The iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie Camera | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie Camera

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As per the general context of the article, it should be that the "smartphone with a camera" should be today's Kodak Brownie camera.

Nothing the iPhone does in particular is highlighted. Taking a picture, even before the iPhone, on earlier smartphones was exactly the same process.

Navigate to an icon / menu item, select "camera", click photos.

But then it wouldn't be able to do double duty as an Apple ad right?

iPhones totally dominate the rankings for most used cameras on Flickr, and also dominate as the phone of choice for most top instagram accounts. So considering people for whom photography is a primary distinguishing feature, as against an incidental feature, it's probably correct.

The point of the brownie isn't "people who are into photography". It's for every-person. Those who aren't into photography, and just want to have pictures to remember things.

There are two points here. Who initiated the trend, and what the trend is now.

If initiate the trend is to be discussed, that is, who started the social change, Blackberry was a behemoth in the smart phone market, before the iphone ever even existed. And they had cameras, messaging apps, their own ecosystem, and people shared photos with one another lavishly and often.

If one is to discuss now, then Android phones are far more numerous than Apple devices, and frankly, more used by people just needing a cheap phone. And the brownie was cheap, quick and easy to use, and even very cheap Android phones today have "good enough" cameras.

Just like the Brownie. "Good enough".

Not sure why the author ties this to iphones. I can only assume it is like Kleenex.

OK, I think that's fair.

What? No! You cannot agree, you have entirely and completely broken my brain.

This is the Internet! The Internet. Right or wrong, correct or not, you are supposed to argue your point relentlessly.

God help us all, if more of you appear, and we actually discuss things, back and forth, using logic and reason. What shall become of us all?

Edit:

Immediate downvote. The above was sarcasm, a comment on our times, and an attempt to applaud simonh's frank and honest "OK, that's a fair point" type of response.

simonh's response is rare. It shouldn't be. I'm wrong, everyone's wrong from time to time. So it's refreshing to see honest discourse.

Downvote away?!

Your tone is very off-putting. It comes off as out of touch, patronising, and smarmy.

Does my edit at least clarify, that my intent was not so?

I prefer that, over comment removal...

You can lose a maximum of 4 karma per comment, relax. It's fine to be downvoted here and there.

Didn't know about the max down votes, but it wasn't that. I didn't want simonh to have the wrong impression, or others.

But thanks for the info.

As a vehicle of introduction to photography, the whole smartphone market,with its wide spectrum of devices is responsible. iPhone is just popular, and that too in the developed world.

I most of developing world, the iPhone is still a luxury. And you ha e millions of other brands that are used for pics.

The iPhone was the difference, though.

I worked for one of the world’s leading photographic equipment manufacturers for decades.

When the iPhone first came out, I showed it to one of the senior marketing managers, and said “this could be trouble.”

They laughed, and talked about the low resolution, depth of field, bad lenses, insensitive sensor, etc.

Well...here we are...

All those are still true.

Sure, latest iPhones may have put a dent in the beginner DSLR marlet,and have definitely sunk the point and shoot market, but nowhere are they replacing the professional stuff.

Would you want your wedding to be photographed with an iPhone? For that matter, thos egoing on vacations might prefer taking a proper DSLR rather than just the iPhone.

Yeah, I agree, but the people who want to use DSLRs are fewer and farther between. Even news organizations are laying off their pro shooters, and telling their print/video newspeople to use smartphones.

Also, computational photography is a big deal. This is something that smartphones are uniquely positioned to do.

I am surprised Canon, Nikon and the likes did not introduce this (Computational stuff) into their DSLR lines. With the battery space and lesser constraints than a mobile, they have more space to add such enhancements.

Heck, they could release an iPhone companion app that does the same with low res pics from the camera.

Add detailed lens info that they have and other data about their cameras, they could build a photo super machine.

They could have added depth sensors, lidars, etc to accentuate their DSLR lines.

Tell me about it...

I did try, but these folks are very conservative.

I have also participated in efforts to develop software-driven cameras. It is not easy. Apple makes it look easy, but there's a lot going on, under the hood, and their vast financial resources are a big help.

