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Comment by KarlKemp | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. I wish I had a list of everyone parroting the wisdom that "it's all about the size of the lens, a smartphone can never be as good as a DSLR" so as to ignore their future opinions. Camera phones now beat cameras worth thousands of dollars with better software and larger R&D budgets, at least in low light performance and color gamut.

Closely related: "It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license plate readable. Lost information ist lost". This was big due to some US TV show at the time, I guess. Here, the error was in the assumption that the information was lost: as it turns out, there's a wide space of possibilities for image quality to be too low for us to easily read some letters, but good enough to contain the clues allowing a smart algorithm to reconstruct them.

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> It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license plate readable.

Well, a phone can reconstruct this license plate, and in fact any license plate in lieu of this one! And invent a new one!

Which is worrisome for justice. Presenting proof, that was uploaded to servers, horodated and geostamped, won’t be enough in a court of law. Anyone can answer: “What if the iPhone recreated and inferred the presence of a knife using the neural engine? This face, is it real? The distance, is it repositionned?”

> This face, is it real? The distance, is it repositionned?

Deepfakes, robocalls and Caller ID and voice impersonation, automatic ML in photos, if this train keeps going, we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to see how we will function.

> we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to see how we will function

That's where we started, in a way. Perhaps our short time of feeling we had a grip on reality will just have been a passing phase, before returning to normality.

the difference is, before media, everyone understood that if they didn't experience something directly, they had to trust someone who spoke, and that speech was always understood to be an interpretation and possibly fiction.

but now we have all these artificial experiences that might clock real to the senses and have a reputation of fidelity, yet have always been editable and are increasingly made of black box constructive interpretations that value who-knows-what over fidelity. and no part of the process can be interrogated for motivations or detail.

You will need a transcript of processing and intermediate results.

But how do you know a particular transcript is not fake?

That has always been the case for photographs from every device that has ever been capable of recording images.

Film camera?

Yes especially film cameras.

Yes, this is getting better, but it reminds me of a story from a friend who was doing work on some classified satellite imaging systems (he was in hardware, iirc) and went to an internal seminar/briefing by some experts on how, from the front to the end of the system, to get the best images for the customers.

He said they went through hours of details on how the various enhancement algorithms and systems worked, and at the end, the bottom line was basically 'take a better picture in the first place' - as in get the lens, lighting, and parameters right in the first place, and that'll be the biggest factor in how far the processing HW/SW/people can take the enhancements.

Maybe the new software with huge R&D budgets is now better, but I'd suspect this advice is still not obsolete...

I saw your post got a down vote, however for eg any given webcam, the best way to improve your video for your mmeetings is likely not to upgrade the camera but to invest in better lighting (eg a couple of key lights) and optimise your visual setup (framing).

It is good advice indeed.

Still, it's amazing how processing has evolved. I took a picture of my 3yo daughter having finally fallen asleep after a bout of night terrors, in the dark light (using a Hue Ambiance in her room; best things ever) - in the S21 Ultra viewfinder I could see absolutely nothing, however after 3 seconds of a steady hand I was rewarded with a fantastic picture better lit than what my eyes had adjusted to.

(If I had any complaints, it would be that I'd like it to be darker - however I can understand why on average most would like the processed result.)

I definitely agree with the lighting bit, and I think that was indeed included in the category of "first, take a better picture". So yes, focus, exposure, no motion blur, etc...

In theory what prevents me from using a huge lens and sensor on a DSLR or a mirrorless camera and then using the same advanced software but now running on a desktop computer or a server that is many times more powerful than a smartphone to do advanced post processing?

Nothing at all. It’s honestly surprising that it’s not a bigger thing.

Guessing what stops you is that the Apple team that makes camera software has a budget that makes the Nikon pc app team look quite small.

Cameras don't have DoF sensors which I believe the phone uses in its processing to know if there's a subject in frame.

they have that dof sensor so they can emulate dof, we get real dof.

Ok, cool.

The processor still doesn't have access to said "real dof", which is the point of this comment thread.

The iphone’s depth sensor is one factor. I don’t know of any lidar integrated cameras that aren’t phones, for example.

Also, because phone cameras have gotten so good, the skill floor for what you’re talking about is higher. There’s more skill involved in using software like lightroom than you might think. I’m a hobbyist photographer, and sometimes my iphone just seems more skillful than I am using my nicer camera and Lightroom.

Isn't that what Lightroom is for?

It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not limited by processing power.

DSLR and mirrorless cameras have better optical properties. But they are held back by starting too late and being much worse when it comes to software. These cameras also are limited by their CPUs, which are a decade behind, and by their batteries, which are much smaller but expected to last for thousands of exposures.

> recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks

I mean, sure, but the A15 bionic is much more power constrained and effectively has less 'GPUs' and cores than the M1, likely because the SoC is also constrained by its size within the phone housing.

But that CPU shouldn't really do anything other than shoveling raw sensor data to flash as fast as possible. All the processing can happen on your workstation (or an iPad or whatever).

