iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras
candid9.com
candid9.com
1. Difference in focal length/ position.
2. Difference in color processing
But…the article is fairly weak on both points?
1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or whatever the focal length is.
2. Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone and the other camera. It’s again, no different between the two.
It’s a poor article because it doesn’t focus on the actual material differences.
The phone will have a smaller sensor. It will have more noise and need to do more to combat it. It won’t have as shallow a depth of field.
The phone will also of course have different ergonomics.
But the things the post focuses on are kind of poor understandings of the differences in what they’re shooting and how their cameras work.
For portraits the ideal length is 85mm equivalent which would be 3.5x, rumored to be on the next iphone pro. At this length there is minimal facial feature distortion without getting the flattening effect you get at longer focal lengths.
Most of the photo examples here were somewhere between “I can’t tell a significant difference” and “flip a coin and you might find people who prefer the iPhone result more.”
Even less of a difference when they’re printed out and put in a 5x7” frame.
Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0. You already own one. You were going to buy a smartphone anyway for other things. So if we are going to sit and argue about quality we still have to figure out what dollar value these differences are worth to people.
And the “evidence” is supposedly that people aren’t getting their phone photos printed out. But let’s not forget the fact that you literally couldn’t see your film photos without printing them when we were using film cameras.
I've had a bunch of "high-end" digital SLRs and they (and the software processing the raw files) do plenty computational processing as well.
I completely agree that all else being equal it's possible to get photos with better technical quality from a big sensor, big lens, big raw file; but this article is more an example of "if you take sloppy photos with your phone camera you get sloppy photos".
Many people buy a more expensive smartphone specifically for the better camera module. These are expensive devices! It's good marketing that you perceive that as "free", but in reality, I spend way less money on my fancy camera (new models every five years), than my iPhone-loving friends on their annual upgrades.
You see similar when people are comparing APS-C, micro 4/3, or medium format lenses.
However, due to physics there is also no working around the quality issues of a small sensor. Photosites get less light and produce more noise, and automated noise suppression costs detail and sharpness.
I wonder whether tiny lenses of equivalent sharpness and clarity as their larger equivalents would be much more expensive or impossible to produce (sure, less material, but much finer precision required), but it probably doesn’t matter because the tiny sensor already loses enough sharpness that better lenses won’t contribute much.
At some point the wave-like nature of light starts to bite. Can't really go much smaller than a micron per pixel. So a millimeter sized chip gets you 1 megapixel. 50MP mean ~7mm. (back of the envelope caveats apply)
Only if you define quality as field of view.
For light-gathering ability and background separation/bokeh, you need a lower f/number on APS-C than on full-frame to be equivalent: A 35mm f/1.2 lens on a 24MP APS-C sensor will take pictures that look nearly identical to a 52.5mm f/1.8 lens on a 24MP full-frame sensor. (Assuming crop factor of 1.5.) Both will have an aperture size of 29.17mm (= 35mm/1.2 = 52.5mm/1.8), will capture a 37.9° x 25.8° FoV.
Almost all important properties of lenses are determined by field of view and the aperture diameter: Amount of light gathered, background blur, diffraction, and weight.
The illumination-per-area on the full-frame sensor will be 2.25x lower, but the area of the sensor is 2.25x larger so it cancels out such that both sensors will receive the same number of photons.
Background blur is determined by aperture diameter, field of view, and the distances to the subject and background. Since the two lenses have the same aperture size and field of view, you'd get the same amount of background blur for a given scene.
For many lenses (particularly telephoto lenses), the size and weight are primarily determined by the size of the front element, which needs to be at least as big as the aperture. For wide-angle lenses, you start needing a front element that's significantly wider than your aperture for geometry reasons -- the subject has to be able to see the aperture through the front element, so that relationship breaks down.
(Also with lenses where focal length << flange distance, you start to need extra optics to project the image back far enough. This can mean that a wide-angle lens can be more complicated to build for APS-C than for full-frame on the same mount. Take for example the Rokinon 16mm f/2 at 710g / 87mm long versus the Nikon AF-D 24mm f/2.8 at 268g and 46mm long. This isn't relevant to phone cameras, since those don't need to fit a moving mirror between the sensor and the lens like SLRs do. Phone camera makers can put the lens exactly as far from the sensor as makes sense for their design.)
Slow telephoto lenses for DSLRs are pretty much the only place where crop sensors have an advantage. DSLR autofocus sensors generally need f/5.6 or better. Thus, for a given field of view, you need a bigger aperture + front element for the full-frame lens than the "equivalent" crop-sensor lens -- e.g. a 300 f/5.6 with its 53.6mm front element is going to be heavier than a 200 f/5.6 with its 35.7mm front element. However, as mentioned above, the 300 f/5.6 on a full-frame camera will gather 2.25x as much light as the 200/5.6 on the APS-C sensor. Mirrorless cameras can typically autofocus with smaller relative apertures. This is why you see Sony selling an f/8 zoom and Canon selling f/11 primes for their mirrorless mounts -- this sort of lens just wasn't possible on DSLRs. On mirrorless, you could have a 300 f/8.4 full-frame lens that would be truly equivalent to the 200mm f/5.6 APS-C lens.
Most people enjoy chasing measurable specs and don't stop to understand what they're actually doing. So they'll go compare a 4/3 sensor's output at iso x to a full frame sensor at the same iso. They won't stop to think about what they're trying to achieve. If they want the same depth of field, they won't be able to use the same aperture. So, out in the field, something has to give. Either lengthen the exposure or raise the ISO. If we're talking high ISOs, you probably can't shoot much slower, so higher ISO it is. Differences are then much less shocking.
The other extreme is people chasing paper-thin focus, which, I guess, isn't as easy to obtain on smaller sensors. Yet, for some reason, they won't go to a larger format, either...
Medium format explodes the cost and again, the lenses I want aren't even available.
So you go for what you can get, given the marketplace and also given the lens system you have bought into.
I doubt anyone is going wildlife shooting with a large format camera, for example.
Not with true large format, but with the new Fuji medium format cameras it's starting to become reasonably possible to do faster work like wildlife at larger format sizes. The main issue remains, which is sensor readout speed, but the technology has gotten so much better that you can get results with things like birds-in-flight that are comparable to a FF DSLR camera from 10 years ago, with MF now, as far as speed, but at 3x-5x the effective resolution.
Cost is still prohibitive though, I recently upgraded and really considered the new Fuji 100MP MF line, but ended up with a Nikon Z8 in the end for wildlife. On my next iteration, I'll probably bite the bullet and go MF. If I could double the resolution and get similar speed, it'd be worth it, IMO. Especially at the sizes I typically print
If Sony would make a MF body, I’d be all in.
As far as I'm concerned, the primes aren't particularly larger or heavier for MF than they are for FF, it's more that the higher resolution and larger sensor size creates physical limits that makes everything slower on MF. No 20fps burst shots in RAW at full resolution with a Fuji GFX100 II, it's only 5fps. That lack of speed is reflected everywhere, because it's doing it on a sensor that's twice the size and twice the resolution, but otherwise it seemed like a pretty amazing camera to me. Speed for me is important though, so I stuck with a Nikon Z8.
It sounds like an MF setup with say a 28mm and a 100mm equivalent lens would require more work but possible (though maybe not enjoyable) to casually carry around.
When shooting raw stills I don’t particularly care about speed. I do enjoy shooting raw CinemaDNG video, there are reasonably priced FF bodies that support it, but if I get a camera for high-quality stills FPS wouldn’t really be a deal-breaker for my uses (I guess it might for bird watching or for sports).
Really? I used a nice longer (maybe 80mm equivalent) lens on an APS-C system a while ago, and it gave very shallow DoF while being much lighter and more practical (cheaper, etc.) compared to what I can find for a full frame. Not going to look up the physics but I was under the impression that shallow DoF is easier on smaller sensors (I don’t mean phone small, just crop small).
> I was under the impression that shallow DoF is easier on smaller sensors (I don’t mean phone small, just crop small).
It's the reverse. These things are continuous. There's no reason for it to be easier one way, then all of a sudden stop and become increasingly difficult. Otherwise, there would be no need for shenanigans with "portrait mode".
My iPhone 14 pro's main camera is an equivalent 24 mm f/1.78. It has way much more in focus than my m4/3 12/2 (also a 24 mm equivalent).
I did not see it becoming shallower after moving to FF, but then I was using different lenses on FF (cheaper older manuals). That probably sums up what I mean.
Sure, when you account for crop and adjust for the same framing then DoF will in fact be deeper on the crop practically. However, even more practically, there are small and affordable f1> lenses made for crops, whereas the brightest 100mm I used on FF is f2.8 or so because going lower they are really big and/or really expensive. So, for equivalent cost/size/weight, you may have easier time getting shallow DoF on a crop if you buy lenses specifically for crops (which admittedly limits your choice of glass).
By having a tiny sensor, the current iPhone pro has a range of 15-120mm.
If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly.
The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing.
Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones.
The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image.
But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment.
(Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.)
It's a great camera in automatic mode most of the time, but not for that scenario.
It is no secret that Apple does a lot of post processing on their mediocre photos to make them look good - more so than most other Androids - because, it's all software. But, from the article, it is understood that the author is trying to point out that Apple could've done a better job to represent skin tones more accurately atleast. The fish-eye defense for Apple is totally understandeable, but, why are we defending the weak skin tones? Every year, they keep launching and claiming grandoise statements "This is the best smartphone camera out there is".
And no, this is not a limitation of smartphone sensors. In fact, if you look at the latest Xperia series from Sony, they have the same software from their DSLRs translated into the smartphones that addresses the skintones perfectly well.
I hope we can skip past the biases and personal preferences we have towards Apple and treat them neutrally like any other manufacturer. This "Apple can do no wrong" narrative and attacking anyone who points out their flaws is just tired and boring at this point.
I’m not defending the default color choices, I’m saying that they’re comparing apples to oranges because they’re comparing an output designed to be opinionated with one that’s designed to be processed after the fact. The iPhone is perfectly capable of outputting neutral images and raw files.
Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable, they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.
I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.
I really don't think it is.
When I pick up a camera, my intent is one of two things: the experience of photography itself, or the best quality I can reasonably obtain. Neither of those goals are attained with a smartphone.
Every other time I take a photo, it's with a smartphone. It's easily good enough for the vast majority of use cases.
> Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable,
That's... absurd. Granted I lean toward a more "street photography" style, but it's exceptionally rare that I spend more then ~30s on a photo in Lightroom. Most of that time is spent cropping. White balance, exposure correction, etc. are all done in bulk.
> they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.
Sure - and why wouldn't you want to play with RAW as well? It's not like the profile the camera would have used isn't embedded in the RAW anyhow.
> I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.
I don't disagree with this at all. Of course there are edge cases; that's why I said "probably".
To put it another way: if you're shooting JPEGs regularly, you're almost certainly not doing it for the craft. There are very few reasons I can think of to choose a traditional camera if you're not going to take advantage of the improvements in ISO and dynamic range that it offers - and those are two things you give up[0] shooting JPEG.
0: You give up ISO in that you are discarding much of the information that you could use to push/pull process, which is very often preferable to very high ISO.
ETA: I just looked it up. In 2024, I kept 767 photos from my iPhone and 1,900 from my cameras. That includes multiple performances of my wife's dance studio, so the latter is heavily skewed by that. Excluding those, I kept 376. In other words, I appear to be taking my own advice here.