As a user of smartphones and a photography enthusiast, I like that computational stuff isn't in DSLRs/CSCs. I want RAW, interchangeable lenses and I want to control as much of the capture process as possible. My smartphone is great for snapshots, far more convenient than a compact camera, and the fact that it now supports RAW is also a bonus!

I have nothing to offer but anecdotes, but I'm sure that those interested in photography as an art form want similar control for their camera and a point-and-shoot experience with their smartphone.

> Would you want your wedding to be photographed with an iPhone?

At every wedding I’ve seen in the last 10ish years, there has been a harassed looking photographer with a crowd of phone waving guests lined up behind them, all documenting the event. It looks infuriating.

It sounds really ironic to compare Brownie (which was a success through its cheap price) with iPhone which is essentially the most expensive camera device in its class (which for the most of the world remains exclusive for the upper middle class).

It's also silly to ascribe this trend to iPhone alone. Camera phones were in heavy use before iPhone showed up.

I am no iPhone/apple fan boy (in fact the opposite) but it is easy to forget that despite camera phones existing before the original iphone, the photos languished on the vast majority of phones, never seen by others.

To get them off you had to plug your phone into your pc, pull the media card, or pay through the nose to email them to yourself (unless you had WiFi at home which not everyone did at the time). MMS was the only common form of media sharing for loads of users and that really degraded the image quality - I forget the maximum MMS size but it was tiny.

The iPhone and the apps actually encouraged people to share their images and explore others in the way that devices before didn't. And even if you didn't use the apps the ease of backup through iTunes was a massive boost to people accessing and using their images away from their phones.

I had Dropbox on my android phones as soon as you could and would tell everyone to do the same, but for android it wasn't really until Google photos that photo backup and sharing got as simple and easy. And even recently it still wasn't installed on the majority of new phones, and manufacturers pushed their own backup/gallery apps that were rarely as good.

Facebook did more to popularise mobile phone snapshot sharing than any app and it was a piece of cake to upload from the phone gallery via the built-in browser. Even basic feature phones could do so.

> To get them off you had to plug your phone into your pc, pull the media card, or pay through the nose to email them to yourself (unless you had WiFi at home which not everyone did at the time).

How is that different from iPhone?

> The iPhone and the apps actually encouraged people to share their images and explore others in the way that devices before didn't.

Shouldn't you give credit for that to the apps/services? Pioneering service in this regard was e.g. Flickr which weren't exclusive to Apple - you could use them on the web, on iPhone, Android, even dumbphones.

> but for android it wasn't really until Google photos that photo backup and sharing got as simple and easy.

Sharing photos on Facebook was a thing since the beginning of Android. That used to be a big reason to sign up on FB.

>which for the most of the world remains exclusive for the upper middle class

Maybe true in poor countries but in Australia it seems that essentially everyone has one or a phone at a similar cost. You see food delivery drivers and school children walking around with iphone 12 pros. Monthly payment plans make anything purchasable I guess.

I've recently picked up a new iPhone 12 and what I would summarize it (and I am sure every new phone these days, probably–I'm just comparing it to my iPhone SE I had before it) is that it is really good at making random pictures look pretty decent, no matter what you are pointing it at. And I think that's pretty remarkable; it's akin to what point-and-shoots did to the average person's pictures but now it is in a device that you literally never leave behind and it also does a much better job. I like to think I have a basic eye for framing and some general knowledge of what ruins a picture (like, I can tell that those super-HDRed pictures with the saturation turned way up are fake and not good) but I'm no photographer, even an amateur one, and I have been amazed by what it does. I've actually been mildly frustrated at the lack of opportunity to really test the camera with the pandemic, but I snapped a couple of quick pictures to try out things like HDR, the wide angle lens, or low light performance (read: I pointed my phone at some random trees, or my family in the dimly-lit living room, or directly at the sun–usually things that don't photograph well) and they have all come out shockingly good for the effort I put into them. It's truly amazing how well it works for someone who just points the camera at something and taps the shutter button. It's so good that I've almost even forgiven them for making a phone that doesn't lay flat on a table :P

Not just their phones but their iPads as well. I replaced my parents five year old iPad Airs and the new ones have both image stabilization along with a fifty percent increase in pixels. There is also a lot of improvement to color accuracy.

the image stabilization features of phones and tablets cannot be under estimated

I am actually angry that they've ruined their iPads with a camera bump, since this prevents people from placing them flat on a surface :/

How quickly does the camera app start (worst case)? Because that is my main frustration with smartphone cameras.

