I've never owned an Apple device. I don't take photographs or video with my phone very often. But this video presentation was captivating. It was clear, concise, without any nonsense, and thoroughly interesting.
this guy knows what he’s talking about. he has authority in his field. he has proven both theoretically and materially that his wisdom is high quality.
yet, videos from people with far less expertise on the subject matter will likely drown his out. over and over again i’ve seen the top videos on so many subjects repeating just plain wrong information but the “creator” says it with confidence so people just eat it up. even worse, so many times i’ve seen people in the comments try to nicely point out where the “creator” went wrong, and people go after the commenter for daring to imply this person on the magic screen might be misinformed.
it’s such a shame that being higher in the search says almost nothing about your knowledge on a subject and only means you’re better at manipulating the algorithm rather than having actual higher quality information.
i really wish that our searches would prioritize quality of information. at this point, years later, i think it’s pretty clear that the “wisdom of the crowd will shoot the highest quality to the top” has been proven to not be the case.
also, i don’t want to imply that amateurs can’t have valid and interesting perspectives, sometimes they might, just that being higher in search means quite literally nothing on wisdom of a subject—especially if a grifter can monetize off a trendy nuanced subject.
anyway, this video was incredible information. thx for sharing his background.
Use a free service, and the person providing it doesn't have an incentive to give you what you want.
Which is how we got current Google.
They prefer you to use the form "their take on reality" . Misinformation is bad! Point of view is good!
So when I see an add for say Kenwood's latest radios in QST magazine, what would be the disinformation being spread? Or an ad for House of Staunton chess sets in Chess Life magazine?
I think disinformation probably implies a level in malice that is not present (or rather, present in consumerist systems by default, and not specific to advertisers), but obviously trying to convince someone to purchase something which it might actually not be good for them to buy, is misinforming them.
If a friend told you to buy a product and you did and it sucked, you'd be upset at them. But when a company does it with an ad, no one gets upset, because we understand that ads are lying to us.
We don't expect that they're being honest.
Or put another way, we expect that they are misinforming us about our need for, and appreciation of, the product.
First, I (and many people that I know) do get upset when an ad misrepresents a product and we get burned. It happens all the time, and people complain about it constantly. You might argue this is wasted breath, but it still happens.
I would also say that while everyone accepts that ads are at a high risk for dishonesty, the vast majority of people live their lives assuming that ads convey some useful information, even if it's just the vague intent and target audience of the product. It's easy to pick out specific genres of ads that don't seem to do this, and ad rhetoric can often be complicated and interesting, but generally speaking they do try to convey some sort of genuine information about the product.
Saying that ads are fundamentally misinformation people because they are "obviously trying to convince someone to purchase something which might actually not be good for them to buy" seems like a reasonable criticism at first glance, but actually I think that's kind of a ridiculous standard. No one except my closest friends and family have any idea what might be "good for me to buy", and I am not so against the idea of basic commerce that I think it's useful to say that someone hawking their wares is "misinforming" the public simply because they're trying to sell to strangers.
This is not to say that the ad industry isn't infested with slimy people with perverse incentives. Of course it is. But advertising itself is a basic extension of human communication, and I think it's awfully cynical to say that any attempt to show someone why they might want to buy your product is spreading misinformation. I do believe that it's okay to advocate for something, and then let people decide for themselves if they agree. If it's not, then nearly all human discourse is an exercise in misinformation.
(Inb4 "actually, nearly all human discourse is misinformation")
To conflate those 2 as being remotely similar in levels of influence (even at an individual level) is insane.
Also, I'm not sure why you jumped to assuming that I apparently believe advertising shouldn't be allowed, just because I can acknowledge that it is based entirely on selfish intent by the ad creators?
All I said was that ads are a form of misinformation. You're the one drawing conclusions about what responses that must entail.
If you prefer to pretend it's not misinformation just because you apparently cannot reconcile that stance, and allowing ads to continue to exist, that's a "you" problem.
You said that ads are misinformation because they try to convince you to buy something that may or may not be in your best interest to buy. My response to this is that's a ridiculous definition of "misinformation," and I disagree with it strongly.
