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My $0.02 as some one with an expensive full-frame DSLR and and the latest iPhone Pro:

There are entire categories of image quality that only Apple seems to bother even trying to improve — and then they leapt past everyone.

A few years ago if you wanted to make a HDR, 4K, 60 fps Dolby Vision wide-gamut video…

That would have cost you. Tens of thousands on cameras, displays, and software. It would have been a serious undertaking involving a lot of “pro” tools and baroque workflows optimised for Hollywood movie production.

With an iPhone I can just hit the record button and it does all of that for me, on the phone!

Did you notice that it also does shake reduction? It’s staggeringly good, about the same as GoPro. Just setting up the stabilisation in DaVinci is half an hour of faffing around.

The iPhone just has it “on”.

I could go on.

A challenge I give people is to take a still photo and send it to someone else that is wide gamut, 10 bit, and HDR, any method they prefer.

Outside of the Apple ecosystem this is basically impossible in the general case. Everything everywhere is 8-bit SDR sRGB.

Heck, even professional print shops still request files in sRGB!

So yes, the software in the Apple ecosystem does have a big impact on the end result of photography.

I can take a 14-bit dynamic range picture with my Nikon, but I can’t show it to anyone in that quality because of shitty Windows and Linux software, so what’s the point?

I take pics with my Apple iPhone instead. All the people I want to show pictures to have iDevices, so I can share the full HDR quality that the phone camera is capable of, not some SDR version.

Exactly like it was explained. People who speaks French or German (I'm just referring the language. No offense please), could only talk to people who know that language. While the majority is English speaking (Hypothetically!), it might make sense to speak that and also, whatever 10bit or 8Bit, the sensor size and capabilities matter. Most of the perception is seriously overrated with the iDevices (the displays and the sensors etc.,etc.,) while I may not able to articulate it technically, it's just 0.00001% of the appealing population (who might be using it in the intended way and might require that in that format!!)

When it comes out of the ecosystem, it has to understand and speak English. No matter how good it might in French or German.

So, the argument is pretty subjective and no point in continuing as no one knows what is under the hood and how it appeals to the eyes. It's subjective and it may or may not have all the required details for it to survice outside of the ecosystem. It's what one calls in vendor lock-in. One needs all idevice and isoftware ecosystem to function and survive in the iworld. And that world is mostly controlled and directed by the company!

This might look like too much of deviation from the topic, but it is how the idevices are portrayed to the world and how the ifanbois take it. It's is just overrated.

It's not just overrated fanboyism. Here's a reviewer that shows that a modern iPhone's display quality is very directly comparable to a $35,000 Sony mastering monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_czpXW3yKE

That's not just insanely good, but it "just works" out of the box. No need to buy a HDR-capable colorimeter, buy separate HDR-capable calibration software for it, and then have to deal with the software workflow around this.

Just take a picture, share, done. All your friends with iDevices can immediately view your HDR photo or video, with calibrated quality comparable to professionally mastered content.

The software (the "computational" part of photography) is a complex, end-to-end thing that is absolutely required to utilise the full capability of displays and sensors.

Apple invested a ton of money into this. They licensed Dolby Vision, and use all sorts of AI-driven automatic picture tuning software to squeeze the most quality possible out of the hardware.

PS: The way I determine if a display has correct calibration is to load a test image on it, load the same test image on my iPhone, and then hold the phone next to the display! I know the phone is going to be correct, whereas everything else is virtually guaranteed to be atrociously bad.

This isn't true.

I've done a lot of action photography. The stabilization of video really is pretty close to a GoPro (and why not - it's software). The ability to do 4K video is much better than most cameras.

> One needs all idevice and isoftware ecosystem to function and survive in the iworld. And that world is mostly controlled and directed by the company!

I don't understand this. You take the photos or movies off the phone and you can use them however you like. There's no particular vendor lock-in in this aspect, and certinaly no more than in the camera world where you choose which of the Sony/Canon/Nikon ecosystems you want to live in.

To be fair, the second you export a picture from an iDevice, it auto-converts it back to JPG with SDR sRGB, to make it compatible with the terrible hardware and software in the rest of the world.

You can upload HDR videos[1] however. I put mine up on YouTube and send Android users the link. This doesn't preserve 100% of the quality, because YouTube doesn't support Dolby Vision and hence is forced to recompress the content into a HDR10 stream. Nonetheless, you get 4K 60fps HDR video that "just works" and generally looks good on any high-end device such as flagship Samsung phone.

[1] Video formats in general have left still imaging in the dust. It's absurd, but the best approach for sharing high quality photography is to encode the still images into a video, like a slide show, and then share that. How nuts is that!?

> it auto-converts it back to JPG with SDR sRGB,

That depends on your settings - Settings → Photos → Transfer to Mac or PC allows "Automatic" (guess whether HEIC or JPG is best) and "Keep Originals" (whatever the photo was shot as). I keep mine on "Automatic" because it sends HEIC to my Mac but JPG to family members who aren't up-to-date with phones etc.

Agreed, Apple is really pushing consumer display technology. It's tough to find FALD 1600 nit displays outside of the XDR or the MBP. Apple has also done a lot for consumer color science.

However, as far as the iPhone producing HDR HEIF photos - as I recall from some brief reading, it seems like possibly an intentional choice from Apple to do this in an opaque, nonstandard way, so other image pipelines can't easily take advantage of it. I don't really want to give them credit for that.

They did it in a nonstandard way because there is no standard way!

This is my point. Also the HEIF files are just a still frame of a standard video format in a standard container format.

The lack of third party support is 100% laziness.

"Everything everywhere is 8-bit SDR sRGB."

Right, because a 10 bit wide gamut desktop display isn't affordable to the vast majority of people?

> Raw pics from a full frame sensors hold the fort and will continue to hold for a longtime to come unless the phones match DSLR in terms of sensor size and optics size.

"Full frame" cameras do not have the best image quality, and don't even have the best image quality for their price. (eg used medium format film cameras are cheaper.)

They're just the best cameras people have heard of. If you're doing product photography you might want a Phase One instead.

It doesn't matter much though; lighting and lens quality are what really make a photo even in a controlled environment.

> eg used medium format film cameras are cheaper

You'd be hard pressed to get better quality from a scanned medium format negative than from a modern 60MP full frame sensor. You might just get there if you use a drum scanner, but any faster and more practical scanning process won't get you there.

> Especially the iPhone photography and videography is always overrated by the fanbois

I love my Nikon but for video I need a tripod to eliminate camera shake. My iPhone gives me stable images every time.