If camera makers don't radically alter image processing on their bodies, they'll soon find themselves in a place even smaller than what's already a niche.
If this would be the case every wedding photographer would just use an iPhone.
Yes, phone does HDR (not always perfectly) but there is so much more to photography than trying to make shadows not black and sky as blue as possible.
As a POC, some have. Here's Peter McKinnon [1], and Tomorrow's filmmakers [2]. The wedding is also a very controlled lighting scenario, allowing the dedicated camera to maximize its advantage. Shutter-speed matters too, which Phones have closed in on but not yet eliminated. (In my post, I called out brightly lit conditions.)
Large camera bodies are also about looking "professional". Like most people don't wanna go to banks where staff is dressed in t-shirts and shorts.
[1]: https://youtu.be/yLZJS2k2V4k [2]: https://youtu.be/6RAVCzd0MZw
To take candid photos in a dimly lit environment (evening, church, outdoors at night etc) you need a big honking flash or a lens that captures more light than the Hubble.
Every good photographer (almost) always bounces their speed light off the wall/ceiling or uses an off camera flash. I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of wedding images and never once had red eye to remove. People also don’t “startle” faster than the speed of light.
Speedlights aren’t “big honking flashes” and as long as you know what you’re doing you’re still usually at a high ISO as you don’t want the background to be super dim compared to the foreground.
Anyways, phones are especially ill suited for that environment compared to modern cameras. At f/1.4, 1/200th of a second shutter at ISO 6400 you can freeze everything but super fast motion with pretty good image quality in very dim environments. Phones absolutely cannot do that. Even pictures taken outside just after the sun sets are a smeary mess after the built in noise reduction.
Stills, IMO, would be even more of a disaster.
I don’t like carrying god knows how many pounds of weight on my shoulders with two cameras, 3 lenses, and often two speedlights on me all day. I also bring two Pelican cases of lighting equipment, a camera bag full of batteries and lenses, and an “oh shit” bad with backup cameras and lenses. That’s what I need to do a good job in any condition.
Phone camera photos look good on your phone. If you have absolutely perfect lighting they may even look good blown up to a somewhat reasonable size. Good luck getting anything useful in a dim church, on the dance floor, etc.
It’s pretty often that a mom comes along to a senior photography shoot and takes photos with their phone of me at work and then sends them to me. The quality is utterly laughable compared to what I’m capturing at the time when actually viewed on something that’s more than 6 inches diagonal.
Photographers might make silly YouTube videos trying to get clicks where they use phones on a pro shoot but that’s where it ends.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that some measurable percentage of "official person tasked with photographing a wedding" are just using phones. These are not professional wedding photographers, but they are acting as a wedding photographer while using a phone camera. (And they are friends or family doing the task for free.)
Surely many weddings are not high expenditure events. An average person with a modern phone who takes a LOT of photos at each moment or scene will produce some good images. They may not be of the quality where you could print large poster size, but most people probably don't print larger than 11x14.
There's no doubt that a skilled photographer with good gear that is suited for the environment can do better. Phones are not a replacement for this if final result is the only criteria. But not only are not all "professional" photographers great, but a lucky amateur with a good phone cam and lots of snaps may end up with output that a layperson, including the subjects of the wedding, might not be able to see the difference of.
So your point really stands here.
However for anybody just a little bit involved the difference is huge. Simple things like depth of field can only be faked on small sensor because if physics.
HDR on phones also often look fake, imperfect and artificial. To the point that I think in 50 years people will try to fake it to get that "2020 look" as nowadays we try to get "film look of 60s".
I know I'm a weird person, but I never got the whole depth-of-field/bokeh thing. While I understand that some people want the "focus" to be the sharp center of attention, and perhaps other things to be less sharp, I never liked the "everything except the main object is super blurry" effect. In many cases, I want everything to be in focus so I can choose what to look at and enjoy.