I’ve got nearly the same CPU in my iPad, MacBook and iPhone. I can do the processing on any device…

You don't have the same heatsink on all three, and not necessarily the same number of cores.

This.

My Corsair H150i Pro AIO water cooler and decent airflow case (Define 7 W/Corsair ML140s) allows me to run my Ryzen 3900XT at 4.4ghz constantly, all cores, for any kind of real life workload.

Good luck trying that with a laptop.

The M1-Max at 30W seems to have tge same Geekbench 5 multicore benchmark score as the Ryzen 3900XT at 105W. Think about that. Also a better single core score. You won't be using all cores all the time.

All the image processing is short bursts so this is mostly irrelevant.

You don't want to shovel 12MP 14-bit-effective multi-frame raw pixel data along its metadata into the flash...

Sure I do. Or very minimally compressed.

Hell, one of the major selling points of the most recent iphones is prores recording! Dump half a second of that into a file. If that means a half-full phone can only fit a thousand photos before it's emptied, then sure I'll take it.

> It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not limited by processing power.

Correct me if I'm wrong but there's still a huge issue with silicon processing capabilities/power when it comes to image sensors (which is why camera sensors buffer images between shots). I unfortunately don't remember the context but it said something that it was (very far) from possible to actually get all the sensor data into the processor and as a result you only take a small fraction of the actual incident light/photos practically.

This isn’t true, really: there are massive amounts of data being pushed about in a modern camera, through custom image pipelines that will do many gigabytes per second of throughout, but none of those are really bottlenecks for the sensor data per se.

Most of it ends up in a RAM-like write buffer, because SD cards, or even faster formats like CF-express, can’t keep up with the write speed of tens of 50 megapixel shots coming through every second.

There are sensor readout speed limits, which is why you don’t see cameras exceed 30 frames per second of 8k recording, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t read out the entire full-well capacity of the sensor each of those frames.

iphones come with a15 not m1

I had to check that, as these big chunky camera batteries “feel” like they should have a lot of mAH compared to a phone.

And I am wrong. Depending on the phone.

A Nikon battery: 2280 mAh.

An iPhone 13: anywhere from 2406–4352 mAH.

Yeah, that’s a way smaller power budget than a Pro iPhone, especially as you have autofocus and image stabilization systems that have to move around a lot more mass.

It is not accurate to compare the capacity in Amp-hours because the Nikon EN-EL15C battery has twice the voltage (two Li-ion cells in series) of a single-cell smartphone battery.

As well I'd like to add the thought that the smart phone could be running all kinds of battery draining things in the background. So actual battery life depends not only mAh but how efficiently the device uses its capacity.

And the camera batteries are replaceable. Quickly. In the field. There are also "battery grips" that have extra battery slots in them and automatically switch between the batteries. The camera never has to sit on a charger, only a spare battery does.

Alternatively: I'd point out that the camera app tends to be a highly battery-draining activity on a phone. Most phone users do not leave the camera app up 24/7.

(And as a digital camera user - at least I can hot swap batteries. I miss my old cell phones that allowed for this.)

Napkin math: 7V/2280mAh = 16Wh or equivalent to 3.7V/4300mAh (USB power banks are always measured and marked in 3.7V and mAh as unit to produce largest comparable numbers)

I've always thought it was odd powerbanks didn't advertise in mWh. That's a bigger number and comparable regardless of voltage.

If you want napkin math then just multiply 2280 by two. It'll be faster and more accurate than converting to watt hours.

Keep in mind that my Nikon really only consumes power when it's _doing_ something. I can leave my camera "on" for months at a time and come back to a fully charged battery.

The screen is off except when I'm previewing a photo. The viewfinder is physical. The metering is only on for 10-20 seconds after I wake the camera by touching the shutter release and is only displaying on a low power monochromatic LCD. Autofocus only happens while I'm holding the shutter release until it finds focus then locks.

Meanwhile the iPhone battery is powering what is, effectively, an entire laptop with a 5+" screen and cellular, wifi and bluetooth radios.

Articles I can find are quoting an iPhone taking a few hundred shots on a charge. Nikon's testing puts my camera able to take a few _thousand_ per charge. There's literally an order of magnitude difference from my Nikon's 1400mAh battery to a iPhone's 2500-4500mAh battery. Two to three times the capacity for 1/10 the pictures.

That comparison doesn’t work for newer mirrorless cameras. I have a DSLR and mirrorless strapped to my body at each wedding and I go through more than twice the amount of batteries in the mirrorless.

They also take a second or so to wake from standby which is super annoying for my job, so I have it set to 5 minutes. That essentially means it never goes in to standby on a wedding day.

held back? why on earth would anyone want the camera to do more then just give you a raw image file back? if you don't want to be creative then yea i guess go with a phone and let it make all the choices for you.

Nope. The image data _is_ actually lost. What happens is that it gets pimped with what on average was lost when a training process artificially degraded a training set. For the results to look(sic) natural, you need both the training set and the degradation to be close to what you're shooting. If that is not the case, hallucination happens.

I use my iPhone when I want convenience. I use my DSLR when I want high quality photos.

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