A decade of "the best smartphone camera competitions" by mkbhd have clearly highlighted what is happening here.
1: In a/b testing, nearly everyone including pixel peepers prefer a more vibrant photo.
2: the traditional perspective of "a photo should look as close as possible to what my eyes see if I drop the viewfinder" is increasingly uncommon and not pursued in the digital age by nearly anyone.
3: phone companies know the above, and basically all of them engage in varrying degrees of "crank vibrance until people start to look like clowns, apply a skin correction so you can keep the rest mega vibrant" with an extra dash of "if culturally accepted to the primary audience, add additional face filtering to improve how people look, including air-brushing and thinning of the face"
This is rightfully compared to the loudness wars and I think that's accurate. It really became a race to the bottom once we collectively decided that "accurate" photos were not interesting and we want "best" photos.
stego-tech · 6h ago
I fully agree with your observations, and would add the irony of such a pursuit by phone makers is that serious hobbyist/amateur/professional photographers and videographers understand that cameras are inherently inaccurate, and that what we’re really capturing is an interpretation of what we’re seeing through imperfect glass, coatings, and sensor media to form an artistic creation. Sure, cameras can be used for accuracy, but those models and lenses are often expensive and aimed at specific industries.
We enjoy the imperfections of cameras because they let us create art. Smartphone makers take advantage of that by, as you put it, cranking things to eleven to manipulate psychology rather than invest in more accurate platforms that require skill. The ease is the point, but ease rarely creates lasting art the creator is genuinely proud of or that others appreciate the merit behind.
mcny · 6h ago
I don't spend too much time thinking about cameras or lenses but this kind of conversation makes me wonder... when I take photos of receipts or street signs or just text in general, is it possible that at some point the computational photography makes a mistake and changes text? or am I being paranoid?
matrss · 6h ago
Worse, Xerox scanners specifically meant for digitizing documents have changed text for a long time. The compression algorithm they used (I think even in the default settings) sometimes replaced e.g. 6 with 8, and similar things. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0 (german, but there should be news articles from back then in english as well, somewhere)
gruez · 6h ago
That's not really "computation photography" in any meaningful sense, closer to "digital processing". It's not impossible for such glitches to occur with modern smartphone cameras, but it's implausible. I don't think there's ever a confirmed instance of such a gaff happening. Meanwhile a few years ago there was a photo with a misplaced leaf that made the rounds, and people were complaining about how it was caused by computational photography, but it turned out the photo was accurate. The leaf actually there.
matrss · 5h ago
My point was that you don't have to take a photo of a receipt to run into this issue, actual machines specifically build to digitize receipts and other documents already made this kind of mistake.
No idea if this can happen with what modern smartphone cameras do to photos. If "AI" is involved then I would expect such issues to be possible because of the basic nature of them being random generators, just like how LLMs hallucinate stuff all the time. Other "enhancement" approaches might not produce issues like this.
jlokier · 4h ago
> is it possible that at some point the computational photography makes a mistake and changes text?
Yes it is. I've seen that happen in real-time with the built-in camera viewfinder (not even taking a photo) on my mid-range Samsung phone, when I zoomed in on a sign.
It only changed one letter, and it was more like a strange optical warping from one letter to a different one when I pointed the camera at a particular sign in a shop, but it was very surprising to see.
bobbylarrybobby · 4h ago
iPhones can definitely garble text, although it's not clear whether they can substitute some text for another. Seems possible but unlikely (in a purely statistical sense).
It was the compression format, not the scanner, right? Same would have happened if you store in that format (with the same quality settings etc.) on a computer or smartphone
Not that that helps anyone who's affected, but that situation is more like if you'd have an .aip file, AI Photo storage format, where it invents details when you zoom in, and not a sensor (pipeline) issue
coredog64 · 5h ago
Having uploaded my share of receipts to Concur, there's 2 checks & balances: If you still have the original, then you can correct the OCR'd value. And then Concur will recognized both line items and totals and whine if they don't match.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 6h ago
It's definitely a possibility if there's a point where LLM-based OCR is applied.
Like almost everything LLMs do, you don't need an LLM to make these mistakes.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 42m ago
LLM-based OCR and speech transcription do come with a failure condition that is different than you see in pre-LLM solutions. When the source data is hard to understand, LLMs try to fill the gap with something that makes sense given the surrounding context.
Pre-LLM approaches handle unintelligible source data differently. You'll more commonly see nonsense output for the unintelligible bits. In some cases the tool might be capable of recognizing low confidence and returning an error or other indicator of a possible miss.
IMO, that's a feature. The LLM approach makes up something that looks right but may not actually match the source data. These errors are far harder to detect and more likely to make it past human review.
The LLM approach does mean that you can often get a more "complete" output from a low quality data source vs pre-LLM approaches. And sometimes it might even be correct! But it will get it wrong other times.
Another failure condition I've experienced with LLM-based voice transcription that I didn't have pre-LLM - running down the wrong fork in the road. Sometimes the LLM approaches will get a word or two wrong...words with similar phonetics or multiple meanings, that kind of thing. It may then continue down the path this mistaken context has created, outputting additional words that do not align to the source data at all.
Karrot_Kream · 1h ago
> We enjoy the imperfections of cameras because they let us create art
For something as widespread as photography I'm not sure you can define a "we". Even pro photographers often have a hard time relating to each other's workflows because they're so different based on what they're shooting.
The folks taking pictures of paintings for preservation are going to be lighting, exposing, and editing very differently than the folks shooting weddings who will be shooting differently than the folks doing architecture or real estate shots. If you've ever studied under a photographer or studied in school you'll learn this pretty quickly.
There's a point to be made here than an iPhone is more opinionated than a camera, but in my experience most pro photographers edit their shots, even if it's just bulk application of exposure correction and an appropriate color profile. In that way a smartphone shot may have the composition of the shooter but not the color and processing choices that the shooter might want. But one can argue that fixed-lens compacts shooting JPG are often similarly opinionated. The difference of opinion is one of degrees not absolutes.
As an aside, this appeal to a collective form of absolute values in photography bothers me. It seems to me to be a way to frame the conversation emotionally, to create an "us vs them" dynamic. But the reality of professional photography is that there are very few absolute values in photography except the physical existence of the exposure triangle.
There's no such thing as "accurate photographs". I don't think we can even agree if two human perceive the same picture the same way.
I do think the average person today should learn about the basics of photography in school simply because of how much our daily lives are influenced by images and the visual language of others. I'd love to see addition to civics and social sciences classes that discuss the effects of focal lengths, saturation, and DOF on compositions. But I don't think that yearning for an "accurate photo" is the way.