No you don't? Good in camera JPEGs will utilise push-pull processing, exposing for maximal dynamic range all for you. You don't lose the advantages of the better optics and sensor just because the JPEG is produced in camera.
Furthermore, JPEG supports ~8 stops of dynamic range while my X-Pro3's raw files support ~14 stops. You lose almost half your total DR when you shoot JPEG (with that camera).
>You lose almost half your total DR when you shoot JPEG
No because the camera is applying a tone curve that compresses that DR when producing the JPEG. You lose precision, not DR, but if you don't intend to process the image further it doesn't matter much.
Some people have a camera because they want to take better pictures than their smartphone but don't want to bother with post-processing, some have tried manual processing and found that the work/result balance was not doing it for them, some think that JPEGs look perfectly fine, some just don't have the time to do the processing... there are myriads of reason for which people would like to land somewhere between “let iOS do it” and “I systematically chose my ISO according to this Darktable script I developed these last years”.
> the best quality I can reasonably obtain.
The best camera, is the camera you have on you.
Photography for me is about the physical and optical side of things. Choosing a lens for a situation, framing the shot, aperture, shutter, etc.
When I switched to digital I was seduced by post-processing, partly as a substitute for the look I could achieve with different films, but mostly I suspect because all those sliders and numbers and graphs are naturally attractive to a certain type of person :)
I eventually pretty much stopped taking photos.
Changing my workflow from post processing RAW photos (and barely ever looking at them again) to using in-camera JPEGs that I can immediately share, print, or whatever was enough to start me taking photos again regularly as a hobby.
More unexpectedly, in addition to the obvious time saving of removing the post processing step (aside from occasional cropping), the satisfaction benefit of the immediacy with which I can now print, share, display, etc. my favourite photos has been huge. It’s so much more rewarding getting photos right after you took them and actually doing something with them!
Now I’m not even sure I’d call all that digital image processing “photography”. Sure, it’s an art in its own right, and one some photographers enjoy, but the essence of photography lies somewhere else. I’d encourage everyone to try a camera with decent in camera JPEG production. You can always shoot Raw+JPEG if you’re scared to go full cold turkey.
But even so, most are tuned to natural colours, and there is no beating low depth of field for bokeh/subject separation.
This is the opposite default to phones where the defaults are to be punchier, but where you can still select a neutral profile.
The argument is basically comparing defaults and claiming it’s endemic to the format.
It the old days Apple used to somewhat pride themselves with taking more "realistic" photos. While Android had it the other way around and basically post processes a lot of things as well as colouring. Mostly used for Social Media like Instagram.
And then came iPhone X. They started changing the colour of Sky and sharpening a lot of things. To the point of a lot of Photos taken by my camera looks great but also looked fake.
The phone processing is lagely shaped by social media culture. Camera makers also started to incorporate in-camera editing features on vlogger targeted models.
DSLRs had in camera lighting correction during shooting and post-processing since 2016 or so [0].
[0]: https://www.nikonimgsupport.com/eu/BV_article?articleNo=0000...
https://www.panasonic.com/uk/consumer/cameras-camcorders/lum...
Star filter is especially funny since it's used in k-drama opening/closing sequences.
Modern cameras like Nikon Z6/III can also do similar processing on camera during shoots to reduce post-processing load after the shoots to accelerate the production pipeline.
Did the iOS/Android situation actually swap, or was the X an outlier? I have photos from a recent event taken entirely with phones, and the result mirrors my experience for the past many years.
iPhone (11-15 including Pro Max) photos look "normal". Very, very similar to what my eyes saw in terms of colors. Photos taken with Android phones (Pixel 9 Pro XL, recent Oppo or Samsung A series, etc.) look terribly unnatural. The blue of the sky, the green of the plants, the red of the dress, they look "enhanced" and unnatural, nothing like what my eyes saw. I can tell apart almost any iPhone vs. Android picture just by looking at the colors on the same display.
The resolution or sharpness are harder to judge with one look and I wasn't trying to compare quality. But the colors are too obvious to miss.
But at the end of the day its all about the photographer than the equipment. Just ask chefs. 20 students same kitchen, ingredients, recipe, 20 different tasting dish.
What really drove that in was when my art teacher took a shot of me with my camera and holy shit it was one of the best pics I've seen. He just has the eye at the end of the day.
The inverse are the professional photographers who work with pictures day in and out, they see everything.
I just don't have the eye for it, despite having a decent amateur setup.
BUT, yes, lots of people might look at a random photo on their phone and not notice skintones, or the fisheye etc. If you then give them a pile of 10 photos from a pro, versus 10 from an amateurs phone, they'll notice. Particularly if they're blown up a bit on a print or a decent screen.
It might not matter if you are just flicking through 20 shots on your phone, but as the article implies, we have perception of these things, even when it is the subconscious.
The professionals have learned to shut off that network.
Checkout this book by the late† Bryan Peterson, where he shows photos taken by his students as well as his own of the same location, and explains the differences in techniques/settings:
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54228164-bryan-peters...
His Understanding series of books are also good (Exposure is worth checking out if you know nothing about camera settings):
* https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/82078.Bryan_Peterson
† April 2025: https://www.crottyfh.com/obituaries/bryan-peterson
Way back when, I bought a couple of his books, probably on the recommendation of someone or other in an online photography forum - 'Understanding Exposure' and 'Learning to see creatively'. The latter in particular was wonderful for someone who had the technical aspects of photography more or less sorted, but was - ahem - deficient in the artistic department.
Anyway, I felt his style was incredible - down-to-earth, but not afraid to go into a bit of background if needed - so I sent off a brief letter of thanks through his publisher.
Lo and behold, got a very nice letter back, thanking my for the kind words and encouraging me (I had mentioned that I shot both film and digital, seeing as at the time, a wonderful film camera like the F5 could be had for a fraction of what even an entry-level APS-C DSLR cost) to experiment A LOT using the DSLR, as the instant feedback provided would help my analog hit rate progress leaps and bounds.
I was already thinking a bit along those lines, but became a lot more conscious about trying to improve my skills using the DSLR upon his encouragement - and my photos improved a lot over the following years as a result.
Thanks, Bryan.
And to be fair, the thrust of the article was "Why don't you see printed and frame iPhone photos", and these things that might be a bit subtle on an un-calibrated screen are going to be a big deal if you professionally print it.
It is the narrow minded perspective of DSLR purist types that this stuff bothers, largely because they cannot look beyond the rim of their plate.
You may want to stop saying “this Apple is a horrible, awful, no good orange.”
I would not be surprised if they don’t actually want accuracy in imaging at all, they want a positive impact on the user, and most people don’t want reality. If that means causing “hotdog skin” under some conditions or with some skin tones, or maybe even if most users prefer “hotdog skin”, while having an overall positive photo outcome for most other users; they will likely always choose to produce “hotdog skin”. They are also serving a far greater and, frankly an increasingly less light skinned audience than most understand. Maybe it’s just an effect of “whites” having given away their control over things as ever more “non-whites” become revert increasingly important and an ever increasing number and percentage of Apple’s users. Do Asians and Africans get “hotdog skin”? I don’t know the answer to that.
It is the narrow minded perspective of DSLR purist types that this stuff bothers, largely because they cannot look beyond the rim of their plate. Some platforms are for accuracy, others for impact and user experience.
People should maybe consider stop saying things like “this Apple is an absolutely horrible, awful, no good orange!”
Color profiles vary per body at the least and are variable based on what post processing you do. I can load up Adobe Vivid and it'll look completely different than Adobe Portrait.
Shoot a Canon, Sony, and Fuji in JPG on the same scene (so same focal length and DOF) and auto white balance. Each body will output a different image.
How do I disable Colour processing?
On my Pixel RAW is also available, even moreso with the non-standard camera software.
You may have to enable it once in Settings -> Camera -> Formats; I've been using it so long I don't remember what the defaults are. But once you've done that, it's in the top right of the camera app - just tap where it says RAW.
A traditional camera has the choice and can choose the most appropriate length; an Iphone is locked in to a fish-eye clearly put in there to overcome its inherent limitations.
So it doesn't really matter "if it's fair" or not, because it's not about a fair comparison, it's a demonstration that a traditional camera is just better. Why should the traditional camera use an inappropriate focal length just because the Iphone is forced to?
Comparing quality with non equivalent focal lengths is as pertinent as to mount a fisheye on the DSLR (because you can!) and then claim that the smartphone have less distortion.
If it were possible to switch out the lens on the iPhone, and the photographer had just chosen the wrong lens for the job, that would be a fair criticism of the article. But that's not what happened. The iPhone is just very limited when it comes to the lens, compared to a DSLR.
It is possible to "switch out the lens" on an iphone, because iPhones ship with multiple camera lenses. (Well, multiple entire cameras). The iphone 16 they're using here has 3 cameras. And yet, I'm pretty sure the photo of the boys was taken with the ultrawide for some reason. A lot of the distortion problems would go away if they took a few steps back and used one of the longer lenses - just like they did with the DSLR.
Most of the criticism comes down to not standing in the same spot for both photos (I’m unconvinced that the difference in jawlines, for example, is not because the subjects moved while the photographer did).
You can take a bad picture with any camera.
I was about to disagree with you - but I think you're right. The photographer clearly took a couple steps back when they took the DSLR photo. You can tell by looking at the trees in the background - they appear much bigger in the DSLR photo because they're using a longer focal length.
I think a DSLR would struggle with the same perspective distortion if you put an ultrawide lens on it. It would have been a much more fair comparison if they took both photos from the same spot and zoomed in with the iphone.
The only workaround for the phone would be to still step back and take the image with the 24mm equivalent, then crop the image a whole lot to get an appropriate and equivalent view.
> I think a DSLR would struggle with the same perspective distortion if you put an ultrawide lens on it.
Note that "proper" lenses have more room for corrective elements in their lens stacks, so decent quality setups should experience less distortion than the tiny smartphone pancakes.
An ultrawide will never be good though, it's a compromise for making things fit or making a specific aesthetic.
Secondly, none of the points in the article are about optical distortion across the lens they’re all about perspective distortion. Corrective elements aren’t going to change that. None of the examples highlight barrel/pincushion distortion or the like as an offender.
I listed focal lengths for an iPhone 16 Pro Max, and good focal lengths for flattering portrait photography is common photography knowledge that I provided as well for reference, set with a little wiggle-room by the optics of the human eye.
There aren't more variables than subject framing and focal length, and a portrait of a person is a well-known size. Comparing the remaining two numbers is simple math.
(It is well-known what distortion effect using the "wrong" focal length will give, which can sometimes be used intentionally but is not what you want in the average portrait. Shorter focal lengths give a silly, elongated facial appearance which exaggerates frontal features like nose and mouth, longer focal lengths give a flatter appearance which exaggerates rear features like neck width.)
> Secondly, none of the points in the article
The article clearly shows distorted images, and that the article fails to mention it does not make it less of an issue.
Most appropriate length for what? Some iPhones have multiple focal lengths, just like some "real camers" have fixed lenses with a fixed focal length (Fuxji x100 and the medium-format one whose model I can't remember, Leica something-or-other, Sony R1).
Plus, for what is a traditional camera "just better"? It's highly usage dependent.
I have both a bludgeon, which can be used as an interchangeable lens camera, and an iPhone. The first doesn't fit in my pocket, so sometimes the latter is the one I grab, since it's "better" for that specific use case.
