Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone photos | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone photos

whatever.scalzi.com

243 pointsTomte419 comments

A bit off topic, but as somebody that doesn't know anything about photography, when I look at pictures taken by dedicated hobbyists and (semi-)professionals vs. normals, the main difference for me is I think almost never from the technical aspects of their cameras but the deliberateness the photos have been taken or selected.

As In "oh, I like this tree, lets snapshot it to put on social media" vs. really thinking about how to capture this moment on a 2D surface. Motif, framing, lights and shadow, flow of lines, fore-, middle-, and background, etc. (As I said, I don't know about photography but those seem to be things you want to care about).

I reckon, the difference of what camera you use is much more about the choices they allow you to make than some superiority in technical specs. The latter is to squeeze out the last few percent or as related to production pipeline e.g. printing on billboards.

I think especially we people in tech, who can often more easily afford it, tend to jump to getting more sophisticated, expensive gear, be that photography, music, painting, etc. expecting better results, forgetting that it's all pretty worthless, if you don't get the fundamental artistry and techniques right first.

As someone who does know a lot about photography, I can tell you that you sure can give off an impression of knowing a lot about photography.

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

I have found that a lot of people who aren't into photography tend to draw a positive impression of a person's photographic knowledge/skill based on that person's gear (bigger, more accessories, expensive appearance).

But then again, I have also found that a lot of people who are into photography will draw a negative impression of a person's knowledge/skill based on that person's gear (sensor size, brand preference, lens choices).

I find it's like programmers arguing about laptops.

At the end of the day, you're arguing about something that you want to "get out of your way" as much as possible. All that time you spend arguing, you could spend programming or learning.

Imagine if you were sitting next to a reincarnation of Ken Thompson at a local coffee shop... who cares if he's typing into a surface pro? The writing and the writer are the important things. In photography, it's the shooter, the subject, and the choice of frame. Gear-ogling is fun to geek over, but past a certain low threshold, it's a waste of everyone's time.

I had a friend who got a chance of a lifetime to go on a photography trip to Mongolia with a pro who had worked for Nat Geo. The dude had some seriously impressive gear. He was kind enough to lend some of it to my friend, who loves to geek out over these things, while the pro used more enthusiast-accessible glass. Shiny gear is nice, but it's best thought of as a set of interchangeable tools.

I don't know what it is, but people want other people to be like them.

You can substitute anything in the place of "laptops" - programming languages, methodologies, coffee, barbecue sauce, diets, exercise etc.

Informally, it’s called ‘having an eye’ and some people are blessed with it, others work hard to acquire it, and camera technology can seem to offer it. But ultimately, you’re right, it’s still your choices as a photographer that most influence the quality of the work, and while good tech doesn’t hurt, it’s not really the tech.

Note that it also applies to consumers of photography as well. Not all consumers of photography necessarily draw any artistic value from the photos they look at.

For example, my mother would complain about my travel photos that didn't contain people, or would look for things like whether the people looked happy. She couldn't care less about the rule of thirds, bokeh or dramatic lighting.

Don't get me wrong, artistry and craft matter, but I think they would be considered "enhancements". Most people would gladly accept a poorly composed image of a loved one or special moment because they value the memory over other attributes.

> For example, my mother would complain about my travel photos that didn't contain people, or would look for things like whether the people looked happy. She couldn't care less about the rule of thirds, bokeh or dramatic lighting.

Heh, this is one thing I regret about my past photos — I have plenty of travel photos, but very few with myself in them.

And while I know my composition and lighting fundamentals, my photos will rarely be on par with someone with the luxury to wait for the right moment, or something from a postcard or the best of Flickr or 500px.

I'm also rarely in my travel photos, but that's more because I don't like looking at myself in photos.

Now, but will you think the same in 20 or 30 years?

I'm already at the half century mark, and while I do go through my older photos occasionally, I am still happiest when looking at photos of our dogs.

Who knows if that will change in 20 or 30 years.

Art is about what the creator adds. There are already better photos of almost every urban and natural scene you could travel to. Download them and you can enjoy the place live and also have great pics to share and save.

What you bring to the scene is you and your relationships with the people and things there. That's your marginal advantage from your photos.

You'll get better photos by taking candids than posing portraits everywhere though.

While I generally agree with what you're saying, I will say that candids are not necessarily better than posing portraits. That's a very subjective thing.

There are some cultures that prefer the posed portraits over candids.

It's an interesting dynamic.

I spent 25 years telling people to "get out of my photos" in landscapes. Then something clicked in 2008 and I became all about people (to the point of running a Wedding/Event/Portrait photography business for a decade or so:).

I'll still take landscape photos, and I enjoy them, and some of them are decent... but I still get most excited when I capture a particular expression on a person these days. Go figure!

It's very trainable.. huge amounts of art classes deal with composition.

Anything you work on in drawing & painting carries over to photography near 100% as well.

And there are plenty of famous photographers who have been great musicians as well who would argue that music & photographic composition are somehow related as well.

This is why I gave up photography as a hobby. I don't 'the eye' for it. All my photos come out bland and badly composed. These days my DSLRs and all their lenses just sit in a draw gathering dust.

My photos are similarly uninteresting, but this is something you can train for. You don't have to be born with this skill.

Photography courses teach basic composition skills that you have to know -- that is, if you follow them blindly you'll get decent and non-boring photos -- and then you can develop your style by selectively subverting them. I suppose getting your own style is about breaking the rules to get more "interesting" and unique photos.

You can definitely train it though, you never see other people's bland and poorly composed photos. Pick em back up! Or sell them...

I'm a pro, and I absolutely despise going back and looking at images of mine that are just a few years old. It's amazing how fast that eye develops when you're doing it often. I bet if I posted all of last year's weddings in full people could judge which ones were earlier in the year vs later. In Minnesota that's just a 4 month window, and I've been working professionally for 6 years.

What aspects of your older work do you not like? Is it your "eye" (subject framing), or technical details (like nonoptimal camera settings or wrong length glass), or something else?

Thanks for sharing your other comments, btw.

Oh god, pretty much everything. I would say the largest thing is editing, including simple things like color balance and overall exposure. My retouching used to be awful, but to be fair to myself very few photographers have the retouching skills I know have. A bit of it is overall composition, lighting, etc.

In short, there are images that I used to be really proud of that now are honestly a bit torturous to look through.

In 2012, I took a photography class led by a professional photographer, and she actively encouraged students to use their phones if they couldn’t get access to a DSLR, and her reasoning was exactly what you describe. To her, composition, color, contrast, textures, lines, framing, and pose was everything. That’s what she was trying to teach us, because that’s the hardest part. Mastering your camera’s settings just takes a lot of time and trial & error.

And this was in 2012, when mobile phones had terrible cameras, mind you!

Of course, resolution and noise are distracting when you print big, but she was trying to judge us for our eyes and hands, rather than for our cameras and mastery over their settings. They’re orthogonal if the observer wants them to be.

I took a photography class in college, and the professor had us down-scale our photos to a super low resolution before submitting them. Both to keep file sizes down, and because he was judging us on our composition skills, not the quality of our cameras.

Resolution only matters for super duper digital zoom for super large prints. An 18MP phone cam is worse than a 2MP DSLR. Resolution is useless if the lens can't put the right light on each pixel.

For a bad photographer, a good camera makes a huge difference. It has focal length/bokeh, dynamic range, shutter speed, and more to "get" a good shot that a phonecam can't.

There's also the factor of "The best camera is the one you actually have with you". If you have a fantastic camera sitting at home when a photo opportunity arises, it isn't much use. A mobile phone camera is often the best camera because of this.

That's basically the same lesson we've been getting before phones, too, only it used to be a polaroid, or even disposable cameras, as it's important to first learn the basics, and the tech does not matter at that level.

Once you've learned the basics, though, the tech starts to matter a lot and the limitations of that phone, or that disposable camera or polaroid, starts to interfere with the things you know you want to capture and how you want it to look, but simply can't.

Altering depth of field is a huge part of giving a photo a unique composition. In 2012, you simply could not achieve those effects on a phone. So, this teacher was probably well aware of how hobbled her students with only phones were creatively, even if she wouldn't say it out loud for the sake of ensuring enrollment in her course.

Totally

I got my first DSLR in 2006. When I got a new one a few years later, my choice was mostly about what the new camera made _easier_. Because the old camera could do almost everything I wanted to do.

So the new camera had knobs and buttons for things that I had to do in menus on the old one. And a couple of automatic things that I had to do manually on the old one. (Shooting brackets!)

That's why I jumped into large format film cameras. DSLRs are nice but when tilting the lens plane relative to the film plane on a 4x5 field camera, the effects on the scene are stunning. It requires a much more intuitive grasp of optics, though.

Also a wheelbarrow of cash! Can you even get started with less than $3K?

You can buy a used Crown Graphic with the stock lens for a few hundred, used film holders for $20-40, $50 for used tanks, etc. A frugal/patient person should be able to keep it to under $500 total - I went a bit over that because I bought a new Sekonic light meter. $2-3k is more if you're doing the enlarging yourself or shooting larger film like 8x10 where the costs rapidly grow out of control. However, if you're handy it can be a lot cheaper. Except for the lens and billows, which are relatively cheap on ebay, everything can be made out of relatively cheap material available at hardware store. The tricky part is leveling the lens and film planes.

Never heard of that technique before! Found some videos from Ben Horne about it, that explain it well to a non medium format shooter. Quite a cool way of adjusting the DOF on a scene.

When desktop publishing became a thing back in the 1990s anyone could put a book together. Fancy typesetting, high-dpm printing, kerning, text wrapping, heck it looked great.

You still had to be able to write to create good content. That never changed.

Now anyone can squeeze out polished crap at the touch of a button because the technology makes it simple to produce something that appears sort of like something that used to take experts a lot of work. It still takes experts a lot of work to produce something of quality. The rest of us just produce a lot.

The idea that a certain type of photography is only used by the low, artless, amateur crowd that has no taste has existed throughout the entire history of photography.

You can start around 18 minutes in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWoqdJ6rIoo

Absolutely.

Equipment may pose constraints on what you can feasibly do (though fewer than people think).

How and what you then do within these constraints is largely up to you.

Will AI increasingly get better and better framing, colours, processing, etc? Most definitely. For the immediate future though, the emotion and ideas of talented, innovative photographers will still stand above.

Videos like the "Pro Photographer Cheap Camera"[1] series do a good job of illustrating just how true this is.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7ECB90D96DF59DE5

Exactly! Point in case. My girlfriend has an art background and a crappy phone, I have a good DSLR and little experience. When you look at our holiday pictures, mine are razor sharp but boring as hell, hers are compressed to a pulp but always funny or interesting to look at. We should really swap cameras. :)

I'm very much into photography and I struggle from this whenever I stray outside of my comfort zone, wildlife.

Just bring some wildlife with you wherever you go and include it in the photo! Should make for some interesting shots...

This is exactly me and my wife. I'm so frustrated that she doesn't want to learn how to use the SLR. I spend hours agonizing over composition, etc. She just walks up, snaps a pic, and it's perfectly composed but looks like it was watercolors painted with a potato. :(

Is there an online gallery?

"compressed to a pulp" sounds like a problem with her postprocessing setup, not her camera

Be wary though; your subjects are affected by the type of camera; A phone may be less noticed for a photo, so you get a more candid photo.

The most annoying thing is using a prime lens or low light photos and people see you have a camera and get in a line to pose, and you're like, I... can't zoom out and can't get you all in focus.

You're absolutely correct. And it's no different than any other art.

But, there are edge cases where a cellphone camera just doesn't work very well. Capturing motion (sports, kids), low-light (bars, concerts, indoor sports), telephoto (birds and animals), and macro (100% scale, insects, flowers, some product photography).

Of course, the best camera is the one you have with you. And cellphone cameras mean that we always have a camera in our pocket or purse. But, I still bring 1-2 camera bodies and 2-4 lenses on most vacations.

I just got a "real" camera a few years ago and I find it much better than any of our phone cameras. The thing is the phones have gotten a lot better and are no longer "good enough" but are actually nice. Big lenses and large sensors are still a lot better, but you often can't tell if pictures never go beyond your phone or social media posts.

I think the right approach is to have both, if you are a serious photo-hobbyist. You need a phone anyway.

The value of a good phone-camera is that you most always have it with you.

A picture is only as good as the thing it is a picture of.

The best portraits I ever took were with a 75mm lens and 2x teleconverter. Nothing is out of proportion and the people look natural because they don't have a camera in their faces. That's hard to do with a cell phone.

I am a pro artist and there is certainly some of this going on when I take a photo but to be quite honest the default photo UI is just so shitty compared to grabbing a huge ring to adjust your focus, and snapping a couple quick photos around your estimate of what the right f-stop for the situation is, that I really just don't want to get into more than trying to get a decent angle of natural lighting and some composition I don't hate.

Also as Scalzi notes, the phone's wide-angle lens is rarely the right choice for a lot of good shots, and yet it's all that's available unless I wanna start carrying unwieldy accessories all the time.

I used to be obsessed over image clarity and sharpness, and now I'm not. When using a DSLR or EVIL camera with a traditional body, I tend to degrade image quality in post for added charm.

This is spot on, but one additional factor that makes me desire a high-res DSLR is because I know one day we will have retina wallpaper and the billboard use case will be real and mass-market. I would like to capture as much data as possible in the camera so I can re-enjoy the scene in the most immersive way in the future.

Most of the pictures I take are most definitely not art, just an attempt at snapshotting now.

I spent from around 2008 to to 2019 carrying a decent camera with me almost everywhere I went. I loved taking photos, and I wanted to make sure I was capturing them in the best format I could.

I also only shared on social media photos that were taken with my DSLR or whatever I was carrying at the time. I received a ton of positive feedback on the quality of the photos, with everyone commenting on the fact I must have a nice camera, asking what camera I used, etc.

Last year, after playing around with an iPhone 10, I made a conscious decision to leave my camera at home for most occasions, and do the best I could with just my phone. The quality was such that I didn't feel I was losing out on much by not using a fancy camera.

Since then 99% of what I post on social media has been shot with my iPhone. And yet, I still, constantly, have people telling me "you must have a nice camera, what kind is it?" They sometimes refuse to believe me when I say it was my phone.

There's no real secret to it, I don't think. I spend a lot of time considering framing, perspective, lighting. I also still post-process in Lightroom (on my phone) most photos I post. Just simple things like some straightening/cropping, maybe bumping the contrast and clarity a bit.

I've come to believe there are really only two things you need a nice camera (or more accurately, lenses) for: 1) nice background separation with a shallow DOF. The iPhone portrait mode is still pretty mediocre, and finicky to use. And 2) the changes in perspective different focal lengths can give you. Compression with a telephoto can give some really nice effects, and you can't beat the wide open sweep of a wide angle.

The fact my iPhone now has 14mm, 26mm, and 52mm focal lengths makes that last point even more irrelevant. And it's so awesome I can quickly toggle through them, rather than swapping lenses or carrying a heavy zoom lens.

Of course phone camera sensors haven't caught up yet with "real" cameras. If you're doing serious night shooting a big sensor still can't be beat. But frankly I'm amazed at just how well my phone does do in low light (just don't pixel peep on a large screen).

It’s true that skill and composition are tremendously important, but having a good camera makes it so much easier to achieve your artistic goals at all skill levels. You have much finer control over things that you have limited or no control over on a cell phone (e.g. aperture), and you can worry a lot less about e.g. low light performance or your ability to push curves in post without getting really bad noise or banding or whatever.

The question is what you see from the person taking those photographs: both will probably have a portfolio of gorgeous deliberate shots, but the person with the actual camera will have a porfolio with a wide variety of types of photos (not subject matter but actual shot: framing, perspective, distance, depth, etc) whereas the portfolio of cell phone photos will be mostly the same, give or take crops and digital edits.

Just viewing lots of photos from lots of different people doesn't tell you the story of what you can do with the tech you're looking at: you really need to look at what individual people are able to get out of them, and cell phone cameras still drastically lose out there, even the ones with "multiple cameras". There are some elementary things that the effectively-pinhole-cameras on a phone just can't do that are trivial with a physically manipulable lens.

> I think especially we people in tech, who can often more easily afford it, tend to jump to getting more sophisticated, expensive gear, be that photography, music, painting, etc. expecting better results, forgetting that it's all pretty worthless, if you don't get the fundamental artistry and techniques right first.

Yes, the main point is the diminishing artistic returns from more expensive gear.

Also to be fair, this comparison isn't fair. The phone has post-processing of the images to improve quality and low-light. DSLR's give raw images so that the photo editor can make those optimizations as necessary. Also, auto-modes on DSLR's are abysmal, especially in low-light settings. A good photographer with the right settings could make the first picture look incredible.

There's no reason for the DSLRs to be abysmal in any regard. Google, Apple, and Sony have shown what's possible with a tiny sensor and lens when you add in computation. Can you imagine what they could do with a big sensor and big lens?

It feels like that's the space Nikon, Canon, and the other big camera companies should be working on. Is there any innovation coming out of the camera companies?

I agree with this. If I buy a modern DSLR, utilizing the same tech as phones with automatic image optimization, I can only imagine how incredible the quality of the Image be by default. It's possible, but they really need to devote the engineering resources to this.

There's plenty of innovation on the hardware side - the move to mirrorless cameras has been the largest jump since digital became a thing (although most pros a sticking with DSLRs for now). Sensors are continually improved, and lenses are better every year.

The software side...not so much. The amount of customization in cameras isn't up to par. For instance, Nikon DSLRs have an image quality button. That's a button that I never want to hit, as it can change the quality from RAW to 'Basic JPEG.' The only way you'll notice that happened is if you see the amount of images you can fit on your card jump up. There's no way to disable it, and on the D750/D610 it's right next to the damned primary ISO button, and they even swapped places between those two cameras.

Fuji has some good film emulation postprocessing for their jpegs. I will say though that a lot of the postprocessing that's done on cell phones is to make up for their limited capabilities. I actually have everything turned off on my DSLRs, as the postprocessing effects the jpeg that's built in to the RAW file. That means what you see on the back on the camera isn't necessarily what you took.

The workflow is just different. With a DSLR the common path is to shoot RAW and do all the processing with software on your computer (Photoshop, DxO, etc).

There isn't much of a point in having the camera itself try to do the processing as it'll never be able to outcompete the capabilities (both hardware and software-wise) possible in the desktop software.

Do those photo editing packages have buttons for things like portrait-mode to automatically black out the background?

