iPhone 12 Pro Max Camera Review: Zion NP | Hacker News Reader

iPhone 12 Pro Max Camera Review: Zion NP

austinmann.com

My iPhone wish: A button to turn off all of the image processing.

Mobile phones, and especially iPhones, have become useless for taking pictures of skin. The phones try to smooth out blemishes, and overprocess skin.

That's great if it's pictures at a tween birthday party, but a lot of doctors and other medical practices are receiving pictures of lesions, bruises, and other skin issues via smartphone these days. It completely ruins diagnostics. I've done my own testing on a recently injured person, and the results are terrible. What was visibly a massive bruise got all the spots and veins magically AI-ed out, and the colors mangled so that some regions of the bruise disappeared entirely. (iPhone 12 Pro)

The healthcare company I work for recommends that patients use a laptop camera instead of a phone, if they can. The problem is that so many people don't have computers, and if they do, they don't know how to take a picture of their skin with the webcam.

You are in luck! Apple has been providing RAW image capture APIs for several years which means you can get a pure image with no processing with many 3rd party apps.

Either recommend patients to use a RAW camera app, or perhaps create a basic app for the healthcare company.

If the image isn’t raw, it is processed in some way, and I can absolutely see how that can mess with diagnostics.

You are in luck! Apple has been providing RAW image capture APIs for several years

I don't see how that means I'm in luck. Me being in luck would be, "Apple has such a feature, but it's just hidden behind another invisible iOS button."

recommend patients to use a RAW camera app

You dramatically overestimate the technical ability of the average person. We have to write our healthcare web sites for people with an eighth-grade reading level.

perhaps create a basic app for the healthcare company.

If we had the money for that, we'd probably hire back some of the doctors and nurses we've laid off over the last six months. Like most healthcare companies, we jettisoned medical professionals in order to stay afloat.

I don't think it's best but the healthcare company should recommend no-AI camera app rather than laptop camera (or build your own).

> I don't see how that means I'm in luck. Me being in luck would be, "Apple has such a feature, but it's just hidden behind another invisible iOS button.

There are apps available that will do this. Like everything else in life, it comes with sensible defaults, and anything extra will require effort, money or personal research.

Well when covid is over in a year or two, you can make the app. TBH it would probably be easier for a segment than trying to figure out how to send you a picture.

I don't know, Austin Mann took some amazing photos in his previous camera reviews, but this time I'm not so impressed. The saturation in the fall tree and water shots is just somehow weirdly off the charts and the night photos look almost like impressionist paintings (nonetheless a great achievement with such a small sensor).

His photos from Rwanda with the iPhone 7 just looked so much more natural and "real" [1].

[1] http://austinmann.com/trek/iphone-7-camera-review-rwanda

That is honestly a post-processing choice and not entirely a reflection of the camera.

I think apple is compensating because people tend to like saturated colors. Though the iPhones still do poorly in head to head blind reviews. The camera gear is top notch but its the "auto processing" and cool color space choices makes it less likable head to head.

Totally unscientific bracket phone comparison: (round up and 20 minute video). https://www.dpreview.com/news/0599221589/video-blind-smartph...

Yeah a lot of those images had very flat color/saturation. The composition was good but they definitely looked like they were taken on a phone camera. Overall just very "flat", no pop. There are some points where you can see the sky clips the image out and that scenario stresses a lot of cameras' sensors if not properly mitigated.

I would not be happy if these pictures were hanging on my wall.

Beautiful photos, but the decision tree can be shortened immensely to:

    Do you like big phones?
    -> Yes: iPhone 12 Pro Max
    -> No: Do you often run out of battery?  
          -> Yes: iPhone 12 Pro
          -> No: iPhone 12 mini

It's kind of ironic that all the questions about photography don't change what phone you end up with in their decision tree.

I wonder if the SE is eating into iPhone mini sales. I’ve been waiting for iPhone mini since the 5S, but I got an SE earlier in the year and now I don’t need mini for a few years.

I'm THAT customer. I purchased the iPhone 12 mini with high hopes but for the price, I didn't feel like I was getting enough. I only had 2 out of 3 rear cameras (of the pro) and I would have preferred telephoto instead of wide. The battery life wasn't quite there either. The only improvement was 5G but coverage is still spotty anyway. I exchanged my purchase for the SE and I'm pretty happy. I still get the smaller easy to reach screen size and the fingerprint sensor is a welcome from the past. I think TouchID > FaceID. I was an iPhone X owner for a number of years until the screen randomly died.

