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Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

it’s amazing how so many people have seen these truck sized drones but they’ve all somehow failed to get pictures.

i can go outside right now in the dark with this phone i’m typing on and get a solid picture of stuff but somehow they keep showing us pictures that look like 1940s era ufo photo blur.

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No you can't - try it. Take a picture of the moon.

careful, you may get an AI moon to make up for the fact you can't really get a good picture of it.

https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-galaxy...

The same probably happens with blurry small aircraft in the scene. It'll "upscale" (i.e. draw in) all kinds of objects with what it thinks is most likely from the context, from its training set.

I can get an acceptable picture of the moon with my phone (at least when autofocus doesn't decide to do something stupid), yet also I can't get good pictures of birds in nearby trees or urban foxes on the other side of the road.

Phone can do night with just hand jitter ok, can't effectively compensate for target motion.

Probably not with a phone, but "affordable" full-frame MILC/DSLR cameras with 100-400mm or 600mm lenses exist and people have them. Much better chances.

This article links photos from a Sony full frame camera and 600mm lens but it clearly struggles:

https://eu.app.com/picture-gallery/news/2024/12/10/drones-in...

These photos look very much like a helicopter. Especially the fifth photo.

Odd, one of those pictures clearly show either a regular RC helicopter, or a full-scale helicopter. You can see the boom and tail light clearly. And no sound associated with it? There are designs for "silent" blades. I mean theyre not silent, bud at least less noisy.

Even decently fast glass won’t do a good job of capturing drones at night unless there’s a significant amount of ambient light.

And telephoto lenses with the range you mention with fast apertures are not exactly cheap. A 600mm F/4 goes for $12-15K and is still not fast enough for shooting moving subjects in the dark.

I did find it odd when this news reporter said of the craft "it's really difficult to show you with our camera, so we have to show you with our phones." You'd think a broadcast-grade camera rig would be better than a smartphone at this.

At the 11-second mark: https://youtu.be/M186uZ1RCxU?t=11

In my experience the majority of that 1940s photo blur comes when you crop and zoom what otherwise looks like a beautiful digital photograph. I experienced this quite often when utilizing security cameras to try and read license plates.

Any movement of the vehicle whose plate you are attempting to track creates pixelization requiring you sometimes to stitch together multiple frames where individual characters on the plate have become clear in order to read the entire license plate.

High resolution film can get to the equivalent to 500 MP resolution just in 35mm.

Larger film has insanely high resolving power...

https://www.analog.cafe/r/409200000-pixels-with-adox-cms-20-...

Incorrect, there are dozens or hundreds of video clips showing these drones in both social media and mainstream news.

Why do the drones always look like airplanes?

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