Most appropriate length for portrait photography is well established to be somewhere between 50mm and 100mm (35mm equivalent). The lower end is often considered more "natural" for such photo type, while the longer focal lengths are considered more flattering.
An iPhone 16 Pro Max has three focal lengths, 12, 24 and 120 (35mm equivalent). The first two are much too short unless significantly cropped, and the last one is excessive and requires stepping way back and has the worst image sensor and likely worst compromise of a lens - a lot of lens chonk is elements to manage chromatic aberration and distortion, which smartphone lenses have no room for.
> ... just like some "real camers" have fixed lenses with a fixed focal length (Fuxji x100 and the medium-format one whose model I can't remember, Leica something-or-other, Sony R1).
People using fixed lenses do so because they prioritize a particular type of image or style, and decided to get an even better (and lighter) lens for that instead of carrying around a compromise they don't need.
> Plus, for what is a traditional camera "just better"?
When it comes to getting the best picture, a chonky camera always wins - although they have had some catch-up to do on the software side, physics and our current technical limitations do not care about pocketability.
But a less perfect picture is better than no picture because you left the "real camera" at home. The best camera is the one you have on you.
(Also note that this is not binary between a smarpthone and an Olympic DSLR setup. Good compact cameras with collapsing lenses and mirrorless with smaller lenses are a middleground.)
> An iPhone 16 Pro Max has three focal lengths, 12, 24 and 120 (35mm equivalent). The first two are much too short unless significantly cropped, and the last one is excessive and requires stepping way back and has the worst image sensor and likely worst compromise of a lens
This point contains one part of the solution: Zoom with your feet.
Back up your shooting position to where you'd shoot an 85mm or 105mm, take the shot with the 2x lens, then crop. (Unless there's tons of light, then the 5x and hold very still. Even then, shoot both 2x and 5x and compare. Next year's phone should update the 5x sensor as well.)
For the color problems the article highlights, shoot RAW and adjust in a raw development app. Otherwise, shoot using the new grid-based styles to make in-phone development adjustable later. Or use a different app – see below.
For the bokeh, consider shooting in portrait, with aperture dialed to a full-frame DSLR level of (granted fake) bokeh. This remains adjustable after the shot so it's safer to leave active than one might think.
Consider avoiding the iPhone's built-in camera app, consider shooting with an app that can skip the processing pipeline, like Lux's Halide, with “Process Zero” mode:
https://www.lux.camera/introducing-process-zero-for-iphone/
The bottom line, of course:
> The best camera is the one you have on you.
Assign the iPhone 16's shutter button to Halide or ProCamera or one of the newer contenders to shoot everything.
Then to best enjoy your results, never shoot with a full frame using big glass and compare.
My iPhone pro has 3 lenses of 15,24 and 77mm equivalents. This is far fewer than many Android phones.
Even the cheapest iPhone 16E has a super sampling sensor which allows a cropped 50mm equivalent. (And yes that’s a digital crop but that’s why I mention a super sampling sensor)
So yes, unless they were shooting on a budget phone or a much older iPhone, they have a choice of focal lengths that would better match whatever camera they’re comparing to.
The angle, different focal lengths doesn't matter in rendering of the images. The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people. Moreover, we want to be liked as human beings, it's in our nature.
So, phone companies driven by both smaller sensors (that thing is way noisier when compared to a full frame sensor) and market pressure to reduce processing needed to be done by end users (because it inconveniences them), started to add more and more complicated post-processing in their cameras.
The result is this very article. People with their natural complications reduced, skin tones boosted on red parts, sharpened but flatter photos, without much perspective correction and sometimes looking very artificial.
Make no mistake, "professional" cameras also post process, but you can both see this processing and turn it off if you want, and the professional cameras corrects what lens fails at, but smartphones, incl. iPhone makes "happy, social media ready" photos by default.
As, again other commenter said, it's not a limitation of the sensor (sans the noise). Sony supplies most of the higher end sensors in the market, and their cameras or other cameras sporting sensors produced by them got the "best color" awards over and over again, and XPeria smartphones comes with professional camera pipelines after that small sensor, so they can take photos like what you see.
I personally prefer iPhone as my smartphone of my choice, but the moment I want to take a photo I want to spend time composing, I ditch default camera app and use Halide, because that thing can bypass Apple's post-processing, and even can apply none if you want.
Is nothing new.
When film was mass market almost no one developed their own photos (particularly colo(u)r). Instead almost all printing went through bulk labs who optimised for what people wanting to show to their family and friends.
What is different now is if someone cares about post processing to try and present their particular version of reality they can do it easily without the cost and inconvenience of having to setup and run a darkroom.
Many of the post-processing an informed person does on a digital photo is an emulation of a process rooted in a darkroom, yes.
On the other hand, some of the things cameras automatically does, e.g.: Skin color homogenization, selective object sharpening, body "aesthetic" enhancements, hallucinating the text which the lens can't resolve, etc. are not darkroom born methods, and they alter reality to the point of manipulation.
In film days, what we had as a run of the mill photographer was the selection of the film, and asking the lab "can you increase the saturation a bit, if possible". Even if you had your darkroom at home, you won't be able to selectively modify body proportions while keeping the details around untouched with the help of advanced image modification algorithms.
When does that matter? It matters when I take pictures to remember what a moment was like. In particular, what the light was doing with the people or landscape at that point in time.
It's not so much that the familiar photographic workflows are more accurate, but they are more deterministic and I understand what they mean and how they filter those moments.
I still use my phone (easy has a quality of its own) but I find that it gives me a choice of either an opinionated workflow that overwhelms the actual moment (trying to make all moments the same moment) or a complex workflow that leaves me having to make the choices (and thus work) I do with a traditional camera but with much poorer starting material.
It's just far easier for anyone to do now.
But you can't change a person's proportions and skin tones so precisely unless you're printing small and have time, equipment and talent to paint the positive (negative would be nigh impossible) in a believable manner to do so.
On the otter hand, you can enable slimming filter on your phone or camera, click and you go.
Oh, also, some of the Soviet photo manipulation is done with stolen and translated French software, in 1987 [0].
[0]: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/04/1821236/soviet-imag...
Disclaimer: I work for a photo processing software.
Yes, you could get the same photo of the guy in the centre on the iPhone, but only by zooming in and cropping out everything else. I guess if you REALLY wanted you could run back, and zoom in. Better get a tripod to hold it steady since you're zooming in then.
So anyone but an expert will shoot with a much shorter lens when using the iPhone.
This is how crop factors work unless I'm really mistaken.
A 24mm equivalent will have almost the exact same perspective on any sized sensor, because that’s what equivalent means. It’s a relationship of sensor size to actual focal length.
A 16mm on a 1.5x APs-c is a 24mm equivalent on a 35mm. The iPhones base lens is something like 1.5mm but when related to its sensor, it’s roughly a 24mm equivalent.
There’s no cropping that needs to happen.
He has some good points, maybe, but in general it’s a pretty naive comparison.
It's the _distance_ that causes distortion, not the _lens_. You can prove this by doodling light rays on a sheet of paper. There is no lens that will get you a good photo at 1 meter from a person. They stand back 2 or 3 or more and then say "ho ho fish eye lens". I'm so sick of it
Someone agrees: https://petapixel.com/2021/08/02/lenses-dont-cause-perspecti...
1: In a/b testing, nearly everyone including pixel peepers prefer a more vibrant photo.
2: the traditional perspective of "a photo should look as close as possible to what my eyes see if I drop the viewfinder" is increasingly uncommon and not pursued in the digital age by nearly anyone.
3: phone companies know the above, and basically all of them engage in varrying degrees of "crank vibrance until people start to look like clowns, apply a skin correction so you can keep the rest mega vibrant" with an extra dash of "if culturally accepted to the primary audience, add additional face filtering to improve how people look, including air-brushing and thinning of the face"
This is rightfully compared to the loudness wars and I think that's accurate. It really became a race to the bottom once we collectively decided that "accurate" photos were not interesting and we want "best" photos.
We enjoy the imperfections of cameras because they let us create art. Smartphone makers take advantage of that by, as you put it, cranking things to eleven to manipulate psychology rather than invest in more accurate platforms that require skill. The ease is the point, but ease rarely creates lasting art the creator is genuinely proud of or that others appreciate the merit behind.
See https://www.runpulse.com/blog/why-llms-suck-at-ocr and its related HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42966958
Pre-LLM approaches handle unintelligible source data differently. You'll more commonly see nonsense output for the unintelligible bits. In some cases the tool might be capable of recognizing low confidence and returning an error or other indicator of a possible miss.
IMO, that's a feature. The LLM approach makes up something that looks right but may not actually match the source data. These errors are far harder to detect and more likely to make it past human review.
The LLM approach does mean that you can often get a more "complete" output from a low quality data source vs pre-LLM approaches. And sometimes it might even be correct! But it will get it wrong other times.
Another failure condition I've experienced with LLM-based voice transcription that I didn't have pre-LLM - running down the wrong fork in the road. Sometimes the LLM approaches will get a word or two wrong...words with similar phonetics or multiple meanings, that kind of thing. It may then continue down the path this mistaken context has created, outputting additional words that do not align to the source data at all.
Not that that helps anyone who's affected, but that situation is more like if you'd have an .aip file, AI Photo storage format, where it invents details when you zoom in, and not a sensor (pipeline) issue
I, probably due to phrasing ambiguity in an old TheRegister article on the matter, had mistakenly remembered the temporary storage between scan and print of the copy mode to also had been affected.
As there were many situations where one would scan and destroy the original once offsite backup has run, while physical copies would/should often not entail destruction of the original, most of the overall damage/impact would be due to scanning anyways, not copying.
No idea if this can happen with what modern smartphone cameras do to photos. If "AI" is involved then I would expect such issues to be possible because of the basic nature of them being random generators, just like how LLMs hallucinate stuff all the time. Other "enhancement" approaches might not produce issues like this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m5zsj7/ai_photo_ga...
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jbcl1l/iphone_16_p...
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/17bxcm8/iphone_15_n...
Yes it is. I've seen that happen in real-time with the built-in camera viewfinder (not even taking a photo) on my mid-range Samsung phone, when I zoomed in on a sign.
It only changed one letter, and it was more like a strange optical warping from one letter to a different one when I pointed the camera at a particular sign in a shop, but it was very surprising to see.
For something as widespread as photography I'm not sure you can define a "we". Even pro photographers often have a hard time relating to each other's workflows because they're so different based on what they're shooting.
The folks taking pictures of paintings for preservation are going to be lighting, exposing, and editing very differently than the folks shooting weddings who will be shooting differently than the folks doing architecture or real estate shots. If you've ever studied under a photographer or studied in school you'll learn this pretty quickly.
There's a point to be made here than an iPhone is more opinionated than a camera, but in my experience most pro photographers edit their shots, even if it's just bulk application of exposure correction and an appropriate color profile. In that way a smartphone shot may have the composition of the shooter but not the color and processing choices that the shooter might want. But one can argue that fixed-lens compacts shooting JPG are often similarly opinionated. The difference of opinion is one of degrees not absolutes.
As an aside, this appeal to a collective form of absolute values in photography bothers me. It seems to me to be a way to frame the conversation emotionally, to create an "us vs them" dynamic. But the reality of professional photography is that there are very few absolute values in photography except the physical existence of the exposure triangle.