Aachen · 3h ago
> "the best smartphone camera competitions" by mkbhd
Also in normal phone reviews, they always put pictures of different phones next to each other so that people can form their own opinion on what they prefer. How is the reader to know what it really looked like? The reviewer should compare it against what they actually saw and felt the mood was in the moment and give a verdict of which camera captured that
Of course nicer colors look nicer but that's not the camera's job: I can turn that up if I want it. For that to work well, the camera needs to know what's there in the first place
Eyeing the raw results from the pro capture mode vs. the automagic results of my five year old 300€ phone, it does an amazing job of removing sensor noise and improving lighting in ways that I usually can't replicate short of using a tripod and a whole lot of image stacking. The only exception is extreme contrasts, such as a full moon on a dark sky or rays of direct sunlight (at sunrise) on half of a rolling hill when the other half is still in complete shadow. Then the only solution is to take two pictures, one where you can see the dark bit and one where you can see the bright bit, and stitch them together
econ · 17m ago
After taking a photo I adjust brightness contrast etc to make the picture on the screen match that what I see in front of me. Sometimes this really brings the mood into the shot.
This is also why I get much better results on a phone than on any fancy camera with a smaller or different display. The phone matches what those to view the image get to see closely or exactly.
m463 · 33m ago
> compared to the loudness wars
I would like to compare it to "cinema mode" on my television.
I sometimes turn on cinema mode, but although the colors have more subtlety, nuance and accuracy... dimness just doesn't compare as well as you think to a much brighter picture.
sigh.
That said, it's a little annoying that the apple camera app doesn't capture raw out-of-the-box.
Melatonic · 17m ago
You can do raw out of the box - just need to enable it in settings
bonoboTP · 2h ago
Yes, and before photography existed, people expected painters to prioritize a flattering appearance instead of realism when commissioning portraits, too. And landscape painters used more vivid colors than in real life to convey a mood. But now that it's regular people preferring the same, it's suddenly bad.
CGMthrowaway · 4h ago
The "Beginner Photographer" samples in the article look the best to me, out of all the samples. Is that not supposed to happen?
ssutch3 · 3h ago
Yeah, TFA's point is that the basic/inexpensive camera in the hands of an unskilled user can be higher quality than an equivalent iPhone camera shot. In my opinion from the example shots used this is definitely the case. Camera phone distortion is pretty bad (you have to stand back further from your subject offset this, use a higher res setting, and crop in) and the processing has gotten out of hand in recent years to the point where it starts making photos look worse and worse.
CGMthrowaway · 2h ago
Ah I see now that I read more closely. Man the difference is really stark!
mcdeltat · 5h ago
As someone into photography as a hobby, I don't get why we invest in smartphone cameras nor why people care. It all looks like the same trash.
If you want a photo to reminisce on, sure use a smartphone. In which case anything short of 1800s camera quality will do the job great. If you want to make a photo that might look good then do yourself a favour and get a cheap dedicated camera.
svantana · 5h ago
The big difference is in low light conditions, where a 10-year old phone or cheap camera will give you 90% noise, and a new-ish phone or quality camera will actually be pretty good.
dagmx · 1d ago
The points really boil down to:
1. Difference in focal length/ position.
2. Difference in color processing
But…the article is fairly weak on both points?
1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or whatever the focal length is.
2. Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone and the other camera. It’s again, no different between the two.
It’s a poor article because it doesn’t focus on the actual material differences.
The phone will have a smaller sensor. It will have more noise and need to do more to combat it. It won’t have as shallow a depth of field.
The phone will also of course have different ergonomics.
But the things the post focuses on are kind of poor understandings of the differences in what they’re shooting and how their cameras work.
neya · 14h ago
I disagree, I thought the article highlighted the differences beautifully. I'm on a professionally color calibrated 27" monitor that came with one of those color calibration "certificates" at the time of purchase. The second I loaded the article, the differences were just stark. The skin tones alone were a dead giveaway.
It is no secret that Apple does a lot of post processing on their mediocre photos to make them look good - more so than most other Androids - because, it's all software. But, from the article, it is understood that the author is trying to point out that Apple could've done a better job to represent skin tones more accurately atleast. The fish-eye defense for Apple is totally understandeable, but, why are we defending the weak skin tones? Every year, they keep launching and claiming grandoise statements "This is the best smartphone camera out there is".
And no, this is not a limitation of smartphone sensors. In fact, if you look at the latest Xperia series from Sony, they have the same software from their DSLRs translated into the smartphones that addresses the skintones perfectly well.
I hope we can skip past the biases and personal preferences we have towards Apple and treat them neutrally like any other manufacturer. This "Apple can do no wrong" narrative and attacking anyone who points out their flaws is just tired and boring at this point.
ksec · 14h ago
>more so than most other Androids
It the old days Apple used to somewhat pride themselves with taking more "realistic" photos. While Android had it the other way around and basically post processes a lot of things as well as colouring. Mostly used for Social Media like Instagram.
And then came iPhone X. They started changing the colour of Sky and sharpening a lot of things. To the point of a lot of Photos taken by my camera looks great but also looked fake.
close04 · 12h ago
> And then came iPhone X
Did the iOS/Android situation actually swap, or was the X an outlier? I have photos from a recent event taken entirely with phones, and the result mirrors my experience for the past many years.
iPhone (11-15 including Pro Max) photos look "normal". Very, very similar to what my eyes saw in terms of colors. Photos taken with Android phones (Pixel 9 Pro XL, recent Oppo or Samsung A series, etc.) look terribly unnatural. The blue of the sky, the green of the plants, the red of the dress, they look "enhanced" and unnatural, nothing like what my eyes saw. I can tell apart almost any iPhone vs. Android picture just by looking at the colors on the same display.
The resolution or sharpness are harder to judge with one look and I wasn't trying to compare quality. But the colors are too obvious to miss.
petre · 13h ago
> And then came iPhone X. They started changing the colour of Sky and sharpening a lot of things. To the point of a lot of Photos taken by my camera looks great but also looked fake.
The phone processing is lagely shaped by social media culture. Camera makers also started to incorporate in-camera editing features on vlogger targeted models.
bayindirh · 12h ago
> Camera makers also started to incorporate in-camera editing features on vlogger targeted models.
DSLRs had in camera lighting correction during shooting and post-processing since 2016 or so [0].
Star filter is especially funny since it's used in k-drama opening/closing sequences.
bayindirh · 6h ago
G100 is introduced in 2020, and is a mirrorless camera with significantly higher processing power. D-Lighting and other similar post processing stuff came at least half a decade before.
Modern cameras like Nikon Z6/III can also do similar processing on camera during shoots to reduce post-processing load after the shoots to accelerate the production pipeline.
ezconnect · 5h ago
Faces became different on different camera phone. I don't think this will stop. I think it will only get worse and everything will be fake like what Samsung did when you are taking a Moon photo it just outright substitute it with a stock photo since they assume the moon looks the same everywhere humans will use their phone.
Karrot_Kream · 10h ago
My hunch is that you'll find more fans of Apple's color profile than detractors. This particular shot may have done it badly (to your eyes, some people prefer the more saturated look) but as a whole I have my doubts.
Color profiles vary per body at the least and are variable based on what post processing you do. I can load up Adobe Vivid and it'll look completely different than Adobe Portrait.
