Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Camera manufacturers are institutionally incapable of writing good software.

I have experience with Sony, and their firmware barely changed in the last decade. Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work. Touch screens are from a bygone era: laggy, imprecise, and without multi-touch. They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos came out sharp. Their phone apps are a clunky afterthought.

Smartphones are running circles around them with computational photography. "HDR" mode on Sony cameras is slow and primitive. I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time.

I can't speak for cameras specifically, but my partner is Taiwanese and apparently this hardware/software dichotomy is extremely prevalent there as well. Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke. Thus, the best and most talented engineers go into hardware, and the jokers work in software, leading to this "good hardware, bad software" observed outcome and reinforcing the stereotype further. Rinse, repeat, and you eventually end up with decent hardware running absolutely garbage firmware.

Given the social cross-pollination between Japan and Taiwan, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar pattern held true there as well.

That's a bit odd. Are they unaware of the last 30 years of computer history?

Even as someone with a background in mechanical engineering the degree of complexity behind some software products, such as Windows, is really impressive.

(Probably a rhetorical question, but...)

It's hard to overcome preconceived notions. As we know from politics, emotions are much stronger than logic. You can't simply say, "be logical!" or "change your view".

I suspect "hardware is real engineering" is really just "hardware engineering is where you can find prestigious employment in this country".

It used to be quite similar in South Korea until the more recent rise of domestic software giants like Naver and Kakao Corp.

In a lot of the East Asian countries, there is a large gap in desirability between the large, established employers and smaller companies due to outrageous differences in pay grade, benefits and job stability. So new business has a tougher time making it to escape velocity and offering significant numbers of jobs.

+1. I have vague memories of my time at a Japanese automation vendor out of the uni. I had quit out of frustration that the software was super buggy, there was no one to help except just a couple of people in Japan who knew the software but would not reply to emails. I also remember feeling neglected as folks working on the hardware or on customer projects were paid higher than me.

A recent experience at a neobanking startup from SE Asia reaffirms the point. Despite the product built around an API-only model, the firm was operations heavy when it came to decision making and investing in people, as it was believed to be the core company strength (for a variety of reasons including the institutional bureaucracy, corruption in these markets, etc.)

TL;DR people work where the money flows. Companies get what they pay for. And the investors pay for what they think is the strength or is likely to sell at inflated valuations.

I too have a background in Mechanical Engineering and while many software products are complex I wouldn’t categorize all of them as engineering projects in the historical sense of the word. That’s not to say there are not quality software products that satisfy real businesses requirements. But it is to say that a lot of software projects would be WAY too expensive if they were engineered the way a passenger jet or a skyscraper was engineered.

The software development field is quite new compared to the other engineering disciplines and many, many decisions are made on gut feel, intuition or out right personal preference. Alan Kay has some very good talks on this specific subject, referring to the current state of our field as a Cargo Cult.

However, I would also say firmware would be the least expensive to engineer because the requirements for that type of software are better known and more rigid.

Automotive and other mixed-criticality systems is where these two worlds butt together and have a lot to learn from each other.

Mech eng processes on one side, ASIL-style safety requirements in the middle, and someone wishing to pour a bucket load of Android apps into the same computer from the other end.

Are they ever really "the same computer"? I don't think that's true even in entirely software-mediated-control vehicles like Teslas.

The discipline of robotics (which is really what you're talking about here — cars are just very manually-micromanaged robots these days) is all about subsumptive distributed architectures: e.g. the wheels in an electric car don't need a control signal to tell them to brake if they're skidding; they have a local connection to a skid sensor that allows them to brake by themselves, and they instead need a control signal to stop braking in such a situation.

This is why, in anything from planes to trains to cars, you see the words "auxiliary" or "accessory" used to describe infotainment displays et al — the larger systems are architected such that even an electrical fault (e.g. dead short) in the "accessory" (non-critical) systems can't impact QoS for the "main" (critical) systems.

I really can't imagine a world where they've got engineers building the car that understand that, but who are willing to let Android apps run on the same CPU that's operating the car. They'd very clearly insist for separate chips; ideally, separate logic boards, connected only by opto-isolated signals and clear fault-tolerant wire protocols.

> Are they ever really "the same computer"?

In short: Yes.

The point you're making is valid in general and you provide valuable context. A modern car does have many different computers, and there is a lot of intentional partitioning (and even some redundancy) into different CPUs, as well as guests under hypervisors.

For example, a typical headunit computer (the "infotainment computer") tends to contain two to three SoCs performing different duties, and one or two of them will run hypervisors with multiple guest operating systems. And that is just one of multiple computers of that weight class in the overall car architecture.

That said, there's an overall drive to integrate/consolidate the electrical architecture into fewer, beefier systems, and you do now encounter systems where you have mixed criticality within a single computational partition, e.g. a single Linux kernel running workloads that contribute both to entertainment and safety use cases. One specific driver is that they sometimes share the same camera hardware (e.g. a mixed-mode IR/RGB camera doing both seat occupancy monitoring tasks and selfies).

Safety-vs-not-safety aside, you also simply have different styles of development methodology (i.e. how do you govern a system) run into each other within the same partition. AUTOSAR Adaptive runs AUTOSAR-style apps right next to your POSIX-free-for-all workloads on the same kernel, for example.

What however is typically not the case in that scenario is that the safety workload in a partition is the only contributor to its safety use case, i.e. typically you will always have another partition (or computer) also contribute to assure an overall safe result.

In more auto terms, you might now have ASIL B stuff running alongside those Android apps on the same kernel, but you will still have an ASIL D system somewhere.

In general, you will start to see more of both in cars: More aviation- and telco-style redunancy and fault tolerance, and more mixed criticality. The trends are heading in both directions simultaneously.

> I don't think that's true even in entirely software-mediated-control vehicles like Teslas.

Tesla has been in the media for bugs such as flipping tracks on your Bluetooth-tethered phone or opening the wrong website in the headunit web browser rebooting the Instrument Cluster display. This is an example of mixed-criticality (done wrong). Many other cars are not architected quite as poorly. However, IC and HU/central displays sharing the same computer (not necessarily the same computational partition/guest OS) is increasingly common.

I believe that a part of the problem with software engineering is the "we can always fix this later" mindset.

Even during development, the only cost of iterating over errors until you get it right is just time.

But HW engineers just don't have the luxury of making 100 iterations of a product until it works, nor the safety net of "we'll update it over the internet". They must put a lot of effort into testing and verification until they say "ok, this is good, let's ship it."

Also, failure modes of mechanical products are often known and intuitive.

I am guessing that before the advent of Internet, the average quality of shipped software was higher on average. Nobody would dare ship a hot mess like Battlefield 2042 if they knew it's the last version they ship.

I have family members who consider themselves "real engineers" compared to me, an SWE. They have backgrounds in Mechanical and other "traditional" engineering fields.

About once a quarter I am subject to conversations where they remark condescendingly about how flabbergasted they are at SWE salaries. I stopped engaging beyond "Mmm if you're interested you should learn more about the field".

This interaction is beyond grating and is detrimental to our relationships.

Yep, sounds like one of those "agree to disagree" topics. Or diffuse using mild humor, like you have tried. Or redirect, and blame supply and demand, or social media.

> perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away

In traditional engineering, there's at least a BOM and manufacturing processes that create pressure to keep things simpler. If physical items were engineered like software, you'd have people bolting a keyboard onto the monitor chassis they're designing because they needed an 'on' button, and keyboards have buttons. Obviously they'd then also have to add in an always-on raspberry pi to plug the USB keyboard into and emit a GPIO signal when the button is pressed. You'd get a lot more complexity, but for most of it, "impressive" would be the wrong word.

That's a pretty insightful analogy!

Bolting an entire keyboard on to a monitor to add a single extra button...

Thankfully the cost of adding physical atoms prevents such outrageously dumb ideas.

The IBM S390 HMC (Hardware Management Console) is basically a thinkpad bolted on the massive S390 case.

I think part of it is that hardware is tangible, software isn't, so for some reason people resent being expected to pay for software. Building software thus has less legitimacy in some peoples' minds. I see this in the retro computing scene: people will quite happily fork over large amounts of cash to have an old bit of kit repaired, or buy a newly-developed expansion for old hardware, but those same people - even the people doing the repairs and building the new hardware - can be incredibly hostile to the idea of someone asking for money in return for new software for those old platforms.

Why is this still true? I can understand in the past, but after the rise of all the tech companies and obvious important software they use everyday (Android and iOS) how can anyone at this point think software is a joke and lesser than hardware?