There's no such thing as "accurate photographs". I don't think we can even agree if two human perceive the same picture the same way.
I do think the average person today should learn about the basics of photography in school simply because of how much our daily lives are influenced by images and the visual language of others. I'd love to see addition to civics and social sciences classes that discuss the effects of focal lengths, saturation, and DOF on compositions. But I don't think that yearning for an "accurate photo" is the way.
If you want a photo to reminisce on, sure use a smartphone. In which case anything short of 1800s camera quality will do the job great. If you want to make a photo that might look good then do yourself a favour and get a cheap dedicated camera.
Also in normal phone reviews, they always put pictures of different phones next to each other so that people can form their own opinion on what they prefer. How is the reader to know what it really looked like? The reviewer should compare it against what they actually saw and felt the mood was in the moment and give a verdict of which camera captured that
Of course nicer colors look nicer but that's not the camera's job: I can turn that up if I want it. For that to work well, the camera needs to know what's there in the first place
Eyeing the raw results from the pro capture mode vs. the automagic results of my five year old 300€ phone, it does an amazing job of removing sensor noise and improving lighting in ways that I usually can't replicate short of using a tripod and a whole lot of image stacking. The only exception is extreme contrasts, such as a full moon on a dark sky or rays of direct sunlight (at sunrise) on half of a rolling hill when the other half is still in complete shadow. Then the only solution is to take two pictures, one where you can see the dark bit and one where you can see the bright bit, and stitch them together
I would like to compare it to "cinema mode" on my television.
I sometimes turn on cinema mode, but although the colors have more subtlety, nuance and accuracy... dimness just doesn't compare as well as you think to a much brighter picture.
sigh.
That said, it's a little annoying that the apple camera app doesn't capture raw out-of-the-box.
EDIT: wait, seems to be only some phones.
This is also why I get much better results on a phone than on any fancy camera with a smaller or different display. The phone matches what those to view the image get to see closely or exactly.
Zoom or cropping is horrible in phones, and I carry a Lumix with 8x zoom, smaller than a phone, everywhere. And every car trip, a very old Coolpix with 42x zoom (24-1000mm effective) small enough to fit in a small shoulder bag. I used the Coolpix Monday to get close up photos of two county police being helicoptered on a long line to a drug bust before anyone knew what was going down.
Phone photographers (I am one) look for scenes within the phone's limits. I used the Coolpix for over 10 years, capturing everything without limit.
For real fun, take photos in Yosemite with an iPad. It looks like a view camera, with the very large display. Add a western hat and a beard, and impersonate Ansel Adams. :-)
Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.
However:
- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)
- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine
Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
Not that I don’t ever take snapshots - I do - but instead of just taking a picture of your kid from eye level, you can get down on their level and wait until their head is turned so they’re shortlit from light from the window.
Of course, in that job you also quickly learn that the moment trumps everything. A technically awful photo of a great genuine smile or someone falling in the lake or whatever is usually better than an incredibly composed and lit photo of a person just sitting there…usually.
If it's the former, take the time to understand not only your gear but also light and image processing (whether digital or film). If it's the latter, and you are a stickler for pixels get a digital camera, if not stick with the phone.
I'm interested in photography, but I won't buy a digital camera. My last film camera was a Minolta 700si (in the 90's) and a camera bag full of lens and flashes and other gadgets (filters shades etc), but was a far cry from the $10k professional camera with professional studio film processing. If you understand your gear, light, and how the images are going to be output (film or digital processing) you can get great images from whatever you are woking with.
Photography vs Photographs isn't about how many pixels a camera has or other limitations of a camera. It's what you do with it. Back in the day I preferred black & white film because I could control the entire processing cycle (I wasn't very good at color processing when the local camera shop could do it faster and better). Now I like the challenge of Photography with the limitations of a phone. Does that make it not "real" Photography? or not a real interest in Photography?
To me that where the difference is for "photography", a phone and dedicated digital camera are still digital. They are still processed and captured with the same medium, so learn it and understand it.
One might have greater ability to capture more light and thus not need the same amount of processing or setup, but it's still processed and produced from digital pixels. Both allow for any amount of post processing, but you have to know how to shoot with the device especially if there are more light capture limitations like a phone. If you just want photographs, put either in auto mode and you get what you get. Paying more for a dedicated camera just makes it easier to do, that doesn't make it "photography" over a more physically limited but still digital, phone camera.
One shot is with my iphone15, the other with my Fujifilm xt5. It’s such a stark difference
I’ve long thought the main “issue” with people not realizing the difference is that they’re just looking at photos on their phones, where the images are so small it’s harder to appreciate the difference. I rarely try to take photos apart from snapshots with my phone because I’ll invariably be really disappointed when I view them on my monitor.
Size is approaching full frame models like 7M2. But yes, lens is where it baloons further, yet good all-purpose zooms are chunky for APS-C too. I sometimes carry multiple cheaper primes on several bodies because that's easier to pack.
So really, body sizes have grown due to processing and cooling needs (and in-camera OIS), but lenses still bring more heft (even with FF: look at the size of A7C series).
On the iPhone, ~everyone on the planet instinctively knows how to do it.
> "Which button do I press"
The Big One.
> focus
It's automatic. (If I'm handing a stranger my camera.)
> zoom level
This is maybe the hardest one, I guess, … but I do think most people have seen enough TV cop dramas to instinctively know. Or, they can just take the photo at the zoom I've handed them, and it won't be a big deal. Walking forward a few steps is also like zooming.
Sometimes you get a stranger looking through a viewfinder and crouching and you know you've got yourself another hobbyist (or pro) as well :) Those compositions usually are better too!
This happened the last time I gave my camera to someone and I was smacking myself, as I'd put the camera into "LCD screen is viewfinder mode", since then it is closer to a phone for most people. And I'd found someone who knew what a viewfinder was! Of course, it's just black. (The mirror being in the way.)
[1] takes lovely portraits and no focus to deal with
But usually when I have passers-by take photos, the context is that we are posing in front of a church in Europe or something, and space can be limited.
I can't very well ask people to take a photo and but first to take 20 paces back and then do a crouch!
My wife wants to see our shoes as well as the church spires in the same photo. Maybe a 35mm or even 28mm would work well in our case.
I shoot on manual with auto-ISO straight to JPG (I don't have time for RAW editing), so my prime photos tend to have lower ISO's and I end up with a faster shutter.
Ever since I started shooting sports indoors (often w/ that 90mm prime or a 135mm prime) and started to depend on noise reduction I process everything with DxO and tend to use a lot of sharpening and color grading. One day I went out with the kit lens by accident and set the aperture really small and developed the "Monkey Run Style" for hyperrealistic landscapes that look like they were shot with a weird Soviet camera.
The lens I walk around with the most and usually photograph runners with is the Tamron 28-200 which is super-versatile for events and just walking around, I used it for the last two albums here
https://www.yogile.com/537458/all
but for the Forest Frolic I used my 16-35mm Zeiss but it was tough because it was raining heavily -- I was lucky to have another volunteer who held an umbrella for me, but I couldn't lean in. The last one (Thom B) was not color graded because I'd had some bad experiences color grading sports when I got the color of the jersey wrong but now I use color grades that are less strong -- at Trackapalooza the greens just came out too strident and I had to bring them down.
To give you some idea of how powerful noise reduction is, this shot
https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lv32zudu2c2d
was done in ISO 80,000 with that Tamron -- I wouldn't say it looks perfectly natural for a picture of cat that was not standing still in a room in a basement that is amazing.
BTW your yogile album is private.
https://www.yogile.com/forest-frolic-2025#21m
https://www.yogile.com/trackapalooza-2025#21m
https://www.yogile.com/thom-b-2025#21m
I have no nostalgia for film, I could not afford to take 1500 film photos at a sports event -- even a photo like this which doesn't seem that remarkable
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114401857009398302
wouldn't have come out that good handheld with a 35mm back in the day.
It would be an amusing experiment to compare a prime lens to a zoom lens that it somehow fixed to the same focal length. Maybe level the playing field a little bit by applying distortion correction to both lenses.
Just got their 10mm M43 (~20mm equivalent) and it's doing a good job[0] - focus peaking on the OM helps a lot with manual focus and aged eyes.
[0] Excepting that it's still wide enough to capture your fingers when adjusting focus or aperture[1] or holding the lens.
[1] Which is the wrong way around to "normal" - clockwise should close the aperture, not open it!
The past 2-4 years have been amazing for lenses: Sony's willingness to let other people make lenses has been an amazing win for photography.
Also, Sigma and Tamron (both Japanese) are putting out more higher quality lenses compared to a decade back. With optical quality rivaling Sony's own G Master series and the Zeissen.
Do you know if there is any option of setting a limit on shutter speed while in aperture mode?
(I understand I can go full manual, but that just doesn't allow for the same point-and-shoot experience in changing light conditions.)
If there is insufficient light, then by all means, the camera should adjust the shutter speed past the limit, but not until it has used all the available "reasonable" ISO range.
It's a shame I have to wrestle my Sony a6400 to get something even remotely close to this.
Sure, I could go into a menu and change it from the range of 1/60 or a second to 1/200th (or 1/250th, depending on the camera), but that was it. This is on Nikon, btw.
But yeah, give me more options damnit. It’s something that comes up so frequently when shooting that it blows my mind it’s not an option.
I went with the recommendation of Ken Rockwell who is both experienced and opinionated, and said to buy that one at the time. https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/recommended-cameras.htm
He was right!
- small, especially if you put a 50mm prime lens on it (which costs ~ CAD 150 by the way)
- light
- full frame sensor (fundamentally better photo quality, but need bigger lenses to zoom)
- battery life is OK but not great. You can easily get through a full day of touristing with one spare battery though.
Personally, I use Sony APS-C the most because of its smaller size, lighter weight, and more affordable lenses. Among APS-C systems, Sony and Fuji offer the widest lens selection. Fuji gear tends to be overpriced now, but it does have a stylish look.
Micro Four Thirds lenses are usually cheaper and more lightweight.
If you're shooting fast-moving subjects like birds or Formula 1 racing, Canon and Nikon are the most popular choices. They offer a wide range high performance lenses designed for demanding situations.
All the displays I own are HDR, and something like a picture of a sunset, or even landscape, is so much better on my phone than my older Canon DSLR.
I have re-exported files that I took in 2007 with the Nikon D7 that I kept the raw files for. They are vastly improved with modern processing (and noise reduction) vs what I exported from the same negative back then. The bit depth was always high enough.
”The best camera is the one you have on you”
I've seen people trying to take photos at an airshow using their phone camera. A small black dot in the centre of frame, rendered as an Impressionist oil smudge by post-processing. Was that worth even trying?
The best camera+lens combo is the one suited to the scene. Anything else isn't.
- your entry level mirrorless is ~$300 of camera HW vs ~$80 of camera HW on the phone (very very rough estimate of sensor+lens BOM)
- the mirrorless doesn't have any of the physical constraints of being tiny and fitting in a pocket, which directly impact image quality
iPhones cameras are really amazing given the constraints.
It’s a lot easier to pump out quality parts for less money when you order 10 million of them and potentially helped finance a factory to build them.
But, perhaps most importantly, along the lines of what others have noted: you know, my phone camera may not be as good, but I have zero complaints about the impromptu photos of my kid growing up that I could never have caught with anything else.
