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The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

photographylife.com

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Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#141

Post by NickNameNick »

fock wrote: post #126
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…

no GPS is relative. Most phones have AGPS - while this works fine in a city, have fun finding, where you took that picture in a remote forest. Actual, independent GPS devices still cost a lot of money (and need power).

AGPS devices are still GPS devices. They just fast-load the ephemera/almanac data from the cell network instead of waiting to get it from the GPS signal. I know there are options for offloading the GPS signal analysis to other devices, but I wasn't aware of any main-stream cellphones that can't use GPS without the network.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#142

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

jacquesm wrote: post #132
wlesieutre wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sony smartphone I used to have put its low-light noise reduction behind DRM keys and if you unlocked the bootloader it irreversibly turned the camera into a piece of shit. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I buy another smartphone from them, especially for anything camera related. Plus the built-in camera app was awful to use, but 3rd party camera apps had awful image quality. I don’t know if that was Sony’s fau…

After the rootkit debacle I'm surprised that anybody on the tech side would still buy Sony gear. As a brand they're burned for me and I used to be quite the fan.

Same here. Never bought anything Sony again.

I also remember the poor kid who had a portable CD player almost red hot trying to play the Columbia/Sony music CD he had bought - riddled with purposeful errors to avoid PC copies.

Making war on customers, indeed ...

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#143

Post by ghemsley »

CarVac wrote: post #15
intolerabletech wrote: post #13

I'm so ignorant about cameras but have been curious... Smartphone manufacturers keep adding additional lens. Is that simply to compensate for not being a standalone camera? Am I complete idiot for looking at standalone mirrorless/DSLRs and wondering if Google's smart tech + Pixel 4's multiple lens are going to eventually eclipse standalone cameras? (My goal is to eventually carry a camera and non-smartphone).

It's to compensate for not having interchangeable lenses.

It is also to assist the computational photography features with the task of simulating the effects of a larger sensor. Generally speaking, information from multiple lenses/sensors is used to apply the selective defocus effect in portrait mode.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#144

Post by guidoism »

foldr wrote: post #119
fock wrote: post #114

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…

Modern smartphones take much better photos than 35mm compact cameras ever did. People have way more family photos of way better quality than they ever used to.

I completely agree. But there was a period of several years, maybe 2010-2016 when they didn't. And especially at the beginning of that time, oh, I remember cringing when I saw friends' baby pictures they took at the time with their phones.

I'm culpable of jumping ship to the new but worse technology too early myself, but in this instance I didn't stop carrying my "real" camera until the iPhone 6s.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#145

Post by IgorPartola »

megaremote wrote: post #72
kenhwang wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Sony could realistically do both in one product. They already make flagship smartphones that are hardware-competitive with everyone else's flagships. They supply the camera sensors for everyone's flagship product. They have the best DSLM and reasonably competitive lenses. Just take their current flagship smartphone, double the thickness to fit a halfway-between-smartphone-and-full-frame sensor, an SD card slo…

> Just take their current flagship smartphone, double the thickness to fit a halfway-between-smartphone-and-full-frame sensor, an SD card slot, ability to export RAWs, and a compact zoom lens, and sell it for like $2000. And no one will buy it. It has been tried before, by Nokia.

Yeah just like nobody would want a social network because MySpace and Friendster tried it. And nobody would want a tablet, Apple already tried that with the Newton.

Not saying you are wrong but “Nokia tried it” is not any kind of marker.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#146

Post by IgorPartola »

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.

I don’t need my images so bad that I want to process them on my phone. I’ll get to them in my laptop when I have the time.

When my phone is involved, I don’t want to do any processing, except maaaaybe Instagram-like filters. Those photos are not for print or anything like that. When I want good photos not meant to be consumed just on 5” screens I want control.

I would much rather have a reliable rugged camera with manual only mode, weather sealing, huge battery, huge sensor, and cheap glass, than a smart camera.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#147

Post by flyinglizard »

kungito wrote: post #98
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also, diffraction limits of smaller optics. All of that can be fixed to some extent computationally, but not in all situations (like moving subjects).

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#148

Post by IgorPartola »

weinzierl wrote: post #84
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…

> Smartphones are simply more convenient than a standalone camera can ever be. This, and as the old adage goes: "The best cameras is the one you have with you" . I, for one, have taken technically superior photos with my camera - unsurprisingly - but certainly the more interesting photos with my smartphone. Now you can argue what is better, but I'd say interesting beats technical superior any day. > Sony and Fuji are…

I remember reading an interview with a famous photojournalist (wish I was informed enough to remember his name), and he talked about snapping a photo that became very famous. He said he saw a bunch of stuff happening in a crowd, lifted his camera above his head, and pressed the shutter release. As far as capturing action, yeah it did that. As far as composing a shot, it was like any cell phone shot of people running in a crowd. It was messy, poorly framed, etc. I believe it hit the news just the right way to become famous, but if he had a cell phone, a video would have been better, or just a ton of shots instead of the one.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#149

Post by inferiorhuman »

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.

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.

While current DSLRs typically have baked-in WiFi functionality, the idea of having them auto upload "to the cloud" seems a bit absurd to me. You're looking at ~50 MB per image if you're shooting raw. While you may want to auto backup the images to a nearby device it's unlikely you'd want to wait for that much data to be sent out over the internet.

Re: The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

#150

Post by inferiorhuman »

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.

The only DSLR with WiFi hardware I've tried was the Nikon D750. Yeah, it was bad to the point where I think I'd rather have an EyeFi.
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