The iPhones XS • Hacker News Board

Re: The iPhones XS

#11

Post by macintux » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

mankash666 wrote: post #8

macintux wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us with iPhones are interested in how the new generation compares to the old. He's not comparing the cameras to other phones, although he does briefly discuss the device vs cloud processing approaches. And, shockingly, even fanboys can have useful information to share.

Indeed they can. "Is the iPhone XS the world's greatest phone of the year, or all time?" "No science involved, but Apple engineers and I agree that the iPhone XS camera is the best" I bet fanboys print out DXOMark as cleaning paper for their iPhone lenses - "best lens cleanser for the iPhone is DXOMARK ratings of other phones being better"

HN is really not the appropriate forum for this sort of straw man hyperbole.

Re: The iPhones XS

#12

Post by mankash666 » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #11

mankash666 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed they can. "Is the iPhone XS the world's greatest phone of the year, or all time?" "No science involved, but Apple engineers and I agree that the iPhone XS camera is the best" I bet fanboys print out DXOMark as cleaning paper for their iPhone lenses - "best lens cleanser for the iPhone is DXOMARK ratings of other phones being better"

HN is really not the appropriate forum for this sort of straw man hyperbole.

And fawning opinion pieces masquerading as reviews, fully intent on indoctrinating your average HN reader, is? When did HN become Apple's blog?

Re: The iPhones XS

#13

Post by ValentineC » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

> … to play with the bokeh depth of field f-stops, you have to use an iPhone XS because it depends on the A12’s Neural Engine. An iMac Pro has a more powerful CPU than an iPhone XS, but it doesn’t have a Neural Engine, and the bokeh effect depends upon it.

This doesn't bode well for anyone who cares about being able to manipulate their photos without being too tied into Apple's ecosystem.

I hope that Adobe and the developers of other photo editing programs manage to reverse engineer this.

Re: The iPhones XS

#14

Post by nobrains » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

princekolt wrote: post #10

(Following on Gruber's examination of the camera lenses on the XS) I have a full-size mirrorless camera with interchangeable lens (Sony alpha-5000), and I love it. I usually import all pictures I take with it to Photos, and you can immediately tell if a picture was taken with it or with my current iPhone 7 (no surprise). But here's the catch: I understand many principles of photography, but I'm no professional photog…

I use something in the middle of a mirrorless interchangeable lens and a smart phone camera. The Sony RX100. Because of the lack of too many manual controls, its a good point and shoot, and because of the large sensor size, the photos are better than current best-camera smartphones. Thats the next target for smart phones.

Re: The iPhones XS

#15

Post by beamatronic » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

sebazzz wrote: post #5

johnbellone wrote: post #4

> Apple describes the glass (front and back) on the iPhone XS as “the most durable glass ever in a smartphone”. I asked, and according to Apple, this means both crack and scratch resistance. I feel like I hear this statement every other year. I'm not invested enough to go back and actually validate my theory, but this definitely isn't the first time I've heard that from a phone company. They always seem to fail the 6…

I guess they get a little bit better each year, just a little bit. But not enough.

You don’t have to upgrade every year though. Still happy with my 6S.

Re: The iPhones XS

#16

Post by ariwilson » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

> Google does advanced machine learning — including for photos — but they do it in the cloud.

This is just wrong; Google is doing lots on the Pixel devices in hardware (HDR+, Portrait, Motion Photos, etc):

https://ai.google/stories/ai-in-hardware/

Re: The iPhones XS

#17

Post by dman » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

gammateam wrote: post #3

I'm very pleased with the point cloud technology called "depth cameras". What was, and is, a gigantic attachment to the xbox is now smaller than my fingernail and there's two of them in the Iphone X series. What I'd like is for greater range and more situations for the algorithmic depth to kick in (ie Instagram's focus camera). My use of exchangeable lens cameras in traditional form factors is about to disappear if I…

What I would like is for a non processed photo to be stored along with every processed photos. I have multiple photos on both the Pixel2 and IPhone where the computational photograhy algorithms got the scene very very wrong. Would have been great to have a non processed fallback in these cases.

Re: The iPhones XS

#18

Post by carloscarnero » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 6:45 PM UTC

I can't be sure, but I think that there's an error on the 5th photo: the column in the background, between his right temple and his right ear should also be processed.

Re: The iPhones XS

#19

Post by nakedrobot2 » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

Hi, camera designer here. There are few issues in this article.

"The other explanation I can think of is that this almost certainly isn’t Apple’s own sensor." - Correct, it's a Sony sensor. Apple has been using Sony sensors since they dumped Omnivision back in the iPhone 4 days.

"Why isn’t Apple touting this larger sensor?" Maybe because the sensor got smaller in the previous iphones (1/2.5") compared to the iPhones before that (1/2.3"). I guess they've gone back to 1/2.3" now?

" Android handset makers can’t just buy a “neural engine” chip and stick it in a phone. " Yes, you absolutely can. [1] This chip is in all the DJI drones, also in the "google clips" camera. OK, it's not an A12, but it is exactly the kind of thing that Gruber is describing - it's a neural image processing chip.

[1] https://www.movidius.com/myriad2

Re: The iPhones XS

#20

Post by thanatropism » Tue, Sep 18, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

It's strange that there is an apparently objective, value-free aesthetic ideal for personal photographs. What is the endgame here? The look of fashion magazines and advertisements?

Because hey, like Gruber, I'm also an unattractive mid-30s gremlin, nothing like a fashion model. My wife, whom I love, is not Kate Moss either.

I used to run around with Dianas and Holgas - plastic cameras with plastic lenses that expose 120 film (medium or 4x5 format). Half of the shots turn out unusable, which gets really expensive -- but the half that turns out good is great. Unlike my (cheap SE) iPhone images, they have a quality that's uncannily "real". Like real people living real lives.

And when I say "strange" I don't necessarily mean "bad"; just that it sure looks that we will soon be normalizing the hard-to-notice glitches of ML models and miss them in "normal" photos. With cheap plastic cameras you knew that the artifacts (light streaks, dust on lenses...) were artifacts.

---

Next up: thanatropism complains about auto-tuners in modern pop music.