iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras • Hacker News Board

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#401

Post by pmontra » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

patrakov wrote: post #317

pmontra wrote: post #292

The average person does not know anything about all of this. I start with TV sets. The usual way to chose one was walking into a shop, looking at dozen of TVs tuned on the same channel, picking the ones that subjectively looked best then check the price and size. Did we (average people) cared about the inner workings of the TV? Nearly zero. Enter cheap compact digital cameras (200-300 Euro or Dollars.) We didn't have…

> So, those 5 golf players look better on the camera but their picture will be taken and shared with a phone 99.9999% of the times. The point not in the article is that a phone camera, when used correctly (i.e., not defaulting to 1x zoom, maintaining a proper distance from the subject, and choosing wisely what's in the background), can produce photos of the same kind as a real camera in terms of composition. And that…

It's worse than that. I bet that the vast majority of those pictures are viewed only on a phone screen, at whatever resolution WhatsApp, iMessage or Messenger transcode them, but not much more than a few centimeters wide. I add the Instagram and FB apps to the list, always on phones.

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#402

Post by givinguflac » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

I find this article to be lacking. Perhaps I missed it, but it seems to me the author was shooting in the default settings and not ProRAW which is head and shoulders better. Also, seriously with the “leaning”? You can’t crop/rotate to make them look identical for comparison?

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#403

Post by ezconnect » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 1:48 PM UTC

petre wrote: post #375

bayindirh wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Camera makers also started to incorporate in-camera editing features on vlogger targeted models. DSLRs had in camera lighting correction during shooting and post-processing since 2016 or so [0]. [0]: https://www.nikonimgsupport.com/eu/BV_article?articleNo=0000...

This is about skin smoothing anf other stuff. See under filter and self shot: https://www.panasonic.com/uk/consumer/cameras-camcorders/lum... Star filter is especially funny since it's used in k-drama opening/closing sequences.

Faces became different on different camera phone. I don't think this will stop. I think it will only get worse and everything will be fake like what Samsung did when you are taking a Moon photo it just outright substitute it with a stock photo since they assume the moon looks the same everywhere humans will use their phone.

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#404

Post by prmoustache » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 1:49 PM UTC

Ironically I have a few framed photos, from mobile (because that is what I had in the pocket), digital and film cameras but most photos that I have framed are Polaroid and Instax ones. An instant camera is a major PITA to carry, the film are expensive, a lot of pictures end up bad because of limitations of the media, the colors are often not very neutral but you are 100% sure that you end up with physical photos after every take, and thus some good memories. While smartphone pictures are more likely to end up in a family whatsapp group, I have tons of mobile and digital pictures I don't even remember I have taken and they mostly just take up space in my NAS and backup storage. Nowadays I never travel without either my Polaroid, Instax Wide or Lomo Instant Square Glass. It is also a great way to make gifts. I tried portable printers. It is nice to make gifts but it was just a hassle to even connect and launch the print most of the time.

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#405

Post by mcdeltat » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #371

A decade of "the best smartphone camera competitions" by mkbhd have clearly highlighted what is happening here. 1: In a/b testing, nearly everyone including pixel peepers prefer a more vibrant photo. 2: the traditional perspective of "a photo should look as close as possible to what my eyes see if I drop the viewfinder" is increasingly uncommon and not pursued in the digital age by nearly anyone. 3: phone companies k…

As someone into photography as a hobby, I don't get why we invest in smartphone cameras nor why people care. It all looks like the same trash.

If you want a photo to reminisce on, sure use a smartphone. In which case anything short of 1800s camera quality will do the job great. If you want to make a photo that might look good then do yourself a favour and get a cheap dedicated camera.

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#406

Post by brianmcc » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

poulpy123 wrote: post #350

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…

> and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us Well, you don't need to teach photography to passerby, just to tell them to look there and push this button. It's not more complicated than on a phone, maybe even less. But it may look more intimidating to old a camera, it's true

Then they half press the shutter button and achieve only a brief moment of auto focus :-D

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#407

Post by matrss » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #397

matrss wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse, Xerox scanners specifically meant for digitizing documents have changed text for a long time. The compression algorithm they used (I think even in the default settings) sometimes replaced e.g. 6 with 8, and similar things. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0 (german, but there should be news articles from back then in english as well, somewhere)

That's not really "computation photography" in any meaningful sense, closer to "digital processing". It's not impossible for such glitches to occur with modern smartphone cameras, but it's implausible. I don't think there's ever a confirmed instance of such a gaff happening. Meanwhile a few years ago there was a photo with a misplaced leaf that made the rounds, and people were complaining about how it was caused by c…

My point was that you don't have to take a photo of a receipt to run into this issue, actual machines specifically build to digitize receipts and other documents already made this kind of mistake.

No idea if this can happen with what modern smartphone cameras do to photos. If "AI" is involved then I would expect such issues to be possible because of the basic nature of them being random generators, just like how LLMs hallucinate stuff all the time. Other "enhancement" approaches might not produce issues like this.

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#408

Post by mcdeltat » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

jpatten wrote: post #344

I’m sure that Apple did tons of A/B testing, focus groups etc. with different image processing parameters to arrive at the settings that their phones use for photos, and from these comments it’s clear that a lot of people prefer the iPhone photos. When I was in grad school (in the pre-iPhone era) I photographed lots of weddings on the weekends, and one thing I noticed during the process was that people often have a s…

I have found that non-photographer people have generally have absolutely no sense of what makes a good photo. They don't care about composition, lighting, colours, detail, or ambience. Their mental/emotional impression of what the photo represents is more important than the photo itself

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#409

Post by markhalonen » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

neomantra wrote: post #337

Has anyone used this Candid9 service or QR code photo sharing workflow? Does it work well? I happen to be making a RPi Camera for Burning Man and was incorporating a QR code workflow into it. With a thermal printer for either a low-res pic or a QR code to print or snap. I devised something along the lines of this service, but dead simple URL generation to filename+hash in an S3 bucket.

I am the creator of Candid9 and I have taken about 290 photos of strangers and distributed them via candid9 QR codes. Happy to chat about it!

Re: iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras

#410

Post by nateroling » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #38

The points really boil down to: 1. Difference in focal length/ position. 2. Difference in color processing But…the article is fairly weak on both points? 1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or…

Looking at the trees in the background of the first photo, it’s clear he’s using a longer focal length on the non-iPhone.

He has some good points, maybe, but in general it’s a pretty naive comparison.