You said nothing about levels of influence, or about modern ad campaigns versus word-of-mouth advertising, or anything of the like. I couldn't have responded to these things even if I wanted to, because you didn't say them. All you said was that selfish motivation == misinformation, and that's wrong, and I disagree with it.
Of course I suspected that you wrote your comment because of angst against the manipulations of "modern ad campaigns," and not because you believe that's actually a useful definition of misinformation, and you just proved it for me. You're trying to redefine words so you can use those words to give your point more oomph.
I also said nothing about you believing advertising shouldn't be allowed. Why do you think I said this? I didn't even imply it. I only said I thought you were being cynical.
It's true that there's a massive gap between a vendor hawking their wares on the street and "modern ad campaigns and techniques." There is also an entire gradient between these two things, and you see examples all along this gradient if you actually pay attention to advertising. The existence of this gradient is why I take issue with your original comment.
No I didn't, even according to you:
> You said that ads are misinformation because they try to convince you to buy something that may or may not be in your best interest to buy
Correct. Which is true if the thing they say you should buy, you should not in fact buy.
> that's a ridiculous definition of "misinformation," and I disagree with it strongly
You don't like that definition because you don't think that pressuring someone to buy something, when you have a vested interest in that thing selling, is inherently wrong. Not everyone has to have the same opinions about business rights and ethics as you.
> You said nothing about levels of influence, or about modern ad campaigns versus word-of-mouth advertising, or anything of the like.
No, you brought that into the conversation:
> I am not so against the idea of basic commerce that I think it's useful to say that someone hawking their wares is "misinforming"
Before that, we were clearly talking about modern ads, not "someone hawking their wares" as part of "basic commerce", which is obviously far more expansive a discussion, and includes said individual sellers.
> not because you believe that's actually a useful definition of misinformation
I am not limiting "misinformation" to only that, I am including that within the umbrella of misinformation, because it is.
Misinformation is simply, "Untrue or incorrect information." You are the one trying to redefine it to exclude common forms of misinformation we're used to navigating.
> I also said nothing about you believing advertising shouldn't be allowed.
Not explicitly. What you said was
> "I do believe that it's okay to advocate for something, and then let people decide for themselves if they agree. If it's not..."
Which is an inherent implication that I do not think it's okay to do so. I do think it's okay, I just can acknowledge that it's usually misinformation. As I said, the issue here is you being unable to reconcile something being misinformation, and that thing still being allowed.
There’s an element of truth, but it is way too reductive. Are you of the mind that word of mouth is the only moral way to grow a business?
it doesn’t make it less of a shame. and it certainly shouldn’t stop us from wondering.
Google as one among competitors (read: pre-Android/~2005) still had to be a useful enough search engine to attract users.
Once their search share attained hegemony, user satisfaction deprioritized (relatively) and revenue was allowed to dominate.
And thus, we now get a Google who has little interest in weeding out SEO'd spam. (And not as in 'tweaking their algorithm' -- as in fundamentally detecting and delisting all recipe-story porn and answer-mills)
You can easily start a search engine using a different model. You’re going to struggle to compete with anything that prioritizes what users find popular.
Granted, it was a simpler problem then, given early web.
But the slide since (in the face of revenue counter-incentives) feels at best like ambivalence about objective value to user.
It’s in almost all topics now, from the Ukraine War to cooking.
And ancient aliens type stuff is all over the place - UFOs, pyramids, gov’t conspiracies of various forms, etc.
Not just YouTube of course, but very visible there.
One lesson (no pun intended) of the academic environment is that no, it doesn’t work that way. Some people are subject-matter experts, some are brilliant expositors, but while you can’t be a good expositor without a decent knowledge of the subject matter, you absolutely can be a world-leading scientist and at the same time completely rubbish at explaining your ideas. (Some areas are better at making use of such people than others.)
Good exposition deserves additional credit on top of subject expertise, is what I’m trying to say.
This also means that you will often find excellent easily digestible expositions of ideas from people who don't have a good grasp of the subject matter, which is problematic.
This particular topic, though, I do feel more strongly about than most I comment on here.
Technical exposition is an underappreciated art, and in many places an unrewarded one. How many star technical writers can you name, compared to star programmers? How much effort does writing a good review paper take, compared to an incremental research advance, and how much harder is it to publish one?
