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Assuming you're not talking about lens effects (which definitely has a huge effect), you might be reacting to the use of tone mapping in iPhone photos, which tends to make things look "flat". There's a slider called "Brilliance" in the iPhone photos app that you can play around with to get a sense of how this type of processing tends to flatten images. I'm not sure how or whether it's possible to disable this in the default camera app.

Every digital camera I've ever owned takes "better" pictures than my iPhone 15 Pro. The iPhone is fantastic for taking a few snaps to remember a trip or event, or recording an ephemeral "story", but when I am actually trying to take photos there's no comparison to my ~10 year old digital camera.

It's partly about sensor size and tech., partly down the the limitations of tiny smartphone lenses, and partly down to what's added (or should that be taken away) by the "computational photography" software in modern smartphones.

> It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.

Can you post a representative mountain photo from each camera? I'm very curious what generates this feeling for you.

It's probably along the same line as how vinyl records supposedly sound better.

I get that you're saying this as if to point out the hipster-ness of vinyl. I work in the music industry and have personally overseen the manufacturing of 100's of thousands of records, so I'm as much an expert as anyone on this topic.

Yes, vinyl is technically an inferior sound quality to FLACs. I'm happy to rant all day about the flaws of vinyl. I personally prefer high quality digital.

However on a good pressing there is an undeniable difference to a good vinyl pressing. It's not dissimilar from why I said that my kids frame the shots on digital cameras in ways that are different using an iphone. The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital. While there's a lot of shitty USB turntables, even those are often far better than how most people listen to music digitally which is often on iphones and shitty laptop speakers. The physicality of vinyl manufacturing incurs requisite different attention and processes that sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) results in a "better" listening experience.

Could you get the same "better" listening experience with lossless digital? Yes. but most don't. So vinyl is "better."

> The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital.

I call BS. I know people who work in music mastering, and I've asked about this. They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.

They know people will buy vinyls if they want to no matter what if they want to, so it doesn't matter if the digital master isn't perfectly attuned to the vinyl medium

> They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.

With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If the engineers you know do that, you don't know good engineers.

edit: I can't reply to tekla's comment, so I'm editing here. It's frustrating on Hacker News for an expert - like myself, who has sat in on dozens of mastering sessions - to be disputed by someone who "knows some people." I'll clarify further. Do some engineers use the same mixes for vinyl as they do for digital? Sure. They're not good engineers. Or the customer hasn't paid enough (it's usually about $60-$100 per song to master per format). Vinyl is a drastically different medium than digital - of course - and any decent engineer will 100% mix differently and accordingly. If there are artists reading this and your engineer is using the same mix, fire them. You're paying a lot to press to vinyl so do the followthrough and get vinyl-specific mastering.

Here's a good article from an engineer I have worked with many times on why mastering for vinyl is different:

https://www.oregonlive.com/music/2014/11/does_vinyl_really_s...

/shrug. He said/she said standoff is always fun, with a mix of insults.

People who are the type to buy vinyls will buy them no matter what, as long as its not obviously a bad press. Why would any sound engineer bother to do extra work for such a low volume, high chance of losing money, PITA to work with medium, unless they were some sort of super artist.

I'm a good engineer. I've done tons of mixes for records released both digitally and on vinyl or even tape. I never create different mixes for the formats - but I work with great mastering engineers and cutters who will create different masters for each format.

Thanks for commenting. I'm curious why you wouldn't master specifically to the format. There are so many nuances to vinyl with mistakes that can deeply impact sales when the job isn't done right.

For my own part, we had to recut the lacquers on a vinyl release five times to get it right, because the nature of the mix created a middling sound that bounced the needle around and caused intense surface sound. Once we solved that problem, the pressings sounded great.

Obviously with cassettes the profit margin isn't there to justify the additional expense of mastering, and to my ears cassette mastering rarely sounds different than the digital master (maybe some slightly different leveling). I believe NAC actually has a mastering guide to master to cassettes kicking around. But...not sure anyone follows it.

Just to be honest, I don't doubt you're a great engineer. But if you weren't mastering specific to format...I wouldn't hire you. Increasingly we've gone to vinyl-exclusive engineers on bigger projects, because it's so crucial to get the sound right at the start and poor vinyl mastering can cause problems months down the manufacturing line that are costly.

Are you confusing mixing and mastering, maybe? I just said that I don't MIX to different targets. I create the best mix I can, checking phase to mono every step of the way, then I deliver my mix to a mastering engineer who will create a master for digital as well as a master for vinyl. The vinyl master will sometimes be more agressively summed to mono in the bass if we're dealing with too much information in that registry. My point is you don't have to mix to different formats if your mix is good. Good mastering engineers and lacquer cutters will sort the rest for you! Maybe we just misunderstood eachother?