I still hear the occasional joke from greybeards about JS and frontend being terrible so it seems like it's just taken to an extreme there.

Just because it’s terrible doesn’t mean the haters have to suck at it. It makes the opinion more valuable if you’re good at something and then criticize the bad parts.

These are orthogonal. You can believe software is important and a great area to work in, and still think JS and frontend is terrible. In fact, the two are often correlated!

If you think frontends, as a general category, are terrible, and backend software, as a general category, is more "serious", "real", or "important", you have precisely the mindset that produces theoretically useful gadgets that are ruined by poor user interfaces.

As a HMI guy myself, I would agree with you. :-)

In general, I think any engineering community that congregates around a particular set of issues is just trying their best to address their needs and build solutions to their problems, and it's important to respect those. Rather than being dismissive, exposure and cross-pollination is how we lift the boat together.

There is a difference between thinking that the front-end ecosystems are terrible to work in and thinking that they are unimportant.

That's not the point OP was making. On the contrary, you have to believe that frontends are important to be really mad about how terribly they are made.

JS and frontend are terrible and you'll hear this loudest from frontend people themselves. It's an entire industry built purely around the inertia of an unexpectedly wildly successful product.

I think it's worth noting that the Web ate software largely because the ergonomics for new devs are vastly superior to building native apps, and can be used cross platform without downloading binaries. What language is easier to get moving in? If writing cross platform native apps was as easy as using a single html file with a script tag, they would be more in vogue.

To accommodate the greater scope of the web the language has evolved. It's fast, supports multiple paradigms, and never makes breaking changes, so your code will run the same 20 years from now.

Yes, absolutely.

Put another way: Systems with great benefits are able to survive their great failings.

This dynamic explains most "inexplicable" situations where something seemingly terrible in certain specific ways enjoys continued success.

> and never makes breaking changes, so your code will run the same 20 years from now.

But only if you can get it to work in all browsers and derivatives today, including their versions of the last 20 years.

Is this a real issue? I doubt the average new coder needs to worry about supporting 20 year old browsers today. I've never worked at a company that needed to support ie8 or whatever.

The issue is that the recent growth in the software field has caused people that would otherwise major in something else, and aren’t really interested in software, to be your coworkers and they don’t care about doing a good job. There are some areas of software which would be benefited (lower cost over time) to apply an engineering mindset. That’s not what happens with agile. The whole ethos is about being able to change the design around, shipping MVPs and quick iteration. In hardware it has to be correct when you ship it , leading to a more methodological approach. As a result, some software work in comparison to hardware work can come off as sloppy.

Define recent? I remember "too many new people are just chasing money in IT" already being a well-established trope 25 years ago, long before Agile or most of the modern stacks were even a thing.

It is true but the general interest level and attention to detail in industry is not what it once was. By recent, I want to say around 2012-2013+.

While software is important, quality of software is usually not. There regularly are articles and comments on HN about how common software dev practices would not fly in real engineering.

Real engineering would be the same if they got to ignore the laws of physics more often.

Also people get oddly grouchy if buildings fall down on them.

My GPU drivers crash and take out my entire computer about once a night (AMD Windows drivers are just..... abysmal) and I just grumble.

If a tiny local bridge collapses, with nobody on it, it probably still is newsworthy and people get upset.

Millions of bridges have been built in human history, but only a handful of GPU drivers.

The bridge doesn’t need to withstand the river suddenly turning into lava or the atmosphere becoming sulphuric. The driver has to be prepared for whatever Windows and the hardware put up.

I think this would change overnight if management were actually held accountable for quality. Right now all the incentives are on ship fast, ship early, ship often. A PM who delays a release to fix bugs (is a hero IMHO, but) looks terrible to management higher up. The PM who rushes to market looks good, even if the reputation of the company as a whole suffers because they shipped crap.

Why wouldn't it be true? All the software that ate the world did so from a very small number of places. Outside those few focal points of software wealth, if an area isn't essentially preindustrial, whatever is happening there related to hardware will greatly outshine any local software endeavors.

In those tech companies, that knowledge has arrived. Of course, among software people, similar is true, because who doesn't like being told they are important and valued. But there are various kinds of "tech" companies. Ones founded by hardware people and EEs, where the key innovation that made the company big was in hardware design. And ones founded by software people in their dorm room or something like that. Usually companies from the latter category offer respect to software engineering, while companies from the former category see it as a cost center and something that ideally you'd out source.

DSLR manufacturers got big by making great cameras. They didn't really feel the need for making good software. Compare this to Google which got big by implementing a clever algorithm and using distributed computing.

Most hardware companies are decades old and so are most of their established competitors. Until one of the old guard breaks rank or a new competitor manages to break into the industry using software as a clear competitive advantage (i.e. Tesla), the success of tech in general means nothing to them.

It doesn’t even matter how big the companies are or if they’re a “hardware” company. All the lumberyards in my area still use DOS era machines that I’m not even sure are networked. I know that at least one of them runs the whole thing by printing the day’s transactions from each computer and paying a secretary for data entry into their similarly ancient accounting/inventory management software. Cost of land and fuel overwhelm labor costs in the lumber business so there’s zero incentive to even try

In europe management is considered more important. Its all bullshit indeed.

If they design cameras from the users perspective and expectations there is still a lot of room to take on phones.

I just want to shoot, possibly edit, publish the images on my server and have some api to make the appropriate database entries.

In stead I have to hook up the cam over usb then pretend it is a slow drive??? Oh and the battery is draining while doing this??? Some models have replaceable batteries that you have to remove to charge???? As a hard drive it scores 0/10

I have to start up an editor, find the right image, load it and find a folder to store the edit???? what nonsens workflow!

Iphones let you shoot the images straight into the upload dialogue.. but its not using the wonderful hacks the photo app offers.

Maybe camera makers should just make a frankenphone the size of a brick with a few TB of storage, automatic wifi connectivity (with more options so that one never has to look at it), a week worth of battery. The extra weight helps making sharper images and probably a cloud account with a list of highly configurable API's

Ill be as weird as to suggest website names could have physical buttons on the top so that one can shoot things straight onto facebook and press delete later.

> Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke. Thus, the best and most talented engineers go into hardware, and the jokers work in software, leading to this "good hardware, bad software" observed outcome and reinforcing the stereotype further.

Curious. In the US, the software people can usually make a lot more money so even many EE’s end up in software. I wonder if it’s the opposite in some of these countries, where software people are paid less than hardware people.

Thank goodness in a way, otherwise all of us firmware people in the US wouldn't have anything to write code for!

I think the US situation just reflects economics. The value of software scales up more than hardware. So software teams and companies get more investment.

> Curious. In the US, the software people can usually make a lot more money so even many EE’s end up in software. I wonder if it’s the opposite in some of these countries, where software people are paid less than hardware people.

In Japan and Taiwan, both EEs and SWEs are generally underpaid. SWEs and some EEs go to the USA or (gasp) mainland China to make more money, since software talent is generally more appreciated in those two countries. The same applies in other Asian countries (e.g. HK and Singapore, where it is software vs. financial services rather than software vs hardware).

Actually, it still happens the same way in the USA as well -- for physical products. The hardware side of physical products is often well-supported, with higher budgets for R&D and engineering salaries, while the software side of the physical products is expected to be done barebones and as an afterthought at the end of the product development cycle.

Software engineers in the US who do not work on physical products are highly paid, because they can potentially create nearly infinite return on investment with near-zero marginal product costs.

But software for widgets doesn't have that infinite margin ratio. So firmware suffers greatly. Think auto infotainment systems, smart-home electronics, appliance interfaces, point-of-sale kiosks, etc.

Don't forget device drivers back in the day before all the chips got thrown directly into the motherboard. You might buy a nice soundcard, but the software that came with it (drivers and utilities both) were quite a mess.

I think a big part of Apple's success was getting both hardware and software right.

"Back in the day"? Software from motherboard manufacturers is still terrible now!

> software is a joke

Sure, but you still have to deliver the punchline right.

> Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke.

Yup. Not just in Asia. The US suffered from that, as well. It may have changed (for the US), by now, as I spent 27 years at a Japanese hardware company.

I spent most of my career, as a software dev at hardware companies, and got the brunt of that crap. It was infuriating.

During my time, I wrote some very good software. In the early days, when my team was given a lot of leeway, it was sent out, and got [mostly] positive reviews.

As time went on, Japan got more and more involved with/in control of the software development that we did, and threw more and more restrictions at us.

We were forced to do a standard hardware-centric waterfall development process. If I even mentioned the word "agile," I might as well have just gotten up and left the meeting, because everything I said, after that, was ignored.