There are equivalents - mostly plugins, but you can do it natively in later versions of Photoshop - but they're not used much. Why not? Because you can do that properly when you shoot the image instead of faking it later.

> Because you can do that properly when you shoot the image instead of faking it later.

Are you saying you can carry a black sheet with you everywhere or that the DSLR can replace the background dynamically when you shoot?

It's not at all difficult to drop a background out to black if that's what you want to do. But that's not what "portrait mode" means to most people - that would be more about shallow depth of field and lighting emphasis - and you mentioned nothing about background swaps in your original comment. (By the way, background swaps were something I could do with film and proper shooting. Masks are easy to make if you're shooting with them in mind, whether they're layer masks in software or litho masks in the darkroom. We weren't exactly snapping with our Brownies and sending things to the drugstore back in the old days either, you know.)

I was specifically talking about computational effects like the one Apple calls portrait mode that can black out the background. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about that.

My whole point in this thread was that nobody in the big body camera world seems to be doing much with computation or multiple sensors. I think it's astonishing what Apple, Google, and Sony have done with small lenses and sensors and would be interested to see what they could do with big lenses and sensors.

My DSLR saves a JPG and a RAW file for every photo I take. It would be nice if there was a setting to apply logic similar to my phone to make that JPG look amazing while leaving the RAW file for my own touches. Sometimes, I just take the photo with my phone instead.

The capabilities of a dedicated camera do help learn about all these concepts. How do you even begin to learn about aperture & depth of field or motion blur if you can't experiment with it? A great chef can cook an amazing meal in a pie tin over a camp stove, but that's not the best way to learn.

I love this point and I've repeated it so often over the years to friends and colleagues who end up at this point. A good forcing function is to always ask, when you're getting a new tool, whether you've exhausted the capabilities of your current setup. It's hard to be honest about this, but consider what skilled practitioners can do with lo-fi equipment, and you might find it'll force you to re-evaluate what you can do with yours.

At a certain point, I stopped looking to new gear (as it pertains to music) and started focusing on trying to push the boundaries of what I had. As it turns out, I wasn't anywhere near close to pushing what I had to its limits, which proved I should just focus on technique and craftsmanship. Since then, I've grown a lot more.

I'm a professional. I could do most of my work with cheap DSLR without much difference (although full frame vs. a crop sensor has some differences that couldn't be made up).

It's the edge cases where a top of the line camera/lens can become necessary. I've had church ceremonies where I've had to be at 6400 ISO at f/1.4. There are times where you need to work quickly and don't have time to get a perfect exposure, so having extra latitude in post production is key. There are also performance issues such as the ability to keep focus on a moving or dark target.

I'm primarily a photojournalist wedding photographer and I end up taking ~6000 pictures for a 10 hour wedding, and that'll get winnowed down to 1000 or less. The amounts are all over the place but that ratio is roughly what I've heard from other photographers. Don't feel bad about bad photos; the primary advantage to digital is that we can do that without wasting film.

I'm probably one of the only professional photographers on HN, just to give some context. I'm taking a break from editing a wedding as we speak. I don't know what the rules here are on self promotion but feel free to Google my name to see my work.

Cell phone pictures to me are the equivalent today of what disposable camera photos used to be. They're easy to use and get decent results in the right circumstances. In the wrong circumstances, they're absolutely terrible.

One thing that I don't think gets mentioned enough is that cell phone pictures generally look good on a cell phone, but blow it up to an 8x10 or a 24" monitor and you'll quickly see how poor they are. I think it's a pretty big shame we're living in a time where really great cameras are quite cheap, but most people's memories are only suitable to view in small sizes.

I also think that a large portion of why camera sales have been on the decline isn't solely due to cell phone cameras, but the fact that a lot of people don't have a PC in their home anymore. The apps to transfer images to a cell phone/tablet are typically quite poor and slow, and managing files generally isn't easy doing that. People rarely get prints with their own photos, so the manufacturer that solves that issue would have a decent advantage.

Yes, a tiny cell phone sensor with a tiny lens will never come close to a large sensor with a large lens, if they are both based on the same technology.

You can buy a Canon camera with ISO 4 million. Slap a f1.2 or f0.95 lens on it, and no phone in the world can compare with, what is essentially, night vision.

The optics will not compare as well. The fake bokeh is cute, but it's full of errors even in flagship devices. And it can't possibly fake the complicated situations with multiple layers, especially if some are semi-transparent.

For me, the lens speed issue is the real killer that phones have never, and may never, come close to real cameras. Yeah, the bokeh can be simulated through software. However, for things like low light, anything far away, anything fast, (basically anything that needs information) you can't make up for it with software. <Insert CSI "enhance" joke>

I dabble in sports photography. There is no way I get the shots I get with a phone.

Bokeh is aperture and distance to subject, yes... but also sensor size. Phones have smaller sensors than even crop cameras.

Some phones actually have quite fast lenses. The iPhone 11 pro wide lens is f/1.8.

f/1.8 on an iphone and f/1.8 on a full frame camera might be the same number, but they are totally different animals.

The amount of bokeh you get between the two sensor sizes, even with the same f/1.8, exposure, and ISO, is going to be vastly different.

And the amount of light that enters the sensor through the lens is insanely different. A couple of years ago I moved from a Canon G16 with a f/1.8-2.8 6.1-30.5mm (28-140mm FF eq) lens to a Olympus OM-D EM-10 with its pancake f/3.5-5.6 14-42mm (28-84mm FF eq) lens.

Long story short, the pancake gets almost 3 times as much light as the canon integrated lens, despite the higher f number, because of the areas and sizes involved on both. And if I had gone for an APS-C for FF camera, we'd be talking in the order of 5 to 10x more light (hence, better low light images, or the ability to use shorter exposures for the same results).

Phones f/1.8 cameras are great -- comparing to other phones. If you compare them to a camera (almost any camera), they're in trouble.

Even different lenses with the same aperture on the same camera can have decently different t-stops.

Yes, because the f number is a ratio between the effective aperture vs the length of the lens. A long lens with larger f number can focus more light into the sensor than a shorter one with a smaller number, say f/4.0 400mm against a f/2.0 50mm.

The factor is not directly sensor size but rather focal length of the lens. But with smaller sensors comes a smaller field of view on the same focal length, such that you need to reduce focal length to keep it the same. I think for phone cameras the factor is ~10x compared to 35mm sensors.

How do you feel about the rise of mirrorless?

A bit skeptical. The biggest advantage for me is the burst rate and live histogram, but the newest Canon 90D, released last year, matches mirrorless FPS and also has a live histogram. The weight's advantage isn't as big of a deal as a lot of people have claimed because many of us have to deal with big lenses anyway.

The low/night light features are cool, I think, but my "mentor" who's a professional night photographer, thinks it's all a gimmick. It definitely lowers the bar for entry in this field for people who don't do a lot of night photography. The vast majority of my shots are under full sunlight or heavy stadium lights, so it's not that big of an advantage for me.

There's going to come a time where mirrorless will reach beyond what mirrors can do, but I don't think we're there yet.

The real advantage of mirrorless cameras is that there are less things that can go out of alignment, for high resolution photography everything counts (before you dismiss this, look up shimming kits for medium format backs).

That Canon has far more features than I'd expect for a DSLR - thanks for sharing.

I'm also impressed by the 90D's Handheld Night Shot mode, where it can stitch a burst of shots together like my Pixel phone.

I find that mirrorless offers another advantage from its somewhat decreased weight (a result of mirrorless camera's decreased flange distance [1], for the curious): it's relatively easy to mount most DSLR-designed lenses to any mirrorless with inexpensive adapters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flange_focal_distance

> you can't make up for it with software

Actually that's why the Pixel gave so good results in the evening scene in the blog post. Because of the tons of AI that Google has put into improving low light conditions.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/night-sight-seeing-in-dark...

With the impressive performances of generative AI I'd raises the interesting question of what people actually want when they take a photo. Is it preferable if it looks great, even if the details aren't actually true and imagined by a neural network?

There was some discussion about it a few years ago when one of huaweis phones had a 'moon mode' that afaik basically recognized the moon and pasted in a static picture. Complete fake, but actually a reasonable idea - it's not like the moon will look any different and that's what the people want after all.

I mean, I don't get this argument at all, I have several photos taken with my phone printed on A3 format and hanging around my house, I don't see any issue with them that would show they were taken on a phone. In comparison I have a few pictures printed out, taken with an old W1 Sony camera and they are awful, would take pictures from my phone over those any time.

Here's my latest printed picture: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h6P5ZbNjQ5FD9nkzdB_TnfsA4li...

And the actual source image: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iVenWHP4TesmhTWAY2qMDQs21u3...

Having said all of this - I find it incredibly rare for people to print photos at all, which is pretty sad in itself. I get not needing albums, but having pictures to hang on the walls is always nice.

you made the parent's point, your picture looks good, but still not as a good as a professional one, taken with a good camera

I have a mirrorless cameras, and time to time I use it... and the pictures I get with it are still much better than my iphonex

It’s the same for me. I have a quite cheap portrait lens for my old Sony Nex-3, and the pictures I get out of it are (subjectively) so much better than those taken with my iPhone XS, with actual bokeh and real depth.

I mean, can anything really ever be objective? Or are things just continually witnessed, from tens - to trillions - of times?

I would say if you perform a double blind study with a decent sample size, you will indeed reach objective conclusions, and you will even know the probability that your observation is correct.

Right, but the parent's point was specifically that pictures taken on phones don't look good in large size....and all I'm saying is that yes, they do sometimes. Obviously had this been in the dark, the result would be abysmal. But in conditions like the ones in the picture? The print is completely ok in my(non-professional) opinion.

Better gear = a wider range of “sometimes”

I don't mean to be critical of your image - I'm always glad when someone is happy enough with any image to actually print it! That said that is an insanely ideal condition. It's during the day, with snow being a natural reflector.

It's well exposed but like pretty much all cell phone pictures it's oversharpened. This was taken during my first year doing professional photography, so don't be too harsh. It's probably a good comparison for that reason though: https://imgur.com/6qtTl89

That would have been with an D3200 or D610, both of which are pretty old tech nowadays.

Love that photo of yours. I will chime in and say that good photos are like good audio equipment, the people that care will notice but the general population is happy with average. It's like that programming or engineering adage, the first 90% takes 10% of the time.

Are you sure that that's the actual source? It seems to be suffering from compression artefacts slightly, and what might have been a somewhat overenthusiastic (i.e. sharp) downscaling.

so... it's a cellphone picture. and yeah this is exactly making the case in point. Photos are ok, but in good to perfect light every camera does this.

True but to some extent those problems could be alleviated if you could get to the actual source, which wouldn't have either of the problems I mentioned. Assuming I diagnosed things correctly, which is a bit tricky. The image has definitely been processed though, as evidenced by the ringing.

The only change I did to it was removing a sewer drain in front of the car in photoshop(hence why it's called wallpaper fix) - I haven't done anything else to the photo. Here's the original original file, uploaded right now from my phone:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16QEm_kxED2vASTgRv8UvyaV4yTA...

Apparently I can't access that file but I'll believe you. Although if the original was jpg as well then it was somewhat unfortunate to save it as jpg again as that would result in additional compression artefacts (lossless jpg exists, but isn't exactly common).

That said it's hard to tell whether it's compression artefacts or some 'smart' sharpening that's responsible for the artefacts. It would need to have been compressed pretty heavily to fit in just 4MB.

Ah, stupid drive permissions! I've enabled it for everyone now, if you'd like to have a look

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16QEm_kxED2vASTgRv8UvyaV4yTA...

How big you can print depends a lot on how close you plan to look at the result. Subjectively I don't like cellphone pictures, even at small sizes where the resolution is entirely adequate: you can tell where there is less detail due to aggressive distortion correction, transitions between in focus and out of focus areas tend to be ugly etc.

https://i.lensdump.com/i/jpzeyr.jpg <- I took this with a camera from 2013 (a Sigma DP3 Merrill)

https://i.lensdump.com/i/jpzL73.jpg <- While I took this with a camera from 1996 and a lens from 1994 (Contax G2 and Zeiss Planar 2/45)

https://i.lensdump.com/i/jpzoID.jpg <- Camera from 1998, lens from 1990 (Leica M6 TTL, Elmarit-M 90/2.8), please ignore the dust on my scan and look at the transitions

(I should probably point out that these are all from relatively compact cameras, not even the size of a small full frame slr)

If you are only comparing number of details of photos made in standard conditions you are missing the point of a large sensor camera.

Actually, literally ANY camera can be used to make good photos. Cameras have sets of conditions they are good to work with. Smartphones, for examples, shine when you want really deep depth of field at standard lighting conditions.

As long as you know what the camera is good for it is possible for you to focus on the specific conditions and get nice pictures.

DSLR will allow for more freedom in the choice of conditions you can work with and still get good pictures and that is the whole point of using it.

It is the 90% rule - when you really look at the quality of most works, 90% of the people won't notice differences in quality between "good enough" vs. "excellent". And 90% of the people who do notice do not care.

Professional photographers, and people who truly are into photography, are the 1% that do care. 1% isn't trivial - that is still more than 3 million people in the USA alone, for example. But when looking at overall consumer habits, the 99% eclipse them.

I think most people would notice on a subconscious level, at least. That's just under ideal conditions though; I've had plenty of scenarios in my professional career where a cell phone wouldn't have been able to get any usable image at all.

> really great cameras are quite cheap

For somebody like me who can't remember what an f-stop is, what are a couple of suggestions?

Maybe I should take a photography class one of these days...

It's generally hard to suggest anything to anyone without knowing a little bit about them.

Having said that, my "stock" recommendation is something really small (i.e. something that you'll still carry with you after the honeymoon period and the novelty is over), and for me, that's something like a Sony RX100 (Panasonic and Canon also have cameras using Sony's 1" sensors with a similar form factor).

1" sensor fixed-lens cameras are "barely" pocketable, and not necessarily cheap, but I feel that recommendation tends to be better than a mirrorless like an A6x00 or an SLR.

I have seen too many people get bored/tired of lugging an otherwise fantastic camera around and then it just starts collecting dust.

I would recommend the Ricoh GR II/III over the RX100. It has a crop sensor in a pocketable body.

My recommendation is as an all purpose camera for stills and video.

So while the GR series are nice cameras, I don't consider them to be as versatile, especially with that fixed 28mm equivalent lens.

I tend to think the GR series is more appropriate for people who know what they're doing (and what they want) than people who think they might want to get into photography.

It all depends on how "in" to photography you plan to get. If you're not ever going to buy a lens, don't get a DSLR or ILC mirrorless. If you want something pocketable, the RX100 or Ricoh GR III mentioned in the other comment are great choices. If you don't care about pocketability, I'd recommend the Fuji X100F. That's a great camera to learn photography on due to all the physical controls it has, plus it's stylish enough to practically be an accessory.

If you do want a DSLR, the D750 can't be beat for the price it goes for now. If you'd rather do mirrorless (which I would recommend for someone new nowadays) the general suggestion is to go Sony, but both Canon and Nikon's options are fine for a nonprofessional too.

The most important piece of equipment to improve is between your ears.

Take lots and lots of photos with your phone. Get a gorillapod tripod for it. Get down on your knees - people mostly look best when the camera is at chest height. Kids look best from the floor. A lot of other things look better from these angles, too.

Look at your photos a lot. And them some more.

Start to see your preferences--the kinds of photos you like taking, and things in your photos that you want to fix. Youtube is a fantastic resource if you want to get better.

After six months or a year of this, you'll have an idea of what you want out of lenses (and therefore a camera).

Buying a camera before doing this is wasting money -- but hey, it keeps the manufacturers in business. :-)

Yes, I think a bit part of the societal change is that we just don't need extremely high-resolution pictures any more. We're consuming the photos on our phones, or if we happen to view them on a TV or a desktop/laptop monitor, we're willing to not look super close and criticism the resolution (after all, we know the photos are intended for phone screens!).

It's closely related to "quantity over quality," and I don't mean that in a bad way! If our personal photos are primarily for capturing memories, then having more memories captured is actually great, even if each memory doesn't have the resolution to blow up to a poster and hang on your wall. Another common way to phrase this is "the best camera is the one you have with you" (which, yes, I realize is considered overly dismissive by lots of photographers and camera enthusiasts).

I agree, but for people that can afford it I would still push them to get a decent camera for moments that you can bring it with you. Vacations, kid's birthdays, etc.

Well, that and if they're going to remember to back up the images somehow, but that's a whole 'nother can of beans.

I have a 5 year old, and bought a new mirrorless camera back around then too. When I look back through photos, there's a lot of photos with that camera in the early years, but some of my favorites are still the spontaneous ones snapped on the phone that was in my pocket. 1 year olds don't understand "wait! Hold that cute pose well I run and get the good camera, make sure the battery is in and the right lens attached!" (and 5 year olds understand, but have neither the patience nor tolerance for that nonsense).

As time had gone by, more and more of our photos are from a cell phone. A few weeks ago I got some really great pictures while we were out on a bike ride and found a neat rocky area off the path, and the sun was hitting everything just right. I wasn't planning on pictures, so never would have taken the camera with us anyway, but and chances are if I had the light wouldn't have cooperated as perfectly as it did.

I've blown up plenty of cell phone pics to 8"x10" and they look fantastic. I'm happy to hang them on my wall. Sure, at 6" away I can tell they're from a phone, but no one looks at them that closely when they're on the wall.

I've worked on digital video systems for the majority of my career, and watching digital television usually drives me insane because I notice the artifacts from poor compression. Do you think a similar effect is at work here? You have an 'eye' for photography and know what to look for. Most people do not.

Cell phone cameras capture a dimension of life you just wouldn't get with a traditional camera because you wouldn't be carrying the camera all the time. Further, it seems like cameras are a hugh investment(someone suggests a Sony in this thread. That's $1000!), and something to store and maintain. Also, from what I've seen, cameras and lenses are a theft magnet.

All the negative points you mentioned are true, but there are plenty of times in people's lives that you can plan ahead to have a camera with. Personally, I feel the absolute best use of money is to capture memories, but I'm biased.

It's mainly the postprocessing to make up for such a small sensor's downfalls that are clearly evident to me, in particular sharpening. Cell phone pictures can come out fine in bright light, but anything dim or dark will be a muddy mess at larger sizes in my experience.

I know I used it as an example, but 8x10s are also quite small. For a wall in a decent sized room I usually recommend 16x20 or so.

At least in regards to the later point about the price of a camera. I think my old camera was about $3,000 with the lenses (7D mk ii). I had it for 5 years. In that time, I’ve bought 4 phones. The cheapest of which was $700, and the avg price which was $1000.