Halmos, one of the best expositors of (non-popular!) mathematics in at least a generation, quotes an anonymous mathematician in How to write mathematics: “All of us, I think, feel secretly that if we but bothered we could be really first-rate expositors”; the mathematician’s point being that nothing could be further from the truth. (Incidentally, it’s a bit startling how well Halmos’s principles map to the ones in Vonnegut’s How to write with style.)
I’m sensitive about this in part because I myself want to be good at exposition and never feel that I actually am. Still, personal hangups aside, if the guy is an expert and can communicate, with no tradeoff on either side, that’s rare enough—and must have needed work enough—that it should be celebrated.
https://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/301497...
I'm the (formerly) young guy who rented the 550 to the production team for a few days. Pretty fun story to be tied to the movie.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ren+and+stimpy+log+song&atb...
It will be fascinating for anthropologists a few hundred years from now to see the increase in quality in «every day photography» that came with the increasing quality of smartphone camera software.
"The Wedding Album" short story by David Marusek
>"Wait a minute!" shouted Benjamin, waving his arms above his head. "I get it now. we're the sims!" The guests laughed, and he laughed too. "I guess my sims always say that, don't they?" The other Benjamin nodded yes and sipped his champagne. "I just never expected to be a sim," Benjamin went on. This brought another round of laughter, and he said sheepishly, "I guess my sims all say that, too."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_Album_(short_story...
>"The Wedding Album" is a science fiction short story by David Marusek. It was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction in June 1999.
>Synopsis: After their wedding, Anne and Ben realize that they are merely recordings of the real Anne and Ben, destined to relive the hours surrounding the wedding for all eternity.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13576562
>With wedding photos and videos and mementos of all kinds, newlyweds attempt to hold on to their special day and to cherish it forever. Someday technology may enable us to record not only our appearance and voices but everything we know, feel, fear, and love at the moment the shutter clicks. Then our wedding mementos, like Anne and Ben’s in this story, take on a life of their own in a world where love may be eternal, but the world is not. Till deletion do us part . . .
A fair amount. Not everything, but a decent chunk. You don't store things in multiple locations?
However, some phones now even apply AI filters to fill in detail it didn't capture. Like adding craters to the moon.
And the thing about contrast, sharpness etc is that "more always looks better" at a quick glance. So when people are doing comparisons between phones etc, the one destroying the picture the most might be declared the winner.
That said, the dopamine hit comes from taking your own shots and seeing the visual perfectness Apple creates, rarely if ever will those shots give the same effect to a viewer. So they don’t need to be photography-perfect, they just need to appeal enough to our monkey brains and monkey eyes to get that shot of dopamine to want us to take more pictures, therefore using the phone and resulting cloud storage more.
In the end, the best camera is the one I have with me. And if I can take a pretty good portrait shot of my kid while I’m at a diner then I’m happy.
To me, the memory/moment is more important than the “quality”.
These camera companies need to invest more in their software. Superzoom, night sight, subject tracking and smart autofocus should be table stakes. Auto mode on my mirrorless should at least be on par out of the box with my phone. It's sad that the pixel phones with very old Sony sensors can take better 10x pictures than mirrorless out of the box. They need to worry less about better lenses and sensors, and worry more about better onboard compute capabilities.
The clarity, the sharpness, the pop - everything was improved. Good glass is a bigger difference than the body.
-- more control of depth of field / shallower DoF ability?
-- faster shutter speeds?
-- less chromatic aberrations?
It doesn't intuitively feel like sharpness should be a factor -- even cheap kit lenses usually get that right.
The chromatic aberration is an important but subtle effect. Remember that lenses are multiple pieces of glass, and every interface diffracts the wavelengths of light like a prism. One of the considerations in lens design is converging all those different wavelengths of light in the same place. Not just at one point, but at every point across the image plane.
Poor lenses might do the well in an area. Good lenses do it everywhere.
The static aperture also helps tremendously of course, yes - nice bokeh with a tight zoom means you can easily get candid portraits that look great from anywhere in the room.
L glass is also a very interesting used market - those things basically don't lose value IME.
Other than the actual business side of things, pesky details like getting clients. And the massive stress of shooting a wedding. I was happy to do it gratis for family, but I don’t think I’d want to deal with paying clients.
A $300 lens is objectively better than a $5 smartphone lens.