They took away all of the user interface from us, and we were just doing "engine" work, which was actually pretty cool, but, they sucked at UI.

Towards the end, I was reading terrible reviews about our software, and tried writing stuff that would directly address these gripes.

My work, and any similar work from my team, was ignored. Instead, they had some disastrous relationships with external companies, under (I assume) the impression that we were not capable of writing "modern" software, and these folks were (they were able to write "modern" software, because their work was terrible, and I have issues with the Quality of "modern" software, in general).

It is indeed exactly the reverse in the US currently. Pay ranges for software engineers tend to be higher than for hardware engineers at big tech companies, and many folks with electrical engineering backgrounds end up going into software as a result. Also similarly, people building hardware inside of software companies tend to have to put up with mismatches in expectations, including questions around why they can’t build hardware in an “agile” process!

> why they can’t build hardware in an “agile” process!

That's not good, either.

Hardware really needs a "measure twice, cut once" approach.

It can be made more iterative, but that is expensive.

Sometimes I feel that "Agile" has become so diluted to mean "there are feedback loops in the design/execute process" and if that's the case then 6σ is an "agile" process for hardware.

I like the spirit of the Agile Manifesto. I feel that the devil is in the details[0], though.

Nowadays, the word "Agile" means "Waterfall, but with different names," or "Tear off all your clothes and run naked through the bluebells! Do what you want!"

I'm really big on Discipline and Quality. It's entirely possible to have a flexible and iterative development process, but there's no way to avoid the difficult bits. They just get shifted around.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/problems-and-solutio...

Isn't that exaggerated by semiconductor manufacturing (TSMC et al) dominating the Taiwanese economy? If your nation's existence is driven by EE-type concerns, software engineering doesn't seem important.

This is also applied to Japan. Toyota, Sony, Keyence are top3 of market cap. (Though Sony is partially software company, games tend to be ignored.)

Anyone who's worked with software management of commercial hardware like cameras, digital signage, time clocks, door controllers, I don't know 1,000 other products types, can attest to the horror-show software you're provided by these manufacturers.

Think: Windows only, often IE/Edge only, ActiveX, crashes constantly. Random UI strings are in Chinese. Barely, barely usable.

The worst part is that, despite treating their software like a joke, every damn business guards their source code, protocols, etc. as if it were their crown jewels.

So end users end up having to reverse engineer it just to fix issues that the manufacturer should have addressed.

And - the real kicker - far too often it turns out to be based open source work, with a few random modifications, distributed in violation of the license.

I couldn't agree with this more. My small child received a compact camera as a gift. While it was a decent camera for a kid, she was very frustrated with how small the screen was and how non-intuitive it was to her compared to a smartphone. I too was very frustrated with it as it was slow, configuring the software on it was a massive pain and the process of quickly getting photos from the camera to a computer was laughable. So, what did I do? I put the camera on a shelf and bought my daughter an older smartphone. I proceeded to lock it down and remove everything I could with the exception of the camera and gallery app. My daughter is now happier than ever and taking non-stop pictures. She can also almost instantly see those pictures on a computer now too!

I've long thought that should be a product. Especially if the shutter is a button.

For kids, and for other kinds of camera products (ahem, GoPro).

Before there were smartphones it was universal that anything other than a PC had a cheaper CPU but it was maybe 1/3 the price for 1/30 the performance. That is, off-brand CPUs of all kinds were a terrible bargain.

Then smartphones came along and there was another commodity platform that gave good price-performance. Around that time Intel also got interested in making low-performance parts with low sticker prices but that were highly uneconomical if performance or user experience mattered.

Thanks for the hint. I was just about to buy an old compact camera for my daughter as she sees me taking pictures with my sony a7. Maybe you are right compact cameras are awful usability.

What software did you use to lock it down? I have some older iPhones laying around.

The iOS built-in Parental Controls settings can be used to enable/disable access on an app-by-app basis; that's probably all that's needed here, since Camera + Photos by themselves don't give you any built-in web browsers. (Camera.app can scan QR codes, but it just pops a new tab in Safari when you click them, and Parental Controls would block that.)

In contrast, my daughter sees us use our phones and uses them as well. I simply uninstalled all the apps I could and used the Google Family link stuff to lock it down further.

You can get really creative with an Android phone. Install LineageOS with only the minimum gapps you want. Lock down everything, remove the play store, add Tasker to make the UI black&white when using apps other than photos/camera install a launcher like nova to further customize what apps are visible/easily accessible. You can even completely remove Chrome but still install the web browser component so things like your e-mail app work but you can't easily browse the web.

I did this for a while a couple years back to discourage myself from spending so much time on my phone. Worked great and I would have kept it up if it were not for my wife constantly complaining that I couldn't look anything up or use Yelp or Messenger or... :D

What kind of smartphone did you use?

Google Pixel phone

Our old Canon IXUS has a decent UI that kids were able to navigate, and no data leakage.

I am one of these luddites that still use a compact camera.

The firmware may be bad, yet I take a picture faster on my Sony compact camera than I do with my smartphone thanks to the physical buttons. I can also do it while cycling while doing the same with my smartphone is annoying as fuck in winter with gloves, in summer with sweat and expose the risk of losing and destroying my precious pocket computer.

Also for some my phone screen show as a black screen when using my polarized sunglasses while the lcd of my camera is still visible and allow me to point and shoot quickly. No idea what is the difference in tech on both that would explain that difference.

Most flagship smartphones may be super responsive but the average sub 200usd smartphone won't necessarily fire up the camera app faster than my Sony compact camera. And there is no way I will buy a 600 to 1000usd smartphone. I'd rather repair/replace either a 200usd smartphone or a second hand compact camera in the event I drop it and break it than a single 1000usd one.

Also from my experience with friends using flagships and apple ones, even the best smartphones are crappy under low light. Smartphones are great during the day, once it is dark they are pretty much useless.

I think that last bit has been true until recent flagships. Recent iPhones are sluggish in the dark, but take pictures that are better than my eyesight.

There is still a small market, but not enough to support many players.

I've got a compact around here somewhere, specifically because it can take getting dunked. With the pandemic my intended use case has gone away and I'm not sure where it is now.

> There is still a small market, but not enough to support many players.

Definitely.

And I can understand Panasonic and Nikon getting out of it when most people interested in a compact are looking for the Sony RX100 or Canon G*X cameras.

I've been carrying a Sony TX100V in my work bag for I suppose 11 years now. I'm on my second one. It has staggeringly good macro capabilities. I've had two 8x10 prints done this year and they're amazing.

It's a 2011 model and AFAIK the latest in the line. You have to go much bigger to get better quality. I'd buy an updated model in a heartbeat.

https://www.dpreview.com/products/sony/compacts/sony_dsctx10...

> ...take a picture faster on my Sony compact camera than I do with my smartphone thanks to the physical buttons.

I will encourage you to check out the Google Pixel line of phones! A double tap of the power button starts up the camera immediately even if the phone is off and then a press of the volume button takes a shot. Can easily do it in gloves!

>Also for some my phone screen show as a black screen when using my polarized sunglasses

If you rotate your phone 90° you'll be able to see the screen.

Sony shooter here (A7S2, A6300)...

> Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work.

YES YES YES. And they don't support such basic use cases as "open an access point and let the connected device do the work of selecting pictures" - no, you have to select the photos on the camera and then call them down from the mobile app. Super "great" when you're in the field that I am and document rallies etc. so you need to get a photo up to social media as fast as possible.

> They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos came out sharp.

Yeah, same for lighting, another annoyance from hell. Personally, for shots in complicated conditions I've grabbed an used Blackmagic VideoAssist 4K... works way better.

> I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time.

Problem with smartphones, even modern ones, is the quality goes down dramatically in low-light scenarios. That's simple physics, the pixels are like 100x smaller. AI can cover for a lot of that, but it's noticeable enough to not make it worth my while - and for what it's worth, there are no Android tablets on the market with a halfway decent camera.

Sony's hardware is the best in class, there is no match at all for the A7S series from anyone in low-light, but the sorry state of their software is laughable. And the best of it is: it's all Linux under the hood. The older A7/A6000 series actually exposed parts of it via an Android subsystem layer where one could write apps for it after jailbreaking - too bad that the Android layer was/is fossilized (IIRC, Android 4-ish?!) and so they ripped it out after the A7S3 :/

Yep - that was an annoying own goal move on Sony's part. Having some sort of scripting layer in the OS would have made a big difference - they should have expanded the layer rather than abandoning it : (

If you don't want to pull with their app, your other option is UPLOADING TO AN UNSECURE FTP SERVER. I have a linux server hanging around (that's also the NAS where I store the raws) so this wasn't a huge deal, but like WTF.