Shoot a Canon, Sony, and Fuji in JPG on the same scene (so same focal length and DOF) and auto white balance. Each body will output a different image.
dkga · 11h ago
I get the point… but I would counterargue, perhaps facetiously, that if one needs a professionally color calibrated screen to notice the difference, then it is really not something that would matter for mere mortals.
prox · 11h ago
Without hyperbole I could give people a badly calibrated CRT from the 90s and it doesn’t matter to some. Some people just don’t see anything wrong with pictures, and don’t even know what to look for or what it’s called.
The inverse are the professional photographers who work with pictures day in and out, they see everything.
Quarrel · 10h ago
I am amazed at the eye professional photographers have. A shot of a building that is suddenly really interesting, versus my shot of that building. Colour. Angle. etc.
I just don't have the eye for it, despite having a decent amateur setup.
BUT, yes, lots of people might look at a random photo on their phone and not notice skintones, or the fisheye etc. If you then give them a pile of 10 photos from a pro, versus 10 from an amateurs phone, they'll notice. Particularly if they're blown up a bit on a print or a decent screen.
It might not matter if you are just flicking through 20 shots on your phone, but as the article implies, we have perception of these things, even when it is the subconscious.
throw0101c · 7h ago
> I just don't have the eye for it, despite having a decent amateur setup.
Checkout this book by the late† Bryan Peterson, where he shows photos taken by his students as well as his own of the same location, and explains the differences in techniques/settings:
Way back when, I bought a couple of his books, probably on the recommendation of someone or other in an online photography forum - 'Understanding Exposure' and 'Learning to see creatively'. The latter in particular was wonderful for someone who had the technical aspects of photography more or less sorted, but was - ahem - deficient in the artistic department.
Anyway, I felt his style was incredible - down-to-earth, but not afraid to go into a bit of background if needed - so I sent off a brief letter of thanks through his publisher.
Lo and behold, got a very nice letter back, thanking my for the kind words and encouraging me (I had mentioned that I shot both film and digital, seeing as at the time, a wonderful film camera like the F5 could be had for a fraction of what even an entry-level APS-C DSLR cost) to experiment A LOT using the DSLR, as the instant feedback provided would help my analog hit rate progress leaps and bounds.
I was already thinking a bit along those lines, but became a lot more conscious about trying to improve my skills using the DSLR upon his encouragement - and my photos improved a lot over the following years as a result.
Thanks, Bryan.
Quarrel · 7h ago
Thanks, that looks great.
amelius · 9h ago
Perhaps the amateurs have an internal network in their brain that corrects for badly shot photos.
The professionals have learned to shut off that network.
josephg · 10h ago
Do those photos look similar to you? Those color differences are huge to me. And some of the stylistic choices the image processing has made make them look like photos of different people.
ubercore · 10h ago
I don't think the point was to say you need the calibrated monitor to notice, rather that it's _even more stark_, and clearly points to the issues raised in the article.
And to be fair, the thrust of the article was "Why don't you see printed and frame iPhone photos", and these things that might be a bit subtle on an un-calibrated screen are going to be a big deal if you professionally print it.
dagmx · 14h ago
You’re somehow both reading far too in to my comment (none of my comment is specific to Apple) and not reading my comment enough (because you m missed the point about color profiles)
I’m not defending the default color choices, I’m saying that they’re comparing apples to oranges because they’re comparing an output designed to be opinionated with one that’s designed to be processed after the fact. The iPhone is perfectly capable of outputting neutral images and raw files.
ubercow13 · 13h ago
The non-iPhone pictures are probably also in-camera jpegs so they are also 'opinionated', not RAWs.
dagmx · 5h ago
You don’t need to shoot RAW to have neutral images. In Camera JPEGS are still defaulted on most cameras to be as neutral as possible unless you opt for a different picture style.
This is the opposite default to phones where the defaults are to be punchier, but where you can still select a neutral profile.
The argument is basically comparing defaults and claiming it’s endemic to the format.
Ancapistani · 13h ago
I would go so far as to say: if you're using in-camera JPEGs, you would probably be better off with a cellphone.
shakow · 12h ago
That's a very contemptuous thing to say.
Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable, they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.
I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.
barnabee · 9h ago
Totally agree!
Photography for me is about the physical and optical side of things. Choosing a lens for a situation, framing the shot, aperture, shutter, etc.
When I switched to digital I was seduced by post-processing, partly as a substitute for the look I could achieve with different films, but mostly I suspect because all those sliders and numbers and graphs are naturally attractive to a certain type of person :)
I eventually pretty much stopped taking photos.
Changing my workflow from post
processing RAW photos (and barely ever looking at them again) to using in-camera JPEGs that I can immediately share, print, or whatever was enough to start me taking photos again regularly as a hobby.
More unexpectedly, in addition to the obvious time saving of removing the post processing step (aside from occasional cropping), the satisfaction benefit of the immediacy with which I can now print, share, display, etc. my favourite photos has been huge. It’s so much more rewarding getting photos right after you took them and actually doing something with them!
Now I’m not even sure I’d call all that digital image processing “photography”. Sure, it’s an art in its own right, and one some photographers enjoy, but the essence of photography lies somewhere else. I’d encourage everyone to try a camera with decent in camera JPEG production. You can always shoot Raw+JPEG if you’re scared to go full cold turkey.
Ancapistani · 11h ago
> That's a very contemptuous thing to say.
I really don't think it is.
When I pick up a camera, my intent is one of two things: the experience of photography itself, or the best quality I can reasonably obtain. Neither of those goals are attained with a smartphone.
Every other time I take a photo, it's with a smartphone. It's easily good enough for the vast majority of use cases.
> Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable,
That's... absurd. Granted I lean toward a more "street photography" style, but it's exceptionally rare that I spend more then ~30s on a photo in Lightroom. Most of that time is spent cropping. White balance, exposure correction, etc. are all done in bulk.
> they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.
Sure - and why wouldn't you want to play with RAW as well? It's not like the profile the camera would have used isn't embedded in the RAW anyhow.
> I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.
I don't disagree with this at all. Of course there are edge cases; that's why I said "probably".
To put it another way: if you're shooting JPEGs regularly, you're almost certainly not doing it for the craft. There are very few reasons I can think of to choose a traditional camera if you're not going to take advantage of the improvements in ISO and dynamic range that it offers - and those are two things you give up[0] shooting JPEG.
0: You give up ISO in that you are discarding much of the information that you could use to push/pull process, which is very often preferable to very high ISO.
ETA: I just looked it up. In 2024, I kept 767 photos from my iPhone and 1,900 from my cameras. That includes multiple performances of my wife's dance studio, so the latter is heavily skewed by that. Excluding those, I kept 376. In other words, I appear to be taking my own advice here.
ubercow13 · 11h ago
>and those are two things you give up[0] shooting JPEG
No you don't? Good in camera JPEGs will utilise push-pull processing, exposing for maximal dynamic range all for you. You don't lose the advantages of the better optics and sensor just because the JPEG is produced in camera.
