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

lux.camera

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

#291
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A photographer friend of mine always used to get comments like you can take such awesome shots because you are using a DSLR (this was 10 years back). So he started taking two pictures one with DSLR and one with a mobile cameras at that time. He would still get the awesome shots comments even with the pics he took with the basic mobile camera and shared them on social media.

That's not surprising. I'd put my money on a good photographer with a crummy camera rather than a crummy photographer with a good camera any day of the week. The biggest part of photography is being able to 'see' the photos before you even raise the camera.

they say it takes roughly 10k photos to get to the OK level in composition and this 'seeing' (and that obviously means 10k serious photo attempts not just 30 selfies per coffee mug in starbucks). Its not that much once you carry camera and ie go to nature over weekends and travel for holidays, or walk around a lot for street photography. I think it can be sped up a bit with editing photos in say Lightroom - ie once you keep cropping the photos in same way to get the best out of them, you grok what is required and do it already in camera, or electing the best composition out of few shots etc.

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

#292

Lol, nothing is better about the dark skyline image. It's a blurry noise canceled mess with bad white balance.

That picture doesn't have a single correct white balance; no photo does if it has more than one light source in it. It's all to taste. But it does look like it was shot through a window without a polarizer filter.

Just because it's taste doesn't mean there is not objectively bad white balance. It's just green XD.

I do agree the other pics are great though (and own an iphone (because the company paid for any phone and I wanted the best camera...)). I'm not 100% happy with the "iphone look", too much fine contrast for my taste, but it's of course great cameras.

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

#293

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?

Because landscape photos are easy. No bokeh, no depth of field (everything at infinity), good lighting, no need for fast shutter speed or a big sensor. Your images will be sharper I guess, but that's not worth $2k in most cases.

Looks like you never took a lanscape photo where you had to use a (Gradiant) ND, Polarisation Filter, Multiple Exposures, Long Exposures for smooth Water or anything where you had to hink about how to take the perfect shot. So yes for a quick snapshot a phone is good enough. For a photograph a bigger camera is much more benefical than "just" for sharper images.

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Z9 has an electronic shutter, and fast one at that. So prepare to see that tech to hit lower tier mirrorless cameras in the next years. Not sure what I'd need frame rates above 100 for stills so, but that's just me, because it sure is cool.

My 2016 olympus pen-f, which wasn't exactly ground-breaking technology when it came out, already had an electronic shutter that worked with the full resolution of the sensor. It's a 20 MP micro 4/3 sensor - so 1/4 the surface area of "full-frame".

Just realized, the Nikon 1 we got for Christmas for my daughter seems to have one as well... Need to test that! Still, we look at a 10 MP sensor smaller in size than a DX. Heck, the more I look at the Nikon 1 series, the more I realize to ehat extend it served as a mirrorless test bed for Nikon.

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

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What aperture are you shooting at? You probably already know it, but for landscapes you'd be looking at f/5.6 or so unless you're hurting for light." this is bad advice.... shoot on a tripod and set your f stop to get the DOF you need or do a focus stack, f/5.6 would work if your shooting a distant landscape but having anything in the foreground f5.6 would not be enough, i usually stay at around F10 any higher i don…

If you are using an APS-C camera or a FF above 30MP, at f/10 you are already suffering from diffraction. You really want to be between f/5.6 and f/8. Of course, composition is still the most important thing, so if you need the depth of field you need the depth field. As for the exposure you can just use aperture priority with your ISO set to the base ISO. On a Nikon camera you'd actually want to be at 64. If the scen…

Actually if you shoot raw its not good to go below base iso. Recently i learned that when you go under base iso the camera just overexposes the image and pulls it down in software to give you longer exposure times. With raw you can just raise shadows in post, its easier than pulling lights down. Negative side effect is highlight blowing out easy when going below base iso. So if you shoot raw then just stay at base iso and raise shadows in post. And if you really need the longer exposure invest in a ND filter.

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 2016 olympus pen-f, which wasn't exactly ground-breaking technology when it came out, already had an electronic shutter that worked with the full resolution of the sensor. It's a 20 MP micro 4/3 sensor - so 1/4 the surface area of "full-frame".

Just realized, the Nikon 1 we got for Christmas for my daughter seems to have one as well... Need to test that! Still, we look at a 10 MP sensor smaller in size than a DX. Heck, the more I look at the Nikon 1 series, the more I realize to ehat extend it served as a mirrorless test bed for Nikon.

Do you expect the physical size of the sensor to have a bigger influence on this than the resolution?

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

#297
post #152

The funny thing is that for all the amazing technological improvements discussed, all the pictures in the article actually show that A. having a photographer who knows how to frame things, and sees the right moment to capture an image, and B. having a subject worthwhile photographing, are way more important than having a top tier quality camera.

When he writes, "I took the iPhone 14 Pro on a trip around San Francisco and Northern California, to the remote Himalayas and mountains of the Kingdom of Bhutan, and Tokyo." , my first thought was: who IS this person? And is this article even at all real?

Its not some random article, its a commercial for Halide subscription.

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just realized, the Nikon 1 we got for Christmas for my daughter seems to have one as well... Need to test that! Still, we look at a 10 MP sensor smaller in size than a DX. Heck, the more I look at the Nikon 1 series, the more I realize to ehat extend it served as a mirrorless test bed for Nikon.

Do you expect the physical size of the sensor to have a bigger influence on this than the resolution?

Depends on the sensor, doesn't it? The more dynamic range, the more data a sensor is collecting.

Edit: I should compare file size, usong the same settings, between a D700 and D300. Same MP, same camera basically, one being FF and one being DX. Or someone with more knowledge on sensors and digital cameras can answer the question.

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

#299
I just can't help but notice how soft so many of these shots look. The composition and lighting is beautiful, the immediate impact of the photo is great, but then if you start to really look for more than a few seconds on desktop, you see how smudgy so much of the detail is.

I recently gave up my mirrorless in favor of my iPhone because the latter was just so much more convenient and largely good enough. I wonder if it is physically possible, however, for these smaller lens and sensor packages to ever get to the point of eliminating that phone camera smudge?

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

#300
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SN…

That is a good point that I hadn't considered, thanks. Are smaller sensors also faster to read, given the lower capacitance? I wonder if that might give them an advantage when it comes to stacking and averaging images to reduce noise.

> I wonder if that might give them an advantage when it comes to stacking and averaging images to reduce noise.

That's another good question and (as ever) the devil is in the engineering detail. I work with noise professionally (well, with signal in a low SNR environment, where the SNR per acquisition of interest is definitely > Are smaller sensors also faster to read, given the lower capacitance?

This Stanford paper with a model of a CMOS sensor [1] is rather old but quite a good explanation of where the readout time comes from; the capacitance across the active area is C_{pd} but the minimum read-out time is dominated by the capacitance of the readout bias, C_T, across the ADC line. As a result it scales by transistor feature size (fig 5) independent of the sensor area. Of course, as 'moar megapixelz' came along, this got higher and other designs were explored to mitigate it – a paper from Rochester [2] states that removing it buggers up the noise statistics unless you do "clever things" (which they describe in detail).

> That is a good point that I hadn't considered, thanks.

I should procrastinate more productively, but thank you!

[1] https://isl.stanford.edu/~abbas/group/papers_and_pub/tcas1.p... [2] https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/ISCAS.2008.4541803

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