111–120 of 196 posts
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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.
Weirdly I use my iPhone for photos but I don’t enjoy the process. I still have my Nikon DLSR set up but when I want to “do photography” for fun these days I use a Fuji X100F. This is a somewhat limit camera although I can get fixed focal lengths from 28-100mm eqv. and it has some other neat tricks. I hardly ever shoot RAW now and if I do I process the RAW in camera. This means I can’t take ever possible shot but I re…
How much better are the photos you get out of the Fuji then the ones you get out of your iPhone? The Fuji X100F is about 3 times as heavy then a usual smartphone. So carrying it around would quadruple the weight of my "camera equipment". I wish somebody would run around with a pocket camera and a phone for a day and then write a blog posts with comparison shots.
For convenience you can’t beat a smartphone. I only take the Fuji with me when I’m specifically in the mood to take photos. I don’t blog but if you do then maybe the camera you have with you is the best choice.
On the question of quality again it’s interesting. The latest generation of smart phones are reputedly very good so I don’t know what the difference is.
The other thing is that with the X100F you get lots of control but no training wheels. Smartphones lack control over what picture you get but you’ll still probably get something pretty most of the time.
The Fuji has stuff like a leaf shutter so it will let you do certain tricks with flash exposure you can’t easily do in post. It also has really good film simulation and a good optical/digital view finder.
Now that’s pretty specific so if it’s not something you think you need a smartphone will again be more useful.
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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.
This site uses user-submitted raw files to calculate the dynamic range. I'm not sure whether this is only a single iPhone shot or not, and it's an Xs, not an 11. (Incidentally, that's data from my personal 1Ds3.)
If you're looking at DxOmark reviews, I'm fairly certain that they do not review ILCs and smartphones on the same scale, and I take every number they give with a huge grain of salt.
Re: computational techniques:
You certaily could get infinite dynamic range, and perhaps the iPhone 11 does better than my Pixel (I hear it does multiple exposure durations instead of repeating one exposure duration), but at least with my Pixel there's tons of shot noise everywhere, even in the midtones and highlights, because the full well capacity on the dinky sensors is accordingly tiny.
You just rarely scrutinize a cell phone photo alongside a large-sensor camera photo so you gloss over where the heavy sharpening plus noise reduction has smeared the fine detail to paste.
The processing has a lot to overcome, after all: the small lens-sensor combinations are running at the limits of diffraction and thus are extremely soft if viewed at the raw data level. Sharpening it heavily just to level the playing field with a large sensor (which you can safely do because a lot of the blur is just diffraction) enhances the noise a ton, beyond what the dynamic range numbers derived from the raws would suggest.
And yeah, basically if it's just sentimentality, maybe a rough, blotty sketch of reality might suffice, but given that photos are kind of unnecessary from this angle, I somehow find trading quality and money for arguable convenience sort of schizophrenic.
As for the aspect of getting pictures of the camera: my cheap big-C-things have an alright app for that, I think it even does raw-files. A USB-cable/card-reader certainly also does the job.
Seeing this, as it is, I wonder how many people really need higher quality _and_ high troughput. The small minority of one-person-online-only-celebrity-cos might profit from convenience and fast turn-around times of even better smartphone cameras, but this is a really small minority. Everyone else doesn't really need both. Professionals (aka selling pictures compared to selling some lifestyle) will still need the quality and all the sentimental people who think they need to shoot crappy photos, would be better served by other things for their obvious long-term-needs. Still, seeing how much emphasis marketing places on plainly overpriced smartphone cameras, it's a fair guess, that the latter group today is mainly concerned with their ephemeral and completely commercialized social-media presence noone will remember tomorrow.
> Why should anyone who wants to take decent pictures suffer through the pain of spending thousands of dollars on a camera system, many hours of learning how to use the camera and how to post-process images from it, when the alternative is to use a small, portable and idiot-proof device that they have in their pockets at all times?
Smartphones are amazing now at producing decent pictures in adverse circumstances. The amount of manual effort required to produce an equivalent with a DSLR in post processing is therefore going up.
Is there room for a iCamera, with the smartphone processing but large interchangeable lenses? Maybe. Are the camera companies able to build it? No.
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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?
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention how every phone camera geotags every image automatically, but that's still a bulky $500 add-on for DSLRs, if it's even available for your model.
Ideally cameras should pick up location from the shooter's smartphone through a Bluetooth link.
Was to a birthday of a person just having his first child. There were photos of his childhood/life, not stellar, but just sentimental, physical pictures of his life. Judging from what is sold in all the crap decoration stores around, people have a real longing for this kind of sentimental stuff. I think a lot of them will awake horrified in 10-20 years, when they notice that all this sentimental stuff is basically ho…
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'll take that one step further (and with a family member in professional photography it's a painful conclusion): the convergence between photography and mobile communications devices will make the photographic camera industry disappear because the numbers won't be there to make the devices economical enough. It's basically a continuum between 'doesn't work at all' to 'works for almost all cases'.
System cameras will at some point be as rare as hole through CPUs.