The kit is about $1500 on eBay these days. The body went from $1600 (new) to $700.

Lens technology is slow moving - at least for the middle prosumer market, and lenses keep their value. You can also upgrade the body and glass independently.

For a while, I thought we might get swappable sensors, but with IBIS and smarter chips that seems less likely.

These cameras retain their value pretty well, and thus so far, the camera tech in phones hasn’t turned into a race.

>I'm probably one of the only professional photographers on HN

I imagine there are thousands. I even know two professional photographers myself who hang out here.

This is what is great here. Every time a topic comes up, someone who specialises in the field pops up. The more obscure the better. It’s great.

Alright, but I'm clearly the best one ;)

I just figured it was rare to start out in computer science and move to photography full time. That said there's a big overlap in both fields, at least as a hobby. I think both attract people that like gadgets/tech.

I started in CS, moved to photography for about 10 years, and I'm now back in CS. The amount of customer interaction is ultimately what soured me on it.

Heh, I certainly don't blame you there. For the most part I really like my clients, but dealing with people and trying to keep up a happy energy for every shoot is tiring. This wasn't really the path that I chose, but I have some health conditions that make a 9 to 5 job impractical for me. I've found it to be rewarding in a lot of ways, though I do hate how little I use my brain while editing/retouching. I do app development during the winter - I'd love to do more during the summer but I find it really hard to switch gears.

Phones are really not ideal for viewing photos. But I've also been wondering lately, what would be the ideal way of viewing digital photos? I have a few ideas and I'm working on a project for that. Is there a way to contact you? I'd love to get feedback from a pro.

Sure, I'd be happy to help. My email is aury@aurygphotography.com

Why do you feel that phones aren't an ideal viewing device? The resolution and color gamut generally can't be beat. Is it the tiny overall size that turns you off?

> Cell phone pictures to me are the equivalent today of what disposable camera photos used to be. They're easy to use and get decent results in the right circumstances. In the wrong circumstances, they're absolutely terrible.

I dunno about that. Disposable cameras got pretty bad results in almost all circumstances, and were barely passable in ideal circumstances. Modern cell phones get really surprisingly good results in most circumstances. Even in low light, I can take passable photos with an iPhone 11.

It's not a 1:1 comparison, just that they both work "ok" under ideal circumstances.

I have the same phone and just compared two pictures I took in broad daylight, one with the phone and the other at a wedding with my D850 that was downrezed down to 2048px on the long end for social media posting. Even zoomed out the difference is pretty evident to me. Zoomed in to emulate a larger size it's very clear. I'm obviously more critical than the average consumer, but low light photos? Even with the recent advances it's not even a fair comparison.

I still use my cell phone camera though. Just last weekend I was out in a canoe with my wife and dog and used it for some great shots. I would have loved to have a better camera with but canoes are tippy.

Alternative view from a very different kind of professional photographer -- I'm an in-house photographer who produces all of my company's marketing materials and product photography. I shoot mostly in a studio, and am using a 6D these days.

But my personal photo kit since 2010 has evolved from a pile of Nikon gear in a Pelican 1510 to a Lowepro shoulder bag, to a little body-and-two-lenses bag, to my current setup - which is an iPhone and a drone. And that setup covers about 98% of what I want to shoot.

Superwide? iPhone's got that. Panorama if I need wider. Stitching if I need even wider than that.

Nifty fifty? Got it. And Portrait Mode has gotten significantly better. Yay fake bokeh.

Underwater? I love that I can just stick my phone underwater and take photos. I had to carry a second Pelican case just for my old DSLR enclosure.

Telephoto? Ok so this is probably the biggest weakness. With a couple of exceptions where I got lucky, I've never been happy with the quality you get shooting through third party lenses or telescopes with a phone. But to paraphrase an old adage about how use a prime lens -- zoom with your drone!

I do agree that phone photos break down when you zoom in and pixel peep. They've got noise, artifacts, aberrations, all kinds of gross stuff. But you have to zoom to like 100% to see that, and the only person peeping pixels on my originals is me.

Edit: I also like that in questionable lighting conditions, my phone produces photos of a quality that would require multiple exposures and editing in photoshop to do with a regular camera.

Studio photography is a pretty different beast as you always have ideal conditions. I had a wedding outside last year on a cloudy night with only string lights lighting up the reception. I have flashes galore but just getting focus was difficult - I eventually had to turn on the modelling light on a strobe to be able to do my job at all. The ability to use flashes at all is a pretty big advantage of dedicated cameras. Video lighting equipment is great but it kills the ambiance in a lot of situations.

But yeah, absolutely. If you're viewing images on a phone (and most people are), phone cameras are just fine for most people most of the time and they have some distinct advantages, especially for the casual user. If you're going bigger than that the difference is pretty clear to me.

Wedding photography is like sports photography meets candid portrait session crossed with real estate photography, fine art, food shots, and cat wrangling. So you have my utmost respect for taking that beast on, and I'll grant that you need the best gear you can get, whatever that may be.

I think it's really a tradeoff for everyone's unique situation. You're being paid to show up in a setting you don't get to choose, and the client expects blow-it-up-for-grandma quality photos. So you're going to use the best possible gear you can, regardless of cost, weight, or bulk to compensate for the aspects you can't control.

As you say - being in a studio means strobes, which means I don't have much choice but to use a real camera. But when I do (ugh) social media content, or one of those ubiquitous photos of an employee hard at work for the background of the About Us page, I'll often switch to my phone because it gives me a comprehensive toolbox of photo and videography tools that are high enough quality for the intended destination.

And I'll also admit that whenever I do anything intended for print I shoot it in the studio with a DSLR and edit it down to the last pixel. Old habits die hard.

It certainly encompasses nearly everything, and thank you. To be honest I wish more people appreciated just how hard of a job it is, and the stress involved. It's a job where if you're not stressed out at least a little you're doing it wrong, and it can really wear on you.

The few times I've done product/food photography it's been nice. You can take your time, you don't have people to direct or kids that can cry... I envy you, at least a bit.

And I guess if the customer pays a lot, they don't want to see you show up with an iPhone doing snapshots of the wedding cake :-)

There are actually quite a few professional and advanced-amateur photographers on HN. A lot are from the generation that had to make their own websites to self publish, hack apart wordpress for client sites, and were part of the old photoblog engine open source era. I doubt many younger photographers have to get very technical these days. Nobody cares about metadata/IPCT and extracting variables for workflow anymore.

> Cell phone pictures to me are the equivalent today of what disposable camera photos used to be.

I think a closer comparison is to point-and-shoot cameras (ones without interchangeable lenses). I have a couple of those hanging around, but really haven't used them in years, and just use my cell phone instead. The lens is undoubtedly better than any cell phone, and I'm sure the current ones are better overall, but the trade-off just doesn't seem there: how much better is the picture really?

If I'm going to take the burden of carrying something that doesn't fit (or barely fits) in my pocket, it might as well be a DSLR/mirrorless so at least it's a dramatic improvement in quality.

> blow it up to an 8x10 or a 24" monitor and you'll quickly see how poor they are.

And yet Apple has billboards all over the place showing off iPhone photos enlarged to several meters by several meters and has for years

https://www.adweek.com/creativity/apple-revels-beautiful-ric...

https://www.google.com/search?q=shot+on+iphone+billboards&tb...

Billboards aren't seen up close, resolution requirements aren't that stringent.

Guess you didn't click the first link. It shows a hallway in a subway with several wall size photos an people walking directly next to them.

Yes, that's marketing. For people looking at something up close you need at least 300 dpi. They'll look ok-ish as long as people are distant enough to see the whole image.

I guess if lighting is good, you put the phone on a tripod and manually set up the shot, you can capture these things. The amount of work involved ist staggering though, and the pocketability of the solutions and using stuff without an assistant... well - forget it.

I guess if lighting is good, you put the phone on a tripod and manually set up the shot, you can capture these things. The amount of work involved is staggering though, and the pocketability of the solutions and using stuff without an assistant... well - forget it.

Those are often done with external lenses, they're composites of multiple shots, and/or have had a ridiculous amount of post processing work done to look good.

And of course they're done with studio lighting. Huawei has been caught at least twice using DSLR shots as phone pictures as well. Samsung was caught once.

https://fstoppers.com/originals/can-you-really-claim-it-was-...

> One thing that I don't think gets mentioned enough is that cell phone pictures generally look good on a cell phone, but blow it up to an 8x10 or a 24" monitor and you'll quickly see how poor they are.

This is so true. Those small but glorious OLED screens really do flatter.

Strictly personal observation.

I was a press photographer when I was a student as a side job, shooting film.

I used to like early mobile phone photos because their (horrendous) defects and imperfections could be used to their advantage. Part of their charm. Somewhat like 'toy' camera such as the Holga.

Now that phones are getting real good, I never use them. I like the tactile feel of my (compact) camera and for now the phone is no match for the glass. And for me, especially in print, the difference is still enormous.

I don't have a particular bone to pick. If you enjoy shooting pics then do so.

I went and looked at your work and I don't think you're necessarily selling the need for people to use "Pro" gear very well. I'm not trying to be harsh here cause you're just doing the same thing as so many photographers. There's no barrier at all to being a "Pro" these days, you just buy a camera and make a website/social accounts and hang your shingle out. It's basically a gig/freelance occupation at this point.

You need pro gear for the types of shots you sell because there is an expectation you have the gear to "appear Pro" as opposed to a real need for this style of photo. Same thing with the idea that you need to take thousands of shots and cull them down with hours spent on the computer.

If your reputation & people skills & marketing are strong enough this style of photo business can be done with a smartphone and with 10s or hundreds of shots per job as opposed to thousands and the business can be successful & more profitable.

There's near 0 barrier to launching this style of photo business these days. If you have nothing else to show your serious you can show the customers that you put a lot of money into gear.

I bet not that many of your sold photos are getting printed huge.. it's the standard work so many families buy and they put it in an album or throw some 8x10s up on the wall until they get bored.

I don't think you've seen enough photographers if you think what I'm doing is average. You're right that the barrier to entry is low, but so is the skill level of those just starting out. In my experience most don't have the drive to improve themselves much either. They just putter along, and their family and friends feel like they need to use them and that's enough gigs to suit them until they bore of it.

Make no mistake, if you gave my gear to someone that had little or no experience they wouldn't get the shots that I do. They would have no idea how to find good light, or in the absence of that use strobes or reflectors to create good light. Just posing people is a huge task. Some people are naturals, but most are far from it. Even if you know exactly how a person 'should' be posed, getting them to do it and be comfortable in front of the camera is tough.

After that is editing and retouching. Most low tier photographers throw on a preset and call it a day, and wouldn't have the first clue how to do anything in Photoshop.

I've had multiple couples that have done an engagement with me, and I later went to their house on their wedding day and they had several large prints up. Families have also ordered large prints of their shoots from me.

Most of my work isn't particularly unique, but I'm in a rural area where I don't have the amount of potential customers where unique work would sell. My strobe lighting is unique though - very few photographers use anything more than a speedlight. That lets me pull off shots that other photographers could never do. If you ever see a photographer claim to be a "natural light photographer" that means they have no idea how to use any artificial light at all. They're literally using ignorance as a selling point, and it's not uncommon.

One of the bad aspects of marketing in this job is that even bad photographers get lucky sometimes, which with enough shoots can equal an OK portfolio. There's also a disgusting trend of "workshops" where good photographers set up a shoot with lighting and paid models and photographers pay to take those photos for use in their portfolio. It's rare that I get asked to see a full wedding when someone is inquiring and it's by far the most important evidence of the skill of a wedding photographer.

I'd put up my senior photography against the best in my state, and I've been hired by companies like Hormel to do photography even though they have an in house team.

I'm a birdwatcher. I recently got a spotting scope and cell phone mount for it, and can take excellent (daytime) pictures. The biggest problem with cell phone cameras isn't the sensor (though that small size is an issue, especially in low light), it's the optics.

"The best camera is the one you have with you." - Unknown

Photographer here. Cell phones have become very capable cameras. I've seen whole segments of my client list evaporate with the last generation of camera phones. The last straw was when the iPhone got portrait mode and could render bokeh/blur like lens physics.

Two things though...

1. The phone cameras are really really good. In the right hands, professionally capable in many situations. You don't need to know the basics of photography/physics to operate a camera phone properly. It helps, but the average person can just point and shoot with solid results.

2. We mostly just publish to social media now. The need for extremely detailed, high quality media work is diminishing at the bottom line. The market is changing. The quality in which we document is shifting. 8K is a buzz word, not an archival format for future proofing.

There isn't a cell phone in the world that could even touch the capabilities of a high end DSLR or Mirrorless camera, but that simply just doesn't matter now.

Also photographer here, I disagree that it doesn't matter. There are some things that you can't do[0] with a phone, e.g. good low-light shots, astrophotography, different lenses, etc.

Yes, I have a phone with me, and it's great for when I forgot my camera, but there is no comparison in the freedom that the 5D gives me in postprocessing compared to a phone sensor. Phones are great for 100% of the things the average user wants, but not enough for what many artists want.

[0] It's not technically impossible, but it's a huge hassle and probably won't be near as good as with cameras.

> Also photographer here, I disagree that it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter to the people who would previously have paid for a product. That's the point being made.

Technical excellence will always matter to some, but the point the GP is making is that the quality of smartphones has reached a level where a larger and larger segment of 'people who would have paid' now rest within the smartphone circle on the Venn diagram.

"Phones have eaten some of the DSLR market" and "it simply doesn't matter now" are not remotely the same, though.

I can sympathize with OP's post even if it was not precise. I feel like he was dejected about the fact that the mass market has previously subsidized the DSLR R&D and now that that evaporated the future of DSLRs is grim. But I don't think it's quite at the level of horse carriages :)

> "it simply doesn't matter now"

If the OP is talking about the general public's perception, with most of them not being photography enthusiasts, I tend to think this rings true.

If you're a photography enthusiast, then yeah, not true at all.

Does it not depends on the level of photographers? Assuming there is level 1 to 10 in DSLR users, surely there would be some DSLR users that flagship cell phone has reached a point where it doesn't matter to them?

I have been wonder at what point will Phones camera reached the law of diminishing return? I thought the iPhone 11 with night mode finally closed the gap for most consumers, we have a roadmap for another 5 years of Lens, Optical Zoom, and Sensors with better light sensitivity.

Apple likes to hype up features, but they still haven't come out and claim they have a DSLR like Camera system. I wonder when they will do that.

> Does it not depends on the level of photographers?

No, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to do street photography, for example, even as a novice, you're going to have a much easier time using a longer lens so you don't get near your subjects and ruin your shots by drawing attention.

Thx. Makes Perfect Sense.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2019/11/30/google-...

See the "it's not technically impossible" part of the comment, which was meant to preempt (unsuccessfully, it seems) such replies.

Yes, but I assumed that meant without a lot of work or obscure settings and stuff. This is a headline promoted feature of the phone and its software.

No, I more meant that it's a huge hassle. For example, with the phone you can't compose very well because you have to wait for each frame to expose before you can make a correction. With the SLR viewfinder, you can just look and see what's going on. Then you have the issue of not being able to capture a specific area using a narrower lens (if your subject requires it), and just the experience is going to not be great.

I think with a phone in a tripod you can use an app like google sky to get it pointed at exactly what you want, and even use search functions and stuff.

There are narrow lenses for phones as well.

Low light? WHen I was a shooting pro, ISO 800 was where colour went away, and P3200 - the new kid on the block - was where you went for B&W. If you took it over 6400, you were fooling yourself. (I remember David Brooks going on in one of the magazines about how he could shoot at 12800 if he metered differently, but anyone who actually knew what they were doing could see that he was finding a different way of metering for 6400, then giving a little extra push in development, which he should have been doing with his other 6400 images as well.) This whole "see colour in the dark" thing is new - arguably, it wasn't a thing before the Nikon D3/D700. And no, phones aren't great for sports or birding - but that's not what most people have ever done with cameras.

The number of people who want a camera is vanishingly small. What almost everybody wants is a thing that takes pictures. These days, that doesn't have to be an extra thing; they're going to be carrying their phones for all sorts of other reasons. (BTW, lighting is far, far more important than the gear you use to capture the effects of the lighting. If I had to tell people to pay attention to only one thing, it would be the lighting - whether that's "found" lighting or something you deliberately set out to create. Get that right, and "fix it in post" becomes a whole lot less attractive.)

> The last straw was when the iPhone got portrait mode and could render bokeh/blur like lens physics.

Have you looked at real "portrait mode" photos? They only really resemble narrow depth of field at thumbnail sizes, but as soon as you open them fullscreen, all of the mistakes jump out and make it look like a terrible Photoshop job. I'm sure it will get better, but I certainly wouldn't say it's anywhere near the last straw yet.

I think this was in regard to some of his clientele disappearing, due to a user looking at his portrait mode photos and saying "wow this looks like they were taking by a photographer!", potentially decreasing demand even though the absolute quality may not be comparable.

Correct. Good enough to the average eye to escape hiring someone.

I have a 46MP DSLR as my primary camera. All small sensor camera photos look awful in comparison especially at full zoom. If nobody views anything larger than their phone screens and Instagram feeds, that level of detail is irrelevant. The end user can't tell.

> Unknown.

That quote belongs to Chase Jarvis.

> The better cell phone cameras get, the more frustrated I get with their limitations — and the more I recognize how much better a dedicated camera is for those situations

Totally agree, as a long time DSLR user.

Six months ago I bought a Nikon D850 – which has 45 Megapixels (8526 x 5504) at a full-frame resolution, allowing aggressive image cropping if I need it. I often use a 200-500mm lens. If I switch the camera to a cropped sensor mode I get a 1.5 x increase in effective focal length (i.e., 850mm) while still getting a 24 mPx (5408 x 4584) image. The D850 also has very low sensor noise, which makes shooting in low light a pleasure.

If I want an image of some friends for a typical social media application, then, yes, I will use my smartphone and get something that is usually good enough. But, for my main application - wildlife photography – there is just no comparison. I want to be able to see the detail of the individual feathers on a bird. And now I’ve gone up the learning curve, unless I make some stupid mistake, the camera will always get a shot if there is one to be had, not let the opportunities slip away because I can’t control the focusing or similar.

[Edit] The D850 also has a tolerable DSLR video capability, although video autofocus sucks a bit. Shooting video at HD resolution, it has some very impressive live view focusing guides (sharp objects are highlighted in red) and a live histogram display. HD or 4K video with a 850-effective mm lens is truly awesome. The newer mirrorless Nikons (Z series) are functionally very similar from a video perspective.

