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iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

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Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#161

Post by foldr »

cthalupa wrote: post #122
foldr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>real camera A minor and pedantic point, but could we stop with the idea that smartphone cameras are somehow not 'real'? They are enormously sophisticated imaging devices that comprehensively outperform, for example, the 35mm film SLRs that many photographers were using in the 90s. An iPhone 14 enables you to take technically superior photos to the photos that professional photographers were taking only a couple of d…

>They are enormously sophisticated imaging devices that comprehensively outperform, for example, the 35mm film SLRs that many photographers were using in the 90s. I'm not so sure about that. I'm impressed by what smartphone cameras do these days, but the Nikon F100 snuck into the 90s and beats the pants off my iPhone 14 Pro's camera, while still being very much in the hobbyist/prosumer price range.

Have you done any side by side comparison shots? Even with a high quality scan, you're unlikely to get the same resolution and dynamic range from a 35mm negative. And that's leaving aside the obviously vast differences in convenience and flexibility. (I'm old enough to have used 35mm SLRs, and I have absolutely no nostalgia for that era.)

Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#162

Post by Wolfegard »

VERY disappointed there is no 48MP RAW available.

The iPhone cameras are superb I think, but the "Apple Image Processing" renders stock camera photos useless for me. The watercolor smear and color smoothness that the article talks about. I like noise, don't smooth away the reality of life.

ProRAW is confusing because it is not RAW at all, instead it's an uncompressed image that has had a milder "Apple Image Processing" applied.

I've tested the iPhone 14 Pro, and the ProRAW files are too processed for me. They are not "reality". This is a philosophical concept. Do I want to capture what I see, or a smoothed watercolor ideal of what Apple think I should see?

I want a 48MP genuine RAW file that I can post-process in Lightroom or Photoshop. Here's looking forward to the iPhone 15 Pro!

Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#163

Post by slowhand09 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #9
m348e912 wrote: post #3

The iPhone 14 has a fantastic camera. It's a noticeable improvement from previous models and takes fantastic photos that rival or surpass many SLR cameras on the market. If Apple had taken another leap and included usb-c port it would have been enough for me to upgrade. For now, I wait.

Phones don't rival or surpass DSLRs or any proper digital camera. They just have lots of fancy processing that makes quick snaps look better than the same amount of effort on a camera.

Its not a phone. Its a camera with comms and apps capabilities.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#164

Post by jillesvangurp »

sys32768 wrote: post #47

I am still not understanding why my iPhone 13 landscape photos look as good as those from my $900 Nikkor Z 24mm f/1.8 S prime lens with its superior optics on a $2k DSLR body. If the reason is fancy post-processing, then why can't Nikon have a tiny lens like the iPhone 13 and just add fancy post-processing to it?

Well, put bluntly, the reason is that you probably are not using the Nikon properly. So, your photos are not coming out that great or as you hoped. Don't take this personally, I also have my limitations using cameras properly. But I understand I'm an amateur when it comes to this and that I'm part of the problem. I try to learn to do better. I try, and sometimes it works out nicely and I get a really nice shot. Landscape photography is tough to get right. You really need to understand your camera and lenses to make that work.

The point of such a camera is not the in camera processing, which most pro users would not use on principle. Instead it's gaining a lot of control over setting up the shot properly with a lot of control over all the parameters that matter to achieve a look that matches what you want, intentionally. And then you finish the job in post processing. There's reason these things have so many buttons and dials: you need to use them to get the most out of the camera. And the point of owning such a camera is having that level of control. The flip side is that that makes you responsible for the intelligence. That kind of is the whole point. If that's not what you wanted, you bought the wrong camera.

The iphone has a very limited set of controls. You actually have very little control over it. Nice if that's what you want and the AI is awesome. But it's also a bit limiting if you want more. Of course it's very nice when that's the camera you have and you want to take a shot quickly by just pointing and clicking. Nothing wrong with that. I have a Pixel 6 and a Fuji X-T30. I use them both but not the same way.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#165

Post by GoToRO »

astrange wrote: post #80
GoToRO wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good looking != captures reality. iPhones apply filters to make the photos look more vivid and to make them "ready to share". If a professional camera would do that, it would not be professional.

It doesn’t do that unless you turn on vivid photographic styles. It’s tuned pretty much like a dedicated camera. This does annoy many people who then switch to Snow/BeautyCam to actually take their pictures since they want to look prettier.

By default, the pictures they take have nothing to do with reality. You can check it yourself by comparing the picture on the screen with the scene you pictured. Try it with some clouds f.e. This was my experience.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#166

Post by FireBeyond »

adrr wrote: post #112
FireBeyond wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we get rid of the shutter? That's a challenge, I think. Take an R5 (only because I'm most familiar with it). 47 megapixels, 12 bpp 211.5MB, maximum shutter speed of 1/8000. In other words, you need to be able to pull data off the sensor (and to be clear, there's parallelization available, I just don't know what) at a global rate of 1.6TB/s.