Ancapistani · 11h ago
How would the camera know if you're exposing two stops below your intended EV because you plan to push it in post or if that _is_ your intended EV?
Furthermore, JPEG supports ~8 stops of dynamic range while my X-Pro3's raw files support ~14 stops. You lose almost half your total DR when you shoot JPEG (with that camera).
ubercow13 · 11h ago
Because some will choose the exposure and decide when to underexpose and push for you, eg fuji DR feature. You choose your intended EV for the image and it chooses whether to underexpose and push based on the dynamic range of the scene.
>You lose almost half your total DR when you shoot JPEG
No because the camera is applying a tone curve that compresses that DR when producing the JPEG. You lose precision, not DR, but if you don't intend to process the image further it doesn't matter much.
justincormack · 7h ago
That should be configurable - my camera has 3 dynamic range settings, and I almost always use the narrowest one.
shakow · 10h ago
All that you said is perfectly valid for your usecase. But you can't just make your use case a generality.
Some people have a camera because they want to take better pictures than their smartphone but don't want to bother with post-processing, some have tried manual processing and found that the work/result balance was not doing it for them, some think that JPEGs look perfectly fine, some just don't have the time to do the processing... there are myriads of reason for which people would like to land somewhere between “let iOS do it” and “I systematically chose my ISO according to this Darktable script I developed these last years”.
dotancohen · 9h ago
> the best quality I can reasonably obtain.
Cellphones absolutely can produce high quality results. Especially if you add the constraint "best quality I can reasonably obtain" as many consider carrying a dedicated camera all the time to not be reasonable. And this was the case even before the advent of the smartphone. How many people did you see carrying a camera in 1980, or 1990, or 2000? Almost zero.
The best camera, is the camera you have on you.
necovek · 45m ago
That's a pretty generic statement, considering how variable are "in-camera JPEGs" depending on camera and generation.
But even so, most are tuned to natural colours, and there is no beating low depth of field for bokeh/subject separation.
sharpshadow · 11h ago
If anyone working on skin color representation try to emulate Agfa Precisa it has with the best skin colors in natural light.
nikhizzle · 10h ago
Thanks for this, this is very useful for a related ai project I’m working on.
dotancohen · 9h ago
What about other colours? Isn't that film famously under saturated for sky, water, vegetation, etc?
sharpshadow · 7h ago
It very might be and it shouldn’t be easy to find good training pictures in the sea of amateur shoots online with different development techniques and light conditions, the last batch was also produced in 2005. Some previous generation of that film line might have similar skin tones.
I would think that with modern techniques it isn’t necessary to apply the emulation to the whole image but to just the parts desired?
hopelite · 11h ago
You and most Apple neggers are not really any better by ignoring what all this comes down to, choices and trade-offs. Apple’s primary objective is clearly related to taking photos that provide a positive impact on the user while being as easy to do so as feasible, not accuracy of the image. They likely care more about the most number of users being satisfied, not accurate reproduction of an image.
I would not be surprised if they don’t actually want accuracy in imaging at all, they want a positive impact on the user, and most people don’t want reality. If that means causing “hotdog skin” under some conditions or with some skin tones, or maybe even if most users prefer “hotdog skin”, while having an overall positive photo outcome for most other users; they will likely always choose to produce “hotdog skin”. They are also serving a far greater and, frankly an increasingly less light skinned audience than most understand. Maybe it’s just an effect of “whites” having given away their control over things as ever more “non-whites” become revert increasingly important and an ever increasing number and percentage of Apple’s users. Do Asians and Africans get “hotdog skin”? I don’t know the answer to that.
It is the narrow minded perspective of DSLR purist types that this stuff bothers, largely because they cannot look beyond the rim of their plate. Some platforms are for accuracy, others for impact and user experience.
People should maybe consider stop saying things like “this Apple is an absolutely horrible, awful, no good orange!”
hopelite · 11h ago
You and most Apple obsessed curmudgeons are not really any better by ignoring what all this comes down to, choices and trade-offs. Apple’s primary objective is clearly related to taking photos that provide a positive impact on the user while being as easy to do so, not accuracy. They want the most number of users to be satisfied, not accurate reproduction of an image. I would not be surprised if they don’t actually want accuracy in imaging, they want a positive impact on the user, and if that means causing “hotdog skin” under some conditions or with some skin tones, while having an overall positive photo outcome for most other users, they will always choose to make you have “hotdog skin”. They are in serving a far greater audience than most understand.
It is the narrow minded perspective of DSLR purist types that this stuff bothers, largely because they cannot look beyond the rim of their plate.
You may want to stop saying “this Apple is a horrible, awful, no good orange.”
sheiyei · 9h ago
Could say, the goal is an OK photo every time, even if it means you only get really good photos by accident.
majormajor · 15h ago
The biggest real differences between iPhone and whatever ye-olde-good-standalone-digital-camera are sharpening/edge enhancements and flattening of lighting.
If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly.
The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing.
Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones.
The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image.
But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment.
(Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.)
sundvor · 11h ago
Yeah I like to take photos of my cast iron cooking with my S25U, on a black induction glass surface - and I find myself swapping to Pro mode all the time as the colour temperature is often way too warm and or oversaturated.
It's a great camera in automatic mode most of the time, but not for that scenario.
rob74 · 4h ago
Yup, that was the thing that jumped out at me too: in the photos with the golf players, the trees in the background appear much smaller in the iPhone photo than in the "real camera" photo, which means the "real camera" photo was taken from further away and zoomed in, so it obviously will have less distortion. Same for the building and car pictures, but the article doesn't mention that at all (except for writing that "the fish eye iPhone lens creates distortion" - of course it does, that's why the iPhone has other lenses as well)!
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 3h ago
Yeah it's disappointing to see photographers getting this wrong. Most of them know better.
It's the _distance_ that causes distortion, not the _lens_. You can prove this by doodling light rays on a sheet of paper. There is no lens that will get you a good photo at 1 meter from a person. They stand back 2 or 3 or more and then say "ho ho fish eye lens". I'm so sick of it
Agreed, in particular the distortion of the players on the ends, the smaller shoulders and chest, as well as the lean can all be attributed to the wider lens used on the iPhone (and as such that the photo was taken closer to players). I'd guess the author was using the "1x" lens on the iPhone, a lot of these issues go away if they use the "3x" or "5x" lens. I'd even consider that most of the jawline change of the player is simply the angle of their chin/face as well as expression.
Joeri · 13h ago
The 2x mode of the wide lens is basically the standard “nifty fifty” of a big camera and what the author should have compared to. The 1x is 24mm equivalent which is a focal length I don’t particularly care for, but I get why they picked it (easy to frame a group of people indoors).