A $2000 lens may be objectively better than a $300 but it depends what you're standing in front of and you.
The Nikkor Z 28mm f/2.8 is my favourite so far and it wasn't exactly expensive.
The priority order for things is of course:
1. What the photographer is standing in front of
2. The photographer
3. The lens
4. The camera
On the flip side, my favorite macro was a Sigma 105mm prime. Tack-sharp, and cost well under $1000. Of course, I’ve never shot with the equivalent Canon L (which isn’t quite the same at 100mm, but close).
But, at least today, you still get enhanced features on the more expensive zoom lens, such as wider aperture, and a constant maximum aperture across the entire zoom range. Neither of those things necessarily yields a superior photograph -- you don't need f2.8 across the whole zoom range if you're taking pictures at f6 -- but they can be very helpful. If they're worth paying for depends on one's personal needs, desires, and budget.
Not sure where you are getting the $5 figure from. In any case, smartphone lenses are manufactured in vastly higher quantities than lenses for interchangeable lens cameras, so it doesn't make sense to compare the per unit cost. Modern smartphone lenses are miracles of optical engineering. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557578 The cost of the R&D that's gone into enabling their design and manufacture probably couldn't have been recuperated if they were being used only in cameras.
If processing power is one of the bottleneck to get some of the features phones can do it would be great if there was a universal hotshoe-like way to mount phones to camera bodies to use the screen, touch capabilities, and offload processing power, maybe with all phones now having USB-C its more of a possibility. If the camera makers don't do it I wouldn't be surprised if Apple/Google eventually do and eat their lunch.
This is exactly the complaint I have about car manufacturers not having enough / the “right” digital UX experience.
Not to mention that I don't walk around with that mirrorless camera in my pocket at almost all times.
My Z50 and kit lens fits in my pocket fine.
It takes 10x longer to setup, take, and post-process and is a hassle for many reasons, but the photo quality is extremely noticeably better.
Camera bodies will keep being updated. Glass is updated, but a lot more stable.
If I have a friend who wants to invest, say, $3,000 in a camera setup, I'd tell them to get a $1,000 body and $2,000 of lenses. A couple have thought they'd buy a $2,500 body and $500 lens, and I explained why they might be disappointed with that investment.
My typical test is to take a photo of the full moon. It works acceptably well on an iPhone (or Android). My recent Pixel phone even adjusts the brightness automatically. Sure, the lens is pretty wide-angle, so the pictures don't have many details.
I had to fiddle around for 20 minutes with settings on my Sony Alpha camera, eventually using manual focus and manual exposure. The pictures are, of course, better because of the lens and the full-frame sensor.
But the user experience is just sad. So I often just don't bother to take my camera with me on my trips anymore.
Also, a note to camera makers: USE ANDROID INSTEAD OF YOUR CRAPPY HOME-GROWN SHITWARE. Add 5G, normal WiFi, GPS, Play Store, a good touchscreen. You'll have an instant hit.
Ass end Nikon Z50, 250mm kit lens, hand held, no setup really other than shutter priority ... https://imgur.com/edCyNjV (very heavy crop!)
And a Pixel 6a mutilating a shot: https://imgur.com/290gXkU
I do not want android on a phone. I don't want to update or reboot it. I want to turn it on, use it and turn it off again. And I don't want someone substituting pictures of the moon for stuff online (hey Samsung!)
My smartphone however does not create photos, it creates digital art based on the scene. Your Pixel image is a perfect example of how algorithms (now called "AI") re-paint a scene in a way that resembles reality when zoomed out.
Comparing smartphone and camera is really apples to oranges at this point, as smartphones aren't even capturing photos, they're entirely repainting scenes.
Calm down, it's not that bad. Take for example night sight or astrophotography; it's using ML to intelligently stitch together light across time because available light in one moment is not enough to capture anything intelligible. Your end result is an accurate representation of what your eyes see (e.g. my own face in a nighttime selfie) and what is sitting there in the sky (the stars). You can call that repainting, but I disagree, it's more information aggregation over the temporal dimension.
Super resolution is similar, using shakes in your hand to gather higher resolution than you can accomplish with a single frame of data from your low res sensor grid. 2-3x digital zoom with super res technology is actually getting more information and more like optical zoom. It's not just cropping+interpolating.
