Comment by Ancapistani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ancapistani | Hacker News Reader

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As a "serious amateur" photographer at this stage of my life, the last thing I want my camera to do is be "smart".

I use a Fujifilm X-Pro3, and while I have a variety of lenses, I almost always have my 23mm f/1.4 mounted. With the crop factor that gives me a "traditional" 35mm focal length. I almost always shoot with fully manual exposure, and only use autofocus about half the time.

I chose this kit specifically because I have full control over the image with physical controls to make changes - I can change shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and even dynamic range without taking my eye out of the viewfinder.

The X-Pro3 is pretty much made for me and my use case. While it has a "screen", it's folded into the back of the camera and isn't visible unless I manually flip it down. It can't practically be exposed when I'm using the camera normally. It's handy if I want to shoot at waist level or if I want to show someone standing next to me an image... but that's it.

I have nothing against "computational photography", and it definitely has its place - but for me, as for most photographers, that place is in post-processing. Adobe is responsible for that stuff, not my camera. I expect my camera to produce a RAW file as an artifact, not an "image".

As a person who makes money shooting video. I wish I had more reason to invest in my camera body. Interchangeable lens should come with chromatic abberation/distortion profiles on a chip that communicates with the camera so we can buy cheaper and lighter lenses with fewer elements. You can always buy the fancy lens with perfect optics if you prefer that aesthetic. A professional camera software will always expose on/off switches for the correction so the photographer retains control over the shot. I really don't see the problem with giving pro cameras more optional smarts, it just makes them more versatile.

Are you sure cameras don’t do that?

I honestly do not know. They definitely do for still photos—Nikon has had chromatic aberration correction and lens distortion correction for quite a while, and it’s keyed to individual lenses.

If they aren’t doing that in video, I suspect it’s a pure horsepower limitation. Reading the data off the sensor, and applying the corrections in real-time while writing to card may be too computationally intensive or bandwidth-limited.

Sony cameras do this, yes.

https://www.sony-mea.com/en/electronics/support/articles/000...

>Interchangeable lens should come with chromatic abberation/distortion profiles on a chip that communicates with the camera so we can buy cheaper and lighter lenses with fewer elements.

Pretty much this, and this is what some people already do with pancake lenses, correcting the result in post. However there's a problem with this: for the universal vendor-supplied profiles to work well, the lens must still be made within pretty tight tolerances, so the cost reduction is limited. And proper manual calibration is really expensive and tedious, which defeats the point.

I don't know if there's a niche, but I'd love to see some startup doing the full-fledged lens and body calibration (STF/OTF and stuff) on demand to make high quality custom tailored profiles. That way you can use really cheap and compact lenses to get the same result; software correction can do wonders nowadays.

Software can't fix a slow aperture.

Of course. But it can fix many artifacts like field non-uniformity and distortions (both spectral and spatial), which otherwise require more lens elements, precise production and exotic materials to fix. Software correction is typically slightly lossy, but it's a reasonable trade-off. Per-lens/per-body calibration extends this much more than it's currently possible with vendor-supplied profiles, but requires pretty complex and expensive gear.

It can if the scene is willing to sit still. You can get rid of shot noise by fusing different exposures.

You've just described Olympus, and they mostly get shit for it. Apparently it's cheating or something.

Ignoring the computational parts, Olympus makes some spectacular optics but isn't recognized (much) for those, either.

The Olympus cameras look sweet. Hadn't looked into them before. They seem a bit more stills-focused, but very nice.

Lightroom has profile for most lenses, and given it knows which was used from EXIF data, applying the correct correction is all automatic.

Pretty sure camera lenses already contain a ton of information about distortion and chromatic abberation which the camera uses to compensate automatically. But this is generally disabled when shooting RAW.

I think it would be nice to have a shooting mode where you could create a "folder of files" from one shot. maybe call it multi-raw?

examples:

  - exposure stacking
  - focus stacking
  - time lapse 
  - burst
  - panorama (or any kind of increased resolution)

You could generate a preview image in-camera as an aid, but you would be free to use external tools on the individual images afterwards.

I'm genuinely surprised that this isn't already a feature in professional and prosumer camera bodies.

It is.

> but for me, as for most photographers, that place is in post-processing

You’re forgetting that today everyone is a photographer. It’s not like the 90s or even early 2000s where a photo was an event and even owning a decent camera was the exception, let alone actually lugging the thing around consistently.

>Adobe is responsible for that stuff, not my camera.

I grew up on analog photography, and one of things I really appreciate about recent Fujifilm cameras is that you don't necessarily need to use Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. There's an "X Raw Studio" app, which lets you develop RAWs in-camera through a USB tether to your computer. It has a very, very limited set of RAW development choices, but for me it brings back a little bit of the feel of working in a darkroom. Limited options. I rarely use actual postprocessing software these days.

I don't see how tethering your camera to your computer is much different then popping out a card and loading any 1st or 3rd party software? Or even just shooting in some processed format?

Fujifilm cameras have an image processing chip that is used for film simulations, which this computer software also uses. Essentially it's in-camera editing controlled through a PC.

That's probably a sign of the famous Japanese inability to write software more than anything. Sony cameras come with a free version of Capture One that recreates the official picture styles, though that's not that interesting.

There is no technical difference. There's no real technical argument for it -- the same thing could easily be done by software. It's more about the gestalt of photography and being limited to a small number of options done "in camera". Most of what Fujifilm has been doing in recent years has been trying to carve out a niche closer to old-style photography (the XPro3's removal of the back screen in the default configuration, for example, so that chimping becomes difficult). When you pull files into Lightroom/Camera Raw/Capture One, there is tons of flexibility, but there's also a ton of sliders and it eventually ends up feeling onerous and not fun in the long term for me. (If I was doing professional photography it would be different of course.) I think that's a big part of what makes people prefer their phones.

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