And so, the reasons why Fuji and point-and-shoots are popular. Lots of “serious” photography enthusiasts don’t really get this and call Fujis “hype” cameras but it’s like bashing Wordpress because most people don’t want to learn AWS to post cat pics.
> The iPhone is always in my pocket
Rationale for both point-and-shoots as well as Leica (also hated by lots of serious camera people ;)).
Fuji and Ricoh can hardly keep their X100 and GR cameras stocked. Fuji added extra production capacity in China because it exceeded their expectations. I brought them up specifically because the serious camera people rag on them for being hype cameras, but I see plenty of everyday people with them. Go to places like the High Line in NY and there’s folks with A6700s and various X-mount cameras in addition to the serious full-frame mounts. Leica is doing financially well because of their Q series.
I think five years ago you could say it was just two groups, but by the numbers and by what I see in the streets, the point and shoots have been prematurely declared dead. Fuji and Sony are meanwhile figuring out how to sell APS-C to a more casual crowd, after the other old players effectively left that market.
I went from a D300s kit with about $10k of lenses to Fuji. I had an X100s, then an X-E2, and now an X-Pro3.
The X-Pro3 especially is light, has excellent physical controls, and very much feels like a vintage Leica. It's what I'd consider an "art camera" -- not what I'd choose if I were shooting weddings regularly, but perfect for street photography, family stuff, and perfectly capable of higher-end commercial work if you're willing to put up with its quirks.
The quirks are the point, though.
But, the dedicated camera photos are always massively higher resolution. You can zoom in on details and they look great, while phone photos seem to use AI upscailers and they look bad
We all go through a period of abusing HDR and saturation, but we usually get over it.
I remember hearing a story from a well known photographer about a trip he took with a few others, including his wife. They woke up early to head out on a small boat in a lake or something. He was lugging all this gear and having to put a lot of focus into tuning the settings on his camera, he was pretty miserable. Meanwhile, his wife was enjoying morning with no baggage and snapping pics with her phone. She ended up having the best picture of the day, while actually enjoying herself, by not being bogged down by the gear.
Dedicated cameras have their value, but it’s been decreasing for years, and requiring higher and higher levels of skill to make it worth it. Most people could improve their photos dramatically by learning about framing and light, while just using a phone. These things have a much bigger impact on the resulting photo. A professional with an iPhone will always take a better and more interesting picture than an amateur with a DSLR for this reason.
I got myself a Nikon D800 over a decade ago when they were first released, and left it in 14-bit RAW mode since then. Technically these are "SDR" photos, but the captured dynamic range is closer to 1000-nit HDR. For a decade, I had to crush these to fit into sRGB SDR JPGs, which is throwing away most of the goodness.
A few months ago I took all of my 5-star pictures in Lightroom and used its new HDR processing mode to export them as 16-bit PNG files. I then turned those into a 2160p HDR video and played it on an OLED 75" television.
It blew my tiny mind!
The quality was simply jawdropping. It was like travelling back in time to all of those holidays and looking out through a window at reality itself.
This is why I go on regular online rants about how frustrating it is that the only way to share the full output quality of a modern digital full-frame camera is by uploading a HDR "movie" of the pictures to YouTube.
For example, take a photo of someone standing in front of a landscape. It looks like you took a photo on a green-screen and photoshopped the landscape behind the subject.
Well, you don't need to teach photography to passerby, just to tell them to look there and push this button. It's not more complicated than on a phone, maybe even less. But it may look more intimidating to old a camera, it's true
This is why my Canon 80D sits and gathers dust. Too many family moments fluffed, vs my Android's basically 100% hit rate. Yes this is largely a skill issue on my part, which is sad, but modern phone photos are more than adequate these days.
I bought a decent camera. I really enjoyed playing with it, and spent some happy hours learning about it. I even took some decent photos (well, I liked them anyway).
But in the end, carrying it became a chore and trying to take off-the-cuff photos during adventures took too long. I found that we needed to go for specific "photography adventures" with the camera, with the intent of taking photographs with the camera, in order to use it. If we were going for a trip without the specific aim of taking photographs it was just easier to use the phone cameras.
Also the camera photos were stuck on the camera, while the phone photos were instantly usable in social media, and shareable from the Google/Apple Photos. I have a portable drive folder somewhere with all the camera photos, but I never see them. The phone photos are a search away.
I think it's the difference between "being a photographer" and "taking photos". I am not a photographer, I just want to take some photos and share them with my friends. They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again. All the comments in the article are accurate but meaningless in this context.
On the other had, if you're a photographer and want to take a photograph that someone will hang on their wall, all the comments in the article are accurate and relevant.
If you are just taking snapshots to share with friends, then it makes sense to not bring the camera. But if it's your hobby, where you sit down and take time and care to take a photo, then it's a different game altogether.
I don't often print my photos out and put them on a wall, but I do have my own photography blog where I post the photos I take (with a camera). I think the article is still relevant to that kind of scenario too.
I think the purpose of this kind of page is to outline differences between taking a snapshot and taking a photo. This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time. It also attempts to combat the prevalent myth that more megapixels = better photos. Yes that myth still exists in 2025.
> This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time.
"Never argue with idiots. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Seriously, are there people who think that iPhones are just as good as dedicated cameras, and can still tie their own shoelaces?
I'm surprised no camera manufacturer has created an easy way to get all your photos to Google Photos / iCloud/ Dropbox / etc. They have some wireless photo transfer things, but they're clunky and unusable. Just connect the camera to WiFi and auto-upload everything to the service of my choice. I'm guessing it's a mix of:
* Camera manufacturers are hardware companies and can't do software and cloud stuff.
* It wouldn't interact well with swapping SD cards, which is what all the pros want.
* The camera would need to stay powered when off to upload photos. Current cameras have a hard power switch.
Also, the RAW format that the camera stores is huge, and pretty much unusable. You'd want to store JPGs but those are export format not that actual image. Though I guess that's an answer to the lock-in question: export jpgs to the cloud, keep the RAW images on the device.
Seems like you don't really care much about those photos then. If you have them on a portable drive, how long would it take to do a drag-and-drop to put them on Google photos? 40 seconds + waiting for the upload? It's really minimal amount of friction.
> They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again
Sure, no need to do anything else for such snaps. But it's also nice to keep some long term photos to show your kids or grandkids. Like people did from the 70s up till the 00s. In fact, there are inexpensive services that help you arrange your photos in quality printed book-form albums, similar in principle to the physical photo albums of the past, where individual printed photos were glued. I find that picking such a book off the shelf happens much more readily than any urge to load up an external hdd to view photos on a screen.
For iPhone golf player shot, they were standing closer to the players and using a wide-angle lens. For the “beginner photographer” shot they were standing farther away and using a longer focal length lens. You can tell by the size of the trees in the background. This difference in positioning, not “because iPhone,” is why the player’s faces are distorted on the left.
These details might not matter to random folks grabbing snapshots. But I expect something posted to HN to actually contain useable detailed information, rather than vague “looks worse” comparisons with an obvious thumb on the scale.
So it would be a fairer comparison to use a longer focal length, but it's also true that I am the Average Joe, and Average Joe took a better photo with the camera, because it guided me in that direction more than the iPhone did.
It tipped the scales and the post became overwhelmingly misleading, attributing the "distortion" to the camera, instead of the distance and zoom.
But also, very fun to see the Copper Country featured on hacker news!
I'm white as ghost. Pixels are determined to make me looked tan for absolutely no reason. I mean, maybe I look 'better', arguably, but it's not me. Is that what people want?
I bought the kid some newfangled Polaroid type thing, and she uses that way more than phones anymore for photos. Maybe the kids will be ok.
Big enough to take the world and all it's got
Keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out hot-dog-coloured people by the score"
It's similar to the loudness war in music. Slightly louder/more saturated looks subjectively better when compared side by side. Apply this slight increase over and over again and you get something that no longer reflects reality.
This is complicated with pictures of people because people want them to look "good", not accurate.
I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone.
I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc.
But I've come to the conclusion that once you start look closely there's absolutely no comparison.
One thing I've started doing is creating custom photo books from all my photos. It's really helped me focus my photography. When doing this though I've noticed how edited phone photos are, as well as how poor the quality actually is (particularly in low light).
The quality issue is understandable (it's physics). The editing issue is a bit more insidious I think.
All in all, if you just want to view phone photos on your phone, they look great. But if you're actually interested in photography and printing, you should get a dedicated camera.
Unfortunately, the less I use it, the worse I get. So snagging my "nice" camera for a vacation, then spending a lot of time making sure I lug it around and use it, and then having the results be, frankly, bad, is really frustrating. In particular, I have quite a few photos that are.. either blurry, or out of focus, and it's hard to tell which. I am pretty careful to ensure I hold the camera still, and have a sufficient shutter speed, but I'm definitely messing something up.
I need to take more time to practice at home rather than capturing a thousand frames over 3 weeks and hoping they're good (like the bad old days of film!)
I also have a fuji camera. In manual mode, you can have focus indicator showing e.g. red dots in the in-focus areas. Another way is to use "focus check" button which is basically a quick digital zoom to check the focus yourself.
Regarding blown-out sky, I often use the HDR auto mode which effectively automatically lowers the exposure 1 stop and then raises it in post, so trading some shadows for highlights. You lose some control but it makes shooting easier. I also use the display indicator / blinkies for blown out parts so I can easily see when something is overexposed.
* zoom in
* print them
* watch them on a bigger screen
Sometimes I compare photos I've taken over 10 years ago with Sony NEX-5 with photos I take today with an iPhone. There's no competition, APS-C from 15 years ago is still solid.
Anyway, the best camera is the one you have with you, so in that sense iPhone is great.
Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.
Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing.
For fisheye, I guess it would have been more accurate to say: the perspective distortion is present in both photos and is stronger for the iphone photo due to a shorter effective focal length, and there is no noticeable fisheye/barrel distortion in the iphone photo.
Not just phones. Most wide-angles for "serious cameras" have distortion and rely on digital correction. See [0] for an extreme example in the form of a 16mm Canon, which is much less wide than the iPhone lens.
[0] https://photographylife.com/reviews/canon-rf-16mm-f-2-8/2
And when I use the Photos app on my Apple TV to review a couple videos I took, I'm surprised at the weird, wavy quality I'm seeing in them. It's really strange.
I will compare this to the videos I took with my Sony a6700. But until then, I'm surprised at how odd the videos looked on a large OLED TV. Might be compression from iCloud or something. Can't quite explain it otherwise.
I have no shortage of friends who asked me why I bothered to buy a real camera, but if you're a hobbyist photographer, it's nice to use a real camera and have full control. There are apps that do let you do this on a smartphone, and it's definitely more convenient.
But there's something about the real photos (with real Bokeh) that still look much better to me.
Using a OnePlus 12 now, and find the photos much less overprocessed (and wavy).
Folks will say it’s just the focal length. But can you crop when your sensor is already that small?
In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible.
It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.
9 times out of 10 when I see someone making this claim it’s engagement bait. They know it triggers people and generates interactions.
I think most people are well aware that they’re not the same. The point usually made is that it’s amazing that we can get such good photos out of something that fits in our pockets. In well-lit scenes you really can get some impressive image quality out of those tiny devices.
Here is an example of what that looks like: https://imgur.com/Q4J5BHi
In case it isn't obvious due to the zoom and lack of context:
- The texture on the top and windshield don't exist, it's plain gray.
