> The size of the sensor and the smarts behind it matter a lot more
And the lenses.
My backup DSLR shooting at 6MP with $100 of glass on the front looks infinitely better than the photos out of my iPhone 12 Pro.
And the lenses.
My backup DSLR shooting at 6MP with $100 of glass on the front looks infinitely better than the photos out of my iPhone 12 Pro.
I'm thinking if it were a good idea, then Canon, Sony, and Nikon would all be doing that.
I bought an iPhone 12 Pro pretty much entirely as a camera to use to capture a bunch of photos of my kid because (1) I don't have my DSLR within arm's reach in the house all the time and (2) our house isn't very well lit. I have zero complaints about it. I probably take photos with my iPhone versus my actual photo gear at least 20:1, if not more.
The photos look great on a phone screen.
But even just printing a 4x6 photo from the iPhone and a 15 year old DSLR and putting them side by side, the difference is immediately obvious. The iPhone photos are disgustingly oversharpened while somehow being weirdly smoothed, but in all the wrong spots.
I grabbed a couple of my own photos taken on the same day in the same place under largely the same lighting conditions (it's never exact) and zoomed/cropped them to help demonstrate and for privacy. Neither have been adjusted at all (I did try and improve the iPhone photo best I could, but really managed no substantial looking improvement so posted it as-shot), so focus more on the definition in the hair: https://imgur.com/a/7bn8W5S
See if you can guess which came from an iPhone 12 Pro, and which came from a Nikon D70 (about a $100 camera body at this point).
That all said, the entire point was... expecting anything more than 12MP out of an iPhone is absolutely pointless because the sensor size and optics simply aren't there to actually produce a better photo.
That's just the iPhone's default JPEG processing. You can avoid that by shooting RAW. I posted a comparison in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769511
Not sure what is going on with your comparison crop. The phone photo seems to actually be out of focus in the relevant area, not to mention overexposed.
JPEG uses DCT with fixed block sizes. The results of the two file formats are similar.
The main issue, as far as I understand it, is that the tiny sensor and tiny lens at some point just end up limiting the effective resolution. You can capture more pixels, but you never really increase the actual effective resolution of the end product. At that point you're not accomplishing much more than scaling up a lower resolution picture.
The "computational photography" usually ends up just vastly over-doing the sharpening and creating artifacts, and leaving weirdly smooth gaps where there was nothing to sharpen but the camera completely failed to pick up detail.
Just a couple random photos I grabbed from a day I took my kid to the park, but not necessarily like... scientific-paper worthy examples: https://imgur.com/a/7bn8W5S
One's taken with my iPhone 12 Pro, one with a Nikon D70.
Mainly, though, I base this off of trying to print any of the photos I've taken, and maybe someone else can hop in and explain this for me. I could be way off base here.
Printing photos from my iPhone at 4x6 they all look like someone took a really soft or slightly out-of-focus photo, applied way too much sharpening, and printed it. Printing a photo from my D70 generally still looks crisp and natural. Even if I blow it up beyond the actual resolution, it looks pixelated... not soft and then sharpened. This is even though the iPhone has twice the resolution of the D70.
For it's price it is pretty unbeatable, if you're in the MFT ecosystem.
Computational photography can overcome some of the optical limitations of the small sensor. E.g. you need a really good camera to get the dynamic range that is available with iPhone HDR.
Old camera (I am not aware of any modern cameras having 6mpx sensors) is an old camera. Cheap glass is a cheap glass. The bigger the sensor the better your lens has to be optically, because light is bent at the bigger angles.
The two most obvious areas (ergonomics and interchangeable lenses aside) of advantages of the "proper" cameras with bigger sensors are low-light performance and "bokeh". Otoh, if you want to have as much in focus as possible small sensors win.
The angle that the light is bent depends on the angle of view, not the size of the sensor.
If you’re still skeptical, consider a pinhole camera with no lens capturing an image at near infinite focus. Adding a piece of glass that refracts the light can’t perform any better than pure parallel rays of light.
Bigger lenses mean more light. More light means better signal to noise ratio. That's an objective metric of image quality.
Phone cameras can try to compensate for this by taking long exposures - actually videos - and warp the frames into alignment to remove blur, but it's a losing game if there's a lot of motion. Or the camera can try and guess the textures and replace them with similar ones, like the Gigapixel AI and similar services do - but then it's starting to move away from capturing the actual scene.
I mean, most of the photos I take are with my phone, because it's the handiest available camera. I don't think people talking about quality from dedicated cameras are trying to say that they're better than phones as a practical tool for taking everyday photos. But you do lose some quality and computational tricks can't get it all back.
And with a moving subject, a lens obviously makes a sharper picture, since the pinhole requires such a long exposure.
In studio light situations, fstoppers did a video years ago that had the iPhone (6 maybe?) produce pictures that rivaled the dslr at the time.
It's simply more complicated than infinitely better.
The computational composition (I wouldn't call it photography) done by modern phones also just looks weird. For example, trying to detect foreground and artificially blur the background, leaving a weird in-focus-yet-distant halo of texture around things.