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iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

austinmann.com

221–230 of 294 posts

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#221
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?

Amateurs rarely benefit from pro grade equipment. Atleast photography is somewhat cheap as a hobby. I see friends buying expensive amps or guitars because so and so uses them and they end up still sounding the same. People who were buying all these cameras, were never photographers to begin with, they jsut wanted something to record their memories with, and a smartphone is amazing for that.

If you compare like to like, same sensor tech, same quality glass .. there is absolutely no way a tiny sensor can out-resolve or out-perform a larger sensor when it comes to image quality. There are other metrics where it can - for e.g. power consumption/heat output, ability to stabilize the sensor (smaller = easier), faster readout (generally easier on smaller sensors), etc.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#222
post #75

The pictures do look good, the colors are nice and the small image on the page is nice. But I haven't seen any 100% crops or full images. it's there that you'll see that the image is worse than a DSLR or another camera with a big lens and sensor. I can get nice pictures (= vibrant and nice colors) with any camera, what I can't get is a sharp image, with sharp edges. I went to a trip with my Android Phone and DSLR, an…

>What I'm afraid is that the new iPhone dark mode (or even the P30 Pro and other phones with post processing) will also process the images too much and stack them thus losing a lot of detail. When put on instagram or made smaller for Facebook/websites, you won't see the missing details, but the colors will be vibrant and that's "good enough" for most people.

BTW - one nitpick, stacking images will _improve_ image quality. Specifically - averaging images (after aligning them) taken sequentially is a common way to reduce noise artifacts. Photon noise follows a Poisson distribution and so if you take multiple images and average them you will generally get a cleaner image. The caveat being that you must be on a tripod and your subject must be still for those shots.. (ideally landscape kinda shots)

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the point of muddying the waters without having verifiable facts? The thing with speculation is .. anyone can speculate, on anything, for any reason. That doesn't make it true. >I'm just saying it's naive to think that everyone is always highly committed to playing nice with the FTC rules. Who exactly said that?

Look at the quote at the beginning of this thread. If it looks like an ad, if it reads unnaturally, like something no real person would say to convey a honest opinion, then it's most likely an ad.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. It didn't read like an ad to me. It reads like someone who was excited to use a cool new product, and wrote about it on their own website.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say the G3 couldn't take good pictures. However saying "my G3 once took a good picture, therefore it's equivalent to this" isn't reasonable. Those are difficult scenes and unless you have a G3 to take a picture in the same lighting and conditions, your claim is baseless. Taking even current, top of the line smartphones and taking photos in perfectly equal conditions often yields significant differences in ou…

> I didn't say the G3 couldn't take good pictures. However saying "my G3 once took a good picture, therefore it's equivalent to this" isn't reasonable. Those are difficult scenes and unless you have a G3 to take a picture in the same lighting and conditions, your claim is baseless. Talk about moving goalposts. What a bunch of baloney. Apparently now you can't argue any point without replicating exactly those specific…

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Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As someone who owned the LG G3 years ago, and absolutely loved the wide-angle lens on that phone, most of these pictures would look identical" They wouldn't look remotely alike. Many of those simple shots are incredibly complex dynamic range scenes were the results are quite spectacular. With a lesser device the results would have been a blah photo, which is the point of the amazing progress that is happening in com…

I suggest you pick up an LG G3 and test it's capabilities out. It's not like HDR is some new invention that just came about in the smart phone space. It's been around forever. Yes, some of the algorithms have gotten better, and the HDR tonemapping has been improved, but I've taken thousands of HDR images with my G3 many years ago that looked great. Case in point - https://photos.app.goo.gl/RMMcJe9X6XjaEqcw7 > As to p…

That photo looks terrible compared to what a modern device would capture...

It's easy to take an aesthetically pleasing scene and capture it in a way that looks vaguely pleasing when zoomed out.

The moment I zoomed in an extremely moderate amount it looked horrible, especially at the hardest part to capture, the clouds and sun.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The review by John Gruber of the Touch Bar based MacBook was critical of the feel of the keyboard - this was before the actual reliability problems came up. He along with everyone else was critical of the first Apple Watch. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/05/03/patel-apple-wat... Seeing that he still not only gets review units every year, he gets the prime live interview every year after WWDC with top Apple ex…

Those two bloggers will only criticize Apple products in comparison to other Apple products. They will never say a competitor's product is better even if most other reviewers say so.

John Gruber on Pixel’s Night Site Camera

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/10/25/night-sight

Gruber has stated repeatedly how much of an embarrassment that the MacBook keyboards have become but he famously still uses an old ADB Apple keyboard so he doesn’t have as much first hand experience as Marco who buys computers more frequently.

They have both complained about Macs falling behind compared to what Microsoft is doing with the Surface line.

Marco routinely criticizes the Apple Watch and compares it to the non smart watches he prefers. Gruber also prefers regular watches.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say the G3 couldn't take good pictures. However saying "my G3 once took a good picture, therefore it's equivalent to this" isn't reasonable. Those are difficult scenes and unless you have a G3 to take a picture in the same lighting and conditions, your claim is baseless. Taking even current, top of the line smartphones and taking photos in perfectly equal conditions often yields significant differences in ou…

> I didn't say the G3 couldn't take good pictures. However saying "my G3 once took a good picture, therefore it's equivalent to this" isn't reasonable. Those are difficult scenes and unless you have a G3 to take a picture in the same lighting and conditions, your claim is baseless. Talk about moving goalposts. What a bunch of baloney. Apparently now you can't argue any point without replicating exactly those specific…

Get a friend with an iPhone 11, the G3, and compare. No need for this whole word duel. I think you'll be surprised.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#228
post #135
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People have always questioned the usefulness of smaller sensor cameras (Ie M43) with the improvement in cellphone cameras, but it looks like I'll still carry my Olympus EM5.2 when I travel. The iPhone 11 gets great social media photos, but I wouldn't want to get any of those printed (at least not larger than 4x6). Of course the best camera is the one you have with you so I am still happy to see the improvements over…

I moved back to aps-c after I noticed my EM10 was giving me nearly zero benefit over the iPhone in terms of quality or resolution. The 16MP vs 12MP is barely noticeable, and the iPhone was actually sharper and had better tone in side-by-side shoots.

That was with a 6S!

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#229

I have two requirements for camera: fast startup time from a standby to taking photos, and working touch exposure control. The majority of phones I've tested do not provide these. For some reason, on Oneplus 5 it works. I tested a newer model and it was worse. Sure, on a newer phone the photos are better for example resolution wise, but that's usually not the limiting factor. I have some street photo / rangefinder ho…

> working touch exposure control

what do you mean? A long press gives you immediate access to exposure on the iPhone. There are also dedicated photo apps (like Halide, mentioned in the article) that offer more advanced controls.

Re: iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review

#230

Still prefer how Pixel 3 photos look like on the phone that was released a year ago [1]. Interestingly I recall my first Android to be Samsung i977 some 9 years ago and photos were more vivid than iPhone X. However Pixel comes with unlimited (!!) photo and 4k video storage [2]. Apple cannot beat that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_3 [2] https://store.google.com/product/pixel_3

> However Pixel comes with unlimited (!!) photo and 4k video storage [2].

Yup, this is why we switched to Pixel, back when the first version came out, and we haven't looked back.

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