- The letters on the card actually read something, here it's gibberish. Sometimes half a letter, sometimes a texture that doesn't exist.
In particular, manual focus with the actual focus scale (no tap around on some surrogate object) and in-focus indicator, control to set a lower ISO in scenes where the phone wants to pull a faster image, or set a higher shutter speed even on darker situations.
Or on the pro line you get the option to stop automatic lens switching, which gives a lot more control (stay on the best lens/sensor and adjust for it yourself, instead of the phone trying to be clever)
All in all it stops being a point and shoot, and there will be a more missed pictures because of wrong settings, but the highs are also a lot higher in my experience. And it can go back to the "all auto" mode anytime.
From there:
> Real cameras capture shadow more accurately.
> professional cameras
That's saying that real cameras don't use wide angle lenses nor have an image processing pipeline, and professionals of the field have adequately labeled cameras.
This kinda makes the whole piece so shallow and weirdly ideological, when it doesn't need to be. People interested enough in the craft will spend time knowing their gear, the strength and limitations, and work with it.
Phone cameras now give more and more access to the underlying mechanisms and RAW formats. There's of course tons of photos I'd want to put in my wall coming from my phone, they're just really great for subjects that properly match the lenses strengths. iPhones or Pixel phones aren't perfect or ideal in all conditions, but what camera is ?
Personally, I carry around a Ricoh GR3, and shoot random shots with the iPhone, but when it really matters I’ll use the Ricoh. The way the iPhone flattens the lighting is what bugs me the most. Recently I was at a kid’s birthday party and each kid had a cupcake with a candle in it. The room was a bit dark, and the Ricoh photo showed that each kids face was illuminated just a bit by the candle in their cupcake… The color temperature of the candle light is warmer than that of the room light. The photo makes you feel like you’re really there. My friend shot a photo on her iPhone at the same time and we compared afterwards. In her photo, every kid’s face is well lit and the candle effect is gone. She likes her shot better and I like mine. Some people want a shot that reflects what they saw, and some people want a shot that looks like what they think good photos look like.
It's annoying especially because at a glance, the pictures taken by my S24+ look just fine, and it sometimes makes me not pull out the aging DSLR.. but then when I get the pictures onto my PC and want to actually look at them.. I always regret my mistake.. Even a 10 year old DSLR on automatic no-flash mode kicks its butt so bad it's not even a comparison..
You can also set styles in the camera settings to fix these problems: incorrect AI white balance and lighting.
Moon-gate: Samsung fans are mad about AI-processed photos of the moon : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds...)
Now every single picture taken is much sharper and better looking, the darker it gets the bigger the difference. Also 10x physical zoom produces much better photos in all conditions. It feels like I just got a new phone with amazing new cameras, I'd say dxomark score should be revisited.
Now maybe they tackled some hardware reserves via better algorithms, its all possible. Or, slightly more probably, some tiny little AI is ironing out pictures on a level not detectable by mere viewing by eye. I don't complain, camera is #1 priority for me on phone as an amateur photo enthusiast, and basically I don't need to upgrade phone for quite a few years. The results are really really good and I haven't seen anything noticeable in few hundred snaps, often done after sunset.
Disclaimer: I don't have an iPhone 16, but my Poco X4 Pro 5G suffers from the same "fisheye" issue with its 25mm-equivalent lens. And I am not a professional photographer.
It is not a "bad camera" issue, but a composition issue forced by the short focal length second and the users' aversion to cropping the image first. You can easily avoid this issue by shooting at 2x digital zoom (or cropping) and going 2x further from the scene. And 2x zoom (with the corresponding decrease in the resolution of the resulting files) is how I shoot the majority of my photos.
So yes, I effectively have a 3MP camera, not 12MP (and not the hyper-marketed 108MP AI camera), and, for many purposes, it's still good enough.
P.S. Composition matters a lot. The right photo has the right proportions between the players and the trees in the background. The inclusion of the yellow golf flag in the "beginner photographer's" photo is also what makes the scene more complete artistically and worth hanging on the wall.
To your point, back up to where you'd shoot the long lens, then crop back. Thanks to the 48mp, there's room to crop, it'll be fine.
FWIW, this crop is what every* camera with a sensor smaller than full frame is already doing to get "reach" from smaller glass, whether we realize it or not.
* By and large.
If my phone photos did bother me, I would turn on RAW mode and do the processing myself.
My "real" camera is a 15 year old Canon Rebel XSi. It's big and can't do a lot of the things my iPhone can and the photos are about the same quality (which is impressive because the Rebel is only 12 megapixels).
I would probably (if possible) repeat this idea but with photos taken at the same time, with cameras as close to each other as possible. If at all possible I would also try to use as similar of a lens as possible, if only as a 3rd comparison point to compare the other two to.
The child in the surf is almost identical. Maybe a few ms of difference, look at the foot position.
The facial structure differences in the players were striking despite not being identical shots.
Would love for someone else to get more scientific about it, but I think the results would be the same.
I mean, if believing your words were enough to convey the message, then there'd be no point in taking the second photo and comparing them.
The point here isn't whether you're telling the truth (of course you are), it's about being able to see what's going on and get an intuitive feel for what changes and what stays the same. When I said "who's to say they're not leaning" my point wasn't to call you a liar; it was to say that that question is what immediately arises in your audience's brain, and it's completely distracting. Trust can't correct for the visual discrepancy, even if I had taken for the photo myself.
I think a lot of the differences you're seeing are the result of FOV differences; the iPhone camera is a ~24mm equivalent, which is much wider than most people would shoot on a dedicated camera. That wide-angle distortion is just a natural part of the 24mm focal length, but not really the iPhone's fault.
The other effects you're seeing are related to Apple's default image processing, which, at this point, most people would agree is too aggressive. This difference goes away if you shoot in ProRAW and process your photos in an app that allows you to dial down (or ideally turn off) local tone mapping.
If you have an iPhone that shoots 48MP ProRAW, don't be afraid to crop the image significantly, which increases the effective focal length and makes the image look more like a dedicated camera. It also increases the apparent bokeh, which is actually quite noticeable on close-ups. With the RAW you can then quickly edit the image to end up colors which are much more faithful and natural.
If anyone out there doesn't have a Pro model, they can shoot RAW photos in 3rd party camera apps, including Lightroom, which is free.
However, it's a battery hog and can be a bit sluggish to get going, and there are some weird interactions with the built in photos app (if you crop the photo after the fact in the Photos app it pushes all the colour towards purple in the thumbnail, but not in the actual image).
I'm already happy enough with the image quality that I can overlook these flaws, which will hopefully get fixed over time. People should try it to see what they think.
The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
Don't underestimate the power of the subject's comfort and state of mind. Gramma is happy to get the picture, she doesn't care how it got taken.
thousands rubbles?
Google a couple years ago, however, made a big stink that they were forcing an always-on filter to "enhance" the appearance of dark skin on Pixels, so yeah you might need a real camera to get accurate photos of subjects with darker skin if you have a pixel.
Considering there are 2 photos of the same subjects, this reasoning becomes very order-dependent, we don't know the order of the photos taken, so we shouldn't be judging the photos on things affected by that.
I honestly can't tell what the site author is trying to do. Criticizing oversaturation is reasonable. Claiming the camera is responsible for differences in pose and composition is madness.
I do shoot with both because I'm not foolish enough to think good work can't be forced from poor tools, but I know the difference between a camera that works with me, and a phone that mostly won't. This author appears not really to understand that difference clearly, identifying accurately some flaws and differences resulting from real constraints, and inventing others from accidents of poor test procedure such as obvious changes in pose between serially taken shots.
It's a confusing way to advertise his "Candid9" service to photographers; as one of those it leaves me hoping he's better as a programmer, and as a programmer it leaves me wondering why I should trust someone with such a questionable grasp of my problem domain has produced software that will successfully serve my needs.
I mean, when I do street work, I just get a phone number or email address and that works fine. What do I need with a QR code that requires a printer to produce? Good grief, I'm the only one I know who still runs on paper, I own three printers, and I haven't found a credible way to like QR codes! What does all this extra complication add for anyone involved, except some Michigander who wants a piece of what I'm doing for no good reason I can see?
Really, what it looks like to me is just that you have a product that costs ~nothing to operate and seems like it sort of makes sense for smallish wedding-and-anniversary party venues - but you've discovered too late what a nightmare that market is and that the fit's not actually that great, so you're pitching to people like me to try to salvage with a pivot, not realizing that the ask to add a Wal Mart style belt mounted printer to my kit in order to produce these QR code tickets is really just never going to happen.
It's bizarre to me in what world you live where this constitutes "easier," but I also don't care. You want to intermediate and transactionalize a relationship so ephemeral it can already be nearly overlooked even to exist, and where your presence is unneeded and unwelcome - and mine is the most HN comment ever? But it does explain why no one in your sample shots is smiling.
Most I've done is 60 group photos in an hour at a trade show.
> Really, what it looks like to me is just that you have a product that costs ~nothing to operate
Correct
> and seems like it sort of makes sense for smallish wedding-and-anniversary party venues
I would say the intended use case is destination venues like a upscale golf course or hotel.
> the ask to add a Wal Mart style belt mounted printer to my kit
Not how it works. If you looked at the website, you'd see that you print and cut the tickets at home before hand on a normal printer.
> It's bizarre to me in what world you live where this constitutes "easier," but I also don't care
Handing someone a ticket is easier than collecting their email.
> You want to intermediate and transactionalize a relationship so ephemeral it can already be nearly overlooked even to exist, and where your presence is unneeded and unwelcome - and mine is the most HN comment ever?
I have unlimited confidence and patience. Hit me with the snarkiest rebuttal you can muster!
At a rate of one a minute in a destination venue, sure, this makes sense, assuming you could land that kind of deal reliably. So why are you trying to sell it to street photographers like me, who do things differently, with different desiderata and different needs? And if you are going to try to do that, then don't you think you might be wise to listen when a putative customer explains how you have failed to earn their money?
I guess maybe it could be worth clarifying your copy, but who'd care? I do street work when I do it because I like meeting people and because it makes people smile. If I wanted money also out of it, I'd more likely just drop my hat on the sidewalk or something.
I still don't see why the comparison page (the one originally linked here, the iPhone 16/mirrorless shootout) treats variations in pose and composition as equivalent with those caused by camera physics, which was what originally caught my interest in any case.
Another use-case perhaps in your case is to do it for free and do higher volume and market your money-making services? I agree that it is fun and mood-lifting to take portraits, but also it would be cool to make it sustainable.
but yeah overall Candid9 is a hammer looking for a nail right now.
What an odd thing to infer. Just a really large leap.
The thing about street and impromptu work like this is that to be good, it must be done gently. Otherwise it's only about you, the photographer, who has made a mirror of your subjects without knowing it. That's why I said it doesn't surprise me no one in any of these samples wears a genuine smile. I've made shots like those too, but I never thought them good enough to publish anywhere.
"Why don't you show examples of your own work so we can compare, then?" For one, because I have no such rights to the likeness of anyone who's put up with my lens. For another, no one here is really whose judgment I care about in this respect. When it comes to photography, HN's commentariat has always managed to be that rare broken clock which is right not even once a day, and not even for entertainment is it worth soliciting such a farrago.
