The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry • Hacker News Board

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#91

Post by kaffeemitsahne » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 8:49 AM UTC

cookingrobot wrote: post #67

CarVac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then when something moves, it will look weird, right?

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#92

Post by cateye » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 8:51 AM UTC

There are a lot of comments like: "isn't it a good idea to integrate a smartphone with DSLR".

But it has been already done in 2013: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-DSLR...

Also https://zx1.zeiss.com/ is coming (not soon) with a fixed 35mm f/2 lens, a 37.4MP sensor, built-in 512 GB SSD storage, integrated Adobe Lightroom and wifi to share.

Also remember https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/hasselblad-tr... and https://www.redhydrogen.com/

So, I don't think there is an obvious solution. Just integrating a mobile Operating system in a DSLR doesn't solve the underlying problems.

How many customers want to put a sim card in their camera to have a really convenient way of sharing to social media?

Do users really want to edit and grade their photo's on a 6 inch display?

How many users find the pocket size form factor of an iPhone outweighing all the photo quality advantages of a bigger lens?

So, maybe the conclusion is that these are different markets whereby the casual camera mass market will use a smartphone and prosumer and professional camera market don't have the same needs like smart image processing or sharing on instagram.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#93

Post by arethuza » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 9:06 AM UTC

geerlingguy wrote: post #54

ip26 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need an adapter anymore, it's been native for years on many bodies.

But the software and connection process are terrible, and have been for years.

I have a Nikon D1000 and the process is fairly painless - I use an app on my iPad to review the pictures and select the ones I want to download from the camera and once I do that they are treated like any other picture and uploaded to iCloud etc.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#94

Post by schuke » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 9:27 AM UTC

I've always wondered if Apple could just make a camera. Or perhaps an attachment via USB-C that has bigger lens and sensors. That'll be Game Over for the Japanese consumer camera industry.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#95

Post by ghaff » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 9:47 AM UTC

freetime2 wrote: post #87

ghaff wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been a Canon user forever and have a 5Diii that I use mostly when I want the lenses and/or am doing real action photography. But I don’t use it a lot (also have a smaller Fujifilm system) and I doubt I’d make the investment if I were starting from scratch today. It’s a good camera but it’s frustrating in some ways. No GPS. No easy way to transfer pics to my phone. I probably care less about in camera processing…

I know “easy” is relative here, but I carry a lightning SD reader around in my camera bag and find it pretty easy to import photos into my phone wherever I happen to be. I’ve also switched to shooting JPEG after many years of shooting RAW because they require much less processing. Mirrorless cameras have made this much more feasible because what you see in the EVF is basically what you get.

I usually write to both CF and SD as Raw and JPG. I got into the habit because I sometimes need photos right at an event I’m shooting.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#96

Post by watertom » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 9:59 AM UTC

What’s that old saying “the things you see when you don’t have a camera”. Now I always have a camera.

I gave up my film DSLR in 1998, I gave up my digital DSLR in 2012, ago and went to a superzoom, now I’m giving up my superzoom for an iPhone 11.

I’d rather become an expert with the a limited camera I always have, versus being an expert with an almost unlimited camera I rarely have.

What’s funny is that I’m taking better pictures with the iPhone than I’ve ever taken before.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#97

Post by usrusr » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 10:08 AM UTC

i_am_proteus wrote: post #40

CarVac wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that there are two nearly polar opposite desires for UI and processing, that require totally different approaches to a camera. One is the smartphone user who desires good quality for whatever the situation, who just wants a photo uploaded to Instagram or whatever, NOW. They don't want to learn how to adjust exposure compensation to expose-to-the-right for optimal raw image quality. This user wa…

The camera makers would be wise to just implement an API over Bluetooth or adhoc WiFi to pair with phones/tablets/laptops and offload RAWs and JPEGs. Lightroom mobile, etc., could then have the images swiftly processed and uploaded, and could probably be implemented with minimal changes to the newest models of camera.

They all have some form of Wifi-to-phone, but I don't think anyone has made it reality enjoyable yet. I only know the Sony side of things which is probably the worst of the bunch, but it's so full of the arbitrary limitations and unpleasantries that others can be twice as good and still suck. It all seems to be merely an afterthought feature that is just there to get a feature checkbox checked.

The only reasonable implementation however would be something like a permanent BTLE connection that wakes up wifi whenever there are unsynced files on the camera. Just push that while I'm shooting, keep it alive until synced (or until permanent connection loss) when the power button is pressed, leave the phone side UI of what to do with all that data to the phone. (OTOH I'm not even sure if phone OS still allowed an app to do that, idle on background BTLE, then fire up the WiFi without user interaction. OYAH this would be the perfect crossover feature for Sony, because a hardware manufacturer could definitely include it in their Android - but even then, if they did it they'd certainly botch it with sticking to their proprietary raw format instead of opening up to Snapseed by going .DNG)

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#98

Post by kungito » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 10:20 AM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #20

CarVac wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The A6600 sensor first appeared on the A6300, actually, not the A6000, so it's "only" three years old. That said, they've bumped into the upper limits of image quality; the newer 26MP sensor (which you'll find in the latest Fuji cameras) actually performs worse in low light than the preceding 24mp sensors. >Imagine how many iPhones Apple would sell if the sensor were not much changed from the 6s and the camera softwa…

And, despite the a6600 not being a flagship, if the light is anything less than perfect, it will take pictures that are plainly higher in quality than anything coming out of a phone.

People keep forgetting about sensor sizes and pretend like their tiny smartphone flagship can compensate with some smart extrapolation and fake bokeh

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#99

Post by mschuster91 » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 10:46 AM UTC

bmarquez wrote: post #23

nradov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally cameras should pick up location from the shooter's smartphone through a Bluetooth link.

The Sony a6400 does this if the Sony app is running on the smartphone, but it drains the camera's battery fairly quickly.

For what its worth the Sony hot-shoe actually has dedicated GPS pins but there is no GPS mouse available (and Sony won't react if you ask for specs). The only thing that is available are external GPS recorders which you have to read out and semi-automatically merge with your photo library. What an absolute clusterfuck.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#100

Post by Lio » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 10:49 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #78

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…

I can dig that. Somebody (was it Apple?) came up with the idea that a phone could be a camera as well. And that a phone is really a communicator so it must support email etc. Now somebody should simply come up with the idea of a camera that is also a phone. I mean you did but somebody should make that idea a reality. Hey, my camera is ringing ...

It definitely wasn’t Apple that came up with the idea that a phone could be a useful “camera”.

The first iPhones compared very poorly with existing camera phones from the likes of Nokia. So much so that they de-emphasised the camera in importance almost as an after thought.

Cameras that are also phones is also very old. Nokia and others have tried it and failed.