As for HDR look, it's a bit difficult to say what neutral/normal is since it depends on SO many variables (including the brain of the viewer). So I would argue that your perception of the "fakeness" of phone HDR is because your mind is trained on images which look different. Even if there is a formal correct definition of ideal, in cases of relatively small differences it's kind of moot.
Plus, at my basic understanding I believe photogs shooting in raw are choosing to some degree how to interpret the data when they convert from RAW. Maybe they let the default converter choose, and maybe (probably) they make some choices of their own. So at this point there is no truth. There is just the subjective choices of the operator.
Even between camera/lens/software choices the results can be quite varied from what I've seen reading many camera tests, reviews, and comparisons.
Ultimately a human with a little training or some intuition/luck can make choices of how and where to shoot which probably have the greatest overall impact on the likeability of the image.
At the end of the day all these choices boils down the argument of photographer as artist vs photographer as documenter. The artists goal is to essentially decide what part they want you to focus on and how you should experince the scene so that they can elicit the emotional response they want. The documenter wants to show you as accurately and neutrally as possible what the actual scene looked like when the picture was taken. Which one you prefer is entirely dependant on what you think the purpose of a photograph should be.
The main reason is to draw your eye to the subject instead of the background. It’s also how our eyes work.
The third (related) reason is that the background often isn’t super controllable. If I’m taking portraits of someone in the woods I don’t want branches “coming out” of their heads, and those branches being blurry helps with that. At weddings if I’m photographing candids of a group of people blurring out everyone but the subject(s) is handy because people often make stupid faces. And don’t get me started on how messy bridal suites are where the girls are getting ready…
Sometimes people just don't have "a feeling" on why professional photos look like professional photos. It is all about composition, angles and stuff. Sensor size is not so important if you are taking a photo of landscape and showing it on instagram.
E.g.: https://smile.amazon.com/Zeadio-Stabilizing-Stabilizer-Panas...
More: https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=video+grip+iphone+rig&sprefix=v...
Sony tried a few years back, but then Sony got it the way...
One big advantage you have with dedicated hardware also is the reduced need to have a virtual interface (though UX is quite often in dire need to be improved on them, especially for advance configuration). A bit like knob are better in a car in a general way.
But to be honest, at the end, it's clearly a difference of philosophy. I'd wager that the smartphone maker have better understood the market than the camera maker for a while.
People confuse the post processing that Apple and Google do in the phone with the quality of the camera. It's impressive what they do and the quality of the raw images is actually not as bad as it used to be on most phones. But it's still a noisy mess compared to any decent pro-sumer camera of the last ten years or so. You don't need the same trickery to make those photos look good.
It's amazing what Apple and Google can do with the relatively limited form factor, sensor, lenses, etc. that phones have but when it comes to sensors, bigger is simply better and bigger requires more distance between the lens and the sensor. It's not the number of pixels that counts but their size and noise level.
My Fuji is fine as an entry level camera but the real deal here is full frame sensors and expensive lenses. It makes all the difference. Some of the lenses on the market today are so good that it's pointless owning them unless you can pair them with a very high end camera and sensor. Phone lenses are comparatively not really worth talking about. Owning such a lens almost automatically means you probably want to have full creative control. So, typical owners of such cameras and lenses are not looking for point and click cameras but are deeply into controlling all aspects of their photography.
Most manufacturers have put dslr development on halt or at least on the back-burner. The high end stuff is almost exclusively mirror less at this point.
Cameras can't do that, because their bigger sensors take longer to read out. There'd be too few frames, and too much gap between frames.
Big sensors are slowly getting faster, too, with stacked sensors and the like. But they're not quite fast enough yet for phone-style computational shenanigans.
https://petapixel.com/2013/09/04/sony-officially-debuts-two-... https://m.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-cybershot-dsc-qx100
https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/int/photography/zx1....
His pictures would systematically look "flatter", almost cartoonish. They were lacking a certain nuance in the colors, especially on larger swaths of similar colors (think the buttes in Monument Valley).
