This article is awful. It's about smartphone cameras not being able to capture, but the three photos included are all ones that at least somewhat worked. Seems like it would be better to include one that failed?
The author is like "look, this gas station one is the only one that worked".. well yeah, the camera's white balance algorithm saw that the scene was about 80% daylight, so it set the white point at around 3500k, the rest of the scene is recorded accurately as a result.
The thesis of the article "I don't understand white balance, so smartphone cameras are bad"
Also, with smartphone sensor/lens quality improvements as well as computational photography enhancements, smartphones are for _all_ picture takers. Point and shoot cameras are no longer relevant.
A better version of your reply is: Expecting accurate results in photographs is not for people who are ignorant of general photographic principles and technology.
The reason this article is so frustrating to me is that instead of the author highlighting what has been true since the dawn of photography - that cameras never truly capture the scene as we view it - they chose to baselessly attack a specific set of devices which happen to have cameras attached to them.
If this were to happen 10 years ago to someone using a Nikon Coolpix 1234Whatever, they would be equally disappointed, and someone using an Olympus Stylus somethingorotherD may have been very pleased. The color representation in images has always been the property of the medium's manufacturer, from Kodak to Polaroid and so on.
It would have been nice to see the author share information instead of just ignorant disappointment
I realise that why I see is just one "interpretation" of the reality, but it seems sensible that one possible ideal for cameras would be to perfectly match my perception of the world. Is it just impossible because the difference in perception is just so big between individuals that what would be perfect for me would be way off for someone else?
You can also create (at least theoretically, no idea how they compare currently) cameras that are better than human eyes at things like resolution, contrasts and so on, and that seems like another possible ideal; but which one is more relevant seems very context dependant.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's a bad ideal, though. Smartphone cameras do a very good job at automatically performing all the right corrections in most circumstances. It's just nontrivial, and thus unsurprising that the normal algorithms fail in weird edge cases like "the entire sky is deep red".
Broadly, the camera is doing the right thing here. Nobody developed these auto white balance algorithms to factor in the sky turning orange. The camera/imaging pipeline is seeing this crazy orange cast, assuming it’s deep incandescent light, and then trying to compensate, which is generally what you want it to do.
Edit: Not to mention that the auto WB algorithm out dates smartphones by more than a decade.
If, in winter sport season, you sent your photos from the Sahara to be developed, chances were you got what looked like snow landscapes back. Conversely, sending winter sport photos in july/august might give you ‘beach with skiers’ photos back (I think that was because of operator error, not automation)
(Which is for the best. I was an extremely homely child. It's for the good of all we shot with slow, blurry film.)