They have global shutter sensors around the 12 megapixel level. They could split the sensor up into different processing paths. Do these 200 megapixel phone camera sensors have really bad rolling sensor issues? They are using electronic rolling shutters like your R5 when in silent mode or whatever canon calls it now.

What 200 mp phone camera sensors? The iPhone 14 is closer to a 12MP digital camera (quad bayer 48 million sensors). And from what I recall, 8 or maybe 10 bit. So in comparison to the 211MB of sensor data coming off the R5, there's 36 to 45MB of data coming off the phone camera. And I believe the 14's max shutter speed is 1/1000, so there's up to 35 times less data needing to be read off the sensor (45GB/s versus 1.6TB/s)

And I'm sure there is multiple processing paths - I just don't know the fine details about how that raw data is slurped off the sensor.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#167

Post by dont__panic »

oldstrangers wrote: post #111

Would be curious to see what they think of the Pixel 7 Pro camera. Video is still worse, but picture quality overall seems to be slightly (but noticeably) better than the iPhone 14 Pro.

I believe the Pixel Pro phones also recently migrated from 12MP to 48MP, between the 6 Pro and the 7 Pro. I wonder if this blogger is already looking into the Pixel? They mentioned that it takes a couple of months to come to a conclusion on a new phone camera, and the Pixel 7 has only been out for a month-ish.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#168

Post by pwinnski »

theturtletalks wrote: post #100
sp332 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Nikkor assumes that you would use software to do the post processing. It gives you something a lot closer to what's coming from the sensor, so you can choose which $XXX image editing suite you want to run it through. The iPhone knows the vast majority of people won't do that with their photos, so they can go all-out, but you're stuck with their specific result baked in to your photo.

Apple has always been about making the choice for it’s users. Jobs always thought giving users too many options was problematic.

Not just Jobs! There is no end[0] to research[1] showing that many options is terrible[2], and "too many options" is terrible by definition.

0. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2018/07/31/br...

1. https://mediaroom.iese.edu/new-research-shows-why-the-human-...

2. https://bigthink.com/thinking/choice-analysis-paralysis/

Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#169

Post by azalemeth »

foldr wrote: post #68

The size of the sensor isn't as important as people think it is. What really matters is the diameter of the aperture (the absolute diameter, not the f number). Consider a cone of light for a given angle of view hitting a small sensor close to the aperture and a large sensor further from the aperture: o If you compare typical shooting apertures for DLSRs and camera phones, they're not radically different. Say you are…

This is related to the conservation of Etendue [1] in an optical system, which is basically a statement of conservation of power: you rightly point out that radiant flux is determined by the source and constant – and for that reason, the primary numerical aperture or f-number of the lens is ultimately what really matters – assuming, as you point out, that you want to use the narrower DoF that arises (in which case SNR scales as the square root of sensor area).

However, sensors get noise from different sources: and while you're right to point out that you might be up against photon shot noise, read noise goes down with pixel area: so, as long as pixel area scales with sensor area, and that scaling is performed by uniformly scaling the pixel, the larger sensor is intrinsically "a little bit better". Quoting shamelessly again from wikipedia [2]

> The read noise is the total of all the electronic noises in the conversion chain for the pixels in the sensor array. To compare it with photon noise, it must be referred back to its equivalent in photoelectrons, which requires the division of the noise measured in volts by the conversion gain of the pixel. This is given, for an active pixel sensor, by the voltage at the input (gate) of the read transistor divided by the charge which generates that voltage, CG = V_{rt}/Q_{rt}. This is the inverse of the capacitance of the read transistor gate (and the attached floating diffusion) since capacitance C = Q/V. Thus CG = 1/C_{rt}.

As capacitance is proportional to area, pixel area matters here – read noise is proportional to it linearly. In low-light conditions, read noise dominated most cellphone sensors (mostly for the above).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor_format#Read_noise

Re: iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

#170

Post by nop_slide »

emkoemko wrote: post #102
nop_slide wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree and as a n00b/amateur I recently picked up my first "real" camera, a Fujifilm x-t20. I've managed to take some amazing photos that simply wouldn't have turned out as good on my iPhone 12. I was sick of the smudgy look that happened often on the iPhone when the lighting wasn't perfect, and also there is a unique "look" that the Fuji mirrorless cameras spit out due to their x-trans sensor[1]. In my short 2 w…

that smudgy, painting look on phones is the phone trying to remove noise in the image

Yes I’m aware, and my point is that it doesn’t happen with a better sensor/camera and the lack of “smart” processing. Even my small compact point and shoot would take sharper photos in the same lighting than my iPhone 12. As mentioned in the article the processing the iPhone does has seem to become more aggressive as well.
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