I bought the camera (A7 IV) because it has ethernet support, which I thought, great. I'll just be able to scp or samba them off or something. Absolutely not.

> your other option is UPLOADING TO AN UNSECURE FTP SERVER.

... what? That's not an option at least for the models that I have. Hell, if the camera would automatically connect to my phone's hotspot and then transfer the photos, that would be a working solution for me.

https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/2110/v1/en/contents/TP1000653...

They took out the playmemories app support, but introduced INSECURE FTP as a replacement?

Just wtf are they smoking over at Sony HQ?!

Smartphones definitely beat cameras at night though. iPhones and Google Pixels in particular can make photos simply impossible with any kind of DSLR thanks to their computational magic.

Yeah, some camera menus suck.

I’m a photographer and your comment made me laugh. Everyone in photo circles hates the Sony menus on their cameras because they’re the worst.

Canon, Panasonic, and Fuji have substantially better menu systems that we all far prefer.

I find it funny your opinion has been informed by using the worst the camera sphere has to offer!

That being said, these menus and UIs are aimed at pros who do nothing else but take photos. It’s a coding IDE, not a simple text editor. It’s going to be foreign to the casual user. That is by design.

Also, the computational photography is a nuisance for our work. We want the LEAST edited photo file possible every time.

I understand your lack of interest in editing, it’s a chore that even we have to do, but it’s also one of our power tools. We choose this, it is not a step backwards for us!

It sounds like “professional” photography just isn’t for you!

However, before I start a bunch of arguments, I will say one thing. There is always room for improvement and they could likely do UX/UI analysis to further improve things. Though, from my use, I do find it to be very hardware focused which feels intuitive to me and those in my photo circles. I think it’s the prerequisite of knowing shutter, ISO, and aperture as well as focus pulling concepts. That makes me “know what to look for”.

The latest Sony OS version is a tad better, but with enough practice you can get used to even the Sony menus. But yes.

It's taken a few years but the menus on my Sony mirrorless have grown on me.

(Canon user here) This response is very misleading. They're all bad. Other camera manufacturers are not substantially better than Sony in this regard. If Sony is a 1 and smart phones are a 10, the other camera manufacturers fall somewhere between 1 and 3. GPs comment is still spot.

edit: Please indicate when you make edits to your comments. Your comment is now very different to the one I responded to.

I respect your opinion, but I have to disagree.

I know this may sound “misleading” but I’ve only started “real” photography for a year or two and I find the Canon and Panasonic menus quite straightforward.

I like the very hardware focused setup of DSLR/mirror-less cameras.

I would also politely ask you don’t call me “misleading” just because you disagree with my opinion. I’m not in here spreading misinformation to start polarizing discussions. I’m merely sharing my opinion.

You completely changed the comment I responded to, so how can we have a discussion about whether or not your comment was misleading? So no, I'm going to stick with "misleading". And the fact that you changed the comment so drastically without telling anyone makes me think you found something wrong with your original comment too.

And after you're edit, I'm going to add "condescending" to my description as well.

> It sounds like “professional” photography just isn’t for you!

As if the only reason anyone would disagree with you is because they are casuals

> You completely changed the comment I responded to, so how can we have a discussion about whether or not your comment was misleading?

I can understand your frustration. I was looking at other comments and felt I wanted to add further reasons why I feel the lack of usability (as they see it) is by design (which makes the UI good, not bad), and not because of laziness on behalf of camera manufacturers. I can see why you'd think I'm being misleading saying that camera UI's are good, also I still fully believe that a Canon/Pana/Fuji UI is substantially easier to navigate than a Sony one. This is only my personal experience though.

> And after you're edit, I'm going to add "condescending" to my description as well.

> As if the only reason anyone would disagree with you is because they are casuals

I don't mean to say the only reason is because they are casual. I meant to point out that because they want computational photography and also hate editing raws, that using a dedicated camera is unlikely going to be fun for them. If you hate two of the most important parts of a photographers workflow to ensure the creative ability to edit a photo exactly the way you want, then yeah, that likely means you're a "casual".

I can see how "bad UI" and "computational photography + editing RAW" was mixed up a bit though. I could have been clearer as to what specifically I was addressing, my apologies.

To clarify on "casuals" though, I don't think being casual is bad. I'm a casual gamer, a casual driver, a casual cook. That isn't a negative either. It's just the truth, I admit I'm not a pro who dedicates the time necessary in those fields.

When a casual person tells a pro "I hate the parts of your work that are necessary to do your job/hobby properly" and then further target their frustration at a UI that might be confusing to them by design (as its meant for a different type of user) seems like something other folks might find interesting. I see it as a very neat case of user targeting and persona analysis, similar to software.

Canon/Nikon/Fuji/Sony are targeting photographers who want a dedicated OS with cutting edge hardware. If the hardware is good, they'll tolerate a stripped down, minimal camera OS for the sake of speed. It's similar to why you don't often see people driving a Formula 1 car on their daily commute.

Hasselblad and Phase One have very simple and in my opinion, great UIs for their modern cameras.

Something that really frustrated me with my camera purchase was how the hard interface was used to upsell higher priced models. I bought a D3500, the low end of that sensor line, and there's a lot of options I have to change through the menu. Things like ISO or timer delay (I also have to re-set this for every shot), things that typically are accessed through a dedicated or function button. The crux of it is that moving to a more expensive model with those buttons is not a strict upgrade: the camera is larger, heavier, and has worse battery life.

Yeah, price segmenting and protecting higher end models is unfortunately common with most technology companies. It becomes particularly obvious when folks install magic lantern (or similar) on their camera bodies and see what unlocked firmware will make use of on their camera.

I feel you, they definitely are out to make a profit and that definitely affects the value you get for your money (as opposed to what the hardware can actually do).

Right, but TFA is talking about the compact camera market. I agree with the comment that cameras haven't kept up with the ease of use and convenience of phones in any way.

The funny thing is that this translates over to Sony Xperia smartphone cameras too. On one hand, their custom camera app's UI feels like a Sony A7 variant. On the other, basic expected computational features such as night mode are missing.

> On the other, basic expected computational features such as night mode are missing.

Oh, how fast is progress in the world of technology.

I remember 6 years ago when google showed some prototypes of night photo from a smartphone using long expose. Meanwhile my Galaxy Note 4 made blurry unusable mess during the 14th of july nightly event I tried it at, while my gf DLSR were clear and great. Ah ah, smartphones will never be able to do that.

How 4 years ago Night Sight blew me away with their demonstration and almost made me go pixel.

How 3 years ago Samsung added a Night mode to my S9+ through a regular update and while the photo took a whole second to take the result was usually clean and crisp compared to the noisy mess on my previous Note 4, making it actually usable for static scene or portrait shot.

How the night mode on my Note 10 was genuinely great to the point it was just another mode as long as you avoid the usual night tricks like light sources.

How my new S22 Ultra for the first time passed my "smartphone will never really be good for night event shots" by taking picture during the 14th of july fireworks the quality of which I would scientifically classify as "pretty fucking great".

And now it's just a basic expected computational feature.

Sometime we forget how much progress is being made due to how incremental they all are, but damn, and that's just one feature on a piece of glass and plastic that's insanely powerful and filled with features in my pocket.

PS: the lack of Apple mention is merely because I'm not an Apple guy, I'm sure they had the same insane path

Among my devices I have a phone that unfolds into a tablet and has 3x optical, 0.6x optical, and 10x AI-assisted zoom that can take pictures like this (https://imgur.com/a/ITwdZSO) with a total 30x zoom from literally 20 miles away.

(Edit: for those curious, it's Samsung's "AI Super-resolution" tech, which I expect works similarly to AI upscaling tech e.g in Adobe's products. The phone I'm using in this example is the Fold 4)

And I don't even have the best smartphone camera on the market right now. That prize goes to the S22 ultra which has two separate telephoto lenses (cameras?), 3x and 10x. https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-out-...

Yeah when you sit down and think about it, it's nuts where we are today relative to last year, five years ago, and a decade ago. Especially considering 2019 still feels like yesterday because of COVID.

What does it look like without the AI assist? I wonder if it is "creating" more than it is "photographing".

Also what phone is it?

Probably Samsung's Z folds, one of the things Apple has so far no answer for and they are mighty usable as they are now. Ie split screen works very well.

