301–310 of 340 posts
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?
Try photographing at night with short exposures.
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.
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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…
Yeah, that was my assumption that I didn't articulate very clearly. For the same total exposure time, you wouldn't intuitively expect an average of multiple short exposures to be much different from a single long exposure (all depends on the mathematical details, as you say). But of course if you have a good alignment algorithm, you can often in practice use a much longer total exposure time. Then, to state the obvious, you can use a lower ISO and get less noise.
Is it the case that C_T is independent of C_{pd}? Looking at the (obviously rather idealized) circuit diagram, it seems odd that their values would be entirely independent in a realistic design. I guess I am basing my intuition on the simpler case of reading a single photodiode, where it is undoubtedly the case that the larger capacitance of a larger photodiode makes it more difficult to achieve a high bandwidth. Perhaps 'read time' as such is not the issue. But being able to scale up the individual photodiodes without sacrificing bandwidth seems a big magical.
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A lot of post processing that modern phones are doing isn't really practical though in post. For super low light shots for example, the iPhone will take hundreds of exposures and merge them. If you were going to save this all as RAW, it's multiple gigabytes of data per frame.
It does not take hundreds of exposures. That is impractical and above all not a good idea. In low light the shutter speed is likely slow (1/10th of a second for a example). Even 16 frames is more than a seconds worth of frames. At that point the differences start to become too high for stacking to be worthwhile, especially because it is hand held. Secondly, the reduction of noise by merging is at best the sqrt (numbe…
This assumes the (typically Gaussian) noise is applied to a static image. Arguably, one could exploit the slight shakiness in a handheld shot to create an image with even less noise.
As a thought experiment, consider thousands of shots of a perfectly static scene made with an idealized, noiseless camera that is moved a very tiny amount for each shot. You could continue improving the resolution of a generated, composite image quite a bit until warping due to camera displacement became noticeable.
Recent techniques like this are actually being used for cryo-electron microscopy to create extremely high-resolution imaging of proteins.
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>Ratio of the sensor size has nothing to do with the ability of the light entering the front lens. I'm aware of that – that's the point I made in my post that I linked. But DoF considerations entail that you can't just keep arbitrarily increasing the size of the opening.
the size of the chips on mobile devices will always mean there is infinite depth of field without software effects. it's like 1990s news camera footage. everybody everywhere in the frame is in focus. boring boring boring.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1akuK5v_PB8DwzDnJC1oJXOETr_S...
Without getting too much into subjective territory, I am personally tired of the bokeh obsession. There's nothing inherently interesting about photos with blurry backgrounds (see above for confirmation!) And if you want background blur, achieving it using software effects is perfectly legitimate.
These pictures are fantastic. For anyone but professionals the reasons to buy a DSLR or mirrorless are virtually gone.
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…
Welcome to the hobby! The X-T20 is a great camera.
> also there is a unique "look" that the Fuji mirrorless cameras spit out due to their x-trans sensor[1]
The performance of the Fuji sensors aren't the main reason behind the processing, for sensor type comparison, there's a great article here:
https://medium.com/@nevermindhim/x-trans-vs-bayer-fantastic-...
Fuji cameras have built in post-processing that allows it to render images closer to film stock. Fuji has spent a lot of time refining their post-processing to match how it would like across their own film stock and really the only manufacturer that achieves such a great out-of-camera processed images.
If you are working and shooting in RAW, you'll find the output from Fuji when processing the RAWs yourself are not much to look at when you look at a RAW file in RAW processing tools like DarkTable etc. They're fairly similar really to any other camera mirrorless or DSLR. You'd really have to be pixel peeping most of the time to really see a noticeable difference (assuming lens etc. is very similar). When working in RAW, you can often get similar processed colours and images out of most cameras so really this shouldn't be a limting factor. From my Android phone, I can save RAWs and generally achieve similar colours and overall appearance etc. Although, due to the sensor size, it will be notably lower quality if you start pixel peeping and generally the colour depth is usually less to work with on mobile sensors.
Edit: Had the wrong link for the article.
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Where it has more power, but lacks info like how the OIS was moving as the pictures were taken, so isn’t necessarily as good. And none of those products have nearly the sales of a smartphone to sustain R&D. Similar to how the headphone dongle of an iPhone is much cheaper and yet better quality than most audiophile equipment.
I would consider myself barely passable in skills compared to the average hobbyist photographer and have never seen in-phone computational work that I would take over what can be done manually in Lightroom, or if you want to go the automatic route, with Skylum's offerings.
For example, I really like live or motion photos.
These pictures are fantastic. For anyone but professionals the reasons to buy a DSLR or mirrorless are virtually gone.
I'd say aesthetically, it's very difficult to get decent background seperation on a phone. The practical reasons for using a camera body (I kind of consider phones to be real cameras) is to deliver quality images and aesthetics that are not achievable trivially on the phone. There's a point where trying to use a phone the same way as a camera body actually becomes really awkward from both a user interface perspective and very difficult based on capabilities.
It's actually a bit infuriating how camera bodies have not been modernizing very much. You won't find many camera bodies having a built in GPS directly, no camera security options (anti-theft, preventing photo access, automatic cloud backup), I haven't found a single camera manufacturer phone app (tethers with camera) that actually works decently with RAW workflows. There is a demand for post-processing in cameras too, not for every photographer, but, fuji users in particular tend to use that camera because of its post-processing capabilities.
GPS is actually a pain for professionals that work in teams too even when you aren't using GPS for positioning. If you're covering an event and don't have GPS, your camera bodies won't usually have decently synchronised clocks and if you're trying to get photos from multiple photographers and trying to make a second by second story, the metadata in the photos will lead to a very jumbled mess quickly. Meanwhile, most phones are accurately keeping the time so perfectly, that if you import images from them, they're typically very well ordered.
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>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.)
Doing a quick side by side comparison of the 'selfie in the woods' shot with a shot of a person with a beard on 500px ( https://500px.com/photo/89633601/ge-by-nika-topuria ), the F100 shot has similar levels of detail in the facial hair, despite being taken from farther away and with what looks to be a wider angle lens by my eyes. You can pick out single strands of hair and bits of fuzz on the subject's clothing, etc., as well.
Bokeh is, of course, massively better on the F100. And I'll take basically any of the Fujia films over the color grading in the iPhone.
Meanwhile, basically every single concert photo on flickr for the f100 absolutely destroys the iPhone in quality ( https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=nikon%20f100%20concert )
Looking at landscape shots, it does appear you'll get more detail out of the iPhone camera ( https://500px.com/photo/10782613/silent-chorus-by-chris-froe... ), so I can't claim it's universally better, but I think the idea that phone cameras "comprehensively" outperform quality film SLRs from the 90s is false.