bigger lens, more money. The availability of digital sensors means often you can shoot with higher film speed and might not require as large a max aperture..

The big difference from contemporary Samyang and Rokkinon catadioptrics is it's really long focus throw. It's about 350 degrees from 1.5m to infinity. At 500mm even f8 is shallow. Hyper-focal distance is over a kilometer on a crop sensor.

Even with a 2x teleconverter (1000mm f16/t22) it's less than a kilogram so it's easy to walk around hand holding and throwing it in the bag is not a major commitment.

Like any other lens it's a compromise. I live with it's technical shortcomings because it provides a specific capability to make images I would not make otherwise. In theory, it's a choice between lenses based on technical specifications. In practice it's a choice between making image with the catadioptric and no image at all. The images that would not exist otherwise exist because I can see in 500mm prime before I raise the camera and when my eye hits the viewfinder I'm not making a "well maybe I can crop it" compromise.

https://www.flickr.com/cameras/nikon/

The smaller sensors are challenged to keep their noise down, given they typically have a smaller pixel pitch to keep up the megapickel count.

http://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fam...

I also remember reading somewhere the actors had a bad time from having to make sure to stand still to not go out of focus. 4cm of depth of field isn't much.