I have S22 ultra and camera is even better there - 10x optical zoom properly sees much better than my eyes, so not only its great for catching kids running around moments without kids being tiny figures on each photo, but its usable ie if I want to check some remote street sign/name without walking 100m closer to read it myself.

Night cameras on top of the line phones these days sees much better than human eyes in the dark too - pics I snap during my night walks (one easy way how to clear my mind and actually do some light exercise) show so much more details than my eyes can resolve, once stopped me from falling down some nasty ravine when I saw just outlines of the terrain. All handheld in almost pitch dark.

Plus S22 ultra has this special mode it turns itself internally in when shooting moon on higher zooms (around 30x) - its more of a party trick since its just 1 subject, but within past few years it was the only time I could see (and produce in this case) literal jaw-dropping effect on folks around me. It looks nice, craters and seas in sharp details, also handheld (30x in the night, thats quite an achievement). They all rushed out with their latest xiaomis and apples just to snap the same, all ending up with small blurry white blobs and not much more.

S22 Ultra optical is only 3x, not 10x.

The reason 10x shot look so great is because it uses the 50MP main AND 10MP telephoto lenses so it has enough details available to produce very clear shot.

S22 ultra telephoto #2 is 10x

https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-out-...

10MP F4.9 [10x, Dual Pixel AF], OIS, FOV 11°, 1/3.52”, 1.12µm

Space zoom is 10x on top of that.

Not parent but the S22 Ultra has a 3x optical zoom, then up to 100x AI assisted that they call space zoom. No the same phone parent mention but it should answer your question: up to roughly 30x the photo is "real" in that the digital side is merely cleaning up noise. Above that you can clearly see a drop both in quality and in details, small errors that are actually there in reality start disapearing from the shot too.

Link to shots from a techradar article [1] (note that these are lossy compressed, even the 1x has artefact, so I put them only to compare between them / the zoom levels):

1x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/4pcFBCfWpfjjJAp7RQ7NXQ-120...

3x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/EdzEYaf85czuW9xJNnPRwQ-120...

10x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/vDCsCZc5EDDHyMF6sRn5UR-120...

30x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/FWkeGcGZTopnXgfLWDbrMQ-120...

100x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/oGBARcTnieEBciBDn4BCEQ-120...

We can agree that the 100x shot is useless, and the 30x shot too except maybe in some specific situations, but the 10x shots are very much good. Perfect or worthy or a dedicated camera with a zoom ? No. But for every day use absolutely.

[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/we-need-to-talk-about-samsung...

S22 ultra, specifically telephoto lens #2, is 10x

https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-out-...

10MP F4.9 [10x, Dual Pixel AF], OIS, FOV 11°, 1/3.52”, 1.12µm

Its #4 in the graphic.

Space zoom is 10x on top of that.

Galaxy Z Fold 4.

The S22 ultra has a better set of cameras, but I needed the foldy tech to have a portable tablet.

I wonder how far we are from the phones running some sort of Stable Diffusion AI with the photo taken as an input to create various fixed and touched up scenes.

Obviously(?) not stable diffusion, but the touching up of scenes is already there with the Pixel 6 magic eraser.

One touch removal of people and background intrusions (even goes as far as suggesting items for removal).

So, not far I imagine!

I wonder if it can run retroactive so you can use the face recognition to Stalin any former Nikolai Yezhovs you may have from all your photos.

that is basically what happens, if you ever saw the raw image that the tiny sensor created it works look hideous, i guess it would just be adding a bit more to what's already happening

For those of you who are an apple, someone implemented Google's HDR+ to work on raw files from DSLR cameras: https://github.com/martin-marek/hdr-plus-swift

I upgraded from an iPhone XR to an iPhone 13 Pro. The differences are striking. Having multiple lenses and advanced optics for features like macro photography and zoom are great. Big advances in low light capability. I also got a great pic of fireworks on the 4th.

Looking back at pics from the iPhone 3GS is wild, totally different world.

This is why the iPhone is actually a good split here: The default camera App is bleeding edge on computational photography but then when you want the pro experience there is the app Halide which is just an incredibly well designed pro camera interface that would thrive on a Mirrorless body. I'm kinda shocked that no small camera manufacturer hasn't reached out to the team.

Hah! I too have used a Sony Xperia Android and the UI was atrocious there as well!

The same has been said about some of the PlayStation UI’s.

In my opinion, this is more of a Sony problem and less of a camera problem. Though that may just be me!

>"I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time."

As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking. And you do not even have to dick with raw files to see the difference. Plain JPEG coming out of my relatively ancient D800 puts best smartphone cam to shame. Size matters and full frame sensor vs one in smartphone are incomparable.

That is not to say that smartphone can not take decent photos and in many cases what is being photographed matters way more than the picture quality as long as it is not atrocious.

I'd be nice to have normal-sized lens, but it's hard to justify lugging them when the rest of the camera is so primitive.

Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus. May screw up exposure. It's harder to check the photos. Extra steps are needed to get the photos out of the camera. And it annoys me to no end that my dumb camera can't automatically adjust its clock and the timezone.

You don't have to cart around a big-ass DSLR with multi-pound lenses. My pen-f (2016) runs circles around an iphone pro, and it's pretty small and light for a "real" camera (it can fit in my coat pocket).

> Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus.

This is not true, especially if we're talking about DSLRs (as opposed to mirrorless). I used to have a Canon 40D. I never turned it off. It would stay "on" in the bag for however long I didn't use it. It consumed next to nothing when in "sleep" mode, but came out of it ready to shoot at the touch of a button. Autofocus was plenty fast, too. Ditto for a friend's Sony A700 (same vintage APS-C DSLR). I understand current mirrorless cameras have much better autofocus, even the mid-range ones.

Even my pen-f (mirrorless) wakes up or turns on much quicker than you can slide around your finger on an iphone. Autofocus isn't great in low-light, though.

You never touched a real camera, did you? AF speed depends on the lense, older ones with a screw drive AF are slower than newer ones where the AF motor is in the lens. Camera AF speed is incredible so, starting with mid-level cameras, let alone to speak of the more pro-grade stuff. And those cameras are ready to shoot faster from fully of than it takes to get them from holding them to your side to your eye. Definitely faster than getting a smartphone camera ready.

> Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus.

This is definitely not true. Cameras may take slightly longer to start than a phone takes to turn its screen on, but the same amount of time (or quicker) to get to "shooting a photo." (Yes, even with shortcuts like double-tap the power button on a phone.)

The Ricoh GR III is ready to shoot in 0.7 seconds, and that includes extending a retracted lens barrel. And this is a pocketable camera.

Fast AF on a phone is mostly due to the fact that they usually use very wide-angle lenses. There's a wider range of acceptable focus. Newer lenses and cameras (i.e. the last 5-7 years) on a DSLR are still way faster.

> Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot

What? If you set up a camera and a phone on the table and do a timed run from the moment of reaching out and grabbing it to having a well-focused image taken, the camera will win 100% of the time. Phones with their touch screen and laggy UI are incredibly slow in comparison.

> or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time

The exact opposite. A camera will last for months on a single charge if not heavily used.

...my relatively ancient D800...

Launched five years ago at $3000.

And being sold used for 700-ish. Heck, an ancient D700 beats any smartphone whatsoever at larger prints and screens. You do have to do some post-processing yourself, true. And you need proper optics, there is only so much you can crop out of 12 MP. Smartphones take great pictures, and I love the fact that it gets a lot more people into photography than back during the film days. making art more accessible can only be good. But let's not kid ourselves, the reason why smartphone photos do look so great is a ton of heavy automated post-processing in device. I'd prefer to have that same functionalities available as stand-alone post-processing software. Or not, I'm fine with darktable.

I think the problem is less about the number of megapixels and more about the size of the pixels (i.e. sensor) personally.

Smartphones simply cannot resolve the same level of detail that a proper camera can, regardless of how many MP of resolution they provide. Computational AI helps a bit, but...

Launched ten years ago: https://www.dpreview.com/products/nikon/slrs/nikon_d800

Currently available for ~$600: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=nikon+d800&LH_Sold=1&L...

I’ve had mine since 2012.

> As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking

I hope I'll view photos on 4K someday...

I've noticed recently that a lot of smartphone cameras are doing a lot of heavy software upscaling and smoothing that erases details worse than simply low resolution. Everything is starting to look airbrushed. Having a real lens to do a lot of the optical heavy lifting and letting the sensor sense makes a huge difference if you really care about detail.