I didn't know what you were talking about at first because I didn't remember seeing any video on the blogpost. If there had been video showing this happen, it would definitely be a good argument against it being inference! Instead, as best as I can infer, you mean the video on the home page and I watched the first ~1min where a photographer takes a photo and they didn't do any more fiddling than I have ever seen someone do with an iPhone and the couple having their photo taken didn't look uncomfortable at all! So not only is this not a video, afaict since I didn't watch the whole 5mins, of this particular set of photos being taken which means the inference made by the OP is very much so an inference but also I don't even think it shows an example of what they purported.
> That's why I said it doesn't surprise me no one in any of these samples wears a genuine smile.
Also, looks like you logged into your throwaway for this reply so now you've linked throwanem <> bdamm together.
This is not a throwaway and I am not Benjamin Damm, nor last I checked was he me. Are you quite well? Have you eaten anything today?
My identity has been obvious from my HN profile for nearly that profile's entire existence. The identity of the person, whom you have accused of using me as a throwaway, is likewise quite visible. They are plainly not the same. So unless you mean me to go on under the conclusion you are incompetent to defame by virtue of being overtly delusional, I'm not really clear on your intent.
> That's why I said it doesn't surprise me no one in any of these samples wears a genuine smile.
So I ask again, why are you explaining "why <you> said it doesn't surprise <you>..." when I've never interacted with you before that reply of yours and you didn't say that prior to this explanation in that post?
I guess that may just be your style of communicating, though? Like you're explaining what you said to yourself? In your post you it seems you were speaking to yourself for a lot of it - posing questions for yourself to answer, eg.
In Hacker News threads about photography, there is invariably a sizable fraction of comments made by people who know nothing of the subject, have never engaged with it to a meaningful degree, and despite such radical ignorance nonetheless feel themselves empowered to speak as if they had any idea what they were talking about, or indeed understood even what they don't understand about it.
It's so common in fact as to qualify in practice as an archetype or invariant of the genre, and it's that to which I'm responding. You're right that I'm talking past you, but don't make too much of it. It's just that I've seen this all many times before.
For the same reason, I predict your next effort would have been to claim I have no stronger basis to speak on the topic than do you, and demand I distill the experience of ten years and something like a hundred thousand exposures into a tidy, ChatGPT-compatible bullet list which you can then performatively evaluate and find wanting. Oh, you won't do that now, of course. But you thought about it two paragraphs ago. Unfortunately, when asked the impossible, I am able to reject it as such.
If you want to see the conversation go a different way, then try taking it in a different direction. I admit you have already done this once! It's rare to see someone claim at once that two other people, strangers all, are both lying. I don't actually mind, being if anything ennobled by the association, though the gentleman with whom you confused me would be entirely reasonable to object.
But to answer your proximate question with respect to the distant antecedent, I referred to the quite long thread [1] in which I hashed out this whole question with the developer of the B2B SAAS for photographers, Candid9, which this article exists to advertise. I also offered some critique of the article itself.
You having spoken as if from great and very confident knowledge of so complex and nuanced a topic, I suppose it seemed reasonable also to expect at least passing familiarity with the actual conversations among which you were doing so. Excuse me. I do have this regrettable habit of assuming people intend to contribute to a discussion when they choose to participate in it, but I realize you're not alone in appearing to have other reasons.
That's a really deranged way to approach interacting with people! It does, however, explain a lot about how you post: you're basically arguing with your internal constructions of how people on Hacker News are and not at all with what they say. Your posts, this one quite specifically, are just you disagreeing with your internal construction of posters:
> Well, I'm not really considering you as a person, any more than you could so consider me, we never having met
I do consider you a person, though! That's just a really weird thing you have decided on and it doesn't extend to everyone else.
> For the same reason, I predict your next effort would have been to claim I have no stronger basis to speak on the topic than do you, and demand I distill the experience of ten years and something like a hundred thousand exposures into a tidy, ChatGPT-compatible bullet list which you can then performatively evaluate and find wanting. Oh, you won't do that now, of course. But you thought about it two paragraphs ago.
I wasn't considering doing that at all! I don't care about challenging your photography knowledge. I don't know anything about it other than you claim to have a lot and I only got that because you made sure to tell me.
> It's rare to see someone claim at once that two other people, strangers all, are both lying.
I never claimed anyone was lying! I claimed, based on your reply implicitly asserting we had already conversed, the logical conclusion that you would have to be the other poster and were using an alt. Why else would someone explain to me what they have already said without having ever said it to me? Now you've explained that: you don't talk to people; you talk to ideas of people that you have internally constructed. That's not typical.
> You having spoken as if from great and very confident knowledge of so complex and nuanced a topic, I suppose it seemed reasonable also to expect at least passing familiarity with the actual conversations among which you were doing so.
I responded to one specific leap of theory of mind! It's actually a really narrow and simple topic: can someone infer from the blogpost that the boys were grimacing because the photographer was fiddling with a camera instead of fiddling with an iPhone. The answer, of course, is you can't with the knowledge presented.
> I do have this regrettable habit of assuming people intend to contribute to a discussion when they choose to participate in it, but I realize you're not alone in appearing to have other reasons.
I did contribute! I even went so far as to watch a large portion of the video you claimed showed that the stated theory of mind could be seen in action. I then wrote that the video doesn't show that at all. That's a contribution and a constructive one!
Yes. So are you. That's how language works in humans. This is a website. The words are mostly written by people, but only words are here. Hadn't you noticed?
> and not at all with what they say
Yet you fail to read what I actually wrote, in your haste to call me insane about it because of how much you dislike what you incorrectly assumed it to say. Have fun with whatever it is you're here to do.
- Don't use the super wide lens and stand too close to people
- Use the super easy edit features to fix distortion
- Pay attention to lighting & exposure
- Don't just accept the iPhones default settings
If you want toned down contrast and color smartphones are perfectly happy to do that.
Otherwise.. I do configure my fancy digital camera to capture reduced contrast and color saturation compared to the defaults on a smartphone. So a lot of the time my samples would look like his.
Average people want contrast + saturation turned up like crazy. This is why the defaults ship that way. This is why a lot of the beginner non-phone digital cameras often shipped with the defaults that way. This is why TVs ship with the brightness/contrast/saturation boosted. The average person might look at your more subtle photo and appreciate it as better than theirs but then they will go right back to being super happy with their high contrast/saturation images.
There are lots of areas where there is a ‘convenience’ / ‘art’ split. One I recognized early was houses that were ‘architected’ and those that were just ‘built’. Looking at cabins from the 1800’s vs houses you can really see a cabin is practical, it is focused on utility that is easily built with a wide variety of materials at hand and skill sets of the builders. Whereas homes that were architected and built used a lot of craftspeople, bespoke materials, etc.
My dad was a professional photographer and he would take pictures and I would take pictures and his looked great and mine looked ‘ordinary’? I was just capturing the view in a given direction and he was composing a view to have various elements in relation to make a picture.
Phone cameras are “free” in that you bought a phone and it happened to come with a camera, and you carry it with you everywhere because phone. So a lot of the image capturing that is done is what you see. People do compose shots, and I’ve seen great photographs from phone cameras. But it is pretty clear that a photographer using a phone works harder to get their shot than someone who just wants a snapshot, and it goes the other way too, a person who just wants a snapshot works a lot harder to figure out how an SLR works, “just to take a picture” while the photographer seems to effortlessly bring it up to take a wonderful shot.
So if you take the whole set of people who are using a tool, you optimize for the largest portion of that population which is where the culture aspects kick in it seems. People grabbing snapshots with ‘one button activation’ vs people taking photographs composing with scenes and light.
To your point, take six steps back and use the 5x zoom on an iPhone Pro and you'll get a much better effect.
As they say, the best camera is the one you have in your pocket. Physics means it can never replace a large sensor with a large lens...
... But Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, The Beach, Trainspotting, 127 Hours) was quite happy to film 28 Years Later entirely on the iPhone 15 Pro Max [1].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/28-years-later-danny-boyles-new-...
Actually using the iPhone telephoto for a group photo like the one shown in the article would require the photographer to stand a considerable distance from the subjects, and then we might start noticing a little perspective distortion from the 45mm-equivalent lens on the Sony.
If you wish to reduce optical distortion and can get farther away from the subject, you'll want to pick the "5x" zoom. Think somebody else here said it was a 105mm equivalent, which sounds about right.
Intermediate values are obviously crops... although given that the 0.5x and the 1x lens are both 48mp sensors (IIRC), and the resulting image is typically 12mp, it doesn't make as big of a quality difference as one might ordinarily think.
I start with TV sets. The usual way to chose one was walking into a shop, looking at dozen of TVs tuned on the same channel, picking the ones that subjectively looked best then check the price and size. Did we (average people) cared about the inner workings of the TV? Nearly zero.
Enter cheap compact digital cameras (200-300 Euro or Dollars.) We didn't have a chance to take pictures to compare cameras and even if we did it would take too much time. We read reviews, trust them, shop from home. Most people would buy the model with the highest number of Megapixel.
Enter smartphones. On average there are people that will buy an iPhone no matter what and people that will not buy an iPhone no matter what. Then they would use the camera inside the phone and would possibly notice that its pictures looked better or worse than their previous phone, especially in dark places.
And about camera vs phone: the phone is always in the pocket, the camera is always at home unless somebody goes on vacation in some scenic place and plans to take a lot of pictures. Half of them will be taken with the phone anyway.
I do have a compact camera. It's some Sony model with 30x optical zoom. It's great to take shots of animals without having to get close and scare them away (so no picture.) It's definitely better than my phone but my phone is not so bad too and it's more convenient to use. Furthermore those compact cameras lost many manual settings that would make them more useful. Sometimes it's easier to pin the autofocus of my phone on a subject than to make my camera understand that it must focus to something instead of doing its best to focus on the surroundings. And I won't digress on how long it takes to take a picture with cameras and send it to somebody on WhatsApp.
So, those 5 golf players look better on the camera but their picture will be taken and shared with a phone 99.9999% of the times.
The point not in the article is that a phone camera, when used correctly (i.e., not defaulting to 1x zoom, maintaining a proper distance from the subject, and choosing wisely what's in the background), can produce photos of the same kind as a real camera in terms of composition. And that's what should be shared 99.9999% of the time. The extra resolution does not matter online, as most people will not zoom beyond what the platform, such as DeviantArt, offers as the default viewing experience - which is approximately 50% of the screen width, i.e., 1920 pixels on 4K displays.
Even so, though, 5 or 7 years ago it became clear that I could absolutely use some iPhone shots as part of my travel sets. Yeah, you could tell they weren't from the full-frame Sony, but the delta was small enough that it was okay. Now that delta is narrower.
But the BULK of the photos I end up sharing are still from a real camera. Some of that is the lack of distortion, and some of that is likely the intentionality of Using A Camera vs. whipping out one's phone, and a good chunk of is the level of control a competent shutterbug has with a proper camera that is mostly absent, or at least harder to manipulate, on a phone (aperture, shutter, ISO, etc).
Ironically enough, the Vivo ("Zeiss") color science also looks more accurate than most phones I've owned, and is pretty flexible at editing time.
No.
I have numerous smartphone photos printed and framed. On both walls and horizontal surfaces.
There does not exist a greater pixel-peeping gearslut than I, but that's just a hobby. Hobbies only dominate my wallet, not my life.
But in a more classical sense, directing the viewer's look is what composition in photography is all about.