Also, if I want a stunningly fast burst mode for 'small' (1920 x 1080) JPEG-quality images, I can use slow-mo video to get 120 frames per second.

If you're running in DX crop all the time, consider a D500. The sensor's smaller, sure, but I don't have noise problems at ISO 2000, and the blazing fast shutter has caught a lot of jump shots I'd probably otherwise have missed. I do use a D850 for macro work, but I wouldn't replace the D500 for wildlife. (Or the 200-500, which is amazing, even if it does make people think I must be a pro and lead to being annoyed with questions when I'm just trying to take pictures of birds.)

edit: Doesn't have the D850's focus peaking in live view, though, as far as I know. I never use it for that, so better off checking the manual.

All fair points. I could only afford one camera body to replace my ageing D3s, and I do use FX for other applications, so the D850 was my choice.

Focus peaking for video is amazing: you can move the focus from the foreground to the horizon and literally see a wave of red 'in-focus' tracking up the frame. For video, I'm a complete convert to live-view.

[Edit]. With practice, focus peaking makes it possible to track a moving animal (e.g. a squirrel approaching you across the ground) using manual focusing, without any of the dreaded auto-focus-hunting that can completely wreck a clip. You just have to learn instinctively which way to rotate the lens to move the plane of focus closer or further away.

A video tripod head also helps, so that you can pan and elevate the camera with one hand while focusing with the other. With a normal tripod head, that has separate locks for panning and elevating, simultaneously moving and focusing requires three hands.

How are you liking the 200-500? I was considering getting one.

The 200-500 is stunning, for its price point; I'm really pleased with it. I much prefer it to the 80-400.

I borrowed a friends 80-400 for a day, and it was big and heavy, but I loved the shots I was able to get from it. I purchased the 200-500 when it came out, and some of my favorite photos I've ever taken came out of it. I havent compared them directly, but from memory the 200-500 feels lighter. The 200-500 is great for the money I think.

As a long-time hobbyist photographer, I've had a lot of the same thoughts. Cell phone cameras are getting really good for the 90% use case. My new Samsung S20 Ultra almost feels like a 'real' camera in some situations and it's really cool to have that available in my pocket all the time. But its limitations are also constantly frustrating because there's a lot it can't do just because of physics.

But one point I'd add - I also find it very frustrating how having an 'almost good enough' phone camera it makes it harder to justify bringing a real camera along to regular day-to-day activities. If your phone is good enough most of the time, you don't want to lug around an extra device unless you are specifically doing a photo shoot. But then when something interesting happens and you can't capture the photo you envision on your phone, it drives me crazy.

> makes it harder to justify bringing a real camera along to regular day-to-day activities.

Back in the film days, pretty much nobody lugged around a camera to regular activities, it was only brought out for special events and the trip to Disneyland. This persisted even with digital cameras.

But the phone camera changed everything.

The worst photos are the ones you never took because you didn't bring the camera.

I kept my Olympus XA in my baggy jeans pocket almost all the time.

I tended to have a camera with me for years too--though I really slowed down after I no longer had easy access to a B&W darkroom. But that wasn't the mainstream case.

To Americans, the Japanese taking snapshots at every opportunity (including business meetings--OK we mostly don't do that) was notably odd behavior. Today, I'm sure just about any random nationality takes far more.

I have lots of dedicated camera equipment but most of that is for event, travel, or dedicated photography of some sort. If I know I'm going to be on a trip where I'm going to just be taking random memory pictures, I mostly just bring my phone.

What's the closest to a digital equivalent of the Olympus XA, i.e., a compact rangefinger, maybe with the same sort of clamshell design?

For a rangefinder style, there's the Fuji X100 series (the latest being X100V). They are not really pocketable though. But for a big sensor compact that is truly pocketable, nothing beats the Ricoh GR series with its APS-C sensor (the latest being the Ricoh GR III). The older model (GR II) can still be had for under $400, which is a screaming value.

The Sony RX1R II and Leica Q2 are better, but rather expensive.

Nothing that's a rangefinder AFAIK. There's something like a Fujifilm X-E3 with the pancake lens. So more like a Leica form factor than an Olympus XA. There are also the high-end P&Ss. But I haven't run across anything that gives you both the control and the pocketability of an Olympus XA.

The FUJIFILM X100 probably comes closest to rangefinder translated to digital with a fixed lens. But a bit bigger again. And it's IMO a whole lot of money for a specialized camera.

Probably an Olympus XZ? I'm not sure if they ever made a successor to it, but still it's a great camera if you're cool not having a touchscreen.

Well any kind of random consumer point and shoot like a PowerShot will give you equivalent image quality to the XA in an even smaller package. But the design elegance and "coolness" of the XA you will not find in digital. The self-timer lever acts as a little "foot" that stabilizes the camera when you're resting it somewhere for a self-timer picture!

There's also a category called pocket cameras these days.

The good ones are still somewhat expensive (i.e, Sony RX100 series) and they are chunky enough that you want or need bigger pockets.

I have the RX100 M5, and I love it[1]. I can fit it in my pocket if I'm wearing loose pants, but the lens sticks out 1 cm from the body and it's just a little bit too bulky to be comfortable, even in a jacket pocket.

But I got a neck strap for it, and the camera is light enough that I can barely tell it's there. That's how I'll use it on a hiking trip, and sometimes I'll even take photos by looking down at the flip-up screen.

[1] I don't love the menu-driven UI though, or the digital lens ring control. But however much of a compromise the pop-up digital viewfinder is, it works great in bright sunlight when the screen gets washed out, or when I need to hold the camera close to me for a steady shot.

I used to be big on viewfinders... until I had to get reading glasses. Even though my cameras with VFs have diopters, I find myself just looking over my regular glasses and touching the screen to focus and shoot.

> (i.e, Sony RX100 series)

they have been around long time enough that you can easily buy used ones in good condition for 200 USD or less. (up to the 3rd version)

Yes, I carried around a Minox. But the picture quality was poor and film + development was slow and expensive, so I rarely bothered.

The security folks at the airport were quite bemused by it :-)

I had to buy a new phone this year to replace one. Because it was one of the smallest packages for what I wanted, I got myself a Samsung Note 10. (Srsly, why must phones now be that big, that the regular note series looks small?)

Also I did had some small travel plans this year for every second weekend, where I wanted take my Pentax SLR out or buy myself a Sony Rx100 if space in the backbag runs out. (Moved to next year.)

But now? I'm not sure.

Yes, the dslr with its bigger sensor would be better suited to get more details in each pic and would be a much easier tool to use. But, there aren't really visible on your averaged sized print. And as long my trip isn't focused on getting pictures of animals, I don't need more reach than the short-/portrait- tele lens from the phone already provides.

But I save myself massively on packing space, weight, theft prevention and stress.

And the last point I think is the biggest deal in the end. If I travel to relax, I don't want to focus on getting the best out of my equipment to justify bringing it. (Or worse have to listen to others unasked opinion about my equipment choices.) A phone does the job and gets out of the way.

Sending pics home from a dslr? I hope you got your notebook with you and 1-2 hours in your hotelroom. I'm already done on the phone...

> Sending pics home from a dslr? I hope you got your notebook with you and 1-2 hours in your hotelroom. I'm already done on the phone...

not sure if you ever had a modern camera (e.g. <5 y.o.), but with my Canons the hotel room is still nice (because somehow most cams don't spit out 2MB 24megapixel images strangely), yet sharing is supereasy with an android phone. start the app, hit the transfee button on the cam, do a NFC-bump, download. Granted this is not suuper fast (mainly because the images are large and getting 20MB+ transfer on portable device Wifi is a quite recent thing), but it works as convenient as 2 devices not mandatorily linked will work togetherm

The workflow to download photos is exactly the same on my Sony A6000 on iOS. You have the ability to send individual photos, or a group (like all the photos from a particular day). Moving them on the phone is nice because you can then open them up in something like Lightroom mobile, along with being able to see everything on a nice high resolution screen.

Wireless transfer works great when it's just a few photos, but takes too long if I need to transfer 200 of them. When that happens, I just pop out the SD card, put it in this[1] card reader and plug it in to my phone so I can transfer them manually.

[1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Anker-SD-Card-Reader/dp/B07NW8RPYN

Have you considered a mirrorless setup?

An Olympus OMD with a fast prime will fit in a purse or other small bag. The PENs are smaller yet, though you give up "prosumer" features. I can fit 2 bodies, 3-4 lenses, and accessories in my carry-on (mid-sized backpack), along with my iPad or laptop, windbreaker, snacks, and other normal travel stuff.

The Fujis are a bit larger (body and glass), but with a larger sensor. But, they are really, really good. The X100 line is amazing for what it is - several friends use it as their main carry-around camera (even thought they own XT bodies and nice glass).

Ricoh GR is another good choice. It's a crop sized sensor in a pocketable body. It's pretty much the perfect travel camera for most people.

Fuji XF10 is also a great choice, smaller than an X100 but no VF.

Do you happen to own one? I've seen reports of slow interface and laggy AF, which is off-putting. But, the features on paper (with price point) are really compelling.

I have an iPhone 11 Pro and I still use my mirrorless camera all the time. It just takes noticeably better pictures. Using a good lens changes everything.

If you leave that stock zoom lens on... yeah, it’s not great. Now put a light-sensitive prime on it and put it wide-open. Instant great pictures that even a novice will notice “its a nice picture”.

I use a Sony A-6000 with a 30mm F1.8 prime.

I would think that wide-open is likely not the sharpest F-stop around, I guess unless you want to maximize that depth-of-field effect that phone cameras can only fake.

generally modern lenses peak sharpness slightly stopped down. and then they are sharp - and yeah, you can't fake sharpness either (and even if not printing, the camera nearly always produces good enough output for a 4k wallpaper - a phone? maybe.)

If you use a smaller sensor camera, like a 1" or 4/3, wide open can appear sharper because of the increased depth of field, and give you a greater margin of error.

I usually shoot at F2.8-F4.0 —- the lens is F1.8

Shooting at 1.8, too much of the picture is out of focus in my experience.

I’m just a hobbyist. Never actually compared sharpness at stops.

To be fair I have a DSLR that quite clearly takes much, much better photos than my iPhone Xs Max takes (despite what Apple's marketing would have you believe), but in reality I just don't bother with the DSLR anymore, because whilst the iPhone clearly isn't as good, it's still easily good enough, and it's a hell of a lot more portable.

I imagine many others feel the same way.

I had a X100F and sold it b/c I just never managed to carry it with me.

I now have an iPhone 11 Pro but unless I uses portrait mode the photos just don't come close. And when I do use portrait mode it feels like augmented reality, not real life.

This is what I'm after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkEq2u_E1VU

So I'm considering an X100V but I am not sure if I can develop the diligence to carry the thing all the time. Especially with family, which is of course when I want it most.

The Ricoh GRiii might be a better fit if carrying it around with you is the biggest challenge. Same sensor size as the X100 range, 28mm f/2.8 lens that's incredibly sharp and small and light enough to fit in a shirt pocket.

The Ricoh portables are fantastic, but they're SO wide. Know of anything comparably portable, but with a longer lens? Even the 35mm lens of the X100 is better.

Afraid not at that size with a big sensor. Maybe something from the Sony RX/Canon Poweshot lines might fit the bill?

Totally agree that everyone notices the difference. I sync all of my α6600 photos to my iCloud library, and just scrolling through my photos to look for something to show a friend, they always comment, "You took these on your phone!?"

Even at small sizes, the difference in dynamic range is insane, which makes a huge difference when photographing people indoors in particular. And of course when you look at the photo full size, the terrible watercolor effects on cell phone photos can't be ignored.

By the way, you should get the Sigma 56mm f1.4 for your Sony; that's the lens of mine that most makes people's jaws drop.

Part of why big apertures let you easily get the "it's a nice picture" comment is that it essentially removes the background from the image.

One of the hardest things in photography is successfully incorporating the background in the composition. And if you fail, the results are devastating: the background will not only look bad, but also distract from the one thing that might look nice, i.e. the subject.

A big aperture lets you sidestep that difficulty, making it easier to take "good pictures".

Those are scare quotes because successfully incorporating the background might have yielded an even better image. Remember that in the cameras infancy and quite some time after, DoF blur was considered a technical flaw.

Agree. When I first got my first DSLR and prime, all I did was shoot wide open on aperture priority.

When I look back at my photos, I cringe.

These days I generally prefer more depth of field as opposed to less. Unless I have to, I prefer to shoot stopped down a little, at around f2.8 or f4. I also use flash (preferably off camera) when I can.

Probably an unpopular preference, but I also prefer to use smaller sensors, like 1" and 4/3. I can shoot wide open but get more DOF, and my cameras+lens combinations are much more portable.

I think its situational.

When I shot portraits I like to shoot more open and blur the background. (I typically used about 100mm).

I have a series of artists in their work spaces. When I shoot those I don't blur the background and shoot wide to get as much of the space.

Right. Straight-up headshot type portraits are special in the sense that you don't really want a background there. But you don't need short DoF to remove the background -- you can also shoot against a flat surface.

The ability to use good prime lenses was also my excuse to buy a new mirrorless, and occasionally to put on a zoom for distant wildlife.

My old DSLR was just to bulky so I left it home more often than not, the mirrorless is just that little more compact and light (especially with a pancake lens, it almost becomes a compact).

And good prima doesn't have to be new and expensive btw. You can buy adapters to fit almost any old lens to any modern camera (especially with mirrorless). Only thing you will be missing is the autofocus and auto aperture control. But for me this adds to the experience, since you must really be engaged with taking the picture (eg, thinking about exposure, zooming with your feet, predicting when a moving object will be in focus), instead of having the camera do it's best (or worst) for you and fixing it in post with software.

I have settled on a Fuji as their controls connect more to that feeling of manual photography, making the experience more fun for me. For everything else, my phone camera with cracked lens is good enough.

I think your Phone is mirrorless. :-)

It is

The main reason for this is innovation in dedicated cameras has slowed to a crawl.

No dedicated camera I'm aware of will take 128 full res frames within half a second, and align and stack them to reduce sensor noise. Yet all modern phone cameras do something like that.

You couldn't even really do the above in postprocessing - the Canon EOS 4000D can only do 3 fps, and only has a buffer of 6 frames.

The reason phone cameras have caught up despite 'worse' physics, is that dedicated cameras electronics are lacking functionality that phone cameras have had for a few years now.

> Innovation in dedicated cameras has slowed to a craw

Agreed! A dSLR with the same hardware/software sophistication of modern iPhones would be a marvelous product. If camera manufacturers are unwilling or uncapable to deliver this, I wonder if Apple would ever consider entering that market. Imagine: an iPhone with an APS-C sensor and replaceable lenses! The sad truth is that it would probably be a product with too long a lifespan for Apple to build it.

The problem is two fold:

> while large cameras have powerful special-purpose image processing engines, they have relatively weak programmable processors. At the same time, they have more pixels to process than cell phones, because their sensors are larger. These two factors made innovation difficult.

from https://graphics.stanford.edu/~levoy/

Also I think HDR+ and other similar stuff uses only around 12 pictures.

Very true. For me the only thing I want from regular camera is amazing zoom capabilities.

However if I compare pictures from e.g. Nikon Coolpix P950 which has small sensor but big zoom, the picture quality is not nearly as good as with phone cameras with smaller CMOS.

I wish camera manufacturers started to mount these cameras on a phone hardware, maybe even run Android directly, if they can't get their act together.

Android was originally designed as an OS for cameras, if I remember correctly...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...

> Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White.[16][17] Rubin described the Android project as "tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences".[17] The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for __digital cameras__, and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004.[18] The company then decided that the market for cameras was not large enough for its goals, and by five months later it had diverted its efforts and was pitching Android as a handset operating system that would rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile.

Emphasis mine. It sounds like it was intended as an OS for cameras, but in the end it was not designed as one. However source from [18], confirms OP's memory - https://www.pcworld.com/article/2034723/android-founder-we-a...

>The creators of Android originally dreamed it would be used to create a world of "smart cameras" that connected to PCs, a founder said, but it was reworked for mobile handsets as the smartphone market began to explode.

> "The exact same platform, the exact same operating system we built for cameras, that became Android for cellphones," said Android co-founder Andy Rubin, who spoke at an economic summit in Tokyo.

I'm glad they pivoted. Having a smartphone OS on my DSLRs would be a nightmare.

Tons of people loved the Samsung Android cameras. I think Sony A7 MILCs 1st and 2nd generation had Android-people still miss the apps you could install. There’s an appeal to some folks

Why would a dedicated camera need to take huge numbers of photos to overcome sensor noise when it's not there in the first place?

No, I think that's a bad example to choose. I do take your point, dedicated camera development is more conservative, but their market is different. If you splurge £10k on a camera system, you are likely a pro, and you want consistency, and longevity to the design and the operation of the system.

Thinking about it, dedicated cameras have mainly been innovating in video production rather than stills in the last 5 years.

I agree with the GP but for a different reason. It's unacceptable to me that I have to buy a separate trigger so I can take exposures 31 seconds long. There's no reason why the timer should only go up to 30, or that I shouldn't have better bracketing, or a timelapse mode, etc etc.

Basically, all of Magic Lantern (a considerable feature set) should have been standard.

That's a weird nitpick. My phone doesn't even have a headphone jack or an SD card tray. A free aftermarket add-on isn't a blocker.

It's a blocker for me because I don't want to pay Canon $160 for something that was deliberately left off the software so I'd have to pay Canon $160.

Also, it's a literal button. I'm paying $160 for a button with a timer on it.

I agree that the camera software should just let you pick any shutter speed, but you can get a pretty cheap remote button or intervalometer for <$30, or even DIY one for cheaper. What does the $160 canon button give you that a cheaper version doesn't?

The cheaper ones don't come with a timer, do they? Besides, it's not that I haven't found a solution (Magic Lantern lets me set the speed to however long I want), but I dislike the gesture. It's obvious that they're gating features so they can release them in the next model.

Dynamic range and motion blur/shake reduction.

> Why would a dedicated camera need to take huge numbers of photos to overcome sensor noise when it's not there in the first place?

Except there is noise. There is always some dark spot that could do with a little more detail. There is always a bright reflection that saturates the sensor losing its color information.

With a decent burst and enough computational photography, you can recover all that information.

