The Evolution of Camera Phones, Visualized | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of Camera Phones, Visualized

simpleghar.com

16 pointslnyan23 comments

The images presented are simulations. And they are based on specs of the cameras. Specs rarely contain actual sensor performance and definitely none of the processing done off sensor. These mockups are not representative in any meaningful way.

Yes, it’s disappointing they didn’t try to find actual photos taken on the devices, but understandable for copyright reasons I guess?

Here’s a recent article looking back at the seminal Nokia 7650 smartphone from 2002, which was the first mass-market camera phone in most parts of the world:

https://nokiamob.net/2022/06/05/flashback-20-years-ago-nokia...

It includes a photo taken on the 7650 by the author back in 2002. The lack of focus, poor exposure and very shallow dynamic range are typical of the plastic lenses and tiny sensors of the era.

From that link: "I know, could be nitpicking with some marginal manufacturers such as Kyocera or Sharp, who, truth be told, were really the first to launch phones with a built-in camera, but everyone knows that these were experiments that never come to life, nor has anyone ever taken them seriously."

...No, Sharp alone moved 10 million cameraphones between Oct 2000 - May 2003 across 12 models[1]. They just didn't ship globally.

1(no English versions available): https://www.itmedia.co.jp/mobile/0305/23/n_sharp.html

Yes. This was the era when Japan's mobile market was several years ahead of Europe and USA. Camera phones were first available there.

Another example is Docomo i-Mode which was a popular mobile Internet service already in 1999:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

As a curiosity, the emoji character set now found in Unicode was created by Docomo for i-Mode.

Yeah, came here to say the same thing after reading the article. Massive omission of Japanese camera phones.

> but understandable for copyright reasons I guess?

They could have bought/rented/borrowed the phones

And it's missing a very important thing; the lens

    SimpleGhar [...] created mock-up images of [...] each camera phone

I wouldn't put much trust into it. If the effort to buy 20 old phones and make real photos was too high for this article, then those "mock-up images" are probably far from realistic.

Camera Phone history without Google Pixels and non-Samsung Android phones is a woeful joke.

This seems like the post author just grabbed whatever ended up on "sold most" that year, instead of putting together an actual look at innovation/quality milestones.

(Also the lack of photo examples from those cameras is also puzzling.)

Well, the Pixels are there (at the bottom) but really should have included the Nexus line too. Anyway, they are simulated photos, so they are of little value.

"Visualized" by using a good photo taken with modern camera and degrading it in theoretical ways without ANY experience with original technology and its limitations.

"Methodology: To visualize evolution of tech we reviewed some data and compiled some list"

That doesnt describe methodology, that describes them making a list of phones to fake :/

The only aspects they cared to fake were resolution and light sensitivity, with some arbitrarily added ridiculous blur to selected models? This sort of stuff is imo harmful. Whats the point? To get good SEO in google by making article that is a list and comparison and seemingly contains original (albeit garbage) content?

Notice the faked tableau showing exactly the same scene supposedly photographed with all iPhone models. Weak ethics.

I especially love the "Methodology" block at the bottom of the diagrams, which seems present only to add an air of authority, but all it really says is that they picked the flagship phones of each brand.

Now that I think about it I saw a twitter thread the other day about a series of garbage vomit SEO gibberish, all using same template with very prominent Methodology/references section. Might be something new Google is sensitive to and seo people picked up.

Given the dialog here I'm not gonna go read the article, but I will say this:

I'm a relatively enthusiastic hobby photographer. Our vacation in 2018 was the first time I realized that my phone's camera (at the time, an iPhone 8) was "good enough" to participate meaningfully in vacation photography. By the time of our next vacation the following summer, I'd worked out a workflow to include phone pics into Lightroom with the images out of my "real" camera. There was still an appreciable gap in quality in some contexts, but in iPhone-friendly situations the shots were definitely competitive with the Olympus.

Since then I've upgraded both camera (to a full-frame Sony) and phone (to an 11 Pro). The gap still exists, but it's not NEARLY what it was, and in many contexts I'll CHOOSE to use the phone instead of the camera.

Given the potato-quality images out of the early camphones, and even the early iPhones, that's a very very amazing and cool progression.

Agree, sensors in phones are good enough for a lot of use cases. The second lighting becomes an issue, or even worse, the lense starts to matter phones still loose. They do take very good pictures so, albeit already with some post procssing applied. Shooting RAW means you have to do that.

I don't shoot RAW on my phone, but obviously I do with the Sony.

The iPhone definitely exploits "computational photography" to get great shots. I'm OK with that. For things like landscape shots in cloudy weather, it's really hard to beat with a "real" camera and my level of comfort with postprocessing in Lightroom.

This seems overly focussed on the best selling phones rather than really the evolution of Camera Phones. The HTC One M8 was I think the first camera to use multiple lenses for depth and different zoom. The first Pixel might not have been all that popular, but was the first phone to take computational photography to the next level (night mode, background blurring that was adjustable after the fact). The Samsung S20 with 10x optical zoom and 100x total zoom might have been also not a complete success, but was really an eye opener.

> Sporting a four-lens, 48-megapixel camera that allowed users to zoom up to 100x without sacrificing any image quality

Yeah right. This article reeks of SEO spam.

Two mirrors: https://web.archive.org/web/20220825104003/https://simplegha...

https://archive.ph/UPKwc

I can't see any appreciable difference in cameras in the last 5 years. Look at the images in the link - do you?

They are simulations and bad ones at that. This article is meaninglessly.

I think they mostly improved pictures taken in low light.

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