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iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

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Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#131

Post by kridsdale1 »

nomel wrote: post #99
FredPret wrote: post #33

My entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water. Add a nice lens and there's no comparison. However: - The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone) - The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a gr…

Has the HDR workflow improved? I'm not talking about the ugly tone mapping, I mean proper bit-preserving HDR, out of the camera. All the displays I own are HDR, and something like a picture of a sunset, or even landscape, is so much better on my phone than my older Canon DSLR.

2025 Lightroom and Photoshop have a vastly better HDR workflow for working with RAW and exporting to AVIF or JPEG with embedded HDR luminance map that shows up correctly on iOS or in Chrome on MacOS with the display set to HDR. I don’t know about Android or windows.

I have re-exported files that I took in 2007 with the Nikon D7 that I kept the raw files for. They are vastly improved with modern processing (and noise reduction) vs what I exported from the same negative back then. The bit depth was always high enough.

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#132

Post by rconti »

aosaigh wrote: post #29

These are some good examples. I'd love more on this. I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone. I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc. But I've com…

I took my Fuji XT-2 and 27mm pancake lens on a recent trip, after leaving it at home the previous few. Every time, I find the Fuji takes more work and skill than I have to develop good photos after the fact. I too often blow out the sky, for example.

Unfortunately, the less I use it, the worse I get. So snagging my "nice" camera for a vacation, then spending a lot of time making sure I lug it around and use it, and then having the results be, frankly, bad, is really frustrating. In particular, I have quite a few photos that are.. either blurry, or out of focus, and it's hard to tell which. I am pretty careful to ensure I hold the camera still, and have a sufficient shutter speed, but I'm definitely messing something up.

I need to take more time to practice at home rather than capturing a thousand frames over 3 weeks and hoping they're good (like the bad old days of film!)

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#133

Post by saaspirant »

FredPret wrote: post #33

My entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water. Add a nice lens and there's no comparison. However: - The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone) - The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a gr…

Which camera do you have?

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#134

Post by rconti »

tverbeure wrote: post #106

My biggest gripe is with iPhone photos today is the way small details get mangled beyond recognition. Small text looks like it was sent through a hallucinating LLM (which it probably was!)

It feels like things are going backwards. I was never much of a pixel peeper, but in my last few iphones, 14/15/16 pro, I'm regularly noticing the airbrushing of all of the things.

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#135

Post by hatthew »

My only significant gripe with phone cameras is that they oversharpen everything. Sharpening can subjectively make things look better as long as you don't zoom in too much, but has one significant problem: desaturation. In high-detail high-contras areas, e.g. the foreground grass, the sharpening pushes many of the pixels towards black or white, which are, notably, not green. This has the overall effect of desaturating these textures, and is the impetus for

Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#136

Post by flkiwi »

scosman wrote: post #127
FredPret wrote: post #33

My entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water. Add a nice lens and there's no comparison. However: - The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone) - The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a gr…

Also: - your entry level mirrorless is ~$300 of camera HW vs ~$80 of camera HW on the phone (very very rough estimate of sensor+lens BOM) - the mirrorless doesn't have any of the physical constraints of being tiny and fitting in a pocket, which directly impact image quality iPhones cameras are really amazing given the constraints.

Phone cameras don't come close to any of my "real" cameras with my decades of experience shooting and composing ... but phone cameras absolutely obliterate anything I was shooting with a film camera as a beginner back when film was a thing. I have also arguably learned far more about photography with my phone, because of its portability and zero cost experimentation, than I have with ANY "real" camera.

But, perhaps most importantly, along the lines of what others have noted: you know, my phone camera may not be as good, but I have zero complaints about the impromptu photos of my kid growing up that I could never have caught with anything else.

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#137

Post by can16358p »

iPhone camera is perfect for getting an instant/algoritmically-processed HDR-enabled photo that looks nice on the phone screen and social media. Oh it's also great for macro due to physically being small.

For everything else, actual camera hands down!

Though for its size and availability iPhone camera is great!

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#138

Post by zensavona »

FredPret wrote: post #89
PaulHoule wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put a 90mm prime [1] on my Sony, set it to aperture priority, put the strap over someone's head and deputize them to get headshots ("frame it up with the viewfinder and push the button") and they do OK so long as the light is predictable. I wish I could tell the auto mode to let the ISO go higher than it will because I do noise reduction in developing such that there is no real quality loss at 6400. [1] takes lovel…

I love the idea of that 90mm prime. But usually when I have passers-by take photos, the context is that we are posing in front of a church in Europe or something, and space can be limited. I can't very well ask people to take a photo and but first to take 20 paces back and then do a crouch! My wife wants to see our shoes as well as the church spires in the same photo. Maybe a 35mm or even 28mm would work well in our…

Pro tip: 28mm on full frame (or equivalent) is exactly the same focal length as iPhone 1x ;)

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#139

Post by jeffbee »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #114
bdamm wrote: post #110

I see iPhone pictures posted on walls all the time, because most people aren't pretentious. The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer…

All these photos also seem to be taken at a further distance at a higher zoom with the digicam. Use 2x mode on iphone and step back a bit and the perspective/distortion should be similar. 12mp is still plenty. Also, they didn't mention if they turned off face smoothing on the iphone. Google a couple years ago, however, made a big stink that they were forcing an always-on filter to "enhance" the appearance of dark ski…

There isn't an "accurate photo" that you can objectively adjudicate. All digital camera outputs are highly processed to get appealing results. The fact that you think Real Tone on the Google Pixel was "a big stink" only tells us about you, not Google.
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