Surprisingly, picture quality was on par. Low-light, stabilization, everything. I sold my DSLR since.
APS-C sensors aren't relevant anymore, only full-frames can beat smartphones nowadays.
I have both a X-Pro 3 and a X-T30 for street photography and both shoot much, much superior pictures than any smartphone is capable of...
APS-C is still pretty relevant, your old DSLR might not be up to par to latest smartphone cameras though. And the image processing done by smartphones using AI tend to create weird and ugly artefacts depending on conditions, that doesn't happen with my mirrorless cameras, for example.
Have you tried printing smartphone pictures and compare them to your DSLR shots?
For me it's the opposite, show how smartphones are better than the current crop of mirrorless APS-C as this is the extraordinary claim requiring evidence.
When I get some time I might shoot some comparison pictures, but if I don't: remember that I'm not here to serve your demands, I'm sorry.
I have used an iPhone SE and a mirrorless M4/3 camera to photograph a sheet of paper containing barcodes of varying sizes (including some with bars less than 1 pixel wide). I then checked which barcodes were readable in the resulting image.
The light levels were the same, both cameras were positioned and zoomed so the target took up the entire image, and both cameras were supported on a tripod.
I expected the M4/3 camera would blow the iPhone out of the water with its much larger lens, bigger sensor, and higher price. But no, the iPhone's image had marginally more readable barcodes.
Modern smartphone camera performance is just crazy, for the sensor size.
Protocol: handheld at 10 PM, 10 shots each, at different ISOs, picked the best one
The bottlenecks are different, but the sharpness is comparable.
- The DSLR was limited by optics, it's blurrier with some chromatic aberration
- The Phone has strong AI processing, I wish I disabled itIt's still over-sharpened and probably used multiple shots to get high dynamic range, it's much more noisy too, and shows less resolution
Also the d5500 is a lower tier camera from 2015, the phone was released in 2021
Yes there's HDR bracketing, but we only care about the result.
One is blurry (optics), the other has artifacts (AI), but overall sharpness is similar.
Depends on what you need, of course, but for most people the photo from the phone is superior.
- The X-Pro 3 is $2k, not what I call middle-end.
- I agree on the aggressive AI processing. Fortunately I could disable it.
- It was a Nikon D5500. I used the 18-55 kit lens, but f/1.8 prime lenses can do better indeed, at the cost of switching lenses all day.
- I compared on my 27" screen, no difference, even in low-light scenarios and at different ISOsThe D5300 is pretty old, I had one in 2013-2014, coming from a D3200.
> - I compared on my 27" screen, no difference, even in low-light scenarios and at different ISOs
This might be the main difference between us, I usually do prints in A3+ sizes and the differences in picture quality between a smartphone and my cameras are very noticeable.
The A72 and D5500 have the same used price.
Again, I understand the price point but it's an oddball comparison. Perhaps a comparison between the A72 and a Fujifilm X-E2 could tell us more but I don't have either devices to directly compare myself :/
Because people who find their 2022 smartphone outperforming their 2015 DSLR don't upgrade to a 2022 DSLR.
Fuji uses the same sensors on many cameras, you can get an xt-2 or xe-3 for much cheaper, with the same sensor
But once you take RAW photos and hit the Auto button in Lightroom, the Pixel doesn't hold a chance against the D5300.
Did you do a real image diff on the same setup? I doubt it. Phone cameras have come a long, long way but a lot of the advances are through "smoothing" things out through software.
I've done 6 years of professional photography to pay for college. Portrait shoots, weddings, even produced videos, ads, festivals, wildlife documentaries. I worked on Nikon D4S fullframes. How is my age relevant ?
My point is, professionals squeeze extra juice of the hardware, but the average consumer does not.
Almost certainly this is not true. It seems far more likely to me that perceived image quality after in device post processing was similar.
