If the reason is fancy post-processing, then why can't Nikon have a tiny lens like the iPhone 13 and just add fancy post-processing to it?
I think it's a great example of the phrase "took many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth". For any given editing task you want, there are like 5 different modules that all do basically different variations on the same thing, and each one has quirks that presumably only make sense to the original author of that module.
I don't know if it's "real" or not but between work and my personal life I've got decision fatigue. Help make decisions. Especially about non-important ones that feel important at the time.
It was pretty fascinating. I ended up doing a fair bit of independent research on the topic to see if it was just same sales BS or a known psychological phenomenon, and it turns out it's a well-known branch of psychology/sociology. (Not necessarily related to the Decision Fatigue / Ego Depletion theory which has been tough to replicate, but is probably true in some respect).
Coincidentally enough, I took that education to my next job, which was waiting tables, and it held up there very well. The key, in my opinion, is actually being deeply knowledgeable about the product so your recommendations are authentic. Bonus points if you use the product.
I wonder what kind of mansions they live in, because I've seen the same 20something dude have like 5 different washing machines and 7 different fridges at home =)
It seems like some table choices are better for the customer, some are better for the server. As a customer I like to be away from the other tables and the server wants everyone together in a noisy clump.
“Allow the illusion of choice”.
0. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2018/07/31/br...
1. https://mediaroom.iese.edu/new-research-shows-why-the-human-...
Though of course deep sky photographers do actually just this - many exposures composited together - but then we are talking about subjects so dim you need effective exposures of 30 minutes or so.
A bit of a digression but the reason why phones need so many exposures to get a decent low light image is due to their sensors/optics being relatively poor at low light. You would only need a small fraction of the exposures from a modern pro-grade camera to generate a comparable final image. This also lets you capture objects in motion in low light far, far better since you can get your required image data in a smaller temporal window.
This assumes the (typically Gaussian) noise is applied to a static image. Arguably, one could exploit the slight shakiness in a handheld shot to create an image with even less noise.
As a thought experiment, consider thousands of shots of a perfectly static scene made with an idealized, noiseless camera that is moved a very tiny amount for each shot. You could continue improving the resolution of a generated, composite image quite a bit until warping due to camera displacement became noticeable.
Recent techniques like this are actually being used for cryo-electron microscopy to create extremely high-resolution imaging of proteins.
Textures can also throw them off - "amplification" of the texture effect, almost.
They also suffer a bit zoomed in.
The post-processing fixes a lot of problems of older phone cameras but it has its limits.
On good camera hardware there's very little that all that post-processing would add outside of extreme-high-ISO-noise, IMO. Which - would it be nice? Sure. But you can find software and stack exposures manually and such for those situations too.
And a lot of the other smart stuff gets fooled too easily.
It's useful for cases of "you're noise reduction is fucking with my texture" in decent lighting or similar, but in lower light I haven't found it to be a worthwhile tradeoff.
The DSLR images also retain much more detail in cropping.
Nikon just expects you to handle that post processing part that your iPhone is doing for you. In exchange you get way more control over the final image.
Both devices are aimed at different people. I myself have an iPhone 13 pro and a Nikon Z6ii. I tend to take snapshots with my iPhone because getting out the Nikon + playing around with sliders in Capture One is just too much hassle for a snapshot. Now would I take the iPhone and do a landscape photo where I hiked 6 hours to the photo location at 3 a.m. in the morning? Probably not. ;)
You'd be surprised how little megapixels are just fine for putting up on a wall or billboard. It's all about how far away the viewer is.
The mirrorless photos will look much better on a laptop or bigger screen but about the same on a phone.
Capturing non-raw in my experience (iPhone 6S, now have 13 mini) the jpegs are heavily de-noised, and really don't look that good 1:1 on a large monitor: on the iphone screen they look very good, as they're downsampled.
The article mentions the 'watercolor' effect since the iPhone 8, but I definitely had the issue with all the jpegs taken on my iPhone 6S since 2015...
DNGs however DO look very good, so clearly the sensor is capable of pretty nice images.
Try taking a portrait photo in iffy lighting, like at a concert, wedding, sporting event, etc. Something that really needs a fast and sharp lens.
iPhones apply filters to make the photos look more vivid and to make them "ready to share". If a professional camera would do that, it would not be professional.