I definitely consider Touch ID to be far superior to Face ID, especially is a world full of masks.

Pressing one home button is way easier than doing swipe gestures especially when the phone is in one hand. Muscle memory takes over and it's a joy. It's kinda like having a Blackberry side scroll wheel all over again.

Main reason im stuck on iphone 8 is the touch id. I dont even want apple to have my face biometric and that says something from guy whos wife was working for apple and could lookup anyone for any reason.

Also nit pick: you don’t “press” the button. In fact there is no physical button; there is surface that acts upon touch and tiny hammer hits the surfec from underneath, making it feel like its a button. I was in shock to discover that once i turned off my iphone 8 first time and though the button was broken because it didn’t “recoil” or made its typical behavior noise.

Understood, the Taptic Engine (haptic feedback) is a really great feature that Apple also took to their MacBook trackpad (actually, not sure which came first). They've removed one extra point of mechanical failure and gave their laptops and phones a consistent feel with minimal delay (instead of a vibrating motor). A disassembled Taptic Engine is actually a bunch of small coils of different sizes and oil filled inside. Quite the engineering masterpiece.

Just to be clear: Apple does not have your facial biometric data with FaceID. It does not leave your device and is protected by the Secure Enclave there.

There are reasons to prefer TouchID to FaceID, but that isn't actually one of them.

I can explicitly have my phone ready and as I am removing it from my pocket with touchid. Even with the newer faster faceid, I have remove it first and look at it. The explicitness of touchid is preferable to me too.

Touch ID requires me to remove my gloves. Everything has drawbacks.

How about adding both? These are high-end, expensive phones.

That would probably be best.

Yeah the mask thing does make me wish I had Touch ID as a backup.

I still prefer face id to Touch ID.

A compromise for me would be letting my watch unlock the phone by proximity as it can do with my Mac. The watch unlock is good enough that I don’t miss Face ID on Mac.

not that there's any reason you should trust my opinion, but I would doubt it. the mini is much nicer than the SE in pretty much every way. the bezels on the SE belong in 2017. the 12 mini has a much larger screen and a smaller chassis. if I were willing to spend $750 on a phone, there's no way I would cross-shop the two.

Besides Touch ID being more useful than Face ID during a pandemic, I'm also not a fan of the PWM flicker across iPhone 12 models. Depending on how paranoid you are about your eyes, this could be a deal-breaker.

I also wouldn't buy any 1st version of a product. It's getting beta tested with the public, whereas the SE is tried and proven for many years and does the job (for me at least), for $300 less to boot. Although, I'll definitely be interested in a perfected mini in the future.

I had the mini for a week and returned it for an SE2. The screen is slightly smaller on the SE2 but in a good way because your thumbs can reach better. It also lacks the cutout at the top. I have average size hands but my thumb can really roam around everywhere on the SE2/iPhone 8 screen size. I just wish the SE2 had OLED and a bigger battery. That would have made it a tank of a phone. I really have to agree again with Steve Job's old reasoning for small phones. It really changes how you interact with the phone. I'm happy to be able to pull up the control center from the bottom again rather than from the top right corner. Source: I'm an iPhone X convert.

I imagine it must be. I needed to replace my iPhone 8 and bought an SE2 instead of the Mini because they still haven't brought back TouchID. I was really expecting TouchID to come back in the 12 line-up, especially after the iPad refresh brought it back, but I think COVID messed up their plans and it got cut. We'll see what next year brings, all I know is no TouchID and I'm not buying it, and I'm not the only person I know who feels this way.

I recently upgraded from an iPhone 8 to a 12 Pro. TouchID is the biggest thing I miss. It is particularly an issue with Apple Pay, since when I'm using it, I invariably have my mask on.

There are hacks to get FaceID to recognize a mask, but I haven't got them to work.

I do find the years where the big-phone has a notable camera improvement frustrating. Because I like the fancy camera, but am at best ambivalent about the really big phones. So I'm tempted, but really just wish I could know I was getting "the best possible phone-camera" by buying the middle model.

Even though "it's huge so we could fit better optics and sensors in" is a completely reasonable position for a device manufacturer to take...

Reading the review says to me that, given that I have never been able to sell myself on the plus-sized models, the regular Pro model is almost as good for most purposes. So if I buy one of this year's family, that's probably what it will be. Of course, I have plenty of other cameras so this is a supplement in any case.

The non-Max iPhone 12 Pro is still a big phone...

