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Comment by Suppafly | Hacker News Reader

>But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular.

It seems like if you have the latest top tier phone: iphone, pixel, samsung s, etc., you get decent photos, if you have any of the 2nd tier phones, they all continue to suck no matter how many mp they claim to have or whatever optics they claim to have.

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I think low light performance is still worse than I thought it would be with an iPhone 16 Pro. With enough light the cameras are great.

Probably because everybody is convinced they can beat entropy with math

With enough light all cameras look great

* until you zoom in or look at it on a screen larger than you'd hold in your hand.

Seriously, even on a modern Pixel (mine) and iPhone (gf's), I'm often disappointed in the level of detail you find once you want to crop an image or zoom in on something distant/small.

The software has come a long way and does incredible things within the limitations of such tiny lenses and sensors. But I've got much lower resolution images from point and shoot cameras in the mid/late 2000's that show more detail and none of the weird software sharpening artifacts of a 20-40+ megapixel phone pic.

Pixel peeping is another story, but most people are looking at these things on the iphone screen itself or at most something ipad/laptop size. Its not like the old days where you went down to the basement with the slide projector and watched the vacation photos on a sheet.

My girl has an S24U and outside it is badass. Indoors, low light, it's really weak. We just bought a 13 year old Canon EOS (Rebel) and it takes much better photos inside. You can get some amazing bargains on old DSLRs.

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