For portraits the ideal length is 85mm equivalent which would be 3.5x, rumored to be on the next iphone pro. At this length there is minimal facial feature distortion without getting the flattening effect you get at longer focal lengths.
bayindirh · 12h ago
I'll kindly disagree with you. Like the other commenter, I'm on a 27" HP business monitor comes with color calibration certificate, and the differences are very visible. Moreover, I'm taking photos as a hobby for some time.
The angle, different focal lengths doesn't matter in rendering of the images. The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people. Moreover, we want to be liked as human beings, it's in our nature.
So, phone companies driven by both smaller sensors (that thing is way noisier when compared to a full frame sensor) and market pressure to reduce processing needed to be done by end users (because it inconveniences them), started to add more and more complicated post-processing in their cameras.
The result is this very article. People with their natural complications reduced, skin tones boosted on red parts, sharpened but flatter photos, without much perspective correction and sometimes looking very artificial.
Make no mistake, "professional" cameras also post process, but you can both see this processing and turn it off if you want, and the professional cameras corrects what lens fails at, but smartphones, incl. iPhone makes "happy, social media ready" photos by default.
As, again other commenter said, it's not a limitation of the sensor (sans the noise). Sony supplies most of the higher end sensors in the market, and their cameras or other cameras sporting sensors produced by them got the "best color" awards over and over again, and XPeria smartphones comes with professional camera pipelines after that small sensor, so they can take photos like what you see.
I personally prefer iPhone as my smartphone of my choice, but the moment I want to take a photo I want to spend time composing, I ditch default camera app and use Halide, because that thing can bypass Apple's post-processing, and even can apply none if you want.
lonelyasacloud · 8h ago
> The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people.
Is nothing new.
When film was mass market almost no one developed their own photos (particularly colo(u)r). Instead almost all printing went through bulk labs who optimised for what people wanting to show to their family and friends.
What is different now is if someone cares about post processing to try and present their particular version of reality they can do it easily without the cost and inconvenience of having to setup and run a darkroom.
bayindirh · 7h ago
Personally coming from the film era, I don't think it's as clear cut as this.
Many of the post-processing an informed person does on a digital photo is an emulation of a process rooted in a darkroom, yes.
On the other hand, some of the things cameras automatically does, e.g.: Skin color homogenization, selective object sharpening, body "aesthetic" enhancements, hallucinating the text which the lens can't resolve, etc. are not darkroom born methods, and they alter reality to the point of manipulation.
In film days, what we had as a run of the mill photographer was the selection of the film, and asking the lab "can you increase the saturation a bit, if possible". Even if you had your darkroom at home, you won't be able to selectively modify body proportions while keeping the details around untouched with the help of advanced image modification algorithms.
Which is one reason why I often still shoot with an actual camera and sometimes even with film. I have a lifetime of experience with common film emulsions and a couple of decades of shooting with digital sensors with limited post processing.
When does that matter? It matters when I take pictures to remember what a moment was like. In particular, what the light was doing with the people or landscape at that point in time.
It's not so much that the familiar photographic workflows are more accurate, but they are more deterministic and I understand what they mean and how they filter those moments.
I still use my phone (easy has a quality of its own) but I find that it gives me a choice of either an opinionated workflow that overwhelms the actual moment (trying to make all moments the same moment) or a complex workflow that leaves me having to make the choices (and thus work) I do with a traditional camera but with much poorer starting material.
tristor · 4h ago
And this is why I have an Olympus Pen-F in one pocket and my iPhone in the other pocket. I love my iPhone, and I use it for taking snapshots day-to-day like receipts for my expense report, but any time I care about capturing something I see I have an actual camera in my pocket. Micro 4/3rds for size/weight, unfortunately, but while I have a FF camera I am not lugging it around with me everywhere, a Pen-F literally fits in my pocket with lens attached.
mattwilsonn888 · 13h ago
You're completely off base on the focal length argument.
A traditional camera has the choice and can choose the most appropriate length; an Iphone is locked in to a fish-eye clearly put in there to overcome its inherent limitations.
So it doesn't really matter "if it's fair" or not, because it's not about a fair comparison, it's a demonstration that a traditional camera is just better. Why should the traditional camera use an inappropriate focal length just because the Iphone is forced to?
dagmx · 5h ago
I’m sorry, if you’re going to argue it’s completely off base at least make a statement that isn’t easily dismissed by looking at the back of a phone.
My iPhone pro has 3 lenses of 15,24 and 77mm equivalents. This is far fewer than many Android phones.
Even the cheapest iPhone 16E has a super sampling sensor which allows a cropped 50mm equivalent. (And yes that’s a digital crop but that’s why I mention a super sampling sensor)
So yes, unless they were shooting on a budget phone or a much older iPhone, they have a choice of focal lengths that would better match whatever camera they’re comparing to.
Twisell · 12h ago
Every hardware have it's limitations, my DSLR don't fit in my pocket for instance. But that wouldn't be a fair point when comparing photo quality against a smartphone.
Comparing quality with non equivalent focal lengths is as pertinent as to mount a fisheye on the DSLR (because you can!) and then claim that the smartphone have less distortion.
josephg · 11h ago
> Comparing quality with non equivalent focal lengths is as pertinent as to mount a fisheye on the DSLR (because you can!) and then claim that the smartphone have less distortion.
I was about to disagree with you - but I think you're right. The photographer clearly took a couple steps back when they took the DSLR photo. You can tell by looking at the trees in the background - they appear much bigger in the DSLR photo because they're using a longer focal length.
I think a DSLR would struggle with the same perspective distortion if you put an ultrawide lens on it. It would have been a much more fair comparison if they took both photos from the same spot and zoomed in with the iphone.
arghwhat · 7h ago
I'd agree if the phone had an appropriate focal length, but it doesn't. You can either go way too wide, or way too narrow (with a worse image sensor at that). Comparing the best the phone can sensibly do while handicapping the camera by intentionally doing the wrong thing for the situation makes no sense.
The only workaround for the phone would be to still step back and take the image with the 24mm equivalent, then crop the image a whole lot to get an appropriate and equivalent view.
> I think a DSLR would struggle with the same perspective distortion if you put an ultrawide lens on it.
Note that "proper" lenses have more room for corrective elements in their lens stacks, so decent quality setups should experience less distortion than the tiny smartphone pancakes.
An ultrawide will never be good though, it's a compromise for making things fit or making a specific aesthetic.
dagmx · 3h ago
How do you know if the phone doesn’t have an appropriate focal length if the image isn’t marked?
Secondly, none of the points in the article are about optical distortion across the lens they’re all about perspective distortion. Corrective elements aren’t going to change that. None of the examples highlight barrel/pincushion distortion or the like as an offender.
DiogenesKynikos · 11h ago
The article is comparing photo quality between two different cameras. The lens affects image quality, so it's completely fair to discuss.
If it were possible to switch out the lens on the iPhone, and the photographer had just chosen the wrong lens for the job, that would be a fair criticism of the article. But that's not what happened. The iPhone is just very limited when it comes to the lens, compared to a DSLR.
josephg · 11h ago
> If it were possible to switch out the lens on the iPhone...