Its saving grace was that, out of camera, my sky was a tad lighter than you'd expect. The camera does have an HDR mode, but I basically never bother with it.
I have phone camera with 16x zoom range altogether, small kids and I strongly prefer making (sometimes) sub-ideal pics of almost all situations rather than a bit better pics of few of those. Often it does properly great photos. And much much much better videos. While weighting 200g and fitting (so-so) in my pocket.
I literally couldn't care less about mirrorless cameras, for me cameras are over.
And you never really know which photo will turn out so nice you later want to print it. Someone taking photos only on their phone won't have that option.
In the wall behind me I have a 4-foot wide print of a photo I took on vacation. It's a crop of a section of the photo that later (a few years later) I realized would make for a great print on the wall. Glad I took it with the DSLR, so a cropped section printed out to 4 feet looks stunning.
That being said I also just bring my pixel 3 for hikes and sport in general even though I own a few leicas, nikon, &c. weight is king sometimes
That would mean they look better to the majority of people who consume photos...
It was unreal, like someone had switched on the sun for a second. It’s grainy from the high ISO, but you can see full details in full colour and with the naked eye it’s as dark as a pool of black ink.
But the results of minutes-long exposures in the dark were absolutely crazy. Colors were very deep, and there was an incredible nuance in the tones of even the darkest corners.
Highly recommended to anyone not used with taking pictures in such conditions. This could even be tried in one's home at night. All the random LEDs shining around in the dark actually create an eerie atmosphere if you look long enough.
It does make you wonder if fullsized camera bodies will figure out better bracketing. Exposure time is really important, and you need good computation to align the images and correct for stability.
it's better to get it right during shooting than in post.
This. My 2016 Olympyus Pen-F does this (a small m43 mirrorless body). It takes 4 captures at different exposures and combines them in-camera. I don't usually use this mode, but the results aren't bad at all for snapshots.
It can also take up to 7 different exposures, but the user needs to combine those manually. This is the mode I use most often, since it allows me to tweak the result how I want.
I dare you to do sports photography in dimly lit situations on a phone.
Sports is the example I had on hand because it's one of the things I do most. But kids, pets, portraits, architecture, wildlife...
Right now, phones kick the butt of compact cameras when it comes to versatility, dynamic range and using AI to make photos appealing and sharp. If the quality can only be rivalled by a dSLR with a 2 kilogram $1500 lens, then that is a big plus point for the phone.
A bigger sensor and lens will always win.
What you should be looking at as a benchmark is cinema sensors with wide dynamic range like RED. You can get slightly better range from the iPhone by shooting RAW, but still far behind.
Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line.
> Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line.
I think this is fairly unlikely. It's a niche market, and there'll be no money to be made in selling $1k medium format cameras. For those who are buying high-end cameras (professionals mostly), the sensor size is just one of the factors determining the purchase. They care about build, weather-sealing, buttons, ports, write-speeds, battery etc - a $1k camera would have to compromise on all of those.
They are barely 1/2" in actual size. The iphone 14 pro sensor for example is 9.8x7.3mm.
When they call them "1/2 inch" or "3/4 inch", they refer to the diameter of a glass tube (ultra old measurement from the CRT days), not the physical size of the sensor. They only continue to name it like that to make people think their sensor is somewhat close to the Full-frame or APS-C that you get in a professional camera.
It's not the same market at all
Google really kicked off the computational photography space, Huawei made some leaps and bounds improvements to it, and now Apple is following up. Unfortunately thanks to US policies we don't have real competition to Apple since Huawei was kneecapped. Other Chinese companies learned their place.
I would love a versatile camera in a phone like what I have in my Chinese phone that cost under $500 - a 108mp camera with a large sensor, 3x and 5x telephoto zoom, and an ultrawide.
They already do something similar for MP3 players, so why the heck not in cameras.