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Comment by lich_king | Hacker News Reader

I like the weird arms race here: phone manufacturers develop more and more computational photography techniques to convert the output from potato sensors and optics into what looks like a professional photo... and phone-based photographers put more and more effort into undoing a lot of that work to avoid the look they used to covet. Back in my day, that first baby photo would be widely considered the best.

I would think there's a point where, if you want this level of creative control and image quality, you go back to a mirrorless camera, which now costs less than iPhone Pro. But I guess the convenience is hard to beat?

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Apple makes a pretty strong creative decision in how it 'computes' photos for its camera. In recent years they've got a fair bit of criticism from both tech reporting and regulars I've seen on tiktok commenting that they're just crushing the shadows out of any image (presumably in an attempt to get better low light images), aggressively colour balancing, and over-smoothing to eliminate noise.

If the old man Process Zero comparison is fair, it shows that sometimes this pretty clearly makes the photo worse and there's room to tweak the processing to get a "better" photo. The difference to his skin colour and shadows across his face is astonishing.

It's the convenience, for me anyway - why carry around multiple devices, when one can do the job.

For travel photography, I went from carrying around a Sony full frame, to a Fuji XT3, to hoping by iPhone 19-20 that I can sell all my bodies and lenses and just rely on the iPhone.

The Sony felt like a chore - from carrying around a big camera and lens, through to the editing and photo management. The Fuji was a breath of fresh air - a bit more compact, and the film sims allowed me to cut the editing process out. But there was still lugging around a camera, and then the photo transfer etc.

With mobile phones' improvements in photography, coupled with the endless opportunities for apps, I can't wait to rely on it as my sole camera.

What do you expect the iPhone 19/20 to have that the iPhone 17 doesn't?

The tradeoffs will fundamentally be the same. You're not getting a > 100mm^2 sensor (with the glass lens required to image on it) on the iPhone anytime soon (or anytime ever really, unless the form factor of the iPhone dramatically changes).

Hopefully 48MP telephoto lens, with similar aperture to the main lens.

The telephoto sensor is already 48 MP on the 17 Pro, so that's a given.

I don't think we're getting a f/1.78 lens on the telephoto anytime soon. The widest aperture the tele's ever had was a f/2 on the 12 Pro, and that was back when the tele was a 2x (52mm equivalent, so not even really tele...). Maybe f/2.4 or f/2.2 (what the ultra wide has)? That'd already be a significant improvement.

The next big upgrades on the ultrawide/tele for the 19/20 generations will likely be larger sensors - they're currently 1/2.55", compared to 1/1.28" for the wide lens. I don't think they can fit three 1/1.28" sensors in there, so plausibly 1/1.7"? But that might mean that effective aperture remains constant.

(and yet none of that will beat an equivalent focal length lens on your XT3)

The first baby photo is definitely the best. Artistic lighting setups can work for adult portraits, photographers used to recommend side lighting for male bone structure, but it just looks wrong in these baby photos.

Not true. Phone sensors are amazing even without any processing. The difference is not as large as you might think.

As a person who has an expensive phone and a professional camera, let me retort by saying that the difference is larger than you think. On some level, it's basic physics. You get fewer photons, etc. Apple hasn't unlocked the secrets of optics or semiconductor manufacturing that are out of reach for Canon or Nikon. So if they keep making sensors and optics that are many times larger and bulkier than in a phone, there's probably a reason for it.

I like to think I have some experience in this area. I have an app on Android that records RAW video (MotionCam Pro). We've compared large expensive cameras to phone sensors many times (you can see it on our YouTube channel if you like).

Not GP, but for me the biggest differentiators of larger sensors are less perspective and better low-light performance. There are probably some other details like f-stop range but I haven't played with those much. I'm just a smartphone shooter (I don't even own a large sensor), but I still prefer to use the telephoto when possible to get squarer-looking shots with less noise, and to me that feels like what a larger sensor should deliver.

It's dark outside. I'm sitting in my living room with reasonable indoor lighting. I point my "Pro" phone camera on the tele setting (but no digital zoom) at the wall and take a photo. I zoom in on the capture and there is basically no real pixel detail anywhere in sight. It's all smudged to algorithmically cover up severe sensor noise. Crown moulding edges are not even straight lines and all have weird jaggies.

If I go and grab my full-frame mirrorless, every pixel of the image will be usable at 1:1 crop. "Taking photos indoors and wanting to zoom in and crop" is not an extreme test. The usability of 1:1 crops from cell phones is limited even in daylight.

But yeah, if you look at a photo taken in good light with no cropping and at screen display resolutions, it looks pretty close to the output from a pro mirrorless. My only point is that you get maybe 3-5 good megapixels, not 45+.

And that's before we get into dynamic range, bokeh, etc, all of which phones more or less need to fake to approach the look and feel of photos taken with grown-up cameras.

Really depends on the environment. Low light and nighttime are much worse than you might think, anything else isn't so bad.

(Try taking a photo of the moon with an iPhone. You can't do it, not even with Halide.)

The lenses are also different and direct lighting can cause annoying internal reflections. I don't know this area as well, but lenses are more important than sensors for photos.

You absolutely can:

https://mastodon.social/@heliographe_studio/1156653713048409...

(taken with BayerCam.app, not Halide, but Halide can capture the same raw Bayer data)

It's not an amazing photo by any means. But it is a photograph of the moon - the seas are all well delineated, Copernicus/Kepler/Aristarchus/Grimaldi are visible/recognizable.

A test that smartphones did not pass a few years ago.

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