In the parent comment I was talking about mastering and you responding about mixing, so I assumed you meant mastering. Yes, there is always a single mix at least in my experience. That gets delivered to a mastering engineer who, imho, if they’re a good engineer, will master for vinyl and digital separately from the originally supplied mix. It is likely that some mastering engineers might create a digital master and then engineer for vinyl from that digital master but that’s not good engineering.

But yes I think we are on the same page and agree! A single mix. And from that mix are multiple master cuts specific to format.

> I call BS. I know people who work in music mastering, and I've asked about this. They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.

Nah, they don't. There is always a vinyl master. I have several here from records I have released. It may well be made from the digital master, but vinyl needs low and high end roll off and mono low end bass to stop the needle jumping out of the grooves.

I know that part. I was imprecise in the words I used. There is a different vinyl master of course, but its almost always based off the digital master that is than modified to not fuck up on vinyl medium. The vinyl master has more "attention" because the vinyl is more limited, it has nothing to do with being "better"

I'm not a mastering engineer and I always send my pre-masters off and get a digital and vinyl master back. So, whether they prefer to create the vinyl master from the digital I wouldn't know for sure, but that would be my assumption, yes.

I would also agree that the vinyl master wouldn't have more attention outside of dealing with the limitations of the format. Most mastering engineers are working on pretty tight schedules, for not much money, so it wouldn't make sense for them to take longer on the vinyl master (outside of the known limitations). There isn't any aspect of vinyl which is (technically) better. So, it's not like they can improve on the digital master.

> The vinyl master has more "attention" because the vinyl is more limited.

This isn't really true from my perspective. There are a lot of factors as to why vinyl mastering gets more attention. It's harder to do right, so there's that. Artists will often pay far more attention to the vinyl master, so it's a crucial A&R issue. But there's an issue on digital master, we can easily (more or less) change the material on DSPs. It's not fun but it's possible. On vinyl, mistakes made on the mastering side may not even reveal themselves until past the test pressing stage and can be very costly.

> its almost always based off the digital master that is than modified to not fuck up on vinyl medium

This might be true at some levels of skillsets, I guess. But in my circles for at least the last ten years, the vinyl master is sourced from the original mix, not a digital master. In fact, on larger projects more independent labels and artists are hiring vinyl-specific engineers who can oversee what is a very physical process from mastering to lacquer cutting in one sitting. Having sat in an a number of sessions, there's a lot of attention to the ways in which the master is effecting the physical nature of the cut. This is actually how it used to be when vinyl was the imminent format, for reasons I've already stated (cost). In fact some vinyl plants had apartments for record label people to stay on site and oversee the vinyl mastering process.

Vinyl is technically worse in that the low-end and high-end frequencies need to be rolled off to cut. It's also technically worse in that it can't do low-end stereo without the needle jumping out of the groove.

The reasons that people might prefer it (subjectively) are:

* The notion that it's 'warmer' - all this means is the high-end frequencies have been rolled off

* The subtle distortion effect you get from feedback through the needle. The needle, as well as picking up the groove, acts like a microphone for any sound nearby (i.e. the speakers playing the record). This then feeds back through the same loop, creating a subtle chorus effect (very subtle).

I've played in enough large nightclubs with massive sound-systems to know that my records sound completely different in them. The feedback is more extreme, so the chorus effect is more pronounced. This often turns into bigger low end at higher volumes. It can also be problematic if you have a record that's been cut too quietly. You need to turn the gain up on the mixer, picking up more of the club speakers, eventually creating audible feedback hum.

But, by having the same 'effect' on every record played, there then seems to be a consistency of sound from one record to the next. Creating something that's more 'glued' together.

It absolutely comes across. If you know what you're listening for then you understand, but most people just feel it. It's technically distortion, but humans like distortion. Anything too clean is boring to the human ear.

So, vinyl, is not technically better. But, it has some artefacts that are pleasing to the human ear. And, I suspect, that's what people pick up on subliminally (if they're not just trying to be boring hipsters).

If the general consensus is that vinyl sounds better, and the improvement is largely from rolling off highs and mono-ing lows - why don't the digital masters use the same technique? ie, why isn't there only a vinyl-ready master?

I'm not disagreeing - just interested. I actually roll off the highs via EQ for almost all my headphones and speakers.

Making lows mono doesn't sound better (although sometimes it can make the bass seem less muddy, but if you have muddy stereo bass you'd normally fix that too). Some of the highs and lows come back in the pressing. You cut more in the vinyl master only for them to be recovered somewhat in the pressing. You don't get it all back, so the effect I guess has an element of the unknown. Thought I'd just clarify that.