You missed the "Do you take a lot of pictures with your phone?" If the answer is yes, you won't get to the mini.

IMO, all modern cellphone cameras as fine for I want. I am trying to capture reminder of something so I remember and reinforce the memory that thing when looking at the photo.

Low light is great, but resolution or color accuracy just isn’t that big of a selling point. And the Mini can have 256 GB of memory so that’s plenty of photos.

> Low light is great, but resolution or color accuracy just isn’t that big of a selling point.

Optical zoom is a big deal, though. If modern cellphones will take the same direction as the 12 Max, entry-level cameras will have no reason to exist, as they have tiny sensors anyway. I suppose that they have a small/shrinking market share already, but disappearing entirely is another level.

This may sound strange, but I really don’t use zoom. I have had 10x optical zoom, but that’s simply not the kind of photos I take.

I’ve been staring at their chart and your simplification for a few minutes, trying to understand what you mean. As far as I can tell there are plenty of combinations of answers that lead to different results.

I tend to disagree. Apple's newest iPhone 12 Pro Max IS supposed to entice photographers and marketed towards creators. Photogs have always inconvenienced themselves with camera gear just to get the better quality shot. You'll see them take time to setup a photo. A few inches here and there on the phone will probably not matter as much. It's a small price to pay on the daily driver phone to pack a good camera sensor. The iPhone 12 Pro Max is a good deal to pixel peepers.

I don't really understand who this post is targeting. It looks like it's landscape photographers but I as one I feel a little bit confused. Let me explain.

I'm a hobbyist landscape photographer and I've invested almost a decade into both my craft and the tools I use. You start out learning exposure, aperture, shutter speed and then mastering composition. As you do this you try to get outside and find good spots offering great composition and light which is science in and of itself. Then you start splitting hairs over various lenses and camera tricks to get the right depth of field and the sharpest image and learning about all the different camera settings you didn't even know existed to help you on this journey.

I understand that I'm very biased, but I see phone cameras fall short here. Don't get me wrong, you can learn some of these basics on a phone camera, but it will get you a quarter of the way there until you're forced to switch to a proper lens and ultimately a DSLR. I see nothing different in this post. These compositions are great but the quality is lacking pretty severely. You can get a much better quality with a basic kit lens and a cheap body which will cost you half the price of an iPhone.

A good camera goes a long way in the hands of a skilled photographer. I could use the best camera and still my photos would look like it came from a potato.

Good photographers spend a lot of time editing and curating their photos.

Everyone takes potato quality photos from time to time.

Good photographers may have better eyes/skills/technique. They also put the time and effort to be in the right place and the right time. And, as you say, you see a tiny fraction of what they shoot--after it's all been edited.

I'm not remotely in the class of top photographers but my Flickr feed is a very curated version of the pictures I take. (How curated being somewhat a function of why I'm uploading.)

Apple Photos and Google Photos have started to assemble nice slideshows with music. Now they're doing face recognition. I think there's great potential for ML to curate the photos for me. I hope my phone can one day present to me low quality vs high quality images based on exposure, focus, and composure. I can then swipe left or right to keep or delete. There's nothing more exhausting than having to sort through photos after a vacation :-)

The two main tricks I'd recommend to not take potato-quality pictures are lighting and framing/composing. Asking yourself a few questions about the lighting situation (which way is the light coming from? Is my foreground darker than my background? should I take the shot from the other direction, if possible?) will help a good bit to start.

For a quick idea on composing, think about the rule of thirds and the golden ratio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds https://www.apogeephoto.com/how-to-use-the-golden-ratio-to-i...

Just these two concepts will get you started taking much better photos than most unskilled photographers, and at least I find it doesn't take me too much time to give a second or two thought to them. I'd encourage you to turn on a rule of thirds layer on your camera, it'll start to make it really easy to do some quick composition.

I'm nodding in agreement here. For composing I would suggest people also look into cropping the photos before sharing them to get to the golden ratio or rule of thirds. It's usually a really quick and simple edit to make and it makes a huge difference. I would also add a third useful concept: find ways to hold the camera still when taking the photo. This can be by using a delay timer, or use the volume button instead of the on screen button, or just holding the phone differently.

I say this as a photographer who has already purchased an iPhone 12 Pro Max:

If you're taking a tripod and an iPhone tripod camera mount with you... why not just take a camera camera (struck: "real camera") without a space-constrained sensor/lens?

This test suite seems a little... silly to me.

