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Comment by acquacow | Hacker News Reader

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 ;)

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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.

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