With the last few iPhones I'd say it's very fast, almost instantaneous.

When you open it before you point, you can shoot right away.

usually quicker than i realize it is my thumb/hand or the case that is obstructing the lens.

I haven’t seen it take longer than a second.

Are you comparing to iPhone SE 2016 (1st generation)?

Yeah, so it's just before Apple started really ramping up their cameras and computational photography. Which isn't to say it couldn't take good pictures back then, it totally could, but it would either only do that in good conditions, or if you put effort into it. That no longer seems to be true anymore.

I had the original iPhone, and the photos were terrible. I don't think it focused on camera features at all! The photos were laughably awful, while my Nokia took reasonable photos to its age.

There were no video support, and a video camera app off Cydia maxed at 320x240 px at a low frame rate (that I don't recall well). My Nokia at the time took VGA quality videos out of the box

People are forgetting Sony Ericsson had absurdly good cameras and really well designed phones but they hesitated on Android. The sony cameras were best in class by a margin.

I had a Sony Ericsson K750 exactly because of its camera. Even better was when I got to upgrade the firmware to the W800 one to have the Walkman features.

It was a really cool phone for the time, circa 2005-2006.

It was terrible. And it documented some of the most beautiful moments of my life, when our children were young.

Right. The best camera is always the one you have with you because you can't take a picture with cameras you didn't bring and a camera is for taking pictures.

I have taken some pretty amazing photos on my phone. I always think "Damn, I wish I had my sony camera here for this" But I don't have it and without my phone I never would have captured the moment.

Its incredible to have a high quality camera in my pocket at all times even if it isn't the best quality.

To be fair, at the time phones were not seriously used to make a lot of photos. If you wanted photos you would have a separate camera with you and phone was used only as a last resort and maybe when you needed to send an MMS with the photo.

Not true, there were phones with much better cameras - as other user pointed out Sony Ericsson made phones with decent cameras (e.g. K850i) and they were actually heavily marketed (and bought) based on its camera quality.

See e.g. https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_k850-review-165p5.php...

Sony Ericsson had much more success in Europe and Asia and as such most Americans don't realize they exist - their memory of the dumb phone era is centered around crappy Motorola flip phones like the RAZR. And Americans get to write most of the tech history online.

Just because there existed phones with much better cameras does not change the fact that almost everybody had a phone that had shit camera that was barely usable.

Today it would be inconceivable to create a flagship phone without matching bleeding edge camera, but at that time, it was true (regardless of the fact that there were some phones with good cameras) that most people did not use phones for photography on a daily basis.

This means there was no immediate expectation the phone will have best camera.

I just went through the original unveiling of the iPhone and the focus is completely on UI and form factor and there is very, very, very little about the camera (basically, yes, it has a camera).

Even today if I really care about pictures I use a camera. A compact camera with x30 optical zoom at a $200 / $300 price point is far better than any smartphone. You can take pictures from far away, the lens is better, the sensor is larger. You don't capture the pupils of a bird on a tree with a smartphone.

Of course I get out with my phone in a pocket and I bring my camera with me only on special occasions and long journeys so I shoot many more pictures with my smartphone than with my camera so I agree that smartphones changed how we think about pictures.

>..illuminating the confluence of the Indus and Zanskar rivers.

I was wondering how that looks like so I DDG-ed and found the below photo titled "Sunset on Indus river":

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/40/7a/21/407a21fbb8d124dff713...

"Neither device was necessarily built for the sake of disrupting the art of image taking. "

Did the writer have access to design briefs for the products? Or what the product leaders communicated to the teams? Ffrom what I read, camera was perceived as quite important for the iPhone.

Jobs did set out to disrupt the market, check even most pop-culture bio books.

iPhone photography pivoted with, maybe the iPhone 4s as the inflection point when they went to 8MP. The early iPhones had pretty mediocre cameras even for the time so when talking about the original vision for the device and it's reason for being, I think that's quite correct.

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