Most other points also seem contrived to me. Not all: skin color really seems better on the traditional camera. Whether that's due to the phone not being able to use the main camera, though, I wouldn't know...
These pictures simply need to be compared with reality if you want to know which camera is better. I can't tell what the shape of the leftmost person's head is. I noticed the difference, found the iPhone version more flattering, but then read the text and saw that the iPhone is apparently distorting it. A reader can't judge how close it is to reality. Continue reading, and matching reality is now bad: the traditional camera can't properly capture the background (or light in the foreground of the later child picture) and the author thinks that's good. Blurring and darkening is something you can always still add in, I'd say that a camera performed better if it delivered a picture close to reality and you can work with that data to highlight any aspect you want. The camera doesn't have to force that upon you
[1] "Don’t Be Ugly By Accident!": https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/dontbeuglybyacciden... (mirror)
But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject.
But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects).
Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground.
BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)
Of course then there's the lack of detail and watercolor effect to try to fake detail, distortion, etc.
fucking hell
“fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.
Wedding photographers use bounce flash because indirect light is flattering and not everyone is supermodel-beautiful.
I don’t know where you’re partying that the ceilings aren’t painted white (they usually are because the problem of color cast on reflected light applies to normal room lights as well) but I’ll take color balance I can fix in post over harsh shadows from direct fill flash.
ALL photos look good with direct flash. Never use bounce flash. And indirect lighting is never flattering. EVER. Fire any photographer that ever uses bounce flash. Nobody wants their muddied color.
I was also a photo editor with thousands of photographer submissions. I can always tell which ones used bounce flash. A sure sign of unprofessional amateurness.
I get that people have a desire to maintain their lazy habits, but my job was to make sure they understood they sucked at photography.
For anyone reading, soft shadows from indirect light is why professional studio setups use beauty dishes, bounce cards, and big flash boxes or umbrellas with diffusers. Bounce flash is a way to create a little of that magic when you can’t get the entire rig to a shoot, as in wedding photography.
Pointing your on camera flash directly at the subject is the easiest route you can take. How does that make every other method lazy? (Note that I’m not calling direct flash lazy - it still takes skill to balance flash power vs aperture and speed. But every other method takes that and more.)
“Specialist thinks the broader domain should universally adhere to the way things are optimized in their area of focus” is not an uncommon thing to see on HN, though its more commonly seen with specialists in different kinds of programming than photography.
Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.
Yes. Everyone does, with every manufacturer, and Apple evidently has determined their visual style. At least they also provide you with an optional semi-raw output you can freely edit if you so desire.
I don't mind the comments but there's always someone. There's also people with the latest phones who come and brag about their photo quality. I'm always nice about it and give my talking points about the sensor sizes and the lenses as quickly as possible.
Sometimes they are more aggressive about it and start to question my competence. I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's as I'm usually in the middle of a few things during events. I liked how the article mentioned amateur photographer (which would describe me) so it addresses some of these concerns. It also uses examples of older cameras that are very affordable.
Next time someone is coping from Big Tech marketing about the camera on their smartphone, I'll show them this. All the "Pro"s use iPhone camera, right?
> "My phone takes better photos"
< "Yeah. I wish I could afford one."
“I prefer the photos I take from this camera.”
I'm not sure anything good will come of showing them this article.
Just say "yeah" and move on.
Even in new cameras (where the viewfinder itself is a tiny screen) something happens when you frame a photo this way, that doesn’t happen when you use the back display (or a phone).
I don’t know if it’s down to physically using one eye, or the psychology of bringing your eye to the camera’s eye, but it feels different (and I like it)
The subject seems to have moved. His expression is different, how he holds the stick is different. Hard to believe that the stance remained the same meanwhile.
Now, I'd hate for dedicated cameras to go away. I love shooting on SLRs, digital and film. I see smartphone cameras not as pretenders to the throne but as democratizing tools lowering the barrier for entry and a great way to get shots when you don't have your dedicated camera.
[0]: for the record, the issue with the camera was that it was cheap and I didn't know what I was doing, not that it was film.
Modern computational photography does a great job of dealing with tricky conditions though.
I regularly take photos outside, at night, in ambient light with my Fujifilm X-Pro3 and 56mm f/1.2. I'm stretching the limits of it a bit, using high ISO and as low a shutter speed as I can get away with.
In the same lighting conditions, an iPhone will basically take 3-5 shots and composite them together in software. The result, predictably, is unusable for most moving subjects.
But why does the article compare what I assume is the iPhone’s ultra wide angle lens (incorrectly referred to as a “fish eye” lens) with a different focal length on a different camera without specifying what exactly it is being compared to? That’s apples to oranges.
Distortion from focal length can only be meaningfully judged in combination with sensor size and subject distance.
Example: iPhone 16 Pro ultra wide focal length is 13mm (equivalent to full frame). So the comparison shots need to be taken from the same spot and with another 13mm equivalent focal length, for example a full frame camera with a 13mm lens or a micro four-thirds camera with a 6.5mm lens.
It effectively states that people don’t print photos anymore because phones produce bad photos.
But back in the film camera days you literally had to develop and print the photos to see them. There was no universal device for viewing photos that you always had on you.
I've got an old Nikon D5100 DSLR which I sometimes pull out and take photos with, and a cheap $200 Motorola phone, which does amazingly well, if there's plenty of light and the subject happens to take up most of the frame (and can thus focus)
Getting a good photo with the Nikon is easier for me, but I've had a lot of practice. The main issue is getting things to focus in macro land.
I happen to be making a RPi Camera for Burning Man and was incorporating a QR code workflow into it. With a thermal printer for either a low-res pic or a QR code to print or snap. I devised something along the lines of this service, but dead simple URL generation to filename+hash in an S3 bucket.
I don't think I have specific questions now, but I'm excited for the kinds of interactions it can spark. I mostly imagine getting lost in a sea of QR codes if it is not managed well. I was going to try to composite an extra copy for photographer reference.
Like yeah, there’s differences, but not to a novice photographer. And they’re not the end of the world to professionals? Idk
I am also not exactly convinced that this supposed iPhone picture of those kids is actually an image taken at 1x.
The dng files that come out of my Pixel phone down sample from 50 mega pixels to 12.5. You can't access the original 50 mega pixels. So each pixel has information from 4 "real" pixels. That's fairly effective for getting rid of noise. I took some night shots with it and it holds up pretty well. It actually makes Google's night vision AI mode a bit less impressive because the starting point isn't that bad.
My other camera is a Fuji X-T30. The lenses and sensor are clearly better on that one if you look at the raw files. More detail, dynamic range, etc. But at night it's kind of weak (noise). And if you are into that, Fuji's film emulation produces pretty pleasing jpg files without a lot of work. I shoot raw so I tend to ignore that. But it's a somewhat fair comparison because in both cases there isn't much post processing. Except the Fuji isn't doing a lot of AI trickery and is just relying on a good results that come out of the camera and applying a prefab tone mapping that resembles what film used to do.
The difference of course is that with the Fuji, you are making lots of creative choices with focal range, depth of field of the lens (aperture), shutter speeds, and ISO while you are shooting. You don't really have that with a smart phone (though you can have some control). The iphone and pixel phones fake some of this stuff and some people like the portrait mode with the fake bokeh. Lens quality is amazing given the size of phones these days. But it's not the same as shooting with a proper lens and they do have some real physical limitations.
And if you shoot raw, you gain a lot of control over tone mapping etc. Not for everyone of course. But also not the end of the world with the right software. I use Darktable for this and if you dial that in properly, it's not actually a lot of work.
That being said, my pixel takes decent photos without a lot of effort and there is value in that. I have it with me by default and that is invaluable. I only use the Fuji a few times per year. But there's less art to using a smart phone. Point and tap on the button and hope for the best.
These things can casually record 4k 60 for as long as your storage can survive with the best OIS. Night mode photo check. HDR mode check.
I wish Apple was selling their processing hardware to camera vendors.
I know what I'd rather take pictures with.
For everything else, actual camera hands down!
Though for its size and availability iPhone camera is great!
I love having a camera on my phone for the convenience, but when I want to take good pictures I take out my camera.
But then I bought a Ricoh GrIIIx, which is very pocketable and takes amazing photos. Even has a handy remote view function through WiFi. I don’t bother with my phone anymore.
But, conversely, how do you do the narrow(er) depth-of-field in the iPhone when you want it?
If you're asking "how do you do", you can select "portrait" when taking the photo, or go to the photo in your gallery after the fact, pick "edit", pick "portrait", and choose a fake aperture ("f/1.4") and focus point to use. The results are ... mid.
Though still good to see how it turns out otherwise for a small phone in your pocket.
One could take the depth map and use it to mask off two areas to keep sharp, which would potentially have better-than-real-camera results. The iPhone does not do this, however. You'd have to write your own program to do it.
Would be interesting to read another perspective on the same subject…
I have a photo I took on my iPhone 6S on my wall. It’s a crop of a panorama taken from the top of a sand dune in Namibia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365510
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482085
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39926633 (sanity prevails)
Fisheye lenses are a specific thing, iPhone lenses aren't fisheye lenses.
I get the author knows what he's talking about/looking at, but most of us don't. I couldn't tell you which of those was iPhone vs Expensive Camera if you didn't tell me. Maybe I could guess but I'd have to examine.
This is the same as me being incredulous that the author has (made up example) a $20 cheap router his ISP gave him vs my lovingly handcrafted config on my home VyOS router.
At the end of the day both work...
Apple is 'famous' for at least a decade to (by default and basically nobody turns it off) overdo saturation towards red spectrum so that every single photo looks like its taken in golden hour (last hour before sunset). Every single one. Skin tones are affected correspondingly, looking artificial. You may not see it, its glaringly obvious to anybody who even scratched surface of photography (I never got deeper and still).
I get it, people like that 'instagram' look, but when its coming from all directions it loses all beauty and its just plasticky looking people.
Apple has some properly good hardware (and corresponding sw processing), they didn't have to resort to overdoing it so much (also very aggressively removing any skin blemishes and moles which all goes back to above). At the end, apple photos and people on them look too artificial. If you like it as such that's fine, but it doesn't represent reality, at least far less than other phones and proper camera photography.
1. Every dude here is pretty unattractive, so the question is which camera gives them enough camera makeup to hide it. If you shake your head at this, take a peek at this: https://i.imgur.com/vdD5r8M.jpeg Every dude is mewing for his life in the latter photo
2. They aren't making the same face for each shot, so all of this is a waste of time. That's so much more important.
3. The only real difference is just the background being blurred or not. Otherwise it's a totally different pose for each guy.
https://www.cined.com/iphone-15-pro-lab-test-rolling-shutter...
anyway the major differentiator in photography is not the device but light.
I stopped reading here. Every photo on the walls in my house came from some smart phone.
Edit: Is this just a good bit of sarcasm/shitpost? If so, it's just a tad too subtle.
The best camera is the one you actually have on-hand at the moment you need to take the photo and that often ends up the phone camera.
My d7100 might be one of my favorite cameras of all time. I've taken very nice picks of birds mid-flight that would be very hard to do on a phone (impossible?). But, it's not a camera you pull out your pocket and start shooting snapshots. It takes time to learn and post-process.
They are all just tools, pick the right one for what you're doing. And sometimes the right one is the one you have with you :)
Is this person going around asking all of their friends what kind of camera they used to take the photos they have on display? Or are they just sure they can tell from looking?