iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

> Full-frame lenses tend to be markedly bigger for equivalent quality compared to, say, APS-C lenses.

Only if you define quality as field of view.

For light-gathering ability and background separation/bokeh, you need a lower f/number on APS-C than on full-frame to be equivalent: A 35mm f/1.2 lens on a 24MP APS-C sensor will take pictures that look nearly identical to a 52.5mm f/1.8 lens on a 24MP full-frame sensor. (Assuming crop factor of 1.5.) Both will have an aperture size of 29.17mm (= 35mm/1.2 = 52.5mm/1.8), will capture a 37.9° x 25.8° FoV.

Almost all important properties of lenses are determined by field of view and the aperture diameter: Amount of light gathered, background blur, diffraction, and weight.

The illumination-per-area on the full-frame sensor will be 2.25x lower, but the area of the sensor is 2.25x larger so it cancels out such that both sensors will receive the same number of photons.

Background blur is determined by aperture diameter, field of view, and the distances to the subject and background. Since the two lenses have the same aperture size and field of view, you'd get the same amount of background blur for a given scene.

For many lenses (particularly telephoto lenses), the size and weight are primarily determined by the size of the front element, which needs to be at least as big as the aperture. For wide-angle lenses, you start needing a front element that's significantly wider than your aperture for geometry reasons -- the subject has to be able to see the aperture through the front element, so that relationship breaks down.

(Also with lenses where focal length Slow telephoto lenses for DSLRs are pretty much the only place where crop sensors have an advantage. DSLR autofocus sensors generally need f/5.6 or better. Thus, for a given field of view, you need a bigger aperture + front element for the full-frame lens than the "equivalent" crop-sensor lens -- e.g. a 300 f/5.6 with its 53.6mm front element is going to be heavier than a 200 f/5.6 with its 35.7mm front element. However, as mentioned above, the 300 f/5.6 on a full-frame camera will gather 2.25x as much light as the 200/5.6 on the APS-C sensor. Mirrorless cameras can typically autofocus with smaller relative apertures. This is why you see Sony selling an f/8 zoom and Canon selling f/11 primes for their mirrorless mounts -- this sort of lens just wasn't possible on DSLRs. On mirrorless, you could have a 300 f/8.4 full-frame lens that would be truly equivalent to the 200mm f/5.6 APS-C lens.

I'll kindly disagree with you. Like the other commenter, I'm on a 27" HP business monitor comes with color calibration certificate, and the differences are very visible. Moreover, I'm taking photos as a hobby for some time.

The angle, different focal lengths doesn't matter in rendering of the images. The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people. Moreover, we want to be liked as human beings, it's in our nature.

So, phone companies driven by both smaller sensors (that thing is way noisier when compared to a full frame sensor) and market pressure to reduce processing needed to be done by end users (because it inconveniences them), started to add more and more complicated post-processing in their cameras.

The result is this very article. People with their natural complications reduced, skin tones boosted on red parts, sharpened but flatter photos, without much perspective correction and sometimes looking very artificial.

Make no mistake, "professional" cameras also post process, but you can both see this processing and turn it off if you want, and the professional cameras corrects what lens fails at, but smartphones, incl. iPhone makes "happy, social media ready" photos by default.

As, again other commenter said, it's not a limitation of the sensor (sans the noise). Sony supplies most of the higher end sensors in the market, and their cameras or other cameras sporting sensors produced by them got the "best color" awards over and over again, and XPeria smartphones comes with professional camera pipelines after that small sensor, so they can take photos like what you see.

I personally prefer iPhone as my smartphone of my choice, but the moment I want to take a photo I want to spend time composing, I ditch default camera app and use Halide, because that thing can bypass Apple's post-processing, and even can apply none if you want.

To me, the "hotdog skin complexion" aspect is a dead giveaway for when a photo was taken on an iPhone. It's so over the top and unrefined that I wonder how not only Apple let it happen, but seemingly entertain it/make it worse over generations of devices? Certainly such photos won't "age well"? And it's not like it has to be this way because of technological limitations, take Pixel photos, for instance, they get their colors much more balanced and faithful.

My phone is too old for this app :(

If you read through the thread on that top story, it wasn't a hallucination. There was really a leaf in the shot.