Yes, and this means that everything you shoot with (say) an iPhone tends to look the same. The camera has a very well curated set of opinions on color science etc that works really well for most people, but it enforces a look and once you try and wander out of that it stops being an effective instrument for looking at the world. (Yes, ProRAW helps a bit, but nothing beats real lenses on a big sensor for having your own control over image creation.)

That said, if you're just taking snaps to share with friends I don't see why you'd care about any of that : )

The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. That's an enthusiast niche at best. That alone a market sustaining a large multinational co does not make.

Sensibly, workflows optimize for the smartphone consumption use case.

And yes, that hurts as photographers who obsessed over sharpness and pixel-level fidelity since the invention of digital cameras, but that just doesn't seem to be where the zeitgeist is at anymore. People never really cared in the first place.

It's similar to how music producers obsess over whether a particular synth sound was made with analog gear or was a "cheap digital knockoff". The listener never cared in the first place. They just want to be moved wherever it is that they are, which happens to be on the phone 99% of the time in photography.

>The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. That's an enthusiast niche at best."

Maybe. I do not care. I only use phone as to call, GPS, controlling some gadgets, take a pic and that is it. I do the rest on PC on big screens.

> The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors.

If you want to further process the image you want the best quality input you can get. Think digitally zooming/reframing, or choosing from a bigger dynamic range to use the colors you prefer. In a lower quality input you might be stuck with whatever photo you took, while the high-quality input gives you more information to correct the picture, even if the end resolution ends up being the same.

P.S. Good printed photos also have more definition that most monitors (idk if 4k, but I believe comparable), for products like printed wedding photos.

When you edit or crop you lose information. It's good to start with extra.

> As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking.

Exactly. Or when you print them out.

On the wall here I have a printed photo about 4ft wide, taken from a cropped section of a photo (not even the full frame) and it looks stunning. And this isn't even from a newer pro camera, it was taken with a ~15 year old Nikon D40.

A 4ft printed photo isn't exactly a popular use case. A 10x15 would look great.

Well, I have some photos of Amsterdam I took on iPhone 5S and they look just fine on my display. And we've had a ton of progress since then.

In general case, you're right, but modern smartphones have come a long way.

It's a shame how well-designed and fun-to-use Fujifilm cameras are (I've owned several and they are the only digital cameras I use, apart from my phone) but how garbage their mobile app is. From what I've seen, Leica is the only company with a usable first-party app.

Can concure, just got an x100v and it's great but sometimes it takes me 10 mins of restarting the damn app for it to connect correctly.

I end up just doing SD card -> iphotos which will sync up to my phone later.

I’ve never been able to get it to work. Setting it to act as a USB-C card reader and tethering to my iPad isn’t too bad, though.

This is a cultural issue: programming is a low status blue collar job in Japan, especially in existing industry. This is especially weird to me given the number of great Japanese computer scientists, but so it goes.

One exception is the gaming industry: Sony Computer Entertainment in particular treats its developers similarly to the US (Ken Kutaragi drove this) while the rest of Sony follows the standard Japanese model. Bandai and Nintendo are similar, though not quite as much as Sony, and Sega a bit more traditional.

This must explain Sony's crappy phone software.

I just except that if I buy a Sony camera, the software is going to suck. I have zero expectations, I know that sending photos to my phone is probably out of the question.

I think they’re actually trying to solve different issues.

Cameras are designed to capture & store the light in a way we can interpret later. They intentionally weren’t designed to edit or interpret the light and make corrections.

Smart phones automatically do interpret and “correct” images. This can lead to artificially created artifacts in the image files. Professional photographers will often prefer the raw because they can apply their own edits without said artifacts.

Now sure, camera photos are good for 99% of people, 99% of the time. BUT because the software on cameras were never designed to do those corrections, they just don’t. This makes night images worse, unless you decrease shutter speed.

On a side note, it’s this very fact that I find it difficult to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if you’re looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify / generate the fine detail.

>On a side note, it’s this very fact that I find it difficult to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if you’re looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify / generate the fine detail.

Are there examples of this? The only example I can think of was an accusation a while ago that huawei phones were compositing a stock photo of the moon when taking moon pictures with their phones. They denied the accusation and it wasn't really clear whether it was actually happening or not.

That Dallas plane crash recently had a new cell phone video surface where it is clear that the fighter started diving, but what is not clear is if there is a drone he was trying to avoid; and it's very possible that the apparent drone could also be a video artifact.

And upscaling tools/etc introduce their own information, and may cause it to make something appear to be there that is actually just compression noise.

You’re right that cameras never adapted to a world where users want cars, not faster horses.

But I think you may be playing a bit loose with the ideas of evidence and details. Yes, smartphones “invent” details, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where those changes produce false evidence. You might find details of leaves rendered as watercolor brushstrokes; you won’t find a suspect inserted into a scene.

And remember that film annd magnetic tape cameras also invent details. All of that film grain that we find artistic is not really there. Should we also question what we see on those videos because they aren’t pixel-perfect?

> Cameras are designed to capture & store the light in a way we can interpret later. They intentionally weren’t designed to edit or interpret the light and make corrections.

That's one thing, but still there are many features of the camera firmware that people want to have, and cameras failed to deliver. One of such thing was apps - Sony provided few in some of their camera, but next model removed them, because they couldn't implement that in a model-agnostic way. They just don't get software.

Depends on the market segment. People wanting apps on their cameras have very capabale smartphones now. People who want cameras, and not phones or computers one can use to take pictures with, have highly capable cameras without apps because they don't need nor want those software on camera. And guess what, photography is more popular than ever, and everyone is happy, including camera makers it seems.

It boils down to 2 things:

1) Fact that whereas camera technology in smartphones has & is continuing to develop rapidly (computational photography as mentioned is latest major jump), it has largely stagnated within the mid-low tier camera market. Makes sense Panasonic is exiting the market, and other major players like Sony and Fujifilm focusing on the high end.

2) Vast majority users value convenience and ecosystem integration over pure photo quality. In most cases the latest smartphone take "good enough" photographs, so who wants to fiddle with having to transfer images from your standalone camera to your photo before sharing on social media? As the adage goes, "the best camera is the one you have on hand".

Personally I'd love to see something like the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom or Nokia Lumia 808/1020 being revitalized - a camera-first smartphone. How long before Apple or Google enter the DLSR or mirrorless market? Seems inevitable given the large investments both companies already make in smartphone camera photography.

It's not a problem with camera manufacturers, it's a problem with hardware companies.

Even chip vendors, who you would would think understand the importance of software, will de-prioritize their software side.

I wonder if it's a sort of macho thing; anyone can learn to write software, but not everyone can get an EE degree.

It also could be that the idea of incremental releases doesn't really exist on the hardware side. Hardware, because it's physical, requires a coordinated release. Then you do the next revision once the inventory gets low. The idea that you can ship on a flexible schedule is alien to the hardware side.

> anyone can learn to write software, but not everyone can get an EE degree.

I took a EE microcontrollers class. A lot of EEs struggled writing assembly, and they all had at least an introductory C programming course.

> sort of macho thing

please contain this to twitter. What does "macho" have to do with comparing the relative difficulty of two things and attaching status to the most difficult?

That's how society brought us where we are.

Get a Canon and install CHDK.

https://bw.vern.cc/chdk/wiki/CHDK

Wow. Thank you. I had no idea this existed. I have a Canon S95 long languishing on the shelf and will have to give CHDK a try.

Digital cameras is ALL about post processing. I used to have Minolta, Panasonic, Sony, and Canon point and shoots. No matter what, Canon pictures always come out much better out of the camera even if it has inferior lens, sensor, or is much older. Basically all sensors of Sony now, so the magic is all about the processing. The rest is really up to the photographer, that is where the art is.

Canon doesn't use Sony sensors. They are the only Non-Sony camera brand left that manufactures it's own sensors.

I don't understand why phone manufacturers don't just get into the camera business, then. They certainly all seem to love making phones that brag about having large sensors and fancy (tiny) lenses... so why not just go one step further and make a "phone" that only runs a camera app, with a lens mount rather than a fixed lens, hardware mode switches, and a tripod screw mount?

The camera market small, quite crowded (before Sony kind of created the mirrorless market the only serious contenders were Nikon and Canon, now you got Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji and Panasonic), smartphones already killed the entry level and compact camera markets and the tech is quite different from smartphone cameras.

Phone cameras don't have sensors or optics at a quality comparable to basic point and shoots. They have to fit into a tiny space and performance is necessarily compromised. They're making it all up on software processing.

Based on this thread and my own corroborating experiences, this feels like a field ripe for harvest—if anyone sold a camera with DSLR-grade optics and smartphone-grade usability and computational abilities, they'd be rich! For those in the know, what makes this more difficult than it seems? Why has nobody done this yet and what challenges are standing in the way?

