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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Mine don't (iPhone 13 Pro Max, Fuji XT-2 and various lenses). They do in daylight, sure, but things like sunrise/sunset or unusual colors throw them off like crazy.

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.

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I hate when you get one of those amazing sunsets where the whole sky changes color, but the phone auto-correct removes/corrects the color tone.

You can shoot in raw on iphones now to prevent this or fix it later.

Thanks, but now doesn't do me any good then

The sun will come up tomorrow, there was a whole song about it.

Capturing raw on iPhone in a low-light situation shows you just how far the sensors have to come if you aren't throwing the whole bag of software magic at it, in my experience.

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.

On recent iPhones Apple has added "ProRAW" which retains a lot of the magic processing without losing the ability to make a lot of adjustments you'd do on RAW photos like white balance correction.

Turn off auto white balance and set it to "daylight", problem solved.

This is true. I should have added "in good light".

The DSLR images also retain much more detail in cropping.

And even moderate optical telephoto lenses are pretty powerful tools as well—especially in poorer light.

I used to use a phone as my backup camera when I was out doing bird photography. After a while I gave up. In variable light and high dynamic range conditions phones just don’t hold up (they do a better job with video). If you’re taking snapshots, nothing better than a phone.

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