First, that's not noise. Second, modern ILC sensors have dynamic range to spare; you can usually pull a couple stops of detail on both sides in post. Third, if you want HDR, which is what you're talking about here anyway, modern ILCs can do it and have been able to for years. You set it up like bracketing and it assembles the shots in camera just like a phone does.

"Why would a dedicated camera need to take huge numbers of photos to overcome sensor noise when it's not there in the first place?"

You have clearly never looked at unprocessed RAW data from the sensor or you wouldn't be saying something so completely wrong.

Signal to noise ratio on any “real” camera format (FF, APSC, MFT) is vastly superior to SNR on a cell phone camera. It’s not even in the same ballpark. PhotonsToPhotos has a lot of numerical comparisons available.

Firstly, I was responding to the claim that sensor noise "isn't there" on a dedicated camera [1], fullstop, which is ludicrously wrong. Without processing what comes out of the sensor is an ugly beast.

Secondly, strange that you don't actually link anything to demonstrate this noise advantage. Much less that it's "vastly superior" and "not even in the same ballpark". Hint -- because it isn't.

[1] - which is a revealing bit of cargo cult analysis. Sensor quality across "dedicated" cameras have enormous variations, and a lot are simply terrible. One of the reasons smartphones do burst and computational photography is for extended dynamic range, yet the iPhone 11 already has a sensor with more dynamic range than the significant majority of SLRs/mirrorless cameras. There are obviously better sensors, like the A7R II+, but there are many that are worse, sometimes much worse.

> Secondly, strange that you don't actually link anything

I told you the name of the website where you should look. How explicit do I have to be for you? Here's a link if it helps.

https://www.photonstophotos.net/Charts/PDR.htm

Compare an iPhone XS Max to a an A7R4 or something. At ISO 100, The A7R4 has 11.6 bits of dynamic range and the iPhone has 6.4 bits. HUGE difference.

> Without processing what comes out of the sensor is an ugly beast.

RAWs from a large sensor without denoising look fine. On my camera I only have lens correction and color correction - zero denoising. I've done statistical analysis of dark frames using LibRaw to make sure this is actually the case, and indeed I exactly replicated the results from PhotonsToPhotos.

> yet the iPhone 11 already has a sensor with more dynamic range than the significant majority of SLRs/mirrorless cameras

Hahahaha, please, show me one even APS-C camera from Sony, Fuji, Nikon, Canon, or any other reputable manufacturer made in the last 4 years that has a worse PDR than the iPhone 11.

"How explicit do I have to be for you?"

Then you link to a dynamic range chart. Yet we were talking about noise. See, I looked at their noise charts where the XS Max (a generation behind, and significantly bested by the 11) beat the majority of SLRs, including contemporary SLRs. Tellingly you decided not to link that.

"Compare an iPhone XS Max to a an A7R4 or something"

Oh you know...an A7R4 or something. The fact that the A7R4 has one of the best sensors on an SLR is just, you know, incidental.

Fun fact - the iPhone 11 has 10 stops (10 "bits") of dynamic range, which exceeds the majority of SLRs on that site (and of those that beat it, few are "vastly superior"). The sensor actually has 12 stops of dynamic range but automatic pre-processing knocks it down 2 stops (though there are tools that circumvent that). "Hahahahaha".

"RAWs from a large sensor without denoising look fine."

You have never seen the actual RAW data, plainly evident from this claim. Do you know what a Bayer filter is? Do you realize the enormous amount of processing it does just to recreate edges and other artifacts? I suspect you don't. Do you know that every sensor has permanently lit elements, permanently dark elements, and permanently errant elements? That the camera has an evolving correction matrix around these artefacts? The amount of processing that turns that bayer sensor array into a so-called "RAW" file is absolutely enormous, and it automatically includes a tremendous amount of smoothing and corrections, even if you, the ignorant user, remain blissfully unaware. When manufacturers push out new firmware, changes to these processing steps is often one of the most noted changes.

So to repeat-

-the iPhone 11 has better dynamic range, single shot, than many SLRs.

-the iPhone 11 has a better noise profile than many SLRs.

And I'm just talking about the iPhone 11 as a very common smartphone. There are smartphones that exceed it now, the point being that many smartphones have superb cameras.

These are facts. There are SLRs that are much better, like the recent A7s, but any cargo culting as if the entire category gives you a superior result is simple ignorance.

> The sensor actually has 12 stops of dynamic range but automatic pre-processing knocks it down 2 stops (though there are tools that circumvent that). "Hahahahaha".

This comment suggests you don’t even remotely understand the poisson statistics underlying sensor noise, or else it would be obvious why they “knock off” those two bits. The SNR of the iPhone sensor is fundamentally limited by the size of the capacitors at each photosite.

> You have never seen the actual RAW data

Yes I have, and my mention of “libraw” should have been a clue for you.

> Do you know what a Bayer filter is?

Yes. I also know about X-trans filters, foveon, etc. I’m fairly confident I can out-namedrop you here ;)

> the iPhone 11 has better dynamic range, single shot, than many SLRs. > the iPhone 11 has a better noise profile than many SLRs.

Give me a specific SLR in the last 4 years where either of these is true. The data is right there on photonstophotos, so go ahead.

You’re going to have a hard time, and if you understood the physics of how a CMOS sensor works you’d know why.

"or else it would be obvious why they “knock off” those two bits"

In a post where I'm talking about necessary processing (where you claim there is none) to turn the ugly sensor data into workable forms you attempt to correct me to tell me that it needs to be processed (I mean, you are aware of libraw so clearly you're an expert. funfact: I worked for two years on a professional codebase that specifically dealt with raw sensor processing), as if to demonstrate my ignorance. Remarkable absence of self-awareness on your part.

Your reply could really be posted as a counterpoint to your own first post where you decided to counter my basic statement that all CMOS sensors have noise and abberations.

"and if you understood the physics of how a CMOS sensor works"

Just to be clear, your authoritative site shows the iPhone (the last generation) being less noisy than many SLRs. And it's fact that the iPhone 11 has 10 stops of dynamic range, before any special bracketing, which bests many/most SLRs on that site. And yet we're still going. Amazing

But your core "if you only understood CMOS...reeeeeeeee!" claim is one that is often erroneously made. "larger sensor = larger sensor pit pitch = better, less noisy sensor!" Right?

I mean, this argument has been made against smartphones for years. To assure us that they'll always be crap because...like...physics or something. Though anyone who didn't decide to die on a really stupid hill has long moved on.

But here's the reality-

a) There are enormous difference between different CMOS technologies and implementations. Sony, for instance, has shot ahead of everyone else (though they bin and segment). There are many SLRs and mirrorless cameras with absolute trash sensors. Cargo culting is ignorant.

b) Many cameras with larger sensors spend the benefit on higher resolutions. The Sony A7R IV subdivides the sensor into 5x more pixels than the iPhone 11 (the A7R IV being one of the absolute best). If that was lossless you could simply process it to a lower resolution and have the best of both worlds, but it isn't lossless -- the circuitry and structure to support that resolution is substantial. Each pit has its own lines and power and memory channel. And even if they didn't, noise scales with the sensor size.

"Give me a specific SLR in the last 4 years where either of these is true."

You've already segued effortlessly from noise to dynamic range, humorously, and now you're making a baseless, nonsensical statement just hoping that no one actually confirms it. Your intellectual sincerity in this discussion is somewhere approaching non-existent, so I'm out. Cheers.

> Just to be clear, your authoritative site shows the iPhone (the last generation) being less noisy than many SLRs.

Charitably, you are confused, and uncharitably you are lying or misleading.

I gave you a simple prompt where you could prove yourself right with a single camera model, and unsurprisingly you’ve failed to take advantage of it.

> And even if they didn't, noise scales with the sensor size.

These noise sources are completely dwarfed by poisson/shot noise (which is the completely overwhelming noise source on most modern SLRs for “everyday” photographs).

The iPhone’s FETs hold a lot fewer electrons. There is no way around this. And then with technology like Dr-pix present in modern Sony sensors (including the ones they sell to Fuji), the gap gets even wider.

"I gave you a simple prompt"

Is that a command? Am I your monkey? I humored your site, noted that it didn't confirm your claims (again -- you didn't link this proof about noise, and when I used your site to demonstrate that you were incorrect...you segued to DR where you could enjoy that this site has a single obsolete smartphone).

Curious that you decided to get the last word in again. Your own proof is flawed.

But again, you claimed that every SLR in the past 4 years is "vastly" better. "Not even in the same ballpark". Your net evidence so far is that a $5000 camera body, which is known to have a class leading sensor, has better dynamic range than a two year old iPhone. "Hahahahaha".

Stop seething and name one SLR made in the last 4 years by Nikon, canon, Sony, Fuji, etc. with worse noise stats than the iPhone.

> You've already segued effortlessly from noise to dynamic range

And you're showing your ignorance by not realizing that noise is the main determinate of dynamic range.

Narrator- "But it actually isn't"

Is there a correlation? Yup. Is it a strong correlation? It is not. And when the cited reference explicitly has noise measurements, when someone so carefully steers clear of it...yeah.

Tell me then what is the definition of dynamic range?

> dedicated cameras have mainly been innovating in video production rather than stills in the last 5 years.

Well, not Sony. Their mirrorless cameras have gotten much better autofocus and battery life and slightly better ergonomics, usability, speed and weather-sealing, but there has basically been no change in their video capabilities.

> The main reason for this is innovation in dedicated cameras has slowed to a crawl.

That's not entirely true, althoughI'm not sure I like the direction. A good example if Fuji's X-T* line, where, as one reviewer noted, "I had thought I'm buing a camera, but it turned out I bought a computer with lens attached". It does all creative tricks to compensate for inaccuracies coming from the hardware, especially the lens - but at the price of draining the batteries exctremely fast, and each lens need a firmware update. Is the final result good? Yes. Do I like it more than more standard solution from Canon and Nikon? Not necessarily. It seems cheaper though.

Agreed, I wanted to do astrophotography with a DSLR, but the experience is so bad compared to just using my Pixel's inbuilt mode.

Considering that Android was originally aimed at cameras [1], maybe that's something Camera OEMs can finally look at again.

[1] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0013837043/android-was-ori...

What's your setup?

I don’t think this is a meaningful example, the canon does not need to take 128 pics to reduce noise in the first place since it has a massive sensor.

I'd agree with this. I have a Fuji X100F camera which produces lovely photos that look noticably distinct from my Pixel phone camera.

However, even on innovative features that it does have - like WiFi or face recognition, it implements so poorly that I kind of wish they hadn't bothered.

Fujifilm simply don't have the quality of software engineers that Apple and Google have access to. Nor do they place the same importance on software. The actual physical feel of this camera is sublime, it's a shame they don't think the software is worthy of the same attention to detail.

I’m sure it’s not that they think software isn’t worthy, but simply that it’s not their traditional area of competence. It took a monumental effort for a lot of them just to make the film to digital transition, and they were only competing with each other. Now they have to compete against a whole different industry that’s faster moving and more software centric. Plus great software engineers don’t come cheap, and we’re talking about a market size that’s a few orders of magnitude smaller. So if they made the necessary investment in software, how much would the cameras end up costing? Maybe 2x to 10x their current prices, and thus further shrinking an already shrinking market? It’s a no-win situation.

Sony's been pushing things forward quite a bit, and after catching up on most of the fundamentals, they're now working in AI/ML. Their latest cameras have incredible eye-autofocus built with ML, and they also recently announced and AI imaging chip.

> the Canon EOS 4000D can only do 3 fps, and only has a buffer of 6 frames.

If you're going to use a single camera as your example for the industry, I don't think that's fair. Canon makes great cameras, but my Nikon V1, circa 2011, is a camera "serious photographers" like to laugh at, and and outperforms your example. It was 5fps with a mechanical shutter, up to 60fps with the electronic shutter.

At the time, some people used the 30fps burst to make 4K video clips: https://vimeo.com/61441075

And FWIW, I used a command line tool to do image stacking to reduce sensor noise on my Nikon 1 cameras years ago. That was until I started using DxO, which does an adequate job of sensor noise reduction on a single RAW shot without as much work.

Also, the DSLRs I used more than 10 years ago (Sony Alphas) were able to do 5fps, but back then, nobody really took you seriously as a photographer if you used a Sony.

The Olympus E-M1X and teh E-M1.3 will take 8-16 full resolution pictures at 60fps and process them together. There are two options, one for macro photography, where the pictures are taken with different focus settings for increasing DOF and the other is high-res modus, where the pictures are taken with a minimal sensor shift and combined for higher resolution and have less noise. This even works hand-held.

In a nice, high end DSLR 6400 IS0 is perfectly acceptable.

I'm no hardware person, but I believe there are serious constraints on how quickly you can take images with larger sensors. The D6 can do 14 frames a second, and the D850 can do about half that.

One point often overlook with phone cameras is that although they can take great pictures, the image quality degrades over time as the glass is rubbed/scratched etc.

When I first got my Huawei P20 Pro, I was seriously impressed with just how sharp and crisp the images it took were. A year later that "wow" sharpness factor just wasn't there anymore. Looking at the glass covering the lenses you could clearly see scuffing and small scratches, the result of a years worth of normal usages.

For daytime snaps it wasn't that big a deal, but for indoor snaps every light source looked like t had the starburst effect.

It's a minor issue, but definitely worth noting. It's also the reason why I still take a "real" camera with me on holidays or to events.

I wonder if the iPhone's sapphire camera lens helps?

My 4 year old 6S (used caseless and without much caution its entire life) lens is still pristine.

Some phones have a movable cover over the lens (for instance, the N900), which should help prevent these scratches.

One must treat all imaging systems with care. A small case goes a long way to slow down the scratching-death of phone cameras.

Last year I found a really nice balance: a DSLR with a really good, really long lens (a Canon 100-400mm telephoto) combined with an iPhone 11 Pro.

I use the telephoto for interesting things that are far away - generally wildlife. I use the iPhone for shots that the telephoto is no good for - landscapes, interesting things that are nearby.

This gives me the ability to take most photos without needing to swap lenses!

Admitting that my phone takes great quality photos and it's OK to use it even when I'm carrying my DSLR was a very useful psychological step for me.

This has been my vacation photo strategy for awhile now. I keep my 300mm zoom on my Nikon and use my iPhone for snaps. The benefits of the iPhone are that the pics it takes almost never need any post. The downside is that it is limited to what pics it can take.

I also do miss having the 50mm on my Nikon while walking around. It's sharp, takes great low light pics, and is so versatile.

So yeah, I understand your psychological hangups because I have the same ones :)

My vacation strategy is the iPhone for the day and a camera with a 50mm prime that I take out at night for low light portraits ;)

Same here.

Same, except it's an Olympus OM-D with a 14mm f/2.5 lens (28mm field-of-view) in my case. It takes fantastic photos even at ISO 1600 and above.

I'm new to photography and I've invested heavily in the mirrorless ecosystem in the past year. I can't echo this articles sentiment enough. For 90-95% of use cases my 2 grand camera is a lame duck.

I regularly wondered if the love of my camera was simply some sunk cost bias towards it. I've been mostly cured of this thought through the reactions of people. A "holy sh*t" when I show them a long-exposure of the stars. A whispered "oh my god" when I show them a shot with beautiful bokeh.

And to me - as a physicist - the act catching the edge cases, that extra 5% of shots. The stuff you need a good sensor and a nice piece of glass to capture. That's what I find exciting.

When you get into heavy postprocessing, the dynamic range of the phone can't hold a candle to that of the camera, though. It's just night and day.

There's no way you could retrieve this much detail from a phone sensor: https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/

The top version of the photo is really nice. It could easily have come from a good phone camera.

The bottom version... OK, my phone can't do that. If it did, I'd take it to the Apple store to see if they could fix it.

Thanks for the feedback.

I would say your phone can do that, it's just that you did not enable HDR.

The thing is, because of how our eyes and brain work (huge dynamic range plus postprocessing), the actual viewed scene was probably closer to the second photo than the first, but with a higher contrast (the camera HDR emulates the eye but you also need a huge dynamic range display to show it right, otherwise it's "compressed" to low contrast). So you can choose the contrast (first photo) or dynamic range (second photo) but not both.

That's not very accurate because the colors in the clouds were inverted in this photo, but you're right that reality is a bit more contrasty, though not as contrasty as we think (nowhere close to the "after").

My comment came out sounding somewhat mean, which wasn't my intention, but the truth is that I'm not a big fan of HDR and related artificial effects. These effects don't look anything like the imagery perceived by my eyes and brain; they're just different ways to ruin a good photo.

In this case, a very good photo.

Non-HDR isn't anything like what your eyes see.

Once dynamic range is lost by rendering something on a phone screen or computer monitor, you can't recover it without making the image look weird and artificial. It's like mixing 24-bit audio for playback through an 8-bit DAC. You can play all sorts of games with dynamic range expansion, but at the end of the day you've done a bad thing.

Then there's the fact that a lot of problems people try to solve with HDR are actually gamma correction issues.

Of course, I may just not be taking the right drugs...

That is a really cool picture. However, it does stray so far from reality that I wonder if you couldn't just as well get someone skilled to spend a couple of hours in photoshop achieving the same effect even without the added range. Probably tweaking sliders in lightroom is more time-efficient, and there's an argument to be made for using the camera as an artistic tool and not just a lens to capture a still picture of your surroundings, but I don't think this is a great example of what isn't possible without a "real" camera.

I guess maybe something like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NDb8js5fCl8/maxresdefault.jpg

I had a Canon T3i for a long time- it was given to me as a honeymoon gift and while at first I was kind of annoyed with it, I became really interested in photography and took it with me everywhere. The last trip I took it on was in 2018, and my father in law had a pixel- maybe a pixel 2- but I think the original. We were under a roman theater, it was very dim, but we both took a few pictures as it was a really interesting scene. His pictures just blew mine out of the water- mine you could hardly make out the details, his looked like it was well lit.

I was in the process of looking to upgrade, and actually for that trip was hoping I could get an A7 III, (~2k for those unfamiliar with cameras), and eventually did a few months later, and even with a "G" lens (not highest end, but still ~$1k USD just for the lens), the gap between my wife's iphone and even my Galaxy S8 for "typical" photos is really small, and for certain types of action and low-light shots, the cell phones are superior.

I am not sure if I will ever buy another "proper" camera again. People talked for years about the limits of physics on lenses and light and such, but software can overcome those limitations for the most part. It makes me sad, and I maybe even feel a little foolish for spending a few thousand dollars on equipment that is quickly becoming unnecessary for most of my uses.

