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iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

austinmann.com

41–50 of 294 posts

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#41
How could anyone read this without knowing it's an advertisement:

"today I’m just as thrilled to be putting an entirely new Ultra Wide lens in my pocket. It gives us another format to tell the story, another perspective to visualize, and a better rounded tool for doing our best creative work."

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#42
post #4

The photography in these kinds of reviews is amazing, and the camera looks pretty stellar compared to the XS, but I find myself reading them wondering if it will make my pictures any better. I'm a mediocre photographer at best, and I'm certainly not going to be able to capture many images like the ones in this review.

I remember a friend photobug taking a few photos with her flip phone camera and it was phenomenal for what it was. There is definitely a skill there that goes beyond lense quality.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#43
post #35

I feel for the compact camera manufacturers. Smartphones killed the 2/3" sensor market. Now they've killed the 1" sensor market too. Micro 4/3 is stale with no major sensor advancements for years now. What's left, APS-C and up?

I feel for all camera manufacturers. Why isn't there a Canon or Nikon or Sony cloud service where photos are sent to? Why haven't the big camera companies embraced computation in their cameras? Do DSLR bodies even have GPS capabilities for tagging photos?

It feels like there's no innovation in the camera space outside of Apple and Google.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#44
post #17
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DSLR manufacturers already have compact mirrorless to catch up with. Now only if the mirrorless moguls would recognize the potential of ehnancing their comparatively giant APS-C sensors with at least half the computational photography wits of modern camera phones, now that would be magnificent. Also, for me personally, the next waypoint for the phones should be the development of compact telephoto lenses -- it seems…

I wonder why traditional camera manufacturers have been so reluctant to leverage the advances in computational photography that the mobile phone world has embraced. I mean I get why they want to have neutral default settings for people who want to do their own editing, but why are their 'scene' settings so crap when compared to mobile phones. Is it simply because they're worried that a sufficiently powerful processor…

I can't speak for the manufacturers but as a DLSR user I love the total predictability (exposure, DoF, focus, etc) when it is in manual mode. I really don't want the camera to try to anticipate the type of picture I am aiming for.

This totally applies to scenes. Portrait, sports, landscape, etc are all just different permutations of shutter speed, aperture and ISO.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#45

How could anyone read this without knowing it's an advertisement: "today I’m just as thrilled to be putting an entirely new Ultra Wide lens in my pocket. It gives us another format to tell the story, another perspective to visualize, and a better rounded tool for doing our best creative work."

Stockholm Syndrome?

But yes, it's good that you were able to see it. I find marketing unethical, most people don't even realize that they are being advertised to.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#47
post #16

The fisherman seen in that photo is also in these very similar photos... http://davidbuddphotography.com/galleries/01-places/china/gu...

"Fisherman/men in a canoe like boat at dusk/night in asia" is such a cliche it should be forbidden... Knowing the journalist/fixer trade a little, this is some well known place/person, and photographers who go to China are taken by their local helpers (who know the drill) there to shoot "interesting" pictures. This fisherman guy probably makes (or could make) more money posing for tourists than fishing...

That photo is from guilin, and I have similar photos. The "fishermen" take people on raft (gondola) rides and will even sing to you in their local dialect. They also like to pick out the most foreign looking tourists and encourage them to sing as well.

Guilin is amazing photography-wise, but the tourism there has a very manufactured feel to it, as it does in most of the very popular places to visit there.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#48
post #6
post #2

These night mode shots are seriously impressive. This might give DSLR manufacturers something to catch up with.

DSLR manufacturers already have compact mirrorless to catch up with. Now only if the mirrorless moguls would recognize the potential of ehnancing their comparatively giant APS-C sensors with at least half the computational photography wits of modern camera phones, now that would be magnificent. Also, for me personally, the next waypoint for the phones should be the development of compact telephoto lenses -- it seems…

> would recognize the potential

Oh I'm sure they've recognized the potential all right. But these smartphone manufacturers have massive software development departments with heaps of funds poured into AI research for multiple reasons other than this specific field, which is now really starting to benefit them. It's a different culture.

And even if we assume a camera manufacturer would have the finances to build this culture on their home turf (a huge assumption to make), they then run into the next problem that their sensors are too big! They can't compete as strongly here because they capture much more information with their larger sensor sizes and even with tiny smartphone sizes, you need laptop level performance on a ~7-10 nm transistor scale and dedicated AI hardware to pull it off without destroying battery life. They're so far behind both in know how and difficulty of the problem that I'm not sure how they'll ever be able to do it in the foreseeable future at least with full frame cameras.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#49
post #38

I would love a high-resolution photos of these. The small size look amazing for phones like Huawei P30 Pro or Samsung Note 10, but then you realize that the full size version has blotched textures or excessive sharpness

Gruber has the originals on his review: https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/the_iphone_11_and_iphones...

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#50
post #2

These night mode shots are seriously impressive. This might give DSLR manufacturers something to catch up with.

From a technical point of view I'm quite sure my >10 years old Rebel XSi will yield similar photos after editing the raw-file. If you are impressed by this you're probably not really following the tech, don't have any clue about image processing and are just blindly following what Apples advertising is selling you.

Most of the "cool" iphone-pictures in non-optimal lighting are about 50% post-processing and they show (for example the linked pictures are about 1.5MP and while they have nicely matched colors, there's barely any texture left (it's the same for the ads on apple.com). This might be fine for viewing and even a small print but that's nothing a DSLR of yore couldn't do. And believe me, once you print a poster of the nice fisherman and compare image quality form the iPhone and a modern ILC you'll see that there's a lot to catch up for the iPhone.

I'd take a typical ILC for ~300 USD over a iPhone everyday from a technical point of view (and so would most photographers if there wasn't the ad-money)

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