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The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

photographylife.com

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Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#61

Post by vosper »

freetime2 wrote: post #59

Most of the images in that article were outdoors with lots of natural light, stationary subjects, wide angle compositions, and a large depth of field. Basically ideal conditions for smartphone photography. I find that in many everyday situations my smartphone just doesn’t cut it. Trying to take photos of my kids running around at dusk or indoors, for example. Or trying to take a decent portrait. I bought an A7iii to…

How old is your smartphone? My wife just upgraded from an iPhone 6S to an 11 Pro and that new camera is impressive. Things have come a long way even in just the last few years, we should assume they’ll keep getting better for at least a little bit yet.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#62

Post by speedplane »

Futurists have been talking about computers or "AI" creating artwork for many years. They traditionally reference music, visual arts, and occasionally written prose, but these en-devours have hardly caught on beyond niche whimsical amusements.

It's pretty clear that the first type of "art" created by computers or "AI" on a large scale is photography. Today, smart cameras don't just assist with objective factors like lighting and focus, they make subjective decisions on which areas to highlight, skin tones, shadows, parts of the scene to blur, and a variety of other details that are typically in the realm of artistic component of photography.

As a society, we have essentially determined what a "good" photo is, and have programmed that into each camera that we carry in our pocket. There are many upsides to this, but it raises an obvious question: are these cameras really being programmed to create the "best" images, or are we being programmed to believe that the images they create are the "best"?

Automation and AI are not a one way street; we don't just create machines that think like us, the machines we create change the way we think.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#64

Post by freetime2 »

vosper wrote: post #61
freetime2 wrote: post #59

Most of the images in that article were outdoors with lots of natural light, stationary subjects, wide angle compositions, and a large depth of field. Basically ideal conditions for smartphone photography. I find that in many everyday situations my smartphone just doesn’t cut it. Trying to take photos of my kids running around at dusk or indoors, for example. Or trying to take a decent portrait. I bought an A7iii to…

How old is your smartphone? My wife just upgraded from an iPhone 6S to an 11 Pro and that new camera is impressive. Things have come a long way even in just the last few years, we should assume they’ll keep getting better for at least a little bit yet.

It’s an iPhone X, so about 2 years old. No doubt the iPhone 11 Pro is better. But Sony is due to release the a7iv next year and they have been improving their cameras with each generation, too (though not as fast as smartphone cameras).

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#65

Post by Cakez0r »

jjav wrote: post #19
jdhn wrote: post #4

I 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?

> smartphone-ify Not sure exactly what you meant, but that sounds terrible. On my Nikon DSLR I can adjust just about any setting using physical buttons, very fast, most often without even taking my eye off the viewfinder. The camera UX is optimized for speed and efficiency. On a phone, I'd be scrolling through touch screen menus to do anything. By the time a shot is taken the subject is long gone (unless it's static…

I think there is still a lot of room for improvement with camera UX. It boggles my mind that all cameras don't have 3 dials as standard - one for iso, one for shutter and one for aperture.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#66

Post by billfruit »

starky wrote: post #25

Maybe because this is something very close to my wheelhouse, but this article seems to be overly wordy for something obvious. Smartphones are simply more convenient than a standalone camera can ever be. Add on top of that the incredible computational imaging capabilities that have been developed over the past few years and the quality of images you can get from the size of optics and pixels that these devices have is…

But isn't sensor sizes still a problem for smartphones. Their tiny sensors will generate noisy images compared with a camera with a full size sensor.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#67

Post by cookingrobot »

CarVac wrote: post #12
leeoniya wrote: post #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 reso…

The dynamic range is there in a raw file. You just need to apply tonemapping the way cell phones do it. My 2008-era 1Ds3 still crushes a modern phone (I have a Pixel 2) in dynamic range when processed properly, and a D7500 is even better still, not to mention the latest full-frame models like the D850 and such. Phones do, counterintuitively, have the advantage in extreme low light because they're able to stack multi-…

From what I can find the 1DsIII has a dynamic range of 8.8 stops and the iPhone 11 has 10 stops. Have you found measurements otherwise? Single exposure cameras are really no match for computational photography in this area because it gives an effectively infinite dynamic range. You can take the equivalent of a long exposure photo for every shadow on a sunny day.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#68

Post by miahi »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #48
kenhwang wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canon and Nikon and I'm sure others already have a WiFi adapter you can plug into the SD card slot that does exactly this.

That’s already too complicated. My phone uploads photos to the cloud (which my computer is hooked up to) automatically. Needing to attach a piece of hardware to my camera to achieve the same thing is arcane and absurd.

Canon cameras implemented cloud functions a while back, and I guess it's the same for others. Unfortunately, being just another small feature and not the main function, works like crap (and it seems to be related to the server's bandwidth). Combine a low upload speed with a 30-40MB photo and the capability of getting 10 of these photos per second and you realize it's faster to get the card out and read it on a PC.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#69

Post by ehnto »

starky wrote: post #25

Maybe because this is something very close to my wheelhouse, but this article seems to be overly wordy for something obvious. Smartphones are simply more convenient than a standalone camera can ever be. Add on top of that the incredible computational imaging capabilities that have been developed over the past few years and the quality of images you can get from the size of optics and pixels that these devices have is…

It took camera companies long enough to catch the digital wave.

I feel Sony are the only company to be looking far enough forward, catering well to the overall industry direction. But even the very best very smallest camera system doesn't fit in your pocket.

I have a bulky DSLR and a mirrorless that I use for bird photography. Most of the time, when not doing that specific task, the camera phone will be good enough if I didn't want to bring my other cameras. And mirrorless cameras are tiny! I can fit a professional quality camera system in a satchel no bigger than my cupped hands, yet the convenience of just keeping my phone on me is impossible to beat.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#70

Post by berkut »

tjr225 wrote: post #24

And yet the photos I take on my 7 year old mirror-less camera look eons better than anything I take on my iPhone?

Yep. Especially on a big screen, where jpegs out of the iPhone (and other brand phones) often look like water colour paintings due to the aggressive denoising that is done, even in bright sunlight where the ISO should be fairly low for the phone.

RAW can be done on phones (I use it on my iPhone), but the result seems to be extremely noisy (but at least you get the detail, which generally gets lost in jpegs from the built-in Camera app).

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