Time always tells. A Bresson photo taken with a Leica in 1940 looks as good now as it did then. Somehow I suspect that, no matter how impressive the current iPhone 11 cameras are, those HEIC files will look obviously lame in just a few years. The same won't hold true for anyone using good lenses on a nice Sony A7R or Leica M10.

True. I've upgraded through all of the iPhones since the first one. Every time I was impressed by the new version of the camera. And yet, ever time I look back at photos from the previous models, I'm always disappointed. Happy with my A7R and Leica M6, it'll probably continue to stay that way.

Good photos keep looking good. Bad photos don't. Story at 11.

"those HEIC files will look obviously lame in just a few years"

This is, of course, absolute nonsense. It is equipment elitism (e.g. "if I just buy the right camera and the right lens I'll be a great photographer"), and is actually extraordinary to compare with your leading comment about Bresson's photography: Bresson was working with extremely limited hardware, though it was pretty good for the time. Grainy film with a very poor dynamic range. Soft, inaccurate lenses. He took great photos so that became irrelevant, not the reason for the success. Yet you segue to saying that therefore smartphone photos won't be good in the future? Talk about missing the lesson from your own example.

Further, there are loads of "prosumers" taking just loads and loads of absolutely disposable, terrible photos on their SLRs with "good lenses" (<- that is of course one of those fun no true scotsman things where you can always just argue that counterpoints just don't fit the notion). Yeah, shooting everything as a bokeh photo on your f1.2 lens is exactly what every first-time photographer does.

Two points not discussed here:

- Startup time. It takes less than half a second from a cold start for my Canon to start shooting at 14fps, but my iPhone 11 Pro often tales 5-10s to open the camera app for some reason, plus more time for it to realize I am holding the shutter for burst and not tapping for single shooting.

- Autofocus time. My Canon can track moving subjects with autofocus and keep them in focus on almost any vector (I mainly shoot surf photos where my subject is traveling both towards and perpendicular to me), whereas my iPhone struggles to keep a stationary subject in focus even in direct sunlight.

Startup time: my phone is right here in my pocket. My camera is in my backpack. I missed on many good shots because I couldn't be arsed to fish it out of here.

If I am carrying my DLSR I generally have it accessible to shoot and not tucked away. I see your point though, I use a crossbody bag on my chest to store my SLR for this reason.

If I'm carrying my phone camera I keep the camera app in foreground.

Get a Peak Design camera clip. It lets you keep the camera on your backpack strap.

Gah I HATE that about apple products.

You can't customize the UI.

Why can't you customize the UI? Apple won't let you. You only get what they have decided to allow.

Why can't we just hold a button and unlock the phone directly into the camera?

(patiently waiting for linux phone)

EDIT: to be clear, I mean an unambiguous way of taking a still photo or video that doesn't require looking at the screen or "being in a mode".

> Why can't we just hold a button and unlock the phone directly into the camera?

Because you can swipe left from the lock screen directly to camera mode (and only camera mode), bypassing unlock so it's super fast. Not holding down a button but achieves the same thing.

This is what I do when something's going down around me and need to quickly capture a shot.

> Why can't we just hold a button and unlock the phone directly into the camera?

FWIW, I'm able to just drag the lock screen left to open the camera app. Alternatively, I can press/hold the camera icon on the lock screen.

Hearing about a 5-10s delay is shocking. It's instantaneous on my iPhone 11.

Sorry, I wasn't more clear.

I mean some way that you don't have to look at the screen for feedback.

What you're saying is true, but it behaves differently depending on reasons (like did you unlock first or accidentally press the home button to get to the home screen or ...)

The idea would be - some unambiguous non-fiddly way of launching the camera into either still photo or video mode.

I'm pretty sure everyone who's ever had an iphone has struggled and lost this battle trying to rip off a photo or video.

From what you're describing, it sounds like you're having a very different iPhone experience from the norm. Just curious, what model/iOS do you have?

Just a data point: I have an older (2015) iPhone 6s from work that supports opening the camera app in <1s from lock screen.

iphone 8 with touch id. I'm not saying it's not fast, I'm saying something else.

Hmm, yes I confess I'm not fully understanding. A left swipe from the lock screen to me seems both fast and non-fiddly.

You don't need to touch the home button at all. Just hold your phone up (the screen will turn on if you have "Raise to Wake" on -- usually on by default). Then swipe left from the right edge. That's it.

well in general my phone will let you click the screen saver button and swipe to get the camera -- when locked.

when unlocked you have to look at the screen and miss the shot.

Maybe a more concrete example would be:

Apple allows apple pay to be a first-class function. You can double-click the home button at any time to access apple pay.

Apple has an "accessibility shortcut" for triple clicking the home button. But it's for magnifier.

Why wouldn't they allow the phone owner to customize the UI for critical functions like camera from the iphone 1 days?

> Why can't we just hold a button and unlock the phone directly into the camera?

My iPhone has a "camera" button right on the lock screen that launches the camera app without needing to unlock the phone. It takes well under a second from when the screen lights up to display the lock screen until the camera viewfinder screen is active.

Are you using a very old iPhone or old version of the OS?

Pretty sure iPhone does or did this

I mean you can't customize it.

instead of having to interact, make the side button "camera" full stop.

My iPhone SE would open camera from a locked screen if I pressed or held one of the side buttons. Honestly it was more annoying than anything else

> Startup time: my iPhone 11 Pro often tales 5-10s to open the camera app

Really? I have an iPhone 11 (standard), and I swipe left from the lock screen. Less than 1 s. Bypasses unlock, no FaceID needed, but you're restricted to only camera mode.

Burst shot, holding down the button, about 1/2 sec.

I can't imagine our phones are that different.

> Autofocus time

Yes, I've found that the iPhone's autofocus to be a little slow to converge. I usually have to manually lock focus and exposure.

Huh? I can reach into my pocket and start recording from my (older) iPhone in under a second. Opening my backpack, and setting up my DSLR itself will take 20-30 seconds or longer.

I was actually relieved when the author came around to my own experience: camera phones are 90% there, but being in that 10% space with only a phone is endlessly frustrating.

Beyond quality, I also dislike how camera phones have cheapened photos. Decades ago I actively thought this wouldn't be a problem, but now it's very apparent that it is: People take thousands of photos and don't look at them.

Why? I think it's too many photos for people to comfortably curate. 4 rolls of film was manageable, and with limited space in the album (and patience for the task), the best ones got picked out and the rest filed away in a shoebox. Today? I've been there, watching patiently, as someone scrolls though their phone "album", skipping over dozens of identical images to get to the next good one. Unlimited space gives even the most fat fingered "photo burst" prone grandparent reason to never delete anything. It's so bad that now the phone AI has taken over the task of "organizing". It's a terrible combination. Maybe the phones will learn to create albums just from the good photos, but so far I'm not impressed.

Agree on the cheapening part - but I really love the reminders on my phone - 5yrs ago or 3yrs ago of simple everyday events - cheap photos but fond memories.. photos that probably would not have been taken with an actual camera.

> Beyond quality, I also dislike how camera phones have cheapened photos.

I don't think this is about camera phones, but digital cameras.

I find myself curating more photos immediately when they're taken with my iPhone — while leaving photos in my DSLR/M43 cameras for future curation, because their LCD screens are tiny.

Curation means deleting things too. And I do a lot of that. Not only does it make it much easier to find stuff, but I can keep my entire image collection on an SD card in my phone (around 60 GB of photos over the last 10 years). I frequently browse through my photo collection, and I love that it's all local.

There's no point keeping that blurry photo of a crappy sunset, or 25 near-identical copies of the same thing. I delete ruthlessly, and keep 1-3 photos of each subject.

Importantly, when I look back at my photos, the ones I'm most interested in are the ones with people in them, especially after a sibling was killed in an accident. I keep nearly all of those (except near duplicates). So although I take lots of photos of things, I don't care that much about them, and only keep the good ones.

Another benefit of smartphones is that photos are geotagged, processed, and backed up automatically. This is a pretty big deal if you travel for more than a few days.

My humble RX100 took objectively better pictures than my Samsung S9, but not enough to justify the extra weight, and the extra logistics. When my RX100 broke, I did not replace it.

I also had larger cameras. They made photography the main activity whenever I brought them with me. I rarely took them with me.

Modern DSLRs do that.

Newer cameras can do this- ironically by connecting with your phone. My Sony A7III can use the phone to geotag, and you can send them to your phone easily too so they can immediately go on the gram.

I will agree this is a really nice to have feature though and one of the main drivers for me to upgrade from my ~2009 Canon.

Second that, I wanted to display the photos from my DSLR on a map. The photos weren't geotagged, so I had to find a way to add the locations. Ended up writing a script that matches the photos from the DSLR with the geolocations from my Google location history. Worked well enough, but geotagging should really be a standard feature in any camera these days.

Lightroom can do that for you

[Said with a sense of irony]

Luckily for my sense of self, I’ve only ever engaged in available light photography.

Ilford Delta 3200 when everyone else was using Kodak Gold 200. Fast fixed focal length lenses when everyone else was using f3.5 or slower kit zooms. Everything shot wide open all of the time, resulting in many dud photos with incorrect focus, and a few fantastic shots.

It’s an excellent way of justifying my box of ”real camera equipment” to myself, on the continuing onslaught of evidence that cell phone cameras are plenty good enough.

I do wish a phone company would offer a phone that does _no_ real processing of the image. Phone photos look fine on a phone, but the moment you enlarge them they really are extremely weird, in my experience. Personally I would love the utility of a modern camera along the lines of old Leicas; simple, manual, compact, and with good quality if you know what you're doing. I suppose there are modern Leicas but god; that price inflation.

Also lovely to see an article by Scalzi on here, one of my all-time favourite authors.

While phone vendors are unlikely to offer it as a first party feature, Apple has APIs to get raw sensor data and various third party photo apps will do that for you if you want. I assume it’s the same in android land.

> a modern camera along the lines of old Leicas

Fujifilm X series. X-100F currently retails for $1000. You can get the (still fantastic) X-100T for around $500 refurb.

I think my dad has both of those cameras actually, and I agree that they're really excellent. He only totes around his big Nikon when he needs the really large lens now.

Must admit that I sorta forgot he owned them.

My Pixel is configured to save a raw image as well as the jpeg. I believe you can do this with most phones.

The DNG files have at least a stop or two of editing latitude from the Pixel 3a.

If you want the feel of a Leica, check out the X100 series from Fujifilm. They are excellent in every version, so you can choose your price on the used market. The only caveat is that the 35mm-equivalent focal length needs to resonate with you.

> I do wish a phone company would offer a phone that does _no_ real processing of the image.

iOS has offered 3rd party apps access to raw sensor data since late-2017 or so: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/camer...

By extremely weird, I'm guessing you mean lacking in detail. The tiny sensors can't resolve as much detail so cropping with phone pictures will hit a wall much faster than, say, a 24MP APS-C sensor. The trade-off here is that you can't really shove a Sony A5100 with its lens on into a pants pocket like you easily can with any smartphone. I've pulled out a phone and taken once-in-a-lifetime pictures within 3 seconds -- good luck doing it with a packed-away bigger camera.

This is part of why you see so many wide angle and macro shots these days: they're the ideal scenarios for phone pictures. Phone sensors are finally starting to creep up in size from the common 1/2.55" sensors. I suspect should they reach the 1" size, the resolution of detail will dramatically improve. It looks like the S20 Ultra has a 1/1.33" already, but I haven't tried it myself.

Ah I mostly meant more in terms of the denoising, HDR-ish effects, and the like, but I do agree that the sensors are also partly to blame there. I imagine the small size increases the need for noise reduction processing.

My hobby is wildlife photography, mostly of birds. I live in hope that a manufacturer will make a 1000mm folded optic inside a phone one day, especially if it's not insanely expensive like an dSLR lens, but I suspect the laws of physics will stop them. That said, if manufacturers can bring the computational photography advances that phones get to the wider photography world that would definitely be a positive benefit.

This is what I'm curious about. I've recently gotten really interested in nature photography, but mostly on small details rather than far away. Trying to get phones to focus on flowers, small insects, etc is an exercise in frustration. Even when I think I got something in decent focus, I'll view the photo on my computer and it is super blurry. I'm currently looking at cameras to get away from this personally.

If it helps, the name for this style is "macro" photography. It should be "micro", but somebody got it wrong a hundred years ago and we're all stuck with it now. That's what to be looking for in info, tutorials, lenses and other gear, etc.

I mainly do macro work these days myself, e.g. https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DSC_9393.jpg - I'm happy to talk about what it was like getting started, if you think it might be useful. Definitely some surprises, even coming at it from a place of good familiarity with interchangeable-lens photography in general.

It's called "macro" based on the image properties not the subject properties. "Micro" would have been confusing because of microfilm.

Nikon calls their line of macro lenses "Micro Nikkors".

Your macro skills are amazing. Boy am I glad that wasp isn't live-sized because when my display showed it, I got the chills!

Phones currently cannot easily capture the details on the wasp, from the blood? vessels to the compound eye cells. Something somewhere would be blurred into oblivion.

Is it the macro lense that captures those details, or is it a wide f-stop / image size / ISO is low enough ?

I know the terms and that they matter, but not what combinations to use given what I want to capture. (this must be what it is like for a non-techie person to try to select video transcoding settings :) )

You definitely need a macro lens for shots like this. Their design differs from regular prime lenses in a way that lets you focus on subjects much closer to the lens than a regular prime, so you can get this kind of detail; with a regular prime, you have to be a lot further out. (I took this shot with the lens objective element about six inches away from the wasp - a regular lens can't focus on anything that close.)

Somewhat counterintuitively, you actually need a very high F-stop to capture this kind of detail offhand, too - this was shot at f/32, through a lens that maxes out at f/2.8. The reason is that, the wider open your aperture is, the more off-axis light is captured - which produces shallower depth of field (DoF), i.e., a narrower space ahead of and behind the focus point that is also pretty much in focus. Because of the way macro lenses work, they exacerbate this problem a lot. So you need a very narrow aperture to have enough of your subject in focus for a good image.

(You do also lose some sharpness to diffraction at such high F-stops, it's true. But that's the tradeoff - high F-stop and deep DoF and diffraction losses, or low F-stop and shallow DoF and almost nothing in focus. The only way to compensate is by taking a lot of wide-open shots and focus stacking, but that requires the kind of time and precision that's only possible with a stationary subject - and this wasp was anything but! I might get away with f/22 or f/25 in the same situation today, but I'm a better macro photographer now than I was a year ago, too.)

Another effect of the narrow aperture you need for good DoF is that you're capturing very little light in any single exposure - there's just physically a smaller space for light to enter and hit the sensor. You can compensate for that by vastly increasing ISO sensitivity, but at the cost of adding a similarly vast amount of noise to your shots; the best way to overcome the light problem is by adding light with flashes.

Ring flashes, mounted on the filter thread at the front of the lens, are especially popular for this, because they produce a largely shadowless light that falls evenly on subjects very close to the lens. Another popular option is any of a variety of macro bracket systems, which let you mount regular "speedlight" flashes in a way that concentrates their light similarly to how a ring flash does. There are also systems such as Nikon's SB-R1C1, which combines a hot-shoe-mounted control unit with two (or more) flash heads that mount to a ring on the filter thread.

That said - sure, you can spend a lot of money on macro lighting, but you don't always need to. Especially if you're just starting out, a regular speedlight on the hot shoe, maybe with a homemade bounce card taped on to help aim the light at the macro subject, is absolutely a good starting option - especially since macro lenses tend to be a little spendier than regular primes due to their more complex construction. Better to start out spending money on the best 60-80mm macro lens you can afford, because you can't do without that and it'll give you a good opportunity to find out whether macro photography is something you really enjoy doing! Once you know you want to keep going, that's the time to be looking at complicated lighting and other gear that'll help you level up your ability to get keepers.

On a related note - image (sensor) size is significant, but not hugely so. I got that wasp photo with a Nikon D500, which has an APS-C size sensor, and it came out well enough that I can have 36x24 inch (91x61 cm) prints made from the full-resolution version at no significant cost in quality. (I actually have such a print hanging on my living room wall. It's quite striking! I never get tired of looking at it, although others rarely feel the same - I used to have it over my bed, but my boyfriend at the time asked me to take it down.) With a larger sensor, you can capture more detail and a wider field of view, for sure. But you don't need a larger sensor - I've seen shots made on Micro Four-Thirds system bodies that equal or better the best work I've ever done.

Overall, macro doesn't give the lie to the axiom that the most important piece of equipment in photography is the one between the photographer's ears. Macro is a realm where that axiom is maybe a little less true, because of the technical constraints of the style. But once you've got a good macro lens and a basic speedlight, you've got enough to where it comes back to practice, skill, and learning how to recognize the kind of images you want to make.

Oh, and speaking of skill - one thing about macro is that autofocus tends not to be very useful, both because AF systems tend not to handle the situation well, and because your plane of focus is so narrow at such close ranges that the best AF in the world can't keep up. If you haven't had much opportunity to develop your manual focus skills before picking up macro, you definitely will have once you do! It's easier than it might seem at first; modern AF cameras don't have the same kind of manual focusing aids that old film SLRs did, but you absolutely can train your eye to pick up detail and recognize where the plane of focus lies. You'll learn, too, to hold your breath while focusing to minimize wobble, and how to synchronize shutter firing with the tiny movements you can't stop your body from making, in order to get tack-sharp shots with the focus exactly where you want it. If I had to pick one thing about macro that's more than anything else a matter of skill and practice, that would be it - don't get discouraged if it's hard to do at first! I was terrible at it to begin with, and I can attest that you will get better if you work at it.

Anyway, that's a lot, but I hope it helps!

(And, yeah, those would be blood vessels in the wasp's wings, sort of - insects have an open circulatory system, so they don't work quite the same way we're used to thinking about as vertebrates. But they do circulate hemolymph - if you're interested, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146780391... has a good deal more detail.)

One benefit that gets rarely mentioned is the ability to stick a flash on the DSLR, point it to the ceiling and do indirect flashing that's properly metered by the camera. This makes such a big difference for the image quality of indoor portraits!

Having a flash that can fire upward is such a game changer when taking photos I have a hard time understanding why this wasn't an option on point and shoots and even built in flashes on DSLR's for years.

Maybe its about differentiation, but if just a single manufacturer created a model that you could adjust the flash to point upward, people would flock to it after seeing the results.

I'm guessing it's a combination of having to engineer an extra hinge, which could affect durability, and not wanting to cannibalise the sales of their external flashes.

