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Comment by meowzero | Hacker News Reader

I've been around photography for a while. This is sad news but not surprising. Mobile phones have gotten good enough that you don't need a DSLR anymore to take "nice pictures." All the computational photography to create fake bokeh, good low-light photos, etc. pretty much ate up all the demand for DSLR.

If you look at the photos on a big monitor, you can spot the difference between a DSLR and smartphone. But on a smartphone screen, where 95% of the photos are viewed these days, the difference is negligible. Heck my wife recently printed out 4x6 prints of her smartphone photos and they looked pretty good too.

I've recently got a iPhone 12 Pro, and it's good enough that I'm thinking of selling my Fuji X100V. DSLRs used to be accessible for amateurs. But unless you need specific capabilities (strobe usage, fast sport shooting, ultra-telephoto, etc), most people don't need to buy a DSLR if you have a decent smart phones these days.

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It is pretty wild to think that, like, 20 years ago digital camera had relatively nice little screens on them and relatively good processing, while phones had those silly little green-and-black LCDs. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where people are saying "Nokia seems to be really doomed. This is sad but not surprising -- smartcamera antennas have gotten good enough that you can get reception almost anywhere that a cellphone can. If you play a smartcamera call through a high fidelity audiophile setup you can kinda tell the difference, but if you are just using the NokiaBuds that came with the thing, they are basically indistinguishable."

I read your comment and felt like I was doing magic mushrooms

The camera manufacturers seem to be set in their ways. Wouldn't it be cool if you could load a sim card into your smart-camera & use android apps for cool features, like proper HDR (not the manual bracketing stuff), maybe apply some casual third-party filters, or instant streaming and sharing on social platforms. But maybe the target market, the professional photographers, are also the older generation that care more about a tiny amount of lens diffraction than the possibilities of new tech. There could also be the aspect of job security, since new tech could lower the barrier for newcomers.

I suspect another aspect to it is that camera manufacturers didn't even really want to go digital at all. They had a nice revenue stream in the form of "selling rolls of film" that would have kept them happy indefinitely. It isn't easy to obsolete your main lifeline.

If I’m not mistaken Canon, Nikon, etc. only ever sold camera’s, not film. And photographers changed camera’s a lot less often in the analogue days. With digital the customers suddenly got on an upgrade schedule similar to that of computers. So from a commercial standpoint the move to digital must have been pretty attractive for the manufacturers.

Huh. Today I learned.

Not only that, but the Big Three in film (Kodak, Fuji and AGFA) were at the forefront of digital photography when it was still barely a thing. Of them, only Fuji was making "serious" cameras for general photography (medium format rangefinders and the studio beast GX680, along with Fujinon optics for large format and enlargers).

This discussion crops up every so often: "Wouldn't it be nice if a camera had a full OS behind it".

Personally, I'm very pleased that my camera (a Nikon D850) boots instantly (approx 0.2 seconds) and has a shutter lag of 0.05 seconds (when pre-focused). It essentially never unexpectedly hangs when I need to take a shot. For my preferred subjects (wildlife) a consistently instant response is far more important than arbitrary functionality. If I want to share pictures or do other things, I can use the built-in wi-fi or Bluetooth to shunt pictures to my SmartPhone.

Exactly! Consider how incredibly slow it is to take a photo on a phone. And how short the battery life is. And how few capabilities the phone photo editing has compared to desktop photo processing where CPU, RAM and battery life are not constraints.

Why would I ever want any of that in a DSLR?

A DSLR can go from sitting on the shelf to having taken a focused photo in less than a second. The battery life is measured in weeks (unless using built-in flash). No comparison how much better experience it is.

The reason phones have those issues is because they have to compensate. I have a FF camera that runs android, and it lasts on standby for a month, takes a picture in 0.023 seconds, and so on. It's just that phone cameras are not optimized for latency and phones in general are not designed to be cameras.

Your camera doesn't actually boot in 0.2 seconds, it just wakes up from sleep.

My Sony runs Android and never hangs nor has an shutter lag. Instant response in everything. It can be done.