I've owned 35mm full frame sensor cameras, Micro-four thirds, and the RX100vii. The iPhone with a tripod still seems to me like the most convenient way to travel. The only thing which would 1UP the iPhone would be a camera and viewfinder on the Apple Watch.

The weight savings are very, very nice when you're doing long or technical hikes. The full-frame body and two lenses I hike with weigh almost 6lbs. That's not even including the filters and sturdy tripod designed for holding a "real" camera. By comparison, a good phone tripod and mount clock in at about 1.5lbs.

That being said... I enjoy printing my landscape photography. It's worth it to lug out my heavy gear because I can get nice, large prints out of it. But if you're just posting on social media, your body will thank you later for leaving those 6lbs home.

I never appreciated weight until I befriended a technical hiker/climber.

They review all their gear in terms of ounces.

There are lighter large sensor cameras you can take with you, such as a Ricoh GR III (9oz / 250g) or similar. You can even share tripods with it.

I've been considering getting my first Apple phone and this will probably seal the deal. I wish there was an alternative to Apple & Android which provided a cutting edge camera with good performance but sadly that doesn't seem to be the case.

A big issue nowadays is that computational photography is now about as important as the camera itself, so the software and computational hardware including ML accelerators are a big competitive edge that’s really only available to the big hitters.

To purist photographers though, it's a little deceptive to have computers modify the photo. It's hard to turn off all those ML augmentation settings on the iPhone. It brings back the old question of how much Photoshop is too much? Will phone photographers get disqualified from photo contests one day?

Literal photoshopping is an indispensable skill for photographers these days. None of the big photography contests disallow photoshopping in general (there are limits) and winning photos are clearly photoshopped. The phone just does it automatically.

Indeed but I’d argue it’s always been an essential skill. When it comes to film, people were already doing tricks to modify the image. Many photos people think of as right out of the camera are “photoshopped”. This applies to photos even from the 1800’s... I mean, the famous full body shot of Lincoln standing up is completely fake.

sony makes some serious camera phones.

They also have a phone which has an HDMI input. *Yes, Input! It's great as a field display for DLSRs among other things.

There are phones with similar pic quality. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcJs_KrPh8A

Interesting but how up to date is the OS? Can I expect current Android versions to show up over the next few years? Are the vendor customizations good or bad?

I tend to stick with Google phones because I like the stock Android experience. I've heard Sony isn't too bad. I really didn't like what Samsung did to Android but I last experienced it over a decade ago.

OEMs these days usually give 3 yrs of OS updates, though usually not as fast as Google. The phone doesn't become a brick after those 3 yrs though, all apps and tools remain updated independently of the OS, actually Androids receive those software updates for longer than iphones. I've got a few very old phones and tablets that are still as useful as on their 1st day, though well behind the current stuff.

Not to mention the fact that AOSP-based distributions like LineageOS can be used to keep the Android version on older hardware up to date for a long time after the vendor has given up on it, providing OTA updates to keep the device current. The real limiting factor ends up being the relatively low amount of memory in very old devices (512KB-1GB used to be common around 2010-2011, Android can still run on this hardware in a limited fashion but 1.5GB or more is preferred).

Mann refers to an app called "Halide mk 2" [1]. That's an interesting choice of brand name. It matches the language used by some camera processing software [2]. Of course, it's not limited to image processing, just happens to be used there. As best I can tell this is just a funny coincidence.

[1] https://halide.cam/

[2] https://halide-lang.org/

Silver halides were (are?) light-sensitive chemicals used in photographic film and photographic paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_halide

Of course! Yes, I should have realized. Thanks!

It's kind of amusing to a chemist, since in "silver halide" the silver is the interesting part, table salt is a halide as well.

Makes sense though, because if you're a photographer it's the only use of the word "halide" you're ever likely to see, and "silver" is the unevocative part of the name.

Another "review" that's iphone vs nothing else, or new iphone vs old iphone. Reviews are informative only when they provide actual context, ie comparison to the competition, otherwise it's just pretty pictures. Most comparisons rate the iphone as great not exceptional, there are other phones out there, some significantly cheaper, that produce equivalent or even better pics. See Techtablets on Youtube.

It's si incredible that Pixel 2 still has better low light photos than latest iPhone

But it doesn’t...

All the nigh shots at the link look like water colors on canvas

Two issues - the page is not ssl. My router flags a javascript loaded on the page as malware. The js is xxxx.cloudfront.net/tracker.js

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