I hate what phones do to photos of persons. Blurring out details that accentuate the character of a person only to make it social media style (beautify). Life is not what you see in social media, life is what people actually are.

Just to throw my anecdotal experience on the pile: When I get home from a trip, I dump my Nikon D800 photos into Lightroom alongside with the pictures from my partner's M4/3s and both of our recent-model iPhones.

When picking and scoring pictures in Lightroom, all I see is a stream of interleaved photos from all of the cameras, without labels clearly indicating which-is-which.

In the end, I typically choose 80% of the keepers from the Nikon, 15% from the m4/3s camera, and maybe 5% from the two phones combined.

Everyone I know compliments me on "how good a photographer I am", but I'm really not, and I know it. Not one artistic bone in my body. The camera and the lenses I have are incredibly good though! I just press the button, and out pops a fantastic image.

For most people and most uses, a cell phone camera is all you ever need. But its more akin to having an iPad vs a MacbookPro. For most, all they ever need is in the iPad but for professionals and techies, its limitations come into play quickly.

Small screens and social media make cell phone pics shine. But their images fall apart with closer inspection and they do not produce the quality needed for fine art or commercial work.

The old saying that the best camera is the one you have on you holds true. And yes, my iPhone Pro is amazing compared to shooting with a Fuji 100 and a Nikon FM2... but I never use it for final shots.

I agree with this, there is no substitute for a "real" camera.

However, I usually only have my phone on me, so, I decided to make that into a novelty selling point for my online store: https://finerpixels.com

The whole point is that I use a phone because the lower quality sensor adds a unique painting-like quality if you look close enough.

I've made several large prints from phone photos and they look really aesthetic in fact. But it still takes an eye to get it right.

The way I end up thinking of it now is: I use my DSLR when I want to do photography, I use my phone when I want to take a photo. The end of goal of both is the same, to create an image, but it's how each one gets there that makes it interesting to me personally. Computational photography has democratised taking really good photos, but having creative freedom of a DSLR (or mirrorless, or film etc) allows for a richer experience in my eyes. Maybe phone cameras will get to that level at some stage.

It's all about the glass ... the lenses.

A camera with a large aperture (translation: one of those great big lenses) can do stuff a phone camera can only simulate.

-- gather more light. (Phone camera sensors are getting better so that's of diminishing importance.)

-- control the depth of field nicely. Lens marketroids brag about "creamy bokeh", which is what the out-of-focus stuff looks like in a photo taken with a narrow depth of field. Cell phones use a depth-sensor hack ... a really great depth-sensor hack ... to drive image processing to blur image backgrounds. Great hack, but still a hack.

If you're thinking of buying a camera with the crappy kit 14-14mm f/2.8 zoom lens, just don't. Use your camera.

But if you know what a good lens is for and know how to use it, buy the camera. I want this LEGENDARY lens to take pictures of indoor events but I can't justify the cost. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1023336-REG/panasonic...

Phone camera designers should keep chasing Neal Stephenson's lensless camera vision from Anathem. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem) But in the meantime good glass has its place.

And, here's the thing: camera lenses, properly cared for, can last a lot longer than camera bodies. If the body craps out get a new body that fits your glass.

"...Or to put it another way: cell phone cameras have gotten good enough that they will do 90% to 95% of everything that the average person would ever want out of a camera. ..."

I've been a photographer my entire life. I love the hobby. Over the last few years, I've been thinking a lot about this also. I have the latest Pixel. I also have a couple of DSLRs and a few lenses. Recently I bought the best point-and-shoot you can buy. From the reviews, I was promised great things about it.

Result? Meh.

The phones and mirrorless DLSRs are not bad cameras. Both have reached the point where I'd guess they'd do about 80% of what I would do, and that's pretty cool. It's especially handy if I'm in a hurry and just want to bang out a few shots to send or post somewhere.

The problem is that last 20%. My time is not free. Usually if I'm going out to shoot some, I want to shoot some. That is, I want full control over the light bucket, a great bucket, and I'm taking time to get shots that might turn out well when I get into post-processing. These higher-tech cameras take pretty cool shots all of the time, but they're just guessing as to what might make a good shot, and they have built-in limits. So if I'm taking an afternoon to shoot, I'm taking my DSLR.

Oddly, the newer mirrorless camera has been the most disappointing, probably because I had such high hopes. It's great tech, it's just not a professional part of a photography workflow. Once I stopped thinking I could take pro pictures with it, it got more fun. But now whenever I'm using it I wonder why I'm not just going with the cell phone.

For stills the new three camera iPhone is amazing unless you want to zoom. I own a bunch of L series Canon zoom lenses including an F4 600mm prime and it’s unbelievable. In particular, compressing backgrounds into foreground subjects is what zoom lenses are great at. Or collapsing a scene. Google ‘seven powerlines scene’ on google images for an example.

Other than zoom lenses my iPhone does everything I need for stills and the new wide lens is amazing.

Video is different. Cellphones still suck at producing video with a wide dynamic range and color depth. I make films and we shoot on Blackmagic cameras. We get raw partial debayered output with 4:4:4 12 bit color and 14.5 stops of dynamic range. Your cellphone won’t come close to this, which is fine because you’re not grading your video much. We put the footage in davinci resolve and push the hell out of it, and if you don’t have that data depth it’ll fall apart fast.

But cellphones will get there with video too and then we’ll be left in the same situation, where the only differentiator will be things that you simply can’t achieve with a small platform - like fast zoom lenses or intentionally large sensors.

Ultimately, the keys to a technically good photograph is to be close and to collect a lot of light. For the documentary photographs most people want to take, there is no camera that wouldn't meet their needs. They are close (literally arm's length) and there is usually plenty of light. Any camera will be good under these conditions.

The challenge comes when you want to photograph something unusual. The biggest disappointment I've had in recent memory was sitting on a ferry at night, surrounded by what seemed like the blindingly bright and infinitely large city skyline. Basking in the glow, I knew I wanted to take a picture, so I busted out my iPhone. All I got was a blurry sphere or two surrounded by pitch blackness. I wasn't close and I didn't have a lot of light, so the choice in camera didn't work. (I know my a7 would have handled this admirably at ISO 1600. I kind of forgot there were stars in the sky until I started using that thing at night -- I can't see them, but the camera can.)

Digital processing can help here -- AI denoising, using frames of video stacked on top of each other and carefully shifted by using accelerometer data to simulate a longer exposure, motors that move the sensor around, etc. But often you can look at one of these pictures and tell that it's synthetic -- not capturing the moment you saw as you saw it, but looking like what you saw shaped by 1000s of other similar moments composited together by an AI.

I have yet to find the perfect camera. Big sensors collect a lot of light, but require big bodies and big lenses. Small sensors are always with you, but fail when you're about to take the most interesting picture. There is probably not a workaround for this, so I think you'll find a lot of people with big cameras for years to come.

In digital photography there are two steps:

STEP 1: capture the light and save it in 0s and 1s

STEP 2: process the original 0s and 1s into a new set of 0s and 1s that is much more pleasant to the eye

-> DSLRs do STEP 1 extremely well and STEP 2 poorly. But, almost all professional photographers would not even let their DSLR do STEP 2 because they prefer anyway to do it themselves MANUALLY (e.g. in Lightroom, Photoshop etc). Therefore they never use the STEP 2 functionality of their DSLR. And I think they wouldn't use the STEP 2 functionality even if their DSLR was good at it. That's because they want FULL control of the final outcome. Probably this is why DSLR companies haven't invested a lot in upgrading the STEP 2 functionality (so far).

-> Smartphones do STEP 1 poorly but they do STEP 2 extremely well using algorithms. So they cater for different needs: When you want to sacrifice STEP 1 for convenience, when you just want a decent photo fast, when you're not that opinionated about the final outcome and would rather let smartphone decide it etc etc. Also, because they can't do STEP 1 very well, they are limited to a specific photography style, the "everyday well-lit snapshot" style. They can't do sports photography, they can't do wildlife photography, they can't do macro etc.

So, smartphones are convenient, and do a few things very well, but they can't do miracles.

DSLRs are not convenient, but if you add some extra work, they can do miracles!

(My prediction is that DSLR companies will start upgrading their STEP 2 algorithms a lot in the future and try to convince more people to use their cameras as "point-and-shoot". But they will fail. People will continue using their mobile phones, because they are light and much more convenient)

To me, phone cameras work great for most cases in good light. For flowers and landscapes I never bother with DSLR now.

Poor light though and real DSLR with large aperture glass and a big sensor works a LOT better. And for some cases like moving wildlife at long range phones aren't competitive. Getting a DSLR is probably driven by whether those cases are important or not.

My Nikon DSLR (and lens) rarely leave the bag in the last few years, my compromise was to get a middle-of-the-pack fixed lens camera, a Fujifim X20, that is compact enough that I can just drop in my backpack and always have around in case i think the cell phone camera doesn't cut it but that stills allows for some "manual" tinkering if wanted.

For those who have made the decision to use their camera phone over a larger DSLR, I urge you to consider a compact mirrorless camera such as Fujifilm X100F (or the newer X100V).

It's small enough to fit inside a spacious pocket, and inconspicuous enough to take subtle photos - plus the thing looks gorgeous. And of course, the beautiful built in film simulations.

Most of the time I post photos I took on an SLR I get comments about how amazing the photos are.

Cell phone photos no longer suck horribly, sure.

I find that the phone creates a version of the picture that it thinks is best, probably to look good on social media. Where as a DSLR has the functionality to make manual adjustments to create a photo to your own specs. Sometimes having a photos with high/low exposure, or grainy effects created authentically via DSLR are preferred.

Most phones have option to click RAW photos

Phones are designed with the implicit assumption that they offer you more storage than you'll ever need. If you start shooting RAW, this assumption crumbles very quickly.

Galaxy S20 comes with 1TB expandable storage. With 20MB RAW images you can store 50000 images. Also you can always pay for cloud storage, you can get 2TB for $10 a month.

I've been torn for similar reasons over the last few years: Should I take my camera when the phone in my pocket is good enough?

Photos I take from my Pixel are 90% there - the automatic processing is excellent. But sometimes the white balance is off or sometimes it exposes for the wrong thing. I can correct these things in lightroom but the adjustability is limited compared to files from a dedicated camera. And then there's other issues with phone cameras like a limited buffer and rapid battery drain.

Ultimately similar to the OP I've decided to not get rid of my dedicated camera. Instead, I'm consciously keeping it out and nearby so I get to it quickly when I need to.

FWIW, I'm on the m43 mirrorless system - awesome balance of portability and quality. Unfortunately companies behind these systems were struggling before phones got so much better. The current economic environment isn't helping.

I used to carry my DSLR almost all the time. Now I don't + even if I do, very often I end up taking a picture with my phone (in even light, and when I don't need any zoom, the result is similar (or better), and I can post it right away).

When there is bad light, or high contrast, even a 10-old DSLR is better... but requires time for post-processing. However, I think it is going to change soon with deep learning, for tweaking everything - from local contrast, through removing chromatic aberration, to fixing blurred pictures with super-resolution. To, well, adjusting ISO a lot: https://github.com/cchen156/Learning-to-See-in-the-Dark

There’s still a profound difference between phone pics and camera pics. Optics quality is just as important as brute resolution. High-end Android phones and iPhones have been getting better optics, but still there’s only so much you can do with glass the size of an M&M and most recent advances and prospective future advances are coming from AI. AI can correct color and lighting, but I seriously doubt we’re going to be filling in poor detail using onboard GANs anytime soon. Who knows, maybe those are famous last words, but I don’t think so. Optical quality is limited by the laws of physics. So unless we discover something fundamentally new, high-end cameras are going to stay the size they have been for the past hundred years.

DSLRs are usually superior cameras.

One weak point seems to be long lenses. The Nikon P1000 is designed with a small sensor and an appropriate lens with integrated image stabilization. It can take usable photos with a 3000mm equivalent magnificaiton. The moon will fill the frame edge to edge, maybe a little extra.

(the P1000 is not a DSLR it's an all-in-one)

There's an additional edge to tight sensor-lens integration that camera phones have, they can even use multiple sensor to get extra information to apply extraordinary effects automatically. That's kind of hard for a DSLR to do.

As to "Scalzi's AI can only do so much"...

https://youtu.be/bcZFQ3f26pA

I think AI still has a LOT of untapped potential.

I think one thing Apple got right about smartphone photography is that they are selling the general public the ability to take superior photos without most of the inconveniences that tend to come with superior cameras.

And that equation more than adequately satisfies the photographic requirements of most people.

What I can't figure out is how, in this day and age, to get a digital camera that does both macro and telephoto without requiring interchangeable lenses.

15 years ago, you'd get a Canon Powershot S1 or some other "bridge" camera, but as far as I can tell the industry stopped making those. My S5 just recently broke, and for my purposes (bugs, plants, and birds) I really need something that has excellent macro without having to carry around a whole bunch of kit, but can also zoom in on stuff in the distance. Last I checked (5 years ago) there was nothing on the market, so I just bought an unopened S5 off of eBay. -.-

Maybe things have improved since?

Camera sales have fallen off a cliff in the last ten years as people increasingly rely exclusively on their smartphones. This has lead to camera companies simplifying their product lines (or simply going out of business).

That being said: Interchangeable lens are great. Join us on the dark side :-)

Ouch, yeah, so the situation may actually be getting worse.

The best camera is the one you have... and I'm not going to have any if I have to carry around extra lenses. Most of my photos are spur of the moment so I rely on being able to carry around my camera all the time. Realistically, I'm only going to carry around an integrated lens camera, no bigger than a Powershot S5 (which is already pretty big!)

Just because you can change the lenses on your camera, doesn't mean you have to. There are zoom lenses with pretty extreme ranges that are even pretty compact like the Olympus 14-150mm and slightly pricier 12-200mm for Micro Four-Thirds. Now, I have a soft spot in my heart for MFT, realistically, it's a system that probably doesn't have too much of a future unfortunately (though not currently defunct at the time of this writing).

If you're more concerned about the future of the system than compactness, there are full frame superzoom lenses like the 18-400mm from Tamron (for Canon EF or Nikon mounts). One of the big benefits of interchangeable lens systems is not necessarily the ability to collect a bunch of glass and swap it out constantly (that's more of risk actually), but rather to figure out the glass that suits the shooting you do and use that. When I was getting started, I bought a bunch of different primes, and it took me a while to settle down, but since I got the Canon L-series standard zoom (1993 vintage), it's just the lens that's on my camera that I use all the time.

One of the most popular cameras on youtube is the g7x line from canon. Which is a ~$500 pocket camera with fixed 1.8 lens.

Judging by youtube alone, this camera has made the careers of countless beauty youtubers and probably made the equivalent of millions of dollars for them.

Its probably the overall best camera for filming yourself indoors. The 1.8 aperture, canon colors, and flip out screen, small size, can't really be beat by anything else. Why? because it makes faces look beautiful!!!

Getting the skin tones correct in low indoor lighting, is something that cell phones couldn't do over the last decade, and can't really do that well even now.

I am a pro photographer and love the G7X. Its my goto travel camera although there are some limitations, it produces excellent images. If you want a compact travel camera, this is a great choice. And no, I dont use it for video, which is why most of the users like it, I like it for the speed, optics and the technical controls.

It's always a fun day when the HN camera thread comes around!

Here are some examples of what you need to be able to do with a phone before it makes sense to talk about interchangeable-lens cameras not needing to exist any more.

https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DSC_9393.jpg

https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DSC0375.jpg

So you're basically agreeing with the article.

But disagreeing with a lot of the comment thread here. "Phones can do everything" is a pretty common claim when the HN photography thread comes around, and I never tire of pointing out with examples that there are whole categories of things that phones just physically can't do.

Something tells me he wouldn't be having such a dilemma when he needs to spend $1000 or more in two years for a new flagship cell phone. Nevermind how much less a new camera costs and how much longer it will be useful for.

Compared to the cost of bodies and glass, I'd say it's not so bad.

Glass is usually a one-time investment that rarely depreciates (though I wonder if my Nikon DSLR primes still fetch the same value these days).

And while my 12-year-old full-frame Nikon D700 might only fetch a token sum now, it'll still take photos that are on a different level from any camera phone out there.

Thousand-dollar phones are a sunk cost, and it's common to only recover between half to two-thirds of the cost after one release cycle.

Glass isn't the investment it used to be. Glass designed in the era of 35mm and early DSLRs doesn't hold a candle to the glass designed for modern high resolution sensors.

My smartphone depreciates faster in value, but I use it several hours a day, every day. The price-per-use is much lower than for any camera I've ever owned. It's easier to justify the expense.

Moreover, $1000 will get you a flagship phone, but at best a mid-level camera and lens. You'll get a vastly better camera, no doubts, but you'll only get a camera.

As the article points out, a cell phone camera will take good to great pictures in a lot of conditions: landscapes, snapshots of people, not too dark conditions, and most anywhere you don't need a specialized lens.

If you get outside that range of conditions, things fall off fast. The dandelion picture at the top of the article is probably getting close to the limits of what you can ask a cell phone camera to do, but the author is a pro, and knows where the limits are and makes good use of the equipment.

For an example of how bad things get when you get past the limits, here are two photos of the same moth (or muppet, we're not sure):

Taken with an iPhone X, which was released 2.5 years ago:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CA1UNSahipd/ (swipe to the second picture; that's me mugging in the first one)

Taken with a Sony a7ii with a Pentax SMC Macro Takumar f/4 50mm. By digital standards the body is ancient (released almost 6 years ago), but it's full frame and the price fit my budget. The lens is, well, very old:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CA2iXoej3Vx/

The light is not challenging; this is purely illustrative of what the glass and/or sensor can or can't do.

In fairness to the argument that the best camera is the one you have with you, my partner pulled out her phone and got the picture. I had to run back into the house for the camera. If the moth had flown away, she'd have had a picture, and I wouldn't have.

We bought the camera principally to shoot finished furniture on a tripod under continuous light. It's mostly long exposures at low sensitivity (for reduced sensor noise) in that use. We use the aperture to control depth of field in that use. This is another case where a phone just doesn't give as much control as we want. We aren't brilliant photographers (yet), but with some time spent, we've been getting good enough photos that I'm not looking to hire this part of my business out yet.

For me, photography is something I do for fun, not really for the results. Not much is more fun than using a precision-made manual focus lens, and no cell phone will ever offer me that experience.

I've been struggling with this.

I've long been into photography and have a crap ton of gear that I've mostly been bored of. Canon 5D3, 5-6 lenses, 5-6 flashes, umbrellas and studio gear, you name it.