The distortion and chorusing are definitely aspects of 'warmth' too. So, it's not just about the highs and lows. Producers absolutely try to 'warm up' their digital sound sources, stems, and masters with harmonic distortion. I guess you'll always get a bit more with vinyl.

I think some of this is the culture of the industry itself. The major recording studios, engineers, etc. were on a 'war against distortion and noise' from the early 50s. Then digital came along and suddenly it was possible to have low-noise floors and pretty much zero distortion through digital sound sources (plugins).

Because digital was deemed to be 'cold', there has been a bit of a backlash against that in the past decade or so:

* Major mixing console manufacturers, like SSL, after decades of trying to make their mixers as clean as possible are now releasing desks like the Origin [1] which are throwbacks to their late 70s desks. Every classic compressor, EQ, delay, flanger, phaser... from the 50s onwards, still exists either in original form or cloned-form. People are still buying the equipment of the past to make music. And digital plugin manufacturers are stil releasing plugins that try to emulate the old gear.

* New genres appeared like 'lo-fi' [2] that actively does what you say. It tries to degrade the sound for digital too.

* The fact that vinyl isn't just still here, but resurgent, is I guess more evidence of that.

But I still think, to a certain extent, that professionals in the industry want to use the full range and accept that some of it will be lost with a vinyl press. Brighter music is perceived to be louder, so on a radio or something like that, it will cut through better and be more likely to be noticed. I think the recent end of the 'loudness wars' [3] may well see some changes toward releases with different EQ curves.

I own over 10,000 records. I don't buy them because they're 'warmer', I buy them for the UX! I have a terrible memory, but I remember the sleeve of every record I own. I don't know what they're called, just "it's the green one"! I think the warmth argument is slightly overplayed, but I also understand why subliminally people might feel that records are subjectively better because of it.

[1] https://solidstatelogic.com/products/origin

[2] https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-lofi-explained

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

That's really interesting; thanks. I didn't realize the loudness wars had "ended", though I suppose with a lot of streaming services normalizing levels across playlists, there's less benefit.

On the physical aspect - I do miss that from CDs, especially looking through liner notes. Streaming in particular made remembering albums difficult for me. I still find the convenience (especially when it comes to storage!) of digital worth the trade-off though, so now I have everything ripped or bought digitally and available from my media server. It's not quite the same as browsing through CDs, but it's a lot closer.

10k records is quite the commitment - that must need a dedicated room? My ~300 CDs were annoying enough to store, lol.

> I didn't realize the loudness wars had "ended", though I suppose with a lot of streaming services normalizing levels across playlists, there's less benefit.

Exactly this. If you're destroying the dynamic-range of your song so that it sounds louder, only for it to be turned down based on perceived loudness (LUFS [1]), then all you're doing is making your song worse.

"Ended" might be an extreme statement, you still need to maximise loudness, but destroying dynamic range, to the extent that was happening before, isn't needed any more.

> I still find the convenience (especially when it comes to storage!) of digital worth the trade-off though

Me too. I play most music off Spotify, don't have an issue with that, just need to find out what everything I like was called :D

I was a DJ at a pro-level for a long time (from 1999), so vinyl was how I got fresh underground music each week. Going to record stores listening to what had just come in. Used to get vinyl promos too, but those have long since finished, all promos are digital now.

I haven't really taken DJing seriously for more than a decade now, but if I'm buying music to play then I still buy vinyl (again for the UX, not some pretentious 'vinyl is better' reasons). For home listening though, digital is better quality and easier to access. Personally, I prefer having the extra fidelity also.

> 10k records is quite the commitment - that must need a dedicated room?

Two rooms, under the stairs, and some are used as to partially acoustically treat my studio [2], although that doesn't make them particularly easy to access! Not all vinyl was made equal ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUFS

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9swzlgk3wszeq6jfjxmw1/IMG_141...

> It's probably along the same line as how vinyl records supposedly sound better.

I'm not an audiophile, but that's actually probably objectively true, but for non-obvious reasons that are not clear if you're just looking at technical specs. Digital music can sound better, but opens up the technical possibility of prioritizing other things, which are in fact prioritized.

IIRC, it was the "loudness war." Digital audio capable of a much wider dynamic range than vinyl, but the record companies choose to throw most of that away in order to make the music sound "louder." Technical limitations of vinyl prevent those shenanigans (I believe the grooves would be too wide or something), which forces the music to be mastered in a better way than sounds better.