A lot of the quality of smartphone cameras comes from their software, which does a really good job at using the sensor data to create good images. Cameras sold to photographers do not do that, or not as much. This is by design, if you are a photographer (someone who is interested in the process of photography) these corrections are something you really do not want, as they remove your ability to manually control these corrections later.
You are actually comparing two different types of images and it is quite unsurprising that the DSLR did not "win".
But that is hardly a shocker ... when will we get better desktop tools to recomupte photos?
As I said. This is by design.
>when will we get better desktop tools to recomupte photos?
Lightroom has already various AI features. What can lightroom not control manually what Google does automatically.
Darktable is the FOSS alternative, although not as advanced.
https://skylum.com/luminar-ai is probably the closest I have seen
The camera itself. Smartphones shoot several frames with different settings at different times, they may have a time of flight sensor to estimate distance, plenoptic features, etc... These can be fed into algorithms specifically trained on that camera and that can take advantage of all these extra data.
DSLRs can do things like bracketing, but external software doesn't have nearly as much control.
This article is about the general public, not us, the HN crowd which love to push hardware to the limit. Which is the historical definition of hacking btw :)
Instead of shooting at 1/8 or 1/15 in low light it could "just" shoot images at 1/125 or even 1/1000 then compensate for minute movements of the camera to get perfect sharpness, and then merge them to denoise it, and boom, near-noise-free, near blur free (just the blur from target movement, not the photographer) image in low-light.
>Instead of shooting at 1/8 or 1/15 in low light it could "just" shoot images at 1/125 or even 1/1000 then compensate for minute movements of the camera to get perfect sharpness, and then merge them to denoise it, and boom, near-noise-free, near blur free (just the blur from target movement, not the photographer) image in low-light.
There is absolutely nothing stopping a DSLR or large format camera user from doing exactly that. This is also a very common procedure in astro photography where dozens of such photos are stacked to capture objects in the sky. This doesn't happen on the camera of course, but a photographer wouldn't want it to happen anyways.
I think you entirely missed the point of a digital large format camera. The user does not want the camera doing post processing. The user wants the camera to capture technically excellent images and process them manually.
The difference between a phone and a large format camera in this case is that the photographer can choose to take such a photo and he can process it on a high performance machine with manual intervention. This is absolutely not a problem with the camera.
I want this, I don't want to spend time in front of a laptop doing post processing.
The intersection of people who want to spend a significant of money on something they already have (a camera) to get a version which allows them fine grained control and technically excellent results, but then don't care how the results are processed after they pressed the shutter is almost zero.
A modern large format camera is for people interested in photography. If you do not care about photography, but care about getting decent enough pictures with each press on the capture button, those cameras are not for you.
I won't tell you what to do or don't but that market segment is probably not very large...
People just want pictures that look good. I don't want to shoot bracketed shots then combine them together in photoshop so I can get the same dynamic range as my phone. I don't want to take 20 pictures at a time of my kids hoping to get that one moment where they looked at the camera when my Iphone has live photo mode.
All r&d is being developed for the small sensor sizes. New stacked CMOS sensors will come to phones first because that is where the money is at. Phone cameras next year may surpass capabilities of mirrorless/dslr cameras in terms of dynamic range with a single picture.
I really don't understand why camera manufactures aren't investing in software. What they are doing now isn't working. I am planning to go on vacation for the winter holiday and this may be first year in a long time that i don't bring my dedicated camera(right now a Sony A7III) because my IPhone 14 just takes good pictures.
Some of them are. Olympus (now OM System) in particular has been emphasizing in-camera stacking features that take advantage of the fast sensor readout and very effective image stabilization they can achieve with a smaller sensor than most.
Those features aren't like the smartphone magic "make my picture look good" though. They're more manual and creative than that, like "let me take long exposures in bright light without filters" or "I want to paint light onto this dark scene with a flashlight". They produce a sort of raw file (it's obviously not simple raw sensor data at this point) suitable for further manual processing if desired. People not taking photography seriously as a job or an art form won't get much out of that, and most everyone else prefers the convenience of a phone.
