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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

Someone should assemble a chain of iPhone camera review comparison images published over the years, 18 → 17, 17 → 16, 16 → 15 etc. showing how each year's new phone being so much better than the previous year's somehow becomes perceivably bad next to the next year's phone.

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Youtuber Marques Brownlee did this (as a short). It's actually not so noticeable, it's only once you get to the very oldest phones that it's visibly worse.

the difference will be in things like low-light, telephoto lenses, video capability, HDR, and lots of other things that don't show up in most photos (including that one)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jru9Gsz3kJY

It'd be much better if this test was done in low light. The tiny sensors in iphones work fine when there's plenty of light around. The real test is how well they do when the you aren't sitting in the sun.

Indeed, I found the oil-painting effect really rough on certain year iphones in low light/when using one of the zoom lenses.

Only iPhone 4 sticks out, 1 through 17 are all fine.

And it sort of reach a plateau where for normal consumer it doesn't matter much other than zoom. Which is important to a certain extend.

I wish there is some tech in the pipeline, that in the next 5 - 10 years we could get decent pictures quality without the huge bump.

The iPhone 1 doesn't look THAT bad to me. Also I wonder if its worth 13.6 thousand ($13,600) in phone upgrades over the years?

I'd suspect the average person won't notice much difference (on the main lens) until about iPhone 11 or older, with still photos. Computational image processing does a TON of heavy lifting with these tiny sensors.

With video OTOH, the improvements are much more noticeable. I also suspect that is why Apple focuses so much on video as its a harder problem to solve and so much easier to differentiate your hardware from competitors.

Could you provide at least one review to support that claim?

> someone should assemble

Did you miss your parent comment's sarcasm?

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