11–20 of 153 posts
Imagine if Apple or Google shipped a digital SLR with all of their software magic onboard (or executed on a paired phone).
The ability to acquire a raw image over USB from a real camera would be amazing.
In some ways, this feels like the reviews of the last couple of generations of iPhone: it can work really well in very good light and at typical web resolutions. The photo of the woman in the parka is very impressive as a technical demonstration but is also pretty blurry/smeared, to my eye. As an only camera, it's probably the best or near the best of the phones.
With slightly better lighting it can be "good enough" to be hard to distinguish from a bigger sensor camera for "web" where "web" really means ~6inch phone display - and that's great, but let's not fool ourselves ;-)
I'm also curious what the max will look like - though at the size and price it's difficult to say if buying a RX100 and a cheaper phone isn't a better option still, for many.
In some ways, this feels like the reviews of the last couple of generations of iPhone: it can work really well in very good light and at typical web resolutions. The photo of the woman in the parka is very impressive as a technical demonstration but is also pretty blurry/smeared, to my eye. As an only camera, it's probably the best or near the best of the phones.
I think the photo of the woman is terrible. I don't blame the phone for it, its very hard to achieve with small sensors, and the iphone is probably the best of the bunch. But it doesn't make the picture quality near "good-enough" for that scenario. With slightly better lighting it can be "good enough" to be hard to distinguish from a bigger sensor camera for "web" where "web" really means ~6inch phone display - and t…
Imagine if Apple or Google shipped a digital SLR with all of their software magic onboard (or executed on a paired phone).
Now, there's some good use cases for it but I guess the tradeoff hasn't been worth it so far. E.g. having some processing options in camera can speed up your workflow (but then again all the "toys" like this are removed from pro cameras because most people didn't use them). Also, the same magic Apple or Google use doesn't really exist outside of their phones (yet at least, I assume Adobe is working on this).
There's also some obstacles that I know of:
- bigger sensor, slower readout, slower sensor processing
- much bigger raw, needs big expensive CPU, heating problems
- hiring engineers that can do this (it took a long time for Apple to catch up to Google f.e.)
I wish these reviews would post the full res images. I clicked "View Image" on a few of these to see just the photo but they're all cropped and compressed. Almost any flagship phone can produce similar pics to the ones in this article. The devil is really in the details now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the photo of the woman is terrible. I don't blame the phone for it, its very hard to achieve with small sensors, and the iphone is probably the best of the bunch. But it doesn't make the picture quality near "good-enough" for that scenario. With slightly better lighting it can be "good enough" to be hard to distinguish from a bigger sensor camera for "web" where "web" really means ~6inch phone display - and t…
What percentage of people would rate portrait photo with bokeh much much better from a DSLR than from an iPhone 12 pro (or any other top Android phone) in a blind test? I would say that more people will prefer the phone photo, unless you edit the dslr photo (which phone is doing automatically unless you shoot RAW on iPhone).
Yes, I get the unit economics of it (at least I think I do, I've never worked in the phone industry so that could easily be hubris on my part), but if you can spend an extra few dollars or even tens of dollars on your BOM for something that is clearly, objectively a better camera to everything else out there I don't see how Samsung couldn't trivially add a minimum $200 markup just for that.
And you don't even need that. You could add a sensor that's just a few dollars more expensive at scale - it seems the margins are trivially there since that would easily justify a $50 markup. I realize the optics also matter, but at this point it's really the sensors limiting the phones, not the cheap glass.
In an industry where everyone is struggling for an edge, it just seems painfully obvious to do this to me. I look forward to someone more knowledgeable telling me why all my assumptions are wrong though (I mean that literally, no snark intended!).