That’s just what they said. The purpose of cameras is to produce images we find pleasing, for a few different values of “pleasing” (recording memories, aesthetics, etc).
Nobody cares about the “how”. Whether it’s a photographer with an MFA doing pixel-by-pixel adjustments on a RAW image or an algorithm in an ISP, nobody cares.
Ok, not nobody, but no casual user, which is 99.99% of the market. For most of us, we take a picture and look at the picture. Insisting that one technology is better even though it produces no user benefit is missing the point.
That's kind of my point. If you just care about getting a good enough result you do not want a camera which is producing images which are good on a technical level. And comparing technically good images to post processed images is essentially pointless. I am not sure about the 0.01% every person who ever used lightroom or similar software has wanted something from a picture their camera did not give them. And even if the number is correct, there still are people who see photography as a creative endeavour and who want images which are easy to edit and not heavily preprocessed. If you aren't one of them your phone is likely more than good enough already and there is nothing wrong with that.
Not to mention that phones have awful ergonomics.
(I use an RX-0, which at first glance seems to fit that bill, but doesn't really: it's an extremely small movie camera that only pretends to be a very small compact for addressing a wider audience than it deserves)
But sharing the pictures is a pain, the UI is hard for beginners. And the most important ergonomic of all : it's easier to grab my phone than the 1-pound DSLR.
Even Canon and Nikon abandoned the DSLR format, the digital photography world has embraced mirrorless, it's much more compact and the only thing you lose is the analog viewfinder through the mirror. For me it wasn't a loss at all.
I've been a hobby photographer for almost 15 years, had DSLRs, full-frames and ended on mirrorless exactly because I needed something compact and light to carry around.
All cameras (compact to SLR does post processing) other than for RAW format. And infact even for RAW format SLR cannot beat modern flagship phones [1] [2].
[1] Apple ProRAW https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/iphone/iphae1e882a3/io...
[2] Samsung's 'Expert RAW' https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-use-samsung-expert-r...
Total nonsense. Of course a modern medium or full format camera outperforms any phone on technical aspects.
What is described is those article is the same as a normal raw that DLSR have been doing for decades. Adding the word "expert" or "apple" in front of the name doesn't make your RAW files magically better.
The only advantage for the smartphone here is that it's more user-friendly to edit the RAW files directly on the phone in one click compared to importing your photos in a software like Photoshop Lightroom
Understanding Apple ProRAW
https://petapixel.com/2020/12/21/understanding-apple-proraw/
Excerpt:
ProRAW has one more surprise up its sleeve. A few years ago, Apple began using neural networks to detect interesting parts of an image, such as eyes and hair. Apple uses this to, say, add sharpening to only clouds in the sky. Sharping faces would be quite unflattering.
ProRAW files contain these maps!
Of all the dumb things in this thread, this has to be the pinnacle!
(Clouds are inherently fuzzy)
To be sure though, out of convenience I pretty much only take my phone on vacations. (Well, and an old medium-format TLR film camera just for the odd novelty photo — but it only ever leaves the van when I think I have a subject best suited for it. Oh, ha ha, and I have a stereo digital camera in the glove box that gets similar treatment.)
The other two lenses have 1/3.5" and 1/2.55" sensors.
That said, I don’t have the experience of phones being "good enough", and even my Sony RX100 (edit: was "RX1", my bad) first gen which is quite old is out-performing 99% of the smartphone market in picture quality on a good screen, if you exclude HDR.
The smartphone does pretty well in most other situations that don't involve fast movement in poor lighting.
Sometimes my Pixel 4a renders something which looks decent, sometimes it gives me oversharpened photos with unnatural colors, like the iphone photo. Let's not even mention the AI generated fake details, which look horrible to me 99.99% of the time.
If only they weren't so anti-repair as to heavily glue their batteries in.
Even my ~15 years old Nikon D40 easily beats my 2022 phone in photo quality.
Better lenses are more expensive than my phone though.