This does annoy many people who then switch to Snow/BeautyCam to actually take their pictures since they want to look prettier.
There seems to be an assumption here that dedicated cameras* always shoot in raws you can spend your time editing later, but that's not the case. If I shoot a concert or wedding and want to return the photos the next day, and in-camera JPEG or HEIF looks good, I'm shooting that.
* you can't make me say "DSLR", they aren't all DSLRs
See also https://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/news-archives/nikon-201... and https://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/news-archives/nikon-201...
Phone makers put the processng power at the post processing of photos, for people who never do their own post processing.
Both approaches are equally valid, they simply aim at different markets. And as far as softeare vs. physics goes, no amount of software and processing power can overcome the laws of optics.
The point of such a camera is not the in camera processing, which most pro users would not use on principle. Instead it's gaining a lot of control over setting up the shot properly with a lot of control over all the parameters that matter to achieve a look that matches what you want, intentionally. And then you finish the job in post processing. There's reason these things have so many buttons and dials: you need to use them to get the most out of the camera. And the point of owning such a camera is having that level of control. The flip side is that that makes you responsible for the intelligence. That kind of is the whole point. If that's not what you wanted, you bought the wrong camera.
The iphone has a very limited set of controls. You actually have very little control over it. Nice if that's what you want and the AI is awesome. But it's also a bit limiting if you want more. Of course it's very nice when that's the camera you have and you want to take a shot quickly by just pointing and clicking. Nothing wrong with that. I have a Pixel 6 and a Fuji X-T30. I use them both but not the same way.
Probably one of the biggest mistakes people make: not understanding at what aperture their lens is sharpest - typically stopping the lens down too much.
Other mistakes: not using a fast enough shutter speed to eliminate blurring from mirror slap (or using anti-mirror-slap features in their camera), not using a sufficiently sturdy tripod and mount, and so on.
Also, sometimes lenses just don't leave the factory in very good shape. If you struggle to get sharp results, it may be beneficial to send it in for service. The stuff sent around to reviewers has been obsessed over by the manufacturer, perfectly tweaked on a lens testing bench to get it as close to perfect as they can.
What people often mean by similar statements is they like default phone processing compared to 0 in the camera, and there is enough detail due to tons of light and due to landscapes being generally easiest scene to shoot.
As for why they are not comparable, also a very strange question from seemingly experienced photo shooter - compare software development department and budget in Apple vs Nikon, who is a tiny player we all love (have D750 since it came out and carried it everywhere up to 6000m), they use very specialized CPUs which are very good for 1 thing only (basic operations on raw sensor data and potential jpeg transformation), and various ML and stacking transformations aren't simply available there at performance required. The whole construction of camera and processing hardware isn't around snapping 30 pics and combining them together under 1s, pre-taking pictures before actually hitting shutter etc.
Apple ate their lunches and then some. While I'm an old-school photographer who thinks a great SLR camera is the photographic equivalent of driving a Porsche, I don't miss carrying pounds of gear around. (OTOH I HATE the Ux of iPhones for photography.) I digress. The camera biz is a classic biz school study in humans being human.
Now try to do sports photography with a mobile phone.
The first problem is lack of zoom compared to a 200mm lens. The second issue is trying to get the 1/8000 exposure you need on a rainy football field you need to stop the action for a good photo.
Likely a Z6 from the price point you mentioned. It has 24 MP (instead of iPhone 13's 12MP) and a much much higher dynamic range (more than 11 steps vs an iPhone's about 8). So unless you don't know what you're doing the Nikon is a way better camera (as it should be. It ways 5x as much with lens)
Autocorrect RAW in Adobe Photoshop looks good. And certainly on a 4k monitor the DSLR images reveal more detail.
My post here has me realizing I need to take iPhone and DSLR shots side-by-side in the same place with the same lighting and begin to compare them in-camera and in post-processing.
this is bad advice.... shoot on a tripod and set your f stop to get the DOF you need or do a focus stack, f/5.6 would work if your shooting a distant landscape but having anything in the foreground f5.6 would not be enough, i usually stay at around F10 any higher i don't like because diffraction starts to reduce image quality and if i need more DOF i just focus stack
for ISO set it to 100 or what ever your cameras base ISO is
then adjust your shutter speed until you get correct exposure
As for the exposure you can just use aperture priority with your ISO set to the base ISO. On a Nikon camera you'd actually want to be at 64. If the scene doesn't have challenging highlights then going under the base ISO or overexposing will provide even better results.