How did you measure the shutter lag? .05s is like a couple hummingbird wing flaps.

Using test equipment, I'd imagine the way to do it would be to sync a microphone and a logic analyzer and then short the shutter button. For the Sony A7 Mark I it's around 0.023 seconds : https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/sony-a7/sony-a7A6.HTM

Granted, it's not "no shutter lag", but 2.3ms might as well not exist.

> How did you measure the shutter lag? .05s

I looked at the camera specs online.

I disagree. I think Samsung tried to do a "smart camera" with one of their mirrorless lines. It didn't really sell well. Besides, most pros will still want to use Photoshop, Capture One, Lightroom, or whatever to edit their photos, not apps. The utility of apps is to upload quick to your social media photo sharing sites.

Also, what you're asking for is already available in most flagship smartphone these days. Instead of moving apps to cameras, they moved a good enough camera to a phone where all your apps are available.

IMHO, no. What would be a great would be even better live integration with phones and other devices (although you can do quite a bit with tethering etc with many modern cameras). They're better devices for editing-like things from an UI perspective, have independent battery and heat budgets (already an issue with cameras with the move to mirrorless), have ecosystems better designed for regular updates, ... whereas in a camera, for me this is all an add-on. I want the core of the camera to be simple and fast, and only move whats necessary for efficient capture in them (e.g. accelerometers for stabilization in post-processing would be something that would need to be added to the camera). And for pros, the reliability etc is even more important, and for the majority of their use cases, capturing and editing are clearly split. You're not going to sit down at a wedding, conference or in the wilderness and try tweak a picture on the back of the camera - and for doing it later a tablet or computer is better suited. And in the studio they tether to a full-size computer with larger screen etc, again the more powerful option.

Oh god please no. The fewer "smart" things to deal with the better. Smartphones have already massively overstepped their calling.

There have been a bunch of those but none of them caught on, because their target market already has a smartphone.

The idea I really liked was Sony that made "smart lenses" that was basically a decent sensor and a decent lens that you clipped onto your phone and connected via Bluetooth/WiFi and used the phone as a display and storage

Oh I wish this AI photo craze died out. I see that it may appeal to some people as a kind of "nicerising" effect, but without the context a casual viewer may take the picture as unaltered snapshot of the world. Of course the alterations are rather minute in the grand scheme of things, but if we continue looking at these taking them without context, I wonder how our perception of the world will get detached from reality? I think pictures computed by AI should be specially marked to let viewer know they don't look at the real thing.

There's no "real thing". All photos are processed, through the lens, by the software on the device, and by the photographers' workflows. When you shoot JPG, there's already a lot of processing that happens, and when you shoot RAW, you need to process that yourself from a dull, flat image.

Photographers rarely post un-processed images. Even before all of that, settings are chosen which alter the exposure, depth of field, focus point, color temperature of the image which alter the "real thing". It's common to think "editing" a photo is some cheating magic, but it should be considered the norm, and how people share their vision of what they want it to look like.

The AI can just automate a lot of the workflow or need to buy extra equipment, still up the human to decide how they want the image to come out.

I understand that all images are processed, but AI for me is crossing the line as it is adding things that come from the trained model rather than derived from the image itself - these elements otherwise wouldn't be there regardless of lens, colour grading and so on.

Strong disagree here.

I'm not sure what's going on, but this craze about computational photography is ruining cellphone photography for me.

Try to take a selfie with the iPhone 12 Pro. It's awful. If you use the regular camera, it generates an HDR selfie exaggerating every imperfection on your face. And if you use portrait, it applies a fake looking blur and softness to your skin and is incredibly strict on framing.

Camera photography is moving further from realism and I don't want a part of it.

Turn the camera around and you get similar problems. From detail-less low-light images, to sun-saturated indoor shots. It's like everyone took the Samsung model and ran with it.

My DSLR is the only lens I have that can produce a realistic photo nowadays and give me access to the raw sensor data.