Now...portrait mode. That's clearly just post-processing. But also...does blurring the background using lens focus have any additional merit vs doing it in post (besides your "purity"-driven feelings about it)?
At the end of the day, I want my mirrorless to do more than be a dumb light capture machine. I spent $X thousand+ for a great lens and sensor, so I want to maximize. It should do more to compensate automatically for bad lighting, motion blur, etc. It should try harder to understand what I want to focus on. As a photographer, I should get to think more about what photo I want taken and think less about what steps I need to take to accomplish that. My iPhone typically does a better job of this than my $X000 mirrorless. So I use my iPhone more.
Oh speaking of astrophotography. It occured to me that all those pretty images of remote planets and nebulas have been doctored to hell and back.
What I don't know is where I can find space images that show the visible spectrum - i.e. what I'd see if i managed to travel there and look out the window.
Is there such a thing?
Apart from that: The phones generally try to substitute the tiny sensors through highly complex software algorithms, creating something that sometimes only has a broad similarity with the original scene. The cameras, on the opposite, usually have crappy software and rely on their great sensors (and other hardware). So in an ideal world, you'd have a proper camera with good software. That software then doesn't have to do all the (good or bad) stuff which is only there to try to make the best out of less than ideal image input, but instead it can provide more user friendly features which allow making quick and easy photos without having to study tutorials for a week (yes, now I am exaggerating a little on purpose :)).
This software doesn't have to do all the crap that in any way reduces the image quality in the end.
Please don't just think in the extremes, but look for the healthy middle way that would provide the best out of both worlds.
It is not Android that does the image processing itself btw., but special software that the phone manufacturers add on top of Android. So this part would be the responsibility of the camera's manufacturer again, but this time they could focus more on their central use case (help making good pictures) instead of writing everything (like the user interface) themselves. And they could even provide their users with more options to extend their software for even better photos.
Of course, cameras with large sensors and lenses are going to be better than small phone sensors. Physics is physics. It's just that it doesn't matter that much for most people (me included).
> I do not want android on a phone. I don't want to update or reboot it.
I have used Galaxy Camera back in 2014. It was awesome. I could take pictures, and automatically upload them to Picassa (RIP) or share them with people. The UI was also pretty good, but it was clearly a V1 without too much polish.
> I want to turn it on, use it and turn it off again.
I have an Onyx book reader that runs Android. It works just like this. I pick it up, press a button, and it shows the book I've been reading within a second. So it's clearly possible.
I also don't want it to have reduced battery life just so that I can use the god-awful playstore on it.
Instant-on Android devices are a solved problem.
Cold reboot after updates takes about 20 seconds, like my phone.
This strategy can work for cameras.
Honestly, I don't see a problem.
Funny enough I enjoy shooting film over digital. A lot less work and decision to be made.
As for convenience, the DSLRs can be tethered to your phone now. I shoot on mine and they go to Apple Photos.
I have been interested in some of the micro 4/3 cameras that have prebuilt filters in them but I think film for me is king if I have a camera.
They offer a free trial, try it out! (I am not affiliated, just a happy user)
https://store.serif.com/en-gb/checkout/?basket=ed0b917180520...
My Sony a7iv gives me the same dopamine hit, maybe more so as there’s no better feeling than getting home, loading your footage into DaVinci and see that your exposure, focus and colours are nailed (on the other side of the coin, it’s a huge punch in the gut to get home and see your focus a little off, giving the opposite effect of a dopamine hit). But it’s more of a process to get there and the average user needs a faster feedback loop from shot to hit.
If you’re always walking around with a camera bag? Sure. If you’re regularly in beautiful situations without one? Eh…
Here’s one I posted several months ago on intentional camera movement photography:
Ha ha, I have no idea. Almost a decade ago I worked on the Photos team for a stint, I should have asked.
Maybe users feel like they ‘touched up’ their photo if they tap the magic wand button.
With glass and a sensor that small they aren't for everything, but the days of mandatory compression, limited color depth, mandatory "enhancements" and all of that stuff are over. If I'm shooting a handheld gimbal video, of something like a person talking outdoors not in direct sunlight, I'm grabbing that iPhone Pro without thinking twice.