The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
photographylife.com
The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
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Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
#2The strangest thing is the camera industry's non-response to smartphones. There's a fellow named Tom Hogan who writes in extreme detail about the camera industry and noticed years ago that camera makers should open up their APIs and work much harder to integrate with smartphones. Here's one recent example of that message: http://dslrbodies.com/newsviews/are-customers-asking-for.htm...
Still, Apple discovered a user problem—stringing together multiple apps to create a one-step process—and is trying to solve it. Are the camera companies doing the same? Doesn't seem like it.
So for now I can only dream about the camera that lets me load some variables into the EXIF data of an image (hashtags, caption, destination, resize choice, priority) while shooting, pushes that over to my phone via something like SnapBridge, and then because that phone app supports Shortcuts, allows me to say "Hey Siri, Output Images with Priority 1." Plus, when I get home be able to say to my computer "Hey Siri, Archive all Images."
Camera makers have done some half-assed wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC integrations with smartphones, but for the most part the camera still lives on its own, still uses out-of-date SoCs, and generally behaves like the year is 2005, not 2019. The various cameras I've used aren't even smart enough to do simple things like transfer a selected image to a given social network whenever the camera gets within range of a wifi access point it knows. And almost none of the camera makers seem to be serious about working on this problem. It's like Sony missing the iPod (a useful analogy because Sony is in the camera industry and, apart from its imaging sensor division, has missed the wave yet again).
Edit I forgot to add that I believe Sony just introduced a new $1400 flagship camera, the a6600. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6975583891/sony-a6000-a610.... It has a 4-5 year old sensor in it and software that is even older. Kitted out from scratch with high quality lenses, it's probably $2,500 – $3,000. Imagine how many iPhones Apple would sell if the sensor were not much changed from the 6s and the camera software not changed at all.
Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
#3At this point, shouldn't a digital camera just be a smartphone with a weird form factor? (Pile of optics and a viewfinder?)
Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
#4I love how the author broke down the user journey for capturing images with a smartphone vs a camera, seems like there's still a lot of room to improve the UX of shooting with a dedicated camera. I wonder why camera makers haven't attempted to smartphone-ify (bad term, I know) their cameras yet, or have they tried and failed at it?
Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
#5I don’t get why the camera industry doesn’t implement phone camera technologies into the cameras. They could easily do smart HDR features and merge multiple exposures into an image. Also they could make exposure smarter which smarter phone cameras tend to nail. Sure you can fix most of it with raw files but that inconvenience is why i reach for my phone instead of DSLR especially when taking pictures of my kids.
Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
#6I love how the author broke down the user journey for capturing images with a smartphone vs a camera, seems like there's still a lot of room to improve the UX of shooting with a dedicated camera. I wonder why camera makers haven't attempted to smartphone-ify (bad term, I know) their cameras yet, or have they tried and failed at it?
They are mostly hardware engineering companies (who were previously optics companies), so transitioning to a software focus is going to be fraught with missteps and half hearted attempts.
Beyond prosumer DSLRs and prosumer Mirrorless there is an opinion among professional photogs that these software enhancements are gimmicks and are not pure photography, although I kind of doubt that being anything but a footnote in decisionmaking since if you feel that way you can simply not use that feature.
Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
#7I'm not an expert on optics, but one thing I remember from my high school photography class (using film, perhaps dating myself a bit) is that smaller depth of field basically requires a large sensor. I guess you could imitate this automatically with software, but it's probably not a coincidence that every photo in the linked page has very large depth of field. To me, this would be a fair reason to prefer a more "normal" camera.
Edit: The article linked below says I'm wrong about why phone cameras have wide depth of field. Based on skimming it, I'm right in that phone cameras will have wide depth of field, but it's due to the the small focal length.
https://fstoppers.com/education/no-larger-sensors-do-not-pro...
Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
#8> Thanks to all the CMOS sensor advancements, we now have cameras that can produce amazing dynamic range and very little noise
i shoot with a pretty recent APS-C Nikon D7500 & good glass these days and i can tell you that its dynamic range is still nothing compared to what a new (or even older) iphone can get by bracketing a shot at 960fps and stacking it automatically for you. i would happily sacrifice half its resolution for the kind of dynamic range you effortlessly get with an iphone.
i had a good Fuji mirrorless X-T2 and its low latency electronic viewfinder sucked the battery dry in an hour and lagged + looked like shit in low light.
sad.
Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
#9I'm not an expert on optics, but one thing I remember from my high school photography class (using film, perhaps dating myself a bit) is that smaller depth of field basically requires a large sensor. I guess you could imitate this automatically with software, but it's probably not a coincidence that every photo in the linked page has very large depth of field. To me, this would be a fair reason to prefer a more "norm…
they're getting really close simulating shallow depth of field with depth sensors and computational photography, but in the same way there is no replacement resolution-wise for 8x10 and other large formats, its better just to use the real thing
Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry
#10I'm not an expert on optics, but one thing I remember from my high school photography class (using film, perhaps dating myself a bit) is that smaller depth of field basically requires a large sensor. I guess you could imitate this automatically with software, but it's probably not a coincidence that every photo in the linked page has very large depth of field. To me, this would be a fair reason to prefer a more "norm…
they're getting really close simulating shallow depth of field with depth sensors and computational photography, but in the same way there is no replacement resolution-wise for 8x10 and other large formats, its better just to use the real thing
If people demand it they may simulate medium format. But yeah seeing large prints from LF or MF cameras the whole image looks very different, more immersive of the scene.