Vinyl is technically lower-performance than well-designed digital but albums that came out in the heyday of the LP sound better on that medium because they were generally mastered with more range. Vinyl has less practical dynamic range than 16-bit PCM but in that era they only had hardware limiters which meant that your mastering engineer couldn't just slap Ozone or L3 on the two-track and brickwall it to within an inch of its life via transient shaping and other DSP tricks. This is also why early CD releases of these albums often sound quieter (and better with a slight turn of the volume knob) than the remasters. Don't get me wrong... some older releases were mastered hot (presumably to stand out on a jukebox in a crowded bar) but even Motown's best attempts can't hold a candle to the nihilistic tidal wave of digital crunch that is possible with modern pop and rock mastering.

For this reason buying modern albums on vinyl doesn't make much sense to me besides for collectibility and sentimentality. I have a few hundred LPs sitting in my closet behind me but it's for those reasons, not because I have any delusions about a non-existent inherent sonic advantage of the medium.

Here are two examples:

https://postimg.cc/gallery/g8kzGHB

https://postimg.cc/gallery/ChSgbdd

Thanks! Which is which?

Are you saying you prefer the bottom ones?

In the mountain photos, IMG_1187 and IMAGE 2024-12-03 08:31:09 are the iphone photos. I think they're fine. But the alternate images (which are by a Canon PowerShot S50) convey better the lighting of how the scene actually looked IRL.

The Canon shots are also more zoomed in, shot with a longer focal length on the lens. The obvious effect of focal length is zoom, but it’s the change in foreground-background distortion that makes the photos look weird or good. Flat, wide lenses like the one used for the iPhone photo exaggerate the foreground and shrink the background. As you lengthen the lens you shrink the distortion and pretty soon you hit a point where it matches the distortion of your eyes’ lenses. That’s when photos look most natural.

The iPhone photo of the mountain has a really nicely balanced dynamic range. The Canon one has blown out highlights where the clouds meet the peaks, and really dark shadows with almost no discernible detail. From a purely technical point of view, the iPhone picture is a "better" photo, but this serves as a perfect example of how "technically better" and "artistically better" are not the same thing.

Ultimately, photography is less about the quality of the equipment, and more about what you do with it (cliché, I know), and phone cameras are pretty high quality but clip your wings by taking all control away from you.

Your kids might benefit from an entry-level Sony a6000 or a6100 (the a6000 is ancient but shockingly capable) or equivalent, and some practice with raw processing software (Lightroom Classic is the default choice here, but Darktable is great if you don't want to give Adobe your money. Apple Photos is a pretty damn decent beginner option too).

>Your kids might benefit from an entry-level Sony a6000 or a6100 (the a6000 is ancient but shockingly capable)

That's what I hate about cameras, the 'ancient' model is still $450 used and ~$850 new.

Wow, I thought it was really obvious which was which, which I found surprising (and I guessed before I read this comment). The thing that gives it away is that the post processing means there's a uniform amount of illumination throughout the picture, which rally makes it look like an iPhone picture.

I'm never going to be bale to unsee this.

The poster said they "convey better the lighting of how the scene actually looked IRL."

I dunno... I've never seen anything like the photo of the mountain (IMG_6491) in real life. The reality is that our eyes have an extremely wide range of contrast. But in that photo, the clouds are blown out and all the immediate scenery is essentially black. In real life, clouds don't get blown out, and you can see everything around you just fine in every situation where there's a big blue sky above you. The iPhone photo is a much more accurate approximation of what our eyes perceive.

And the poster claims the mountains feel like more massive objects on the older camera. I'll respectfully disagree -- on the older camera, I can't judge their size because I can't see any of the landscape leading up to them for comparison. Whereas on the iPhone, I intuitively feel how massive they as my eye is drawn up the road, up the valley, up into the sky. I have full context for comparison.

Of course, there's no arguing with taste. :)

But maybe I can never unsee this either -- I appreciate the iPhone even more now...

> It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.

Might be due to a combination of sensor size, focal length on the older camera, and the distance to the subject.

You should teach them to also move into better positions and think about light and shadows when they take phone pictures.

A big difference between smartphones and cameras is the focal lengths. On an iphone, a 48mm focal length is considered tele, and the main cam is 24mm. That will surely take away the perspective from the Rocky mountains, if not your nose.

Perspective depends on distance to subject only. Focal length decides framing.

They get confused, because one tends to / has to adjust one's position to obtain the framing one wants given one's focal length choices...

It's partly the ccd sensor, it's unfortunate we moved on past these as no modern digital camera can quite match the best of those color-wise imo

CCD or CMOS sensors count photons. They presumably have some natural frequency response curve, but the actual colour discrimination comes from the filters (usually some flavours of RGB, but has been other choices too).

It's those filters, and the colour reconstruction algorithms that change colour response, not the underlying sensor.

the pictures were, subjectively at least, better.

I'm in love with this phrasing.