What is worrying is why would you buy something with a camera that lies at source. When you need it to tell the truth, how do you know it will be telling it?
Yeah 300+ is more comfortable for moonshots on APSC sensors, unless you are in -really- good conditions (i.e. perfect sky, far away from artificial lighting.) With 400mm I was able to take a 'pretty dang good' moonshot just outside of my house, even with a little bit of haze that day. It took a good amount of tweaking in DXO to look -great-, but it was worth it.
> What is worrying is why would you buy something with a camera that lies at source. When you need it to tell the truth, how do you know it will be telling it?
This is one of the reasons I still don't care for getting rid of my DSLRs and shoot raw [0] (Besides, PureView was the last phone camera setup I actually enjoyed.)
At the very -least-, these should be settings that have very obvious controls including turning it off by default, and Ideally should be 'opted in.' Otherwise it opens up the possibility that what is happening could count as cheating at certain photo benchmarks.
[0] Okay I also shoot raw to laugh at how awkward some of Sony's E-mount lenses are without lens profile correction applied. Looking at you SEL16F28.
Edit: Context of what you can do at ~550mm equiv. F8, ISO 250, 1/320: https://imgur.com/a/ryoqQB9
That is - any time you are shooting digital, you don't every look at what the camera saw, but at what some computer interpreted it to be.
I'd be interesting in knowing what that picture of the moon looked like right out of the raw capture.
I shoot both, RAW and JPG fine. The latter for quick sharing, with in-camera processing except for action shoots at 9 fps. JPG fine never runs into buffer limits, RAW or JPGs using processing does so. And for birds in flight or sports or similar I don't care that mich about RAW anyway.
Too many people think of raw files as analogous to slides shot in film cameras. In reality they are digital representations of the analog voltages made by sensors. In order to “see” a raw file it has to be processed which usually means demosaicing and assigning color to values based on what the camera manufacturer has provided. Oh and of course different displays will reproduce colors and brightness levels differently as well.
In reality there isn’t any such thing as an unmediated digital photograph. What is being done by smartphone cameras is a little further down the processing curve but is on the same continuum of “regular” digital photography IMO. This second test shows to me that Samsung is trying to give the photographer as sharp a picture of what they took a picture of.
And analog photographers shouldn’t get but so smug about capturing the “actual” image. Even if you shoot transparency film or collodion wet plate the resultant image is still mediated by the materials. Color reproduction, contrast, and of course the translation from 3d world/object to 2d are still enormous manipulations. Taking a picture will always be transformative compared to the original subject.
So what is considered an “accurate” photograph will always be a philosophical question. IMO I wouldn’t what Samsung has done to be “fake.” A lot of these arguments really sound like DSLR owners being upset that decent pictures can be made with pocket cameras.
As far as accurate representation goes, digital photos are court admissable as proof. And forensic ones goes through a deliberate processing pipeline, the original as taken in camera is never discarded while doing so. Which is close enough for me to be a representation of reality.
Personally, my opinion about those over-processed pictures you see on social media is the same as it is about Ssung faking the moon. I don't like neither, regardless if they are smartphone or "real" camera photos.
Presumably the camera does this directly now?
If these features were openly presented as some kind of augmented reality or editing it wouldn't be an issue, but as it stands it is no different from, for example, presenting an entertainment television network as if it were actual fact-based news, and justifying it by arguing that viewers are not looking for the truth but for something that makes them feel that they know the truth.
As for the professionals, a lot of stuff is edited yes. But there is an art to not needing to do any editing worth mentioning. I think there's some intellectual honesty in not painting over any cracks.
Agree on the camer-faking-pictures bit, who wants that?
I reckon I could have hand held it actually. The lens has pretty decent VR in it. Will wait until there's a full moon again and have another go.
And yeah I want my pictures to look natural.
Why do you “need it to tell the truth”? I would bet a large number of the non-expert consumers (99% of users) do not care.
But to defeat this own argument: just make a “AI Enhance” option in the UI…
Besides stuff like this is like pouring gasoline onto conspiracy theory movements like Flat Earthers. Those may be just 1% of the US a population. But you know what isn’t just 1%? Young Earth Creationists, who believe in a similar conspiracy theory of scientists changing the geologic record and maybe astrophysical records as well. These types have large, maybe even disproportionate, political power as well.