> My DSLR is the only lens I have that can produce a realistic photo nowadays and give me access to the raw sensor data.

Every iPhone currently for sale and I presume most high-end Androids support shooting in RAW, you just have to use a third-party app.

I said the same thing about the iphone 12 pro here a few days ago

as predicted, enthusiasts wanted to argue the point instead of acknowledge what the market can bear

photography enthusiasts have to realize that “the market” is more concerned about their shoes being in the photo than how the bokeh looks, and in that respect AI depth of field that comes with a nondestructive parallel full focus image, with smart HDR on by default, also available in a derivative of RAW format is more than good enough!

All in a much more portable form factor.

The potential for a 5-10% optimizations in a larger traditional form factor just isn't good enough of a distinction.

> I'm thinking of selling my Fuji X100V

Didn't those just come out?

Oddly enough, I just picked up an X100T from eBay and I haven't been using my phone nearly as much. I don't know if the novelty will wear off or not, but I've been really enjoying it

The X100 series is a cool camera. I had one since the first version of X100. But I found it more convenient to pull my phone out instead of carrying that camera. I do have a X-T2 if I want to take more "serious" photos.

I have an x-t30 and my phone can't even compare. It's an entry level Samsung and those have really bad and slow cameras, esp in low light. A flagship might be a different story. Tbh, I wasn't that impressed with the fuji camera with the included 15-45 kit lens, which is rather mediocre. But after getting the 35mm f2 I can really appreciate the difference in the quality of photos. The other part is doing a course on photography and learning the manual settings. Without that, there is really no reason to use anything but a smartphone.

> The other part is doing a course on photography and learning the manual settings.

I will concede that I'm not the average consumer and already had "manual mode" camera experience

> Without that, there is really no reason to use anything but a smartphone.

I would disagree with that sentiment, but I'm on the other side of the fence of knowledge, so it's hard for me to say

This was an introduction course for digital photography with practical training, so we would get out once a week to shoot with our cameras. A lot of my colleagues had either older second-hand or borrowed cameras. Of course, we would hang around before and after the lessons to chitchat. And I could notice a sentiment from some that they couldn't see the benefits of these cameras, since they could get better results with their phones thanks to built-in processing algorithms (at least what you could see on the little screens). Their cameras were complicated and the automatic settings wouldn't return great results without post-processing. And none of them were really excited by the idea of sitting in front of the computer, editing raw files. But this seems like a must for getting the most out of the camera's sensor, since most cameras aren't doing much or any processing by themselves.

I shoot manual with my X-T2 most of the time, especially during portrait shooting. But shooting manual on a DSLR is not the panacea. You only need manual mode in certain situations. Heck, I read pros like David Alan Harvey uses full auto setting on his camera sometimes (probably a lot of other pros too). On my iPhone 12, I have exposure compensation on the main camera app. And that is good enough as well.

Sure, I don't use full manual either, but after being forced to practice I can say that it made me more aware of what the camera is doing. I can track the settings and if the camera chose a slow shutter speed, I can understand that stuff can become blurry. Then I can adjust manually to compensate. Or when the sun is harsh, I will dial down the exposure comp. In general, I adjust either the aperture or speed, but let the ISO work automatically. I can now notice mistakes earlier, when the auto wb or the meter are wrong. I also have a better sense of where each setting should be to get a good result.

You hit the nail on the head, the set of images that can only be taken with a DSLR/MILC is getting smaller and smaller.

To counter that a bit I'd like to add that there is a rise of video/youtuber folks wanting smooth 4k video with tracking auto-focus, and real bokeh which is making cameras, or hybrid cameras relevant again. I don't think phones do fake bokeh in video mode or do low-light video w/o looking like ass.

not yet.

The Lidar and infrared and AI will help with the low light. They fill in colors instead of take the result of the lens and sensor physical limitations.

There are apps that do what the default cameras don’t do yet, and we’ll continue to see rapid optimizations on this front.

what you mentioned is not outside of the realm of what can be done. If there is a need, making an app that does it will give you a brief advantage.

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