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.
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:
"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.
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.