The two cameras I get the most enjoyment out of right now though: - iPhone 8 Plus - DJI Mavic Mini

The introduction of multiple lenses on the smartphones was the thing that started changing everything for me.

I have never really been a "must have every focal length covered" guy with my SLRs/DSLRs. I very often felt more creative and got better results with prime lenses. Having only one focal length feels restrictive, but 2-3 is plenty. With these new phones having 2-3 it's suddenly enough to feel like I'm not creatively restricted. I am fairly excited to get an iPhone 12 Pro or Pixel whatever the next time around that hopefully has super-wide/wide-normal/telephoto options.

The Drone has 1 focal length, but it's an insane tripod that lets you get all kinds of compositions & angles & shots you can't get any other way, so very very exciting.

Having the phone with you all the time breeds creativity. Not having to carry a bunch of heavy stuff breeds creativity. Not dealing with terabytes of RAW photos & programs like Lightroom and hours of "processing" at your desk breed creativity.

Most of what has been sold with high end photo gear has ended up revolving around pixel peeping and being sure you can get a sharp photo of the maximum # of possible shots, even if a lot of those shots aren't really creative. Unless you're really really focused on shooting wildlife or something a lot of those very expensive tools are mostly going to sit and not produce that many killer photos you want to look at all the time. It's also been very aspirational... people get satisfaction out of saving up and buying more stuff and consumerism. But once you have the stuff for years that starts to not be as fun.

I am fairly certain at this point there's no way I'm going to go drop $3k+ on another DSLR body. (My 5D3 is the 3rd I've bought). It's more a question of do I end up starting to sell off some of that gear. There's just more fun trying to do creative stuff with less at this point.

With the depth camera on my iphone 11, the phone is able to dynamically add or adjust bokeh after the fact when a photo is taken in portrait mode, and get a reasonable approximation of it as well without the need to transfer to a PC for manipulation.

It's very easy to quickly see right there on site how the photo will turn out and take a few more if you're unhappy, as opposed to a DSLR where I would lug around an ipad as well just to throw the SD card in it to view at a reasonable size, and still not be sure if I can fix the photo in post.

For life, a phone is now the right camera. For professional endeavors, it might still be worth the compromise to buy the gear.

This parallels the debate between vinyl enthusiasts and digital music consumers. Vinyl enthusiasts swear it's better, but most people don't want to spend hundreds of dollars and hours of time researching and tweaking settings.

Coming from someone who would've been a musician pre-digital era, I think 95% as good is good enough for most folks, they don't need the real thing or the luxury good by a expert artist if it'll cost them 10X the money for an incremental improvement.

I only use DSLR/EVIL cameras for portrait photography, for the depth of field. They have no utility for me for outings, tourism, or landscapes, hiking, etc. My phone has more utility.

For reference, I would consider myself an enthusiast and professional photographer. I used a darkroom, and have published books and felt quality was important.

When AI depth of field works for distances of 6-20 feet I will ditch the physically superior camera for my phone in that use case too.

Besides picture quality, there's definitely something to be said for using a device that's exclusively for photo/video. You've got better UX (hopefully), amazing lens options, no notifications or distractions, and a different state of mind (at least for me). It's also immediately obvious to everyone in the vicinity that you're taking pictures and not just messing with your phone.

I bought a Fuji x100s back in 2013. I rarely use it any more as cell phone cameras have gotten so good. However, when one of the x100s photos comes on the slideshow on our living room TV, I'm blown away at how good it looks.

Having had children during that time, I'm undecided whether it's better that my oldest has a handful of superb baby photos or that my youngest has a ton of decent baby photos.

Big sensor cameras are needed for 1). Low light work 2) printing 3). Dynamic range

Stacking photos introduces artifacts- the subject moves in between sho5s

One thing I don't see mentioned frequently is that old-style DSLRs are TOUGH. This means that the cost per year of ownership is not as high as it seems at first glance. So if DSLRs have any advantages for you at all (for me, I like to have a lens with a good zoom) then it's worth considering getting one, even if you continue to mostly use your phone camera.

I think cellphone cameras can be good when couple conditions are met:

- mid range focus length

- normal, good lighting conditions (for example, no huge dynamic range where you have to be able to choose part of dynamic range you are working with)

- fast exposures in good lighting

- static targets or slowly moving humans

- conditions where you can't or won't take large camera

I use my full frame for things that can't be reliably or at all captured with smartphone:

- dramatic, wide shots, or super sharp telephoto. It is not possible to replicate extreme wide shots or super sharp telephoto (mine is 70-200 f2.8 VR),

- isolate specific targets with shallow focus depth (cellphones are only good at isolating human faces because that's what algorithms are trained)

- smartphones are useless in dark conditions -- and not just because bad image quality but also because they can't focus and because you have to stare at the screen which blinds you

- I can work with extreme dynamic range (think dark church with one ray of sunlight lighting couple people). Smartphones can try to guess what you are doing but what if their guess isn't what you want?

- framing lots of photos in short succession -- I use full manual mode and can reliably frame lots of interesting photos in short succession (think a wedding) which the smartphone isn't really built for. With DSLR I can spot interesting target, fix focus point, frame and shoot every second or two.

- I can track moving targets and not just humans

- I can shoot wide open in good light to get shallow depth of field, using ND filters

- I can use polarizing filters to get dramatic sky or crystal clear water

- I can trigger additional fill lights to get nice pictures in adverse conditions like shooting into sun

I will say one more thing. People are drowning in smartphone-made photos. By choosing full frame camera I can make photos that instantly pop up and are interesting to the viewer exactly because they have some uncommon aspect (like extremely wide shot). I don't think DSLRs are anywhere close to death. There are some aspects of photos that are not possible to replicate due to physics and geometry that will always be tempting for photographers to use to make their photos interesting.

Ergonomics still matter. My DSLR is so much more fun to shoot with than phone. That said the Osmo Mobile 3 is pretty damn cool.

It's all about lenses, specifically the ability to vary them to achieve a wide variety of looks.

If you see those great professional movies that are "shot on iPhone" or "shot on iPad", if you could see their shoot, many of them have a selection of after-market lenses they are mounting on the phone or tablet for different shots.

If Apple had some sort of body to mount an iPhone as the sensor and attach DSLR lenses it would probably kill the DSLR industry or at least greatly damage it.

The biggest reason to use a DSLR are the lenses. The second is better low light performance and RAW capabilities (for video and photography) but I think a Pixel or iPhone can do that already.

For sure, the difference even on a DSLR between a kit lens and a nice L-series is night and day. Would the sensor on a phone be able to take advantage of the lens though?

Honestly I don't know, I imagine Apple should be able to solve that.

A couple of years ago before DSLRs could be able to record video I used a RedRock adapter [1] that allowed to use photography lenses with digital video cameras. It was super clunky but it worked.

https://www.provideocoalition.com/redrock_micro_alters_indie...

Not without some optics to shrink the image circle down.

Even if you did that, a full-frame DSLR's image sensor is 35x larger than the iPhone's. I'm not sure why you'd want to use such a tiny sensor unless it's the only camera you have on you.

Tangentially related, but not really a comparison of cellphone cameras, but: I find the incompatibility of lenses between the different manufacturers really annoying. I have to choose between say nikon/canon/sony and then if I buy lenses, which I have to, I am stuck with that manufacturer, unless I replace everything.

My iPhone takes great portrait mode photos of my kids to send to their grandparents and the occasional sunset, but that’s it. My mirrorless and my film cameras in particular create photos of such quality and character (especially film) that, for me, a dedicated camera is a no brainer. But they both have a place, and that’s okay!

When our kids arrived our SLRs and nice lenses quickly got relegated in favour of our iPhones. But we’re getting then back out once more bit by bit.

I’m extremely happy with the cameras on my 11 Pro but it is nowhere near a 100mm f/2.8 macro on a 5D mk3 for image quality.

Fortunately I can control love both and hope to restore the balance.

I like all kinds of cameras. One major nit-pick I have of cell phone cameras is that I have to interact with a touch screen to take a picture.

A separate dedicated "function" button that could be optionally set to take pictures without unlocking the phone itself or fiddling with a touch screen would be amazing.

I hit the power button twice to activate the camera then hit the volume button to take the photo. That's the Pixel behavior anyways.

Wanted: A phone and SMS device that easily syncs photos, messages and contacts and has an excellent camera (iPhone or Pixel hobbyist level). No apps, spyware, built-in Google ties. Just shoot photos and be in touch when needed.

Kickstarter, anyone?

I tried the Light Phone II. It is okay, but missing a camera was too much of a hurdle.

What about an iPhone with no apps on it? (not trying to be snarky, but it seems like it does the things you want).

For that price one can buy maybe five Android phones (with comparable or better hardware). Then install Lineage. Or maybe more than five.

1. intended output and quality of the photo 2. the joy the physical act of using a camera provides 3. you want to take photos while disconnected

these are basically the only three reasons to buy a camera beyond the smartphone. Like most things in life unless its a job, the trade offs are personal.

The amazing thing to me is phone cameras are still getting better. They've reached a stage where I've given up using an SLR. In the future there will be very little need for a dedicated camera - yes weddings maybe excepted.

Any mirrorless cameras shoot "live photos"? I'd like nicer image quality and would like to drop to a non-smartphone, but won't give those up. It's the single feature keeping me paying for smartphones. :-/

> Any mirrorless cameras shoot "live photos"?

If you mean what Nikon calls 'live view', yes, either through the electronic viewfinder or on the screen on the back. Often with superimposed aides such as exposure histogram or focus highlighting ('peaking'). You can set it so that touching the back screen takes the picture as well as pressing the normal shutter-release button.

I'm sure Canon and the others are the same now, I just don't have direct experience of them.

No, I mean the thing where it captures a short video (usually lower-res, I think, at least on the phone I have) at the same time as taking a full-res photo. The result is like something out of Harry Potter—you're looking at a photo, you hold your finger on it (at least on a touchscreen interface) and now you're seeing video giving a couple seconds of context, with sound, on either side of the photo. It's downright magical. I've got no use for a camera without that feature as long as my kids live at home, at least (a while yet).

"Live Photo" is what Apple calls it. I don't know if anything like that's available on other phone platforms, let alone stand-alone cameras, but last time I checked I couldn't find any.

[EDIT] a clip of the announcement of the feature, with examples (it's far from new): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTEj8Gfe144

Ah - I see what you mean. In that case, for Nikons at least, the answer is 'no'

What non-photographers don’t know is that iPhone pictures only look good on iPhones. That amazing shot you texted me? Yep it looks great. But if you ever print it, or look at it on a computer monitor, it will look like a sad joke.

For a long time I thought cell phone cameras were so good there was no point in buying a dedicated camera. Then I won a hackathon at work and the prize was a Sony mirrorless camera. It's a totally different experience

Off topic - anyone recognize the artists on stage in the last photograph? I'm pretty sure that's Jonathan Coulton in the middle, so I suspect it's from JoCoCruise, but I don't recognize the others.

I think so!

What I find interesting there's very little open source until DSLR cameras. I know the sensors will always be proprietary. I've always felt limited more so by the firmware.

There's a few projects like Magic Lantern.

For me if the camera is a networked computer then I will refuse having my picture taken by it (of course this is futile but I will break most etiquette and accept being labelled rude and unfair to follow my beliefs here).

Of course I try to be symmetric, I never take pictures of anything with my own networked computer.

It is absolutely incredible how entitled people are when it comes to taking group pictures.

If you want to draw me then I will sit still for however long you want. If you have a polaroid or something like that then go nuts, etc.

It's not really about privacy because it's not really a useful way to preserve my privacy, however, it is kind of about privacy since making this distinction (that no one seems to be aware of / willing to make) sometimes reaches people and gets them thinking.

It's amazing how this impacts even schools - I refused to sign off for my kid's class post pictures on Instagram (owned by FB), so they just ask her to stay out of the group pictures.

I mean, they have a locally hosted hub for photos - called memberhub (it's primitive, but functional), but the teacher & school insist that I need to authorize them to post to Instagram if she's in the group pics.

My kids are understanding but feel left out. It sucks. I'm not so paranoid about digital photos, but I draw the line at them getting fed into a facial recognition AI.

> but the teacher & school insist that I need to authorize them to post to Instagram if she's in the group pics.

It's ridiculous that students are now forced to be part of a school's marketing, or get excluded from class activities.

It's not so much that I object to the marketing (if there is any). It's that they refuse to use any alternative to Instagram which sends my kids pics to be harvested by FB. There's a reason I have quit FB and never gotten on Insta.

I mean, they do also take pictures for the yearbook which I'm ok with.

Off topic but if you didn't recognize the name Scalzi, he's the author of an incredible mil sci fi series called Old Man's War. If you're fond of that genre, you may really enjoy it.

Am I the only one who finds it really hard to correctly angle a photo-taking device without an optical viewfinder to look through?

Nope, same here. You can turn on a rule-of-thirds grid in camera settings, and I find it helps - not so much for composition, the rule's fine but overrated, but just in providing a set of rulers to align against.

Phone cameras have become so good that the market for DSLRs and high-end consumer cameras has cratered. Canon's market cap is now back down to what it was in '98-99.

Canon Inc's market cap history (in millions of $USD):

1994: $14,700

1995: $15,300

1996: $18,600

1997: $26,200

1998: $21,300

1999: $35,500

2000: $43,600

2001: $36,100

2002: $34,800

2003: $46,500

2004: $47,200

2005: $52,900

2006: $75,600

2007: $79,800

2008: $65,600

2009: $51,500

2010: $62,000

2011: $63,700

2012: $57,800

2013: $46,300

2014: $37,800

2015: $41,000

2016: $32,700

2017: $41,900

2018: $43,400

2019: $31,800

2020: $29,800

“... if I don’t think I’m going to get a lot of use from something... then I can’t justify the price in my head.”

Which is exactly why I didn’t hesitate to spend $1200 on an iPhone 8 Plus a couple years ago but am looking to sell my awesome Nikon D7500: I almost never use my Nikon but I use the iPhone all day, every day (including for photos of significant life events).

That tiny quality difference hardly matters versus the "I always have my phone on me" factor.

> But if you’re an avid photographer (or a professional photographer), you spend so much more of your time than the average person in the 5%-to-10% area where cell phones fall down, that you become painfully aware of how far they have yet to go, regardless of how far they have come. This isn’t about snobbery (or more accurately, shouldn’t be) — it’s about use cases. For how I use cameras, my Pixel phone, as wonderful as the photography out of it is on a regular basis, still can’t give me everything I want and need, and it’s frustrating for me that it can’t.

The article goes into use cases and technical differences, not just a "one is better than the other".

As a hobbyist photographer and professional phone owner, I have thoughts I'm not afraid to foist upon you unwilling audience:

1) Yes, phones are great for 100% of the average person, who just wants some snapshots to remember/post on Instagram/etc. Not only that, but most phones apply filters to the photo that makes it look more appealing (like in the article), which is what most people want. Photographers want fidelity, so they can apply their own edits in post, so a deciding factor is maximizing post-processing freedom.

Cameras are more for professional/artistic use these days.

2) Phones are never ever going to replace professional cameras. Hell, not even non-professional cameras are ever going to replace professional cameras. I have a Canon 5D as my main camera and a Sony RX-100 mkIII as a travel camera, and while the latter is fantastic, has great quality in a very small form factor, I end up frustrated 30% of the times I use it. The 5D is a professional camera, and much of what you pay for is for the ergonomics.

It's very cumbersome to have to go three menus down to change a setting in the smaller camera when I could have done it without taking my eye away from the viewfinder on the 5D, and it leads to missed shots. I haven't seen this point mentioned anywhere, and it's a big differentiator.

I could include here the fact that the camera is much more predictable: If you hear the "beep" that tells you it's focused, pressing the button gets me a photo in < 100ms. Phones have a will of their own, and it's pretty random when you'll actually have your photo. Cameras focus in a few milliseconds exactly on the subject, phones focus somewhere in the vicinity of where you asked, at some point soonish. This leads to a much better, more solid-feeling experience when using a camera.

3) Phones are great for taking wide-angle photos in ample light, but not great for everything else. They can clean low-light photos decently these days, but a large sensor is much more versatile in what you can do with it. The same goes for the lenses, 24mm is good for a lot of things, but sometimes you just need a different focal length.

4) Larger sensors have a lot more detail in the resulting photo. A camera lets you go from the before to the after here, and this isn't even a terrible shot: https://imgz.org/ius5Vhb9/

A phone wouldn't be able to retrieve much detail in that scene, and the result would look much worse. A camera can help you salvage many photos that would have been write-offs with a phone, e.g. when they're too dark/bright, or when you have tones too close to each other.

TL;DR: Phones are great, but cameras are great too.

You can turn off focus priority on shutter release if you want, fyi. Then the shutter releases exactly when you tell it to, every single time.

I did that when I found I was missing jump shots because the AF system got confused and waited to refocus, giving me a tack-sharp shot of a place where a bird had just been. Now, when I miss a jump shot, at least it's my fault.

Hmm, can I do that in Google Camera? I can't find the option.

Sorry, no, I meant on ILCs, to eliminate the focus delay before release. I don't know of any phone camera that lets you. Maybe with an app.

Oh, yes, though there it's so fast that it usually doesn't bother me. If I've focused beforehand on a static scene I just turn AF off from the switch on the lens.

Back-button AF is super convenient for this, too. No need to worry about turning AF on and off, you just hold the button when you want it and let go when you don't. With enough configurable buttons, you can even have multiple AF modes instantly to hand - I do this on my D500, for example, so I can coach in on a sitting bird with group AF on Fn1, and then get tack-sharp eye focus with single-point mode on AF-ON, and not ever have to think about dinking around with control dials or menus while I'm shooting.

Now that I think about it, that obviates my shutter focus priority setting anyway, since half-pressing the shutter only locks exposure. Oh, well...

Hmm, that's a good idea, though my focus is on oneshot, so half-pressing the shutter locks focus anyway. I don't really shoot moving things, so oneshot works well for me.

Also fair!

I've got that mkIII too, and I'd agree that the ergonomics just aren't great. It does make me wonder how much of a difference the touch-screen on the mkVI makes.

Cameras are like fast food they're quick and cheap but not as good as "home cooked".

I think the early 2000s are going to be the fuzzy ages of pictorial history.

Early digital cameras I meant. Not all cameras. I actually started down the road as a photographer but my local college cancelled the class due to lack of interest.

I have a Yashica Mat 124G, a Mamyia 645J, a 35mm, and several old accordion types for show.

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