It is possible to "switch out the lens" on an iphone, because iPhones ship with multiple camera lenses. (Well, multiple entire cameras). The iphone 16 they're using here has 3 cameras. And yet, I'm pretty sure the photo of the boys was taken with the ultrawide for some reason. A lot of the distortion problems would go away if they took a few steps back and used one of the longer lenses - just like they did with the DSLR.
labcomputer · 59m ago
You can always crop a wide shot.
Most of the criticism comes down to not standing in the same spot for both photos (I’m unconvinced that the difference in jawlines, for example, is not because the subjects moved while the photographer did).
You can take a bad picture with any camera.
vladvasiliu · 10h ago
I'm not sure I get your point.
Most appropriate length for what? Some iPhones have multiple focal lengths, just like some "real camers" have fixed lenses with a fixed focal length (Fuxji x100 and the medium-format one whose model I can't remember, Leica something-or-other, Sony R1).
Plus, for what is a traditional camera "just better"? It's highly usage dependent.
I have both a bludgeon, which can be used as an interchangeable lens camera, and an iPhone. The first doesn't fit in my pocket, so sometimes the latter is the one I grab, since it's "better" for that specific use case.
arghwhat · 7h ago
> Most appropriate length for what? Some iPhones have multiple focal lengths, ...
Most appropriate length for portrait photography is well established to be somewhere between 50mm and 100mm (35mm equivalent). The lower end is often considered more "natural" for such photo type, while the longer focal lengths are considered more flattering.
An iPhone 16 Pro Max has three focal lengths, 12, 24 and 120 (35mm equivalent). The first two are much too short unless significantly cropped, and the last one is excessive and requires stepping way back and has the worst image sensor and likely worst compromise of a lens - a lot of lens chonk is elements to manage chromatic aberration and distortion, which smartphone lenses have no room for.
> ... just like some "real camers" have fixed lenses with a fixed focal length (Fuxji x100 and the medium-format one whose model I can't remember, Leica something-or-other, Sony R1).
People using fixed lenses do so because they prioritize a particular type of image or style, and decided to get an even better (and lighter) lens for that instead of carrying around a compromise they don't need.
> Plus, for what is a traditional camera "just better"?
When it comes to getting the best picture, a chonky camera always wins - although they have had some catch-up to do on the software side, physics and our current technical limitations do not care about pocketability.
But a less perfect picture is better than no picture because you left the "real camera" at home. The best camera is the one you have on you.
(Also note that this is not binary between a smarpthone and an Olympic DSLR setup. Good compact cameras with collapsing lenses and mirrorless with smaller lenses are a middleground.)
Terretta · 6h ago
Really appreciated this comment, written as if by a photographer who also happens to use a mobile phone camera for EDL or street. Adding some similar color...
> An iPhone 16 Pro Max has three focal lengths, 12, 24 and 120 (35mm equivalent). The first two are much too short unless significantly cropped, and the last one is excessive and requires stepping way back and has the worst image sensor and likely worst compromise of a lens
This point contains one part of the solution: Zoom with your feet.
Back up your shooting position to where you'd shoot an 85mm or 105mm, take the shot with the 2x lens, then crop. (Unless there's tons of light, then the 5x and hold very still. Even then, shoot both 2x and 5x and compare. Next year's phone should update the 5x sensor as well.)
For the color problems the article highlights, shoot RAW and adjust in a raw development app. Otherwise, shoot using the new grid-based styles to make in-phone development adjustable later. Or use a different app – see below.
For the bokeh, consider shooting in portrait, with aperture dialed to a full-frame DSLR level of (granted fake) bokeh. This remains adjustable after the shot so it's safer to leave active than one might think.
Consider avoiding the iPhone's built-in camera app, consider shooting with an app that can skip the processing pipeline, like Lux's Halide, with “Process Zero” mode:
I think you can get RAW on iPhone? I don't own one so I can't confirm.
On my Pixel RAW is also available, even moreso with the non-standard camera software.
mh- · 13h ago
Yes, I shoot in RAW by default most of the time. It can be quickly turned on and off from the stock camera app without even leaving the main screen.
You may have to enable it once in Settings -> Camera -> Formats; I've been using it so long I don't remember what the defaults are. But once you've done that, it's in the top right of the camera app - just tap where it says RAW.
lambdasquirrel · 17h ago
This does not address the detrimental parts of computational photography.
dangus · 17h ago
Which I’m personally failing to witness consistently by the “evidence” in this article.
Most of the photo examples here were somewhere between “I can’t tell a significant difference” and “flip a coin and you might find people who prefer the iPhone result more.”
Even less of a difference when they’re printed out and put in a 5x7” frame.
Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0. You already own one. You were going to buy a smartphone anyway for other things. So if we are going to sit and argue about quality we still have to figure out what dollar value these differences are worth to people.
And the “evidence” is supposedly that people aren’t getting their phone photos printed out. But let’s not forget the fact that you literally couldn’t see your film photos without printing them when we were using film cameras.
Derbasti · 14h ago
> Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0.
Many people buy a more expensive smartphone specifically for the better camera module. These are expensive devices! It's good marketing that you perceive that as "free", but in reality,
I spend way less money on my fancy camera (new models every five years), than my iPhone-loving friends on their annual upgrades.
_tik_ · 15h ago
I can see a noticeable loss of detail in the iPhone sample photos. Personally, I prefer cameras that prioritize capturing more detail over simply producing visually pleasing images.
Detailed photos offer much more flexibility for post-processing.
chongli · 16h ago
The problem with computational photography is that it uses software to make photos "look good" for everyday users. That may be an advantage for those users but it is basically a non-starter for a photographer because it makes it a crapshoot to take photos which predictably and faithfully render the scene.
askbjoernhansen · 16h ago
Lots of apps gives you other options for how to process the image data.
I've had a bunch of "high-end" digital SLRs and they (and the software processing the raw files) do plenty computational processing as well.
I completely agree that all else being equal it's possible to get photos with better technical quality from a big sensor, big lens, big raw file; but this article is more an example of "if you take sloppy photos with your phone camera you get sloppy photos".
dkga · 11h ago
This made me ask, is there a (perhaps Swift) API to get the raw pixels coming in from the camera, if there is such a thing? I mean, before any processing, etc.
Narew · 7h ago
There is. If you use lightroom app for example you can have access to raw pixel.
But I'm not sure there is a way to get all the images the camera app from the iphone take.
Phone don't take one shot to create the final image. they take hundred of shot and combine them.
ChrisGreenHeur · 15h ago
Your brain also uses software to make what you see look good
SoftTalker · 17h ago
Can you really have a 70mm focal length on a phone that is less than 10mm thick? I thought it was simulated by cropping the image from the actual very short focal length.
Espressosaurus · 16h ago
Usually it's "FOV equivalent", e.g. scaled to a full frame sensor size. Tiny sensor size means you maybe have a 10mm focal length, but the size of the sensor relative to 10mm makes it the FOV of a 70mm lens on a full frame camera.