Popular notion is that at f/11 only will diffraction start to affect you, but with modern high resolution cameras diffraction starts to creep in as early as f/9, so f/5.6 is generally best unless you really need the deeper field. You're probably going to be fine at 24MP, though.
That's a challenge, I think. Take an R5 (only because I'm most familiar with it).
47 megapixels, 12 bpp 211.5MB, maximum shutter speed of 1/8000. In other words, you need to be able to pull data off the sensor (and to be clear, there's parallelization available, I just don't know what) at a global rate of 1.6TB/s.
And I'm sure there is multiple processing paths - I just don't know the fine details about how that raw data is slurped off the sensor.
Not sure what I'd need frame rates above 100 for stills so, but that's just me, because it sure is cool.
It's a 20 MP micro 4/3 sensor - so 1/4 the surface area of "full-frame".
Edit: I should compare file size, usong the same settings, between a D700 and D300. Same MP, same camera basically, one being FF and one being DX. Or someone with more knowledge on sensors and digital cameras can answer the question.
(Which requires a lot of patience, but an old one would be cheaper than a new camera. Though renting is always an option.)
edit: changed "sensor sizes" to "sensor areas" for clarity.
iPhone photos are excellent as long as viewers are only seeing them on iPhones.
"HDR stacking" apps are actually "SDR tone mapping" apps; they /start/ with an HDR result and make it not HDR anymore!
If a users needs are being met by an iPhone then they shouldn't worry about dslrs.
If a users needs aren't being met by the dslr gotta wonder is it the technology or the skill of the user?
But the idea of enhancing filters or social media features is completely alien to them.
Edit: Apologies for commenting on downvotes, but I'd be genuinely curious to see some objective evidence that the optics of a typical DSLR lens have a superior design. Of course it is true that larger lenses for larger sensors tend to be superior because they do not need to resolve as many lines per mm and they do not need to be machined as precisely (all else being equal). But does anyone know of any actual lab tests that make relevant comparisons? I am a bit tired of people just assuming that DLSR lenses are higher quality than smartphone lenses, even though the cost of modern smartphones, and the enormous disparity in the number of units sold, makes it far from obvious that this should be the case.
This is not really true to a very great extent once you take depth of field into account. At least, it would be helpful if you could indicate what it is exactly that you take the laws of physics to imply in this context. I made a comment here that's relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33426540
I took 'superior optics' to be a claim of greater sophistication or higher quality, but perhaps that is not what was meant, and the poster was merely referring to the difference in size.
A 14mm wide-angle lens with a primary opening of 2mm is never going to let in the same amount of light as a 14mm wide-angle with a 114mm primary opening will. Ratio of the sensor size has nothing to do with the ability of the light entering the front lens. There are some adapters that are known as speed boosters that reduce the exit pupil for full frame lenses that will actually add a stop to the lens.
I'm aware of that – that's the point I made in my post that I linked. But DoF considerations entail that you can't just keep arbitrarily increasing the size of the opening.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1akuK5v_PB8DwzDnJC1oJXOETr_S...
Without getting too much into subjective territory, I am personally tired of the bokeh obsession. There's nothing inherently interesting about photos with blurry backgrounds (see above for confirmation!) And if you want background blur, achieving it using software effects is perfectly legitimate.
Congrats! You took a bad photo with a shallow depth of field! I guess the photographer does matter more than the equipment.
> Achieving it with software effects is perfectly legitimate
Sure you can. But if you think software bokeh can compete with any dedicated camera bokeh (even a vintage 35mm camera for that matter) than you need to try and use a dedicated camera with a good prime lens, ie 50mm f/2.
The biggest thing that a dedicated camera can get you is simply options. You can choose the depth of field of the shot. You can choose the shutter speed. You can choose the focal length. Sure you have some control over these things in some apps, but it’s not the same level of control.
I shot on my iPhone for years, but after I got my mirrorless camera I have taken so many pictures that never would have been possible on an iPhone.
It is true that a dedicated camera gives you more options. (I did not deny this.)
>You can choose the shutter speed
Pedantic point: you can also choose the shutter speed on a cell phone camera if you use one of many apps that give manual control over shutter speed and ISO.