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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

By the 1930s, photography as a field had already existed for a century or so, so I'm not sure why you'd expect it to look terrible in any meaning of the word. For comparison, here's a photograph taken almost a hundred years earlier in 1845 [0], aside form lacking colors, it too is already high quality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_Daguerreoty...

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Well, I’m not surprised they’re surprised. The two main factors in image quality are optics (which has been a solved problem for a long time), and imaging surface area.

Even what is considered “full frame” today is ridiculously small from a historical point of view, when 8x10 plates were common (that’s 60x the surface area!) and not even the largest format in use.

Cell phone photography has made us used to imaging surface areas that are not even a centimeter on each side - it’s a miracle of engineering we can get decent pictures out of those constraints, but image quality is as low as it gets, even though the marketing tells us those are the most advanced cameras ever.

>image quality is as low as it gets

I'm going to dispute that. Given some constraints in both the subject and the use of the image, certain cell phones can really take pretty good pictures. I have a bunch of bigger gear and I mostly don't find it worth taking on trips any longer. Yes, it's older gear but I doubt I'd find it worth spending thousands of dollars to upgrade. I know other serious photographers who feel similarly.

I agree with you only so long as you want to look at those images on those same small devices. The moment you want to print something, the difference is night and day. That being said, I'm a very big believer of the best camera being the one you have with you, so.

I'm not sure I completely agree with respect to small prints. I probably do for 11x14s and beyond. (Which I basically never do any longer as I'm well out of wall space.) But, yeah, it's almost always display on computer and I just don't have a lot of interest in lugging a medium/large camera everywhere like I used to.

> certain cell phones can really take pretty good pictures.

They look pretty on LCD screens but once you print them they look awful compared to professional gear. Like light and day.

Optics were not a solved problem in the 30s they wouldn’t be until the 80s at least for camera lenses. 30s camera lenses were optimized for black and white and very poorly corrected for chromatic aberrations. Well corrected color lenses wouldn’t become common until the 50s. Optics bigger apertures than f4 were expensive and often had severe aberrations. Coatings which prevent internal reflections didn’t mature until the late 60s/early 70s. Up to this point lenses had concentrated on a few well known good optical formulas. In particular high quality zoom and ultra wides were tremendously expensive r&d efforts with bespoke manufacturing[1]. This local maxima wouldn’t be breached until computer aided design and manufacturing processes became the norm leading to aspherical, extra dispersion elements and much higher element counts becoming common. By this point camera lens development has become much more iterative many lenses from the 90s and 2000s are 70s/80s optics with slight coating updates with a plastic auto focus housing.

1: see the achromatic Takumar with quartz elements that was produced in a very limited run for scientific laboratories. And aspherical low aperture lenses like the leica noctilux which required hand grinding the aspherical element.

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