You see similar when people are comparing APS-C, micro 4/3, or medium format lenses.
strogonoff · 16h ago
Physics really works out such that the smaller you make camera sensor, the smaller you can make the lens. Full-frame lenses tend to be markedly bigger for equivalent quality compared to, say, APS-C lenses.
However, due to physics there is also no working around the quality issues of a small sensor. Photosites get less light and produce more noise, and automated noise suppression costs detail and sharpness.
I wonder whether tiny lenses of equivalent sharpness and clarity as their larger equivalents would be much more expensive or impossible to produce (sure, less material, but much finer precision required), but it probably doesn’t matter because the tiny sensor already loses enough sharpness that better lenses won’t contribute much.
croemer · 15h ago
> Physics really works out such that the smaller you make camera sensor, the smaller you can make the lens.
At some point the wave-like nature of light starts to bite. Can't really go much smaller than a micron per pixel. So a millimeter sized chip gets you 1 megapixel. 50MP mean ~7mm. (back of the envelope caveats apply)
meatmanek · 12h ago
> Full-frame lenses tend to be markedly bigger for equivalent quality compared to, say, APS-C lenses.
Only if you define quality as field of view.
For light-gathering ability and background separation/bokeh, you need a lower f/number on APS-C than on full-frame to be equivalent: A 35mm f/1.2 lens on a 24MP APS-C sensor will take pictures that look nearly identical to a 52.5mm f/1.8 lens on a 24MP full-frame sensor. (Assuming crop factor of 1.5.) Both will have an aperture size of 29.17mm (= 35mm/1.2 = 52.5mm/1.8), will capture a 37.9° x 25.8° FoV.
Almost all important properties of lenses are determined by field of view and the aperture diameter: Amount of light gathered, background blur, diffraction, and weight.
The illumination-per-area on the full-frame sensor will be 2.25x lower, but the area of the sensor is 2.25x larger so it cancels out such that both sensors will receive the same number of photons.
Background blur is determined by aperture diameter, field of view, and the distances to the subject and background. Since the two lenses have the same aperture size and field of view, you'd get the same amount of background blur for a given scene.
For many lenses (particularly telephoto lenses), the size and weight are primarily determined by the size of the front element, which needs to be at least as big as the aperture. For wide-angle lenses, you start needing a front element that's significantly wider than your aperture for geometry reasons -- the subject has to be able to see the aperture through the front element, so that relationship breaks down.
(Also with lenses where focal length << flange distance, you start to need extra optics to project the image back far enough. This can mean that a wide-angle lens can be more complicated to build for APS-C than for full-frame on the same mount. Take for example the Rokinon 16mm f/2 at 710g / 87mm long versus the Nikon AF-D 24mm f/2.8 at 268g and 46mm long. This isn't relevant to phone cameras, since those don't need to fit a moving mirror between the sensor and the lens like SLRs do. Phone camera makers can put the lens exactly as far from the sensor as makes sense for their design.)
Slow telephoto lenses for DSLRs are pretty much the only place where crop sensors have an advantage. DSLR autofocus sensors generally need f/5.6 or better. Thus, for a given field of view, you need a bigger aperture + front element for the full-frame lens than the "equivalent" crop-sensor lens -- e.g. a 300 f/5.6 with its 53.6mm front element is going to be heavier than a 200 f/5.6 with its 35.7mm front element. However, as mentioned above, the 300 f/5.6 on a full-frame camera will gather 2.25x as much light as the 200/5.6 on the APS-C sensor. Mirrorless cameras can typically autofocus with smaller relative apertures. This is why you see Sony selling an f/8 zoom and Canon selling f/11 primes for their mirrorless mounts -- this sort of lens just wasn't possible on DSLRs. On mirrorless, you could have a 300 f/8.4 full-frame lens that would be truly equivalent to the 200mm f/5.6 APS-C lens.
vladvasiliu · 7h ago
You're absolutely right, but what's depressing is how few people understand this. I'd say the problem with your point is that it's too practical and involves people going out and trying to produce some artistic expression.
Most people enjoy chasing measurable specs and don't stop to understand what they're actually doing. So they'll go compare a 4/3 sensor's output at iso x to a full frame sensor at the same iso. They won't stop to think about what they're trying to achieve. If they want the same depth of field, they won't be able to use the same aperture. So, out in the field, something has to give. Either lengthen the exposure or raise the ISO. If we're talking high ISOs, you probably can't shoot much slower, so higher ISO it is. Differences are then much less shocking.
The other extreme is people chasing paper-thin focus, which, I guess, isn't as easy to obtain on smaller sensors. Yet, for some reason, they won't go to a larger format, either...
Espressosaurus · 4h ago
It's a market problem. If I could get the lenses I wanted in APS-C format, I'd have an APS-C camera as my main camera. Instead the market has chosen for full frame to be the main place investment is done in, so I get a full frame camera since the APS-C cameras and lenses are second-class citizens (not true for Fuji, true for Canon, Nikon, and Sony).
Medium format explodes the cost and again, the lenses I want aren't even available.
So you go for what you can get, given the marketplace and also given the lens system you have bought into.
I doubt anyone is going wildlife shooting with a large format camera, for example.
tristor · 3h ago
> I doubt anyone is going wildlife shooting with a large format camera, for example.
Not with true large format, but with the new Fuji medium format cameras it's starting to become reasonably possible to do faster work like wildlife at larger format sizes. The main issue remains, which is sensor readout speed, but the technology has gotten so much better that you can get results with things like birds-in-flight that are comparable to a FF DSLR camera from 10 years ago, with MF now, as far as speed, but at 3x-5x the effective resolution.
Cost is still prohibitive though, I recently upgraded and really considered the new Fuji 100MP MF line, but ended up with a Nikon Z8 in the end for wildlife. On my next iteration, I'll probably bite the bullet and go MF. If I could double the resolution and get similar speed, it'd be worth it, IMO. Especially at the sizes I typically print
dagmx · 14h ago
I specifically said “equivalent focal length”. Equivalent focal lengths are relative to a 35mm sensor unless otherwise specified, and the actual focal length reduces with sensor size providing the same fov.
By having a tiny sensor, the current iPhone pro has a range of 15-120mm.
jeswin · 17h ago
Yes, periscope lenses are fairly common on phones. 10x "optical zoom".
geldedus · 5h ago
they don't even know what "bokeh" means
isodev · 10h ago
I think the physical parameters of the lenses are negligible compared to the distortions caused by "computational computing" and the colour changes iPhones tend to add to make photos more instagramable by default.
Narew · 7h ago
Some of the distortion shown in the article is call "Volume Anamorphosis". It's a distortion that strongly deform face and person. This deformation is really visible for short focal lens.
Disclaimer: I work for a photo processing software.
dehrmann · 14h ago
Does anyone have experience with aftermarket add-on lenses? Theoretically, they can help with the focal length.
wisty · 9h ago
Um, I'm pretty sure a 24mm shot on a full frame camera will look the same as an iPhone shot, but only if you crop the full frame shot (ignoring pixels counts).
