Comment by noahtallen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noahtallen | Hacker News Reader

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Definitely true. I did photography as a hobby, but phones match or exceed the performance in many cases now. For example, low-light mode on phones outperforms older entry-level canon DSLRs (T3/T6) by default without having to twiddle with the settings. Of course, you could get better pictures with these cameras, but it takes time and a really good lense! So in other words, it’s just not ideal for quick pictures around the house.

I think there are two areas where phone cameras have a lot of room for improvement: sharpness and landscape.

By sharpness, I mean that if you zoom into any phone picture, it falls apart very quickly. There is a lot of software optimization hiding how a small sensor can’t actually do that well in the details.

By landscape, I mean if you take a picture of a mountain or object in the far distance, you’ll barely be able to see it in the phone because the lenses are so wide. It really makes nature pictures underwhelming :)

> low-light mode on phones outperforms older entry-level canon DSLRs

Shouldn't you compare with modern entry-level DSLRs? Otherwise of course, you are possibly skipping all technological improvements that DSLR cameras might have received over time.

There isn't a real comparison with low light mode on phones vs what the best SLRs can do at high ISO at night.

Phones are now using a combination of photo stacking and HDR in order to achieve pretty ridiculous low-light results.

You could certainly sit there with an SLR and bracket half a dozen shots and then stack/HDR them in post, but that is a lot more work and can't be uploaded to facebook/instagram seconds later ;)

I only agree on the seconds later and that's where it ends. Unless you are shooting for social media even old dslrs with a good lens outperform any phone in terms of final output. It takes offline processing but the result is almost always better. Phone photos definitely look nice but generally look nice on phone screens, zoom in a bit and all the magic is gone.

I just try to keep things in perspective, it's pretty wild how many pictures I took with my iPhone 4S because it finally had a reliably good camera.

If I can't take high quality pictures with a iPhone 12, that's a creative issue, not hardware. Low light capture is better than my DSLR ever was without a tripod, also.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive that I can take a photo of my moving baby in dark situations and my iPhone will do image stacking to get an acceptable image - but it’s just that, acceptable. On a phone. Blow any of those up and they’re a smeary, noise-reduced mess.

I’d rather shoot at high ISO on one of my cameras and have some grain.

I think the point is more that someone who felt they needed an entry-level DSLR a few years ago can get better performance from their phone today, and doesn't need any camera.

>Shouldn't you compare with modern entry-level DSLRs?

Not if the quality of those older entry-level DSLRs was already good enough for most people, and even good enough to win photo awards, print and hang in galleries in many cases.

>Otherwise of course, you are possibly skipping all technological improvements that DSLR cameras might have received over time.

Considering the above, who cares, if their current phones already do a fine job as far as they are concerned?

In 2000-2005-up to around 2010 or so, the era of "potato camera phones", that wasn't yet the case, so casual Joes and Janes still bought the entry-level DSLRs of the time.

Nawww, you're missing the market here.

2000-2012ish, Casual Joes and Janes were buying Point and Shoots. Most folks only bought DSLRs if they were actually doing it as a hobby or decided to take Photography as an elective in college.

At the time, DSLRs were a worse video experience for casual users, if they supported video at all. Point and Shoots were anything from pocket sized to 'DSLR' sized and typically (but not always) accordingly scaled in relative capability.

In any case, Point and shoots are what got killed in the last decade, or rather, got moved to niches. It's still the best option for certain things (e.x. Superzooms like Sony's RX10 IV or Nikon's P1000) Whether DSLRs/MILCs get niched out remains to be seen.

Both comparisons are interesting, IMO.

Phones naturally get replaced every two years or so, for lots of reasons most of which have nothing to do with the cameras.

DSLRs are expected (by me, anyway) to last for decades. Mine was made in 2009 and still looks and functions just as if it was brand new. Since they last so long, lots and lots of people still have DSLRs as old as mine and want to know how they compare to the recent phone camera that they also have.

Yeah, that's always dissapointing. Realistically, this is only an editor issue, no viewer can even zoom into a photo on Instagram etc. Even the sharpest Ansel Adams print is subject to the same JPEG compression artifacts. Not sure if the modern hobbyist/entry level print much these days.

It's still so nice to zoom deep into my crisp old shots.

Ansel Adams and the New Topographics are meant to be seen in a museum. Or at least in a book. Definitely not on Instagram.

These days, those who print their photos are usually:

- Couples after finishing their pre-wedding photo sessions

- Photography enthusiasts. Some even still have their own darkroom.

The rest? Nahh. Printing is a waste of money. We have social medias, which are cheaper and faster.

> who print their photo

Print? Who is even looking at photos after taking them. But photos are also used as input for other graphics that can be printed - which is now also less common for reasons you have already mentioned.

By low light mode on phones I assume you mean image stacking. This requires a stationary subject.

Intrinsically, phones are still far behind simply because of the physics of having a tiny sensor. https://www.imaging-resource.com/IMCOMP/COMPS01.HTM has a comparison tool that includes both phones and DSLRs. The newest phone I found was the iPhone 11 from 2019. For comparison, I chose the Canon 40D from 2007 (4 years older than the models you list) as the oldest model with the same test scene available. It's a 2007 cropped sensor DSLR. The shot of the 40D at ISO3200 absolutely destroys the iPhone 11 at ISO2500 (try reading the bottle labels). The 50D from 2008 has a 12800 image available and it still easily beats the iPhone at 2500.

> By low light mode on phones I assume you mean image stacking. This requires a stationary subject.

Which is a misconception. The entire point of stacking in smartphones is to handle lots of movement in a robust way, and it's surprisingly good at that. You can actually perform similar stacking manually for a camera, the algorithms are well known and there are applications to do just that, for example [1]. There's less benefit on a normal-sized sensor since it can perform much better with a single shot as you pointed out, but there are still valid uses for it in certain scenes where even proper cameras struggle, see [2].

[1] https://github.com/martin-marek/hdr-plus-swift

[2] https://www.timothybrooks.com/tech/hdr-plus/

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