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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

I used to feel the same way 10 years ago, but the quality of phone cameras nowadays is incredible.

They have to make some compromises because of their size, so a pro with a DSLR is always going to win. But for the rest of us, phone cameras make it so much quicker and easier to get a good photo. And you don't have to lug gear around with you everywhere and spend ages fiddling with settings, tripods and lenses.

So, as a non-pro, I prefer my phone camera, even for once in a lifetime experiences - it actually means I get to experience more myself, rather than my experience being taken up by the camera.

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It’s easy to tell from the photos in the article that the iPhone is making up a lot of the images. It’s like a dream, it looks perfect until you start paying attention, and your brain starts filling in the gaps with nonsense. To me, that’s not good enough for a cherished memory.

> And you don't have to lug gear around with you everywhere and spend ages fiddling with settings, tripods and lenses.

I feel like if you’re lugging a lot of gear around it should be to take a photo that is difficult or literally impossible to take with a phone anyway.

No one remembers events perfectly. You remember the highlights; your brain fills in the gaps with what it believes it remembers happens, sometimes going so far as to lie to you.

When faced with that fact, you can choose to feel that it elevates the importance of accurate recreation of the past in our photographs.

I'm more on the opposite side; I don't look at old photos to remember what happened. I look at them to remember how I felt when it happened. I'll never look at an old photo and think "what the; the goldenrod shade of that lion's mane had a 0.54% deeper saturation in real life, this camera sucks!" I'll be thinking "that lion was fucking awesome, and this photo makes him look fucking awesome."

So, maybe camera phones over-process and produce a dream-like representation of what happened. That's how everyone remembers how it happened anyway. There's certainly value in accuracy, but I'm not the New York Times.

Your brain does much much stronger “computational photography” on everything you see. Like, there is no hole around your nose, the physical hardware ain’t as good as the resulting picture, we do plenty of noise reduction, etc.

Compared to that, these AIs are mostly overhyped noice reducers.

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