Yes, you could get the same photo of the guy in the centre on the iPhone, but only by zooming in and cropping out everything else. I guess if you REALLY wanted you could run back, and zoom in. Better get a tripod to hold it steady since you're zooming in then.
So anyone but an expert will shoot with a much shorter lens when using the iPhone.
This is how crop factors work unless I'm really mistaken.
dagmx · 5h ago
Please note that I specifically said “equivalent focal length”.
A 24mm equivalent will have almost the exact same perspective on any sized sensor, because that’s what equivalent means. It’s a relationship of sensor size to actual focal length.
A 16mm on a 1.5x APs-c is a 24mm equivalent on a 35mm. The iPhones base lens is something like 1.5mm but when related to its sensor, it’s roughly a 24mm equivalent.
There’s no cropping that needs to happen.
FredPret · 1d ago
My entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water.
Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.
However:
- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)
- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine
Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
rainsford · 20h ago
I agree with your iPhone camera advantages, but to that list I'd add that I'm already going to buy an iPhone, which means any comparison of value for the price is effectively between the price of a camera (which for even an entry-level mirrorless isn't exactly cheap) and literally zero dollars. You could argue that the phone would be cheaper without the nice camera to make for a fairer comparison, but such a product doesn't really exist.
snicky · 19h ago
This applies only if you assume that you are not willing to spend more on a phone with a better camera and a lot of people do. I have friends who decided to buy an iPhone over way cheaper Android phones in the past, because "the iPhone camera was so much better". Funny enough, the differences were obviously negligible when compared with any actual camera.
snackernews · 16h ago
And upgrade frequency. You might give your old iPhone another year or two if the phone isn’t your limiting factor for photo quality.
loeg · 17h ago
$200 for iphone pro vs regular (I only got Pro for the camera). But otherwise, yeah.
al_borland · 14h ago
Not only is the iPhone always in your pocket, but it’s easier to carry and deal with.
I remember hearing a story from a well known photographer about a trip he took with a few others, including his wife. They woke up early to head out on a small boat in a lake or something. He was lugging all this gear and having to put a lot of focus into tuning the settings on his camera, he was pretty miserable. Meanwhile, his wife was enjoying morning with no baggage and snapping pics with her phone. She ended up having the best picture of the day, while actually enjoying herself, by not being bogged down by the gear.
Dedicated cameras have their value, but it’s been decreasing for years, and requiring higher and higher levels of skill to make it worth it. Most people could improve their photos dramatically by learning about framing and light, while just using a phone. These things have a much bigger impact on the resulting photo. A professional with an iPhone will always take a better and more interesting picture than an amateur with a DSLR for this reason.
kalaksi · 11h ago
Those sound like the 2 extremes, though. You don't have to take a lot of gear or tune a lot of settings manually with dedicated camera if you don't want to, but it's an option if you want to have more control or go for the ultimate quality.
SchemaLoad · 17h ago
I get sent a lot of photos of me cosplaying at conventions, and something I've noticed is that the phone photos are almost always nicer in general. The people who do photography as a hobby seem to always edit the photo too extreme and you get whack HDR type effects or they just aren't as skilled at manually setting settings as the iphone auto mode.
But, the dedicated camera photos are always massively higher resolution. You can zoom in on details and they look great, while phone photos seem to use AI upscailers and they look bad
Espressosaurus · 16h ago
Wack HDR is usually the sign of a novice photographer, assuming it's not the phone (my experience is that phones go absolutely insane with the HDR and saturation).
We all go through a period of abusing HDR and saturation, but we usually get over it.
Which only holds true if you don't care much about the result.
I've seen people trying to take photos at an airshow using their phone camera. A small black dot in the centre of frame, rendered as an Impressionist oil smudge by post-processing. Was that worth even trying?
The best camera+lens combo is the one suited to the scene. Anything else isn't.
amarshall · 13h ago
The point is: who cares what the “best” camera is if one doesn’t have it with them to take a photo of the fleeting moment anyway?
watwut · 11h ago
But if you snap that pic, but never use it for anything because it looks slightly weird ... then you as well might not have the camera.
bombcar · 7h ago
I always take a few snaps at events like that - not to capture the picture, but to capture the moment in my “digital memory” - if I’m on the ball, I later get some of the “official photos” and add those; but the phone camera snaps remind me that I was there, which turns out to be surprisingly useful.
illiac786 · 4h ago
I feel it’s still better than nothing, hence the saying holds true for me. “Best” does not imply “good”.
rafram · 14h ago
Not really, because the scene you want to capture is there at that moment and probably wouldn’t be there anymore if you went back to the apartment/hotel/camera store and swapped out for a technically better kit. That’s what the “best camera” saying is about.
PaulHoule · 1d ago
I put a 90mm prime [1] on my Sony, set it to aperture priority, put the strap over someone's head and deputize them to get headshots ("frame it up with the viewfinder and push the button") and they do OK so long as the light is predictable. I wish I could tell the auto mode to let the ISO go higher than it will because I do noise reduction in developing such that there is no real quality loss at 6400.
[1] takes lovely portraits and no focus to deal with
jauntywundrkind · 20h ago
Viltrox, Sirui, Sony themselves, and Samyang have all kicked out really nice 85mm fast primes. $600 down to $400, listed in decreasing weight order (down to 270g!). Yes, whatever you have: it's a massive amount of gear to carry compared to a phone. But what results!
The past 2-4 years have been amazing for lenses: Sony's willingness to let other people make lenses has been an amazing win for photography.
jeswin · 16h ago
What has changed is the last four years is that Chinese and Korean lens makers have caught up in a big way, and are now producing excellent optics at a fraction of the price with AF and weather sealing (as of now, primes only). For example, the Viltrox Lab and Pro series, or the Samyang 135/1.8. The other Chinese manufacturers are a cut below.
Also, Sigma and Tamron (both Japanese) are putting out more higher quality lenses compared to a decade back. With optical quality rivaling Sony's own G Master series and the Zeissen.
roesel · 15h ago
I would love to do:
- set aperture priority (fully open for most cases)
- set shutter speed to AUTO with a limit (never open for longer than 1/100 s)
- set ISO to AUTO with a limit (never go above 6400)
If there is insufficient light, then by all means, the camera should adjust the shutter speed past the limit, but not until it has used all the available "reasonable" ISO range.
It's a shame I have to wrestle my Sony a6400 to get something even remotely close to this.
AuryGlenz · 12h ago
My entire photography career I was incredibly frustrated that there was no good way to change the minimum shutter speed in aperture priority.
Sure, I could go into a menu and change it from the range of 1/60 or a second to 1/200th (or 1/250th, depending on the camera), but that was it. This is on Nikon, btw.
But yeah, give me more options damnit. It’s something that comes up so frequently when shooting that it blows my mind it’s not an option.
But usually when I have passