This is just the mop-up operation. The only products left are going to be super-telephotos for live sports (sales: a hundred a year, if that?) and 4K+ IMAX digital cine cameras.
sensor size matters for low-light stuff too. sure, an iPhone can do a pretty good job at taking several pictures over say a 2s. exposure, but there _will_ be artifacts in the shot as there isn't physically enough light to form a legible image regardless of post-processing.
this is just one of many reasons why digital cameras are NOT at the brink of collapse yet.
Watching them take photos on their iPhones at high school sporting events is always painful.
For what it’s worth, I’m a professional sports photographer (side gig obviously), and I don’t get paid for iPhone photos. I’m not disagreeing with you that iPhones cannot replace dedicated cameras, but they are a lot closer to replacing them for weddings than they are for sports.
But yeah, there is only so much advanced computational photography can improve - you can probably do a fairly good job for a slow scene like a wedding, but fast movements are hard to capture with small sensors.
It’s not the sensor size they matters (larger sensors actually have more noise: that’s why phone photos can look as good as they do). Stop and think for a second: where does the extra light captured by a larger sensor come from?
What actually matters is the physical aperture of the lens. What a large sensor forces you to do is use a larger physical aperture to get the same focal ratio (“f-stop”) and field of view. That’s how you get more light. (the larger physical aperture and constant focal ratio implies a longer focal length, so the math works out)
If you do the math, the larger physical aperture more than compensates for the extra noise of the larger sensor (signal to noise of the system scales as sqrt(sensor_dimension)), so camera systems with larger sensors and the same focal ratio have better noise figures. But it’s not directly due to the sensor.
You can compensate for a lot of that effect by simply installing a lens with a larger focal ratio on a small sensor. That’s because it turns out to be easier to have a high focal ratio when the lens is small: the shorter focal length (for a given field of view) requires a smaller radius of curvature, so controlling chromatic aberration and circle of confusion is easier at higher focal ratios.
I also see a lot of outdoor photographers using them to save on weight (and pairing with some type of spotting scope when needed).
Digital cameras are definitely not on the brink of collapse, but I do see phones being used to either augment or replace specific scenarios more and more.
Pentax has bucked the trend and has continued to release new DSLRs as recently as this year.
I’m a data point in that: I bought a DSLRs and a few lenses probably 15 years ago. Over the years I used them less and less to the point that they’re gathering dust now. It isn’t worth the extra bulk when I head out the door, smartphone cameras are good enough.
If you're out there shooting a hundred basketball games a year or you're camping out in a swamp every weekend to get a picture of a bird it matters.
But that was never the majority of people buying "Pro" and "Prosumer" camera gear. For the vast bulk of the market the smartphone camera gets the job done at a fraction of the cost, way less stuff to carry around, and a much better workflow.
Too many hobbyist photographers seem to miss the forest for the trees here, no one cares about how sharp the picture is or how much dynamic range there is if the content of the photo isn't compelling.
But my experience with a Sony is that you need to do at least an auto-correct on Lightroom/whatever before sharing.
But an iPhone/Android is much much less conspicuous, which is a huge advantage for street photography.
The Olympus Tough series may be the last man standing in that category until Apple makes a shatterproof and diveproof iPhone.
But photography with dedicated cameras is alive and well, and won’t go anywhere anytime soon even as these phones get better and better.
The super telephoto market is alive and well, and Wildlife photography in particular is a big contributor to this. When Olympus released their 150-400mm (300-800mm full frame equivalent) super telephoto aimed at wildlife shooters, it was sold out for almost a year.
For me, the new iPhone means I can shoot B-roll footage that looks great, but this will not replace my main camera anytime soon. It’s currently far more viable for high quality video than it is for high quality photographs.
Currently, the best editing software for social media appears to be CapCut as its ease of use for the power it provides is miles ahead of anything else.
But DSLR's with their large lenses aren't going anywhere, because physics. If you want to capture high-quality footage under low light conditions, or work with a variety of lenses, the tiny aperture on a phone is never going to be enough.
I also have a Sony A7C but I haven’t used it since getting the Ricoh. Being pocketable is a massive factor in how much I use a camera.
Even if the next-gen Oculus had parity with Apple Vision Pro in how vividly they could display VR/AR content - and I doubt this is the case - only Apple (perhaps among any company in the world) can mirror that with a battle-tested supply pipeline for creating pro-level video capture equipment and for integrating those sensors into consumer devices at scale.
While I'd leave the branding to better minds than my own, I'm bullish about Apple's ability to make an "iPad Vision Pro" that has two cameras at eye distance apart as well as laser rangefinding. That would allow for binocular Apple Log capture, and with the advent of Gaussian splatting for point cloud rendering, and increasingly better generative AI for inferring colors/textures of occluded points in the point cloud, you could have professionally color-graded interactive scenes. All that's missing is better ergonomics for this workflow in DaVinci Resolve etc., and one imagines Apple's war chest could go a long way towards incentivizing this.
Apple products will be where high-quality VR content is created, proofed, and consumed. They're not rushing because nobody else has a hope of being close.
Eh... I think this is a bit like claiming "Apple hardware will be where high-quality video games are created, proofed and consumed" in the 90s. You'd be right given the circumstantial evidence, but the industry doesn't really want to play ball. Besides AppleTV and Apple Arcade, I don't think Apple has a huge constituent of VR developers the same way they did for Apps. Simply building the infrastructure won't be enough.
And plus, I don't think your argument rules out a world where Vision Pro is used for recording and Quests are used for content consumption. Unless Apple intends to reinvent the wheel again for 3D video, nothing should stop it from being playable (or at least portable) on other platforms. For most people, the $3,000 price difference will probably not be worth the recording capabilities (especially if they already own an iPhone).
Anything could happen, I guess. Even if you're entirely right though, I don't think Content Creation will be the killer app you think it is. Games and video moves millions of units; productivity and capture are both unproven features poised to reprise Hololens' failure.
Sort of a contrived example... you're a pro and let's say you NEED a headphone jack, but apple just killed headphone jacks.
But more indirectly, they killed the lower volume, higher margin folks with alternatives that offer a headphone jack, and maybe even XLR headphones and microphones.
An analogy might be tesla giving you a 90% better car experience, except they have killed off the dashboard. (now they've killed control stalks like PRND and turn signals)
And it turns out, Sony already has significantly better sensors in their cinema cameras than what they sell to Apple, which is why almost half of Oscar and Emmy nominations are filmed on Sony Venice. Even the low end of their camera line is extremely capable, e.g. the FX3 which shot The Creator.
Apple is far away from actually competing in that market.
But they have pro video editing features! Yes, but it's a subfeature of their general platform, so they can 'count that low' for a hardware feature like that, that will also be useful for their entire userbase since everyone takes videos with their hardware and watches video on their devices anyway.
At the end of the day, a professional camera with good glass and a larger sensor gives you much more control of an artistic vision, and better performance in challenging imaging conditions. I've never seen a cellphone camera that gets anywhere near the image quality I can get from my mirrorless camera in still images. This is likely to be even more apparent in video production due to how the cameras are used.
One of the most glaring mistakes Apple did to its Pro market. And they did quite a few.
They grabbed most of AVID’s and Premiere’s share.
And then Final Cut X happened, or iMovie Pro, as some depreciatively called it