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Night Sight for Pixel phones

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Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#81

Post by hug »

endorphone wrote: post #78
hug wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that EIS over a series of burst photos is incapable of making things better? Everything I can see you saying -- much if it agreeable, like the fact that long-exposure OIS makes a lot of what this technology currently does possible without it -- is simply handwaving away the fact that EIS-over-burst with OIS can achieve things that OIS cannot by itself. It seems to me that it's patently true that EIS h…

Where did I discount EIS? EIS+OIS is a golden solution. It's what the Pixel 3 does. It's what the iPhone 8 does. It's what the Huawei P20 does. This all gets very reductionist, but EIS over a series of bursts is a bad alternative to OIS. It will be garbage in->garbage out. EIS with OIS, however, gives you the benefits of OIS, with the safety valve and "time travelling" effect of EIS (in that it can correct where OIS…

> Your Olympus probably has a 75mm equivalent or higher lens

50mm equivalent in 135 terms, but yes, larger than 28. (I've since moved on to an X100F, but that's neither here nor there. :)

> EIS is brilliant. OIS is better for small movements, but add EIS and it's great. Computational photography is brilliant. However Google has really, really been pouring out the snake oil for their Pixel line.

This is what I was missing. It seemed you were arguing that computational photography is not capable of much, but you're more just pointing out that this computational photography is not doing much, despite Google's claims to the contrary.

I'd agree with you that this is not exactly revolutionary stuff.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#82

Post by rubatuga »

nanomonkey wrote: post #25
fsargent wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link to some research on that? I'd love to throw together a hack where you use LED light strips to do this. Isn't it possible that the light would increase bacteria though? https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/66878/blue-light...

I'm sadly unable to find the original study where I found this. If memory serves me it was from around 2003. Not sure how it would increase bacteria, as bacteria don't photosynthesis light, unless the lights gave off sufficient heat to increase their activity. If anything I would think the light might inhibit bacterial growth.

Cyanobacteria, purple sulfur bacteria, and I forget another type, those all undergo photosynthesis

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#84

Post by sonofgod »

chrisweekly wrote: post #74
derefr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, you can predict goods spoilage just given how old stuff is. You don't need a smart fridge; you just need an ETL pipeline from a ScanSnap (reading in your grocery-store receipts) to an inventory tracker app. You've got "smarts", but they're not in the fridge. (And in the end, that's better: an inventory-tracker app that's on your phone is able to tell you to throw stuff out without you needing to own a "smart-…

I can't recall where I came across this idea but how about fridge shelves that (like mini moving sidewalks) slowly move food towards an edge to drop to a lower shelf and eventually to a composter or trash -- the idea being to put food items at a certain spot on a given shelf based on items' expiration date. Wildly impractical IRL, but clever enough to be memorable (for me anyway).

https://xkcd.com/1109/

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#85

Post by ehsankia »

endorphone wrote: post #64
ehsankia wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was so simple to take handheld long exposure photos, how come no other phone had done it yet? I think you are overly simplifying this. At a high level it might be a simple concept, but clearly getting it working in practice isn't simple otherwise every company out there would've added it years ago.

Lots of other phones do let you do it, usually in pro or manual setting. It requires a pre-requisite of good OIS (which paradoxically the Pixel 1 didn't have, claiming that it wasn't necessary -- because of some magic AI sauce or something -- and seeing that noise repeated across the tubs. They added it with 2 and 3) and usually it is hidden behind an interface. Why? Because 99.9999% of smartphone photos in real use…

> Lots of other phones do let you do it, usually in pro or manual setting.

That's single frame long exposure, not many frames merged. And as you mention, unless you have a tripod or extremely good low light stabilization, in most cases you'll end up with a bad photo.

I would definitely like to see more with actual people in them, your point about humans moving is fair one, and I'd like to see how it handles them. That's where taking multiple shots and merging them vs a single super long shot would make a big difference, as you can smartly deblur things.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#86

Post by gingerbread-man »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #80
nkoren wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah he's a good egg. I'm sure it'll keep going as long as he does. His startup actually grew out of those articles -- which were basically supposed to be his retirement hobby -- and now it employs 20 people! I'm really proud of what he's accomplished.

Wow, what a cool guy. I know we don't do AMAs on here but it'd be amazing to get HN to pick his brains for a bit.

We don't do them often, but there have been at least a couple of AMAs on here.

Alan Kay https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851 Michael Siebel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895362 Ny AG Eric Schneiderman https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15853374 Scott Aaronson https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17425377 Sam Altman (he's done a few) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12593689

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#87

Post by walrus01 »

nkoren wrote: post #31

What the Pixel cameras are doing is staggeringly good. My father is the founder of https://www.imatest.com/ , and has a substantial collection of top-end cameras. He's probably in the top 0.0001% of image quality nerds. But most of the time, he's now entirely happy shooting on his Pixel.

If you don't mind my derailing the conversation a bit, could you ask your father what he would recommend for 4K/60fps video as competition for the Panasonic GH5s? In its weight class, it's one of the few 60fps (and 400Mbps bitrate capable) cameras that can be mounted to a relatively small sized gimbal, and flown on a drone that doesn't cost $10,000.

Is there anything expected to be released in the next few months that will be in a similar price, feature set and weight class?

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#88

Post by greeneggs »

Johnny555 wrote: post #37
rdtsc wrote: post #17

> Google says that its machine learning detects what objects are in the frame, and the camera is smart enough to know what color they are supposed to have. That is absolutely impressive. The color and text on the fire extinguishers along with the texture detail seen in the headphones in the last picture are just stunning. Congratulations to anyone who worked on this project!

It's impressive, but it also means that your camera isn't always going to capture what's there -- it'll capture what it guesses was there. I wonder how easily it is fooled to capture something that's not there?

Soon these cameras will be able to take Milky Way photos in San Francisco. (Find a few stars, and it fills in the blanks.) If you want to simulate a long exposure, the cameras will add star trails.

It's too bad that the technology is proprietary. I'm curious what could be done with a larger-sensor camera, from compact cameras to DSLRs.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#89

Post by nanomonkey »

rubatuga wrote: post #82
nanomonkey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sadly unable to find the original study where I found this. If memory serves me it was from around 2003. Not sure how it would increase bacteria, as bacteria don't photosynthesis light, unless the lights gave off sufficient heat to increase their activity. If anything I would think the light might inhibit bacterial growth.

Cyanobacteria, purple sulfur bacteria, and I forget another type, those all undergo photosynthesis

I stand corrected! Are any of those likely to be found on vegetables, and break them down?

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#90

Post by bscphil »

woolvalley wrote: post #69

Now if we could only get this on APS-C & 1" compacts like the sony rx100 or fujifilm xf10. With first class smartphone integration and networking.

My thoughts exactly. If a little IS work and some great noise reduction like they've shown here can look this good, can you even imagine what an APS-C or full frame could pull off?
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