People needing and wanting DSLR grade optics, or mirroless as optics are more less the same thing, don't want or need shiny clicky smartphone apps. They need and want a professional tool that produces the least edited picture possible for post-processing later on. I wouldn't touch a camera that runs on Android with feet pole.

This. I'm going to do any editing on my PC, not the picture-taker. Far bigger screen, far better control.

The brains I want on the camera are for things that actually involve taking the shot. Give me intelligent capture of images for stacking. That entails two things:

1) HDR exposure. Point the camera at something, select HDR. It takes the exposure and examines the frame for any pixels near the extremes of the sensor. If there are any pixels near the top it reshoots exactly the same shot but with a shorter exposure time. Repeat until there are no really bright pixels. On the other end, if there are any really dim pixels reshoot with a slower exposure, repeat as needed.

2) Focus stacking. Manual focus, pick a point. Pick another point. The camera shoots a sequence of exposures moving the focus between the two points.

Yeah well, you're right, but some new features would be welcome, like, for instance, the ability to immediately send images out of the camera. Yet even with recent DSLRs and mirrorless top-end cameras it's still a hassle.

I recently made a photobooth from an old Canon DSLR and a rPi running gphoto: a script takes the images out of the camera and posts them on a server, and people can see them in almost real time.

It's really great, but it would be even better if it was all done in camera.

Camera manufacturers are very capabale of making hardware, incl. optics, that run sophisticated embedded software to take pictures. For editing, go to Adobe or one of the alternatives. Different use cases, different products, different markets. And not everything in the world can be solved by some consumer grade app.

I prefer manual buttons when taking photos the traditional way. Too many digital screens these days deviate from a good solid device that does a few things really well.

This is why I got a Fuji XT-30. It’s got a physical control for everything. I don’t have to use the menu unless I’m doing something unusual.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem like there are many cameras designed this way anymore.

This has nothing to do with editing. Modern smartphones combine multiple pictures for each picture you take, and have very sophisticated demosaicing, noise reduction and color grading. No app needed.

I could not disagree more.

Professional photographers require good reliable connectivity. Nikon cameras are extremely clunky in this regard.

Similarly, their menu system is atrocious. I am not saying this as somebody who looked at a camera once and said "this is too hard". I ran a photo business from 2008 to 2018, read all the manuals intimately and worked with Nikon cameras daily, and came to it from techie nerd perspective and knew what every button option and mode does in intricate detail.

"Great hardware, horrible software" is well understood state of camera business last 2 decades.

I now have two young kids. I have 4 dslr and two mirrorless cameras at home... And take kids photos with my cell - because it's convenient accessible and fast to transmit. Why can't I have an efficient sharing work flow with my $3000 camera? Because they make sucky closed systems and refuse to change open or learn.

Studio photographers need connectivity, everyone else needs two fast storage card slots. And your comment is honestly the first time I hear anybody claim Nikons menu system is "bad", especially with all those custom menus and buttons one can set-up to automated basically everything.

I never worked with Sony or Canon, so I cannot say how that compares.

>>Studio photographers need connectivity, everyone else needs two fast storage card slots.

That is, at best, myopic.

Sports photographers need fast connectivity far more than studio photographers. Their whole business is to take, select, and send shots out as fast as possible.

News coverage needs fast connectivity.

Think even wedding photography - the ability to share photos to social networks right after ceremony, or display the couple shots during dinner is a professional USP. Instead, I'm juggling card reader, with my "two fast cards" and laptop and lightroom on my lap during speeches.

Just about every type of photography, professional or consumer, benefits from fast and easy connectivity.

>>And your comment is honestly the first time I hear anybody claim Nikons menu system is "bad"

Possible. we simply have different colleagues and frequent different forums then :).

Their menu system is powerful but poorly designed. Why are there two different types of setting banks? Why aren't there hardware buttons to select them? Why is some stuff unDer shooting but other under 6 layers of custom setting menu? Which is different than setup menu? Why is AF ON setup not under "controls"? And myriad other idiosyncracies.

Just because you're used to it (as am I!) does not make it good.

Damn, forgot about sports... Funny so that theose pros seem to be really happy with their 6k camera bodies paired with 10k+ optics, one would assume that if connectivity would be a killer feature, like AF back when Canon ate the sports market from Nikon, someone between Nikon, Canon, Sony or Fuji would implement it. The money is definitely there.

I 100% agree with that assumption. But sport pro photographers I follow haven't stopped complaining about connectivity and work flow for a decade (while being as you say happy with hardware and optics). Granted it's a small sample, as sport photography isn't my thing. :-/

And again, for myself, I'm in a "shut up and take my money" for camera that would allow me to seemlessly capture and share photography. As you say, that's money in the table. And I'm not alone in my group of friends and colleagues.

Top end Sports focused bodies typically have Ethernet for fast as possible transfers.

Studio photographers can at least shoot 'tethered' to a computer by cable more easily than others.

I mostly agree. I have three DSLRs and several very high-end lenses, but I take way more photos of my kids with my phone than with the DSLRs. The workflow for getting shots out of the phone is just so much better than the cameras, and the phone is always with me.

This isn’t an insurmountable problem. Some Nikon camera bodies have Wi-Fi. If they cared to they could make it much much easier to get photos off and process them. It’s just not a focus of theirs.

That's the thing. All my Nikon cameras have some sort of wifi or Bluetooth or nfc. All of it is a pain.

I agree their hardware and optics are superb. I don't even begin to understand how their work flow or integration are anything but atrocious.

They could make their integration software better or let others do it - but they don't!

Yeah, I've got connectivity--and I never use it. I'm not shooting with a PC nearby, I'm bringing home a camera full of shots. And it's *far* faster to pop the card in my PC than transmit them.

> And take kids photos with my cell

My conclusion is the exact opposite. Cellphone cameras are so incredibly slow (measuring time from moment of picking up phone to photo having being taken) that I can't imagine using it for any kid photos since the phtographable moment usually lasts a few seconds, they aren't posing.

I keep my older Nikon DSLR cameras around the house so one is usually within easy reach so I can snap a photo in less than a second when a cute kid moment is happening.

As to the Nikon menus, atrocious is not a word I could use. Sure it's always possible to nitpick something I'd do differently but they work just fine. More importantly, after initial setup it's not something I use much since everything is controlled by the physical buttons and that's the overwhelming win of a DSLR over a phone (and photo quality of course).

DSLR powered up has a time to shot similar to phone already on the camera screen.

Either is adequate for casual photography.

We don't have any cute kids, but I hike and wildlife shows up now and then. I hike with a bridge camera, not because it's any faster or more convenient than my phone, but because of the lens. I have an older flagship phone, I would say the image quality is as good, but I have yet to get a wildlife shot with it due to the lack of zoom range.

My general experience is the harder the shot the more camera you need.

> DSLR powered up has a time to shot similar to phone already on the camera screen.

But that's not a realistic comparison since the phone is almost certainly not on the camera screen if I wasn't expecting to take a photo and the phone is just sitting there on the table (or worse, pocket).

It is a realistic comparison--both are fast from their ready states but the reality is neither is likely in their ready state when you have the cute kid moment.

No, that was my point. A DSLR is always in the ready state. The only way it couldn't be ready is if it was turned off, but there is no reason to ever turn it off.

I think we likely have a large area of agreement - in addition to perhaps slightly different personal preferences and use cases :)

My Nikon cameras are setup the way I like them, so everything I need is indeed reachable by physical buttons. This is good - as I said, their menu is powerful. But! When I get a new Nikon camera, despite 15 years of experience... it's a pain to set it up how I want it, and I still chase settings around the menus. So I deem them powerful, but poorly designed.

As to kids photos - it's all down to individual use cases, so lots of room for variation. For myself though, even though like yourself I literally have a DSLR ready to go on the shelf in the family room and on the TV stand in the living room... time to turn on cell and take a photo is far lower/faster then the time to grab the camera and shoot. Add to that, the time to then share that photo is literally 10 seconds via phone, vs realistically days to weeks via camera (by the time I bother taking the card out to the office, transferring photos, ingesting them, processing them, exporting, and then sharing). In majority of cases, DSLR would've taken a higher quality photos. In majority of cases, it doesn't matter.

And then there are all the other cases - playing in backyard, going for a walk, run, adventure, guests, whatever. Phone is there, good enough (hasn't always been the case! In the Note 8 / S8 time, only a few years ago, phones were not good enough, and phones weren't fast enough - now they are! I don't need to log in or face scan the phone, there's a shortcut and a snappy app and fast focus), and it shares so quickly! That sharing is really the winning factor and why I'm peeved expensive cameras don't make it easy to share.

In most scenarios, I get far better pictures with my Canon DSLR than with my iPhone, yet most of my pictures for the past few years have been taken with my iPhone.

But the big difference, for me, is, most of those pictures are quick pictures that I almost certainly never would have taken with my DSLR camera. I've got thousands of family pictures done on my phone that otherwise probably wouldn't have been taken at all.

When I'm going somewhere or doing something that I know I deliberately want to have pictures of? I still haul around the DSLR. When I want pictures I could only get with a super-telephoto or ultra-wide lens? I still haul around the DSLR.

I do feel that my iPhone has replaced any need for a cheap "compact camera", but I rarely used one after getting my (D)SLR cameras anyway. But I'm not sure that my iPhone has really taken away that much usage share from my DSLR. I just use it to take pictures that I wouldn't have gotten at all otherwise, which has turned out to be quite a few.

I've sworn off Sony cameras after paying ~$1500 for a NEX-6 and having them abandon the firmware at version 1.03, 18 months after the camera was released.

I don't even remotely understand how that's possible. Did they just contract all of the work out?

I never had a firmware upgrade for any of the compact digital cameras (Canon) I had between ~ 1998 and 2012. I did not even think that this should exist, they worked well from the beginning.

The NEX-6 mentioned by the parent isn't compact. Nikon DSLRs do get updates. Example [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32248732

There's also an issue with camera UI that phones managed to largely bypass. I remember getting a Canon t4i with a touch screen. The touch interface was actually pretty decent and this was probably ~10 years ago! But a lot of "camera people" hated it. They'd complain that it would inevitably lead to smudges on the screen and they wanted physical controls instead.

So who do you sell a dedicated camera to? A new UI will largely alienate the small market that still exists. The old UI guarantees an unappealing product for the smartphone user.

Ultimately all interfaces have to be easily navigable with buttons and this has consequences.

Wifi and Bluetooth... Yeah. It's not good on DSLRs either. My Pentax K1 has WiFi option, and, otherwise being an excellent camera in terms of imaging quality, build, ergonomics, good UI, it has somehow unreliable and cumbersome wifi - hard to set up and the mobile app is average at best. As if different people designed the wifi subsystem.

And interestingly my Tascam 44dw (not a camera, but sound recorder) has also abysmal wifi. Low range, unreliable and seems to be using single TCP connection for sending realtime data which suffers from head-of-line blocking. As if noone there heard about UDP.

Why is wifi such a problem? Weird.

This is so true. I have an Olympus M4/3 camera, and to update the firmware on it, you must install a Mac application that requires a kernel extension.

This is offensively stupid and I can’t believe this hasn’t changed in years.

Sony has a stupid update app as well, but Nikon and Pentax? Download a firmware file, put it on the root of the SD card, and boot itin a particular way or goto some menu and runu the update. Its a very 90's process but easy and simple compared to Olympus and Sony.

I'll go against the grain here and hard-disagree.

My Canon has locked up hard only once in half a decade of hard use, generating ~8TB of images in adverse conditions. It is sometimes left turned on for months at a time. I sometimes accidentally do terrible things with the power switch and SD card. Lenses are attached/removed without a care in the world. I've never seen a flaw in the function of menus or the corruption of a single image.

I cannot state the same for almost any other software product. I can use it like a tool, not like a computer. That's a sign of good software.

Aren't all the things you described signs of good hardware?

It's both. If pro cameras (or even point and shoot) had really bad software, we would see corrupted files all the time, unreadable media, exposure completely off, weird bugs in battery monitoring or power consumption, etc.

Smartphones have constant "updates" and yearly new OSes, and we think it's marvelous if a two year old phone still functions. Yet digital cameras from 15 years ago still work fine with exactly zero update.

Robustness and dependability are important features. In-the-box HDR is cute but it matters less.

Nikon do very well with the Z series. I have a Z50 and it's closer to smartphone than DLSR. BT and WiFi work, decent quality viewfinder and articulated multi-touch screen. Also with the 16-50 lens it still goes in your pocket but is a proper camera.

I disagree with smartphone quality. I have what could be considered a close to best of breed in quality iPhone 13 Pro and it's crap. It's a 2009 DSLR with three crap prime lenses stuck to it. It's mostly usable if you shoot ProRAW with it but the processed images (HEIC/JPEG) are really quite fucked up.

It's so bizarre that camera manufacturers never figured out that the camera should be treated primarily as a smartphone peripheral. When I take a picture on the compact camera it should automatically sync to the smart phone camera roll with geotagging. All of the camera's settings and shutter should be controllable through a smartphone app. This lack of integration was a real failure of vision by camera manufacturers.

Sounds like you're complaining about a lack of vision because they couldn't mix technologies from different years, or have the budget to make a phone as well as a camera...

But it does seem to be a clever idea, I'm imagining a phone that has surface contacts on its back, and a Go-Pro-sized camera module that you can attach to the phone (with precise magnets, so the surface contacts on both devices would connect both devices electronically as well) and be recognized as a peripheral for the phone.

But I guess if already have a pro camera, you don't want to need to slap your phone on it to get it to work.

That exists, the Sony QX100. Nobody bought it because it’s not quite as good as a real camera and it’s something you have to remember to bring with you.

The whole lag and connection issue shown in the video is probably why grandparent comment's idea hasn't taken off. Since no phones have surface contacts, maybe if the lens had a USB-C connection it'd be a lot better (but no closed-garden iPhone support, obviously).

Fuji have all of that functionality over WiFi on their X series.

...Only, as the parent comment says, it barely works, and the UI to get to it is awful, and the WiFi transfer speed is ridiculously slow.

My 2016 Olympus does this, too. The controls are surprisingly good (you get cable-less bulb mode), and you can even get the live image on the phone while shooting. There is some lag, though, so it won't work for moving subjects.

Photo transfer is ridiculously slow, though.

In case of DSLRs, and their mirrorless offspring, the purpose and the target audience's need is to capture light as good as possible, using a combination of precision electronics, optics and mechanics, to be edited later. They threw in some basic editing functionalities, various image formats and what not, but those are not mission critical.

Smartphones are lacking the optics, sensors and some other things a real camera has. As a result, they are still a far cry from replacing mid-level and up cameras. Smartphones, as the article points out, are perfectly sufficient for the compact and point-and-shoot market, and as a result killed it / took it over.

And heck, the ergonomics of Nikon blow any smartphone / app way of setting up a camera out of the water ever since before Nikon got serious about DSLRs.

The technology lifecycles haven't lined up. 10-15 years ago there were phenomenal DSLRs coming out, and honestly there weren't any good enough smartphones worth connecting them to. The iPhone App Store was in its infancy (it's only 14 years old); there weren't / still aren't any good, widespread standards for fast, personal-area-network data transfers of photos. Smartphones didn't have a lot of memory either: the iPhone 4 baseline model in 2010 ran with 4 GB, and the top of the line was 32 GB, with no slots for memory swapping - not something you can sync a lot of photos to at all.

I don't think, 10 years ago, camera manufacturers could've adopted a meaningful integration strategy. They could perhaps have entered the fray as Android phone makers and try to solve it, but it would've been a bigger jump than just integrating.

I agree on all points with my sony a7. Especially the Bluetooth connectivity was a great start but no updates and constantly dropping connections make it look laughable in 2022.

I guess there is a perception that it is like hardware « once its out its sold and we don’t care about it ».

At this stage I am seriously wondering if I will ever replace my camera with a new one or just be happy with a new smartphone. Maybe the camera will just stay a a sidehobby.

I got a full frame Nikon Z5. I use it with a f2.8 lens. In low light, the output from my iPhone 14 pro looks much better. Especially on video. Haha

Precisely. Big lenses should be dump peripherals to phones.

and lets talk about how increasingly out of touch photographers are about all of that!

A whole decade of people in enthusiast photography communities collectively playing devil’s advocate “why do you want that feature, whats a UI have to do with taking a photo, I never understood the point of a Live Photo, bluetooth? Thats what tethering and an external contraption is for….”

meanwhile the rest of the world just turned around and walked away

Sony still makes many smartphone sensors. And optics? Not sure.

They just don't get to put their name on the resulting "camera" in this new world.

Mostly agree, but I will say Canon seem to have eventually nailed the Bluetooth/WiFi experience, at least for me on Android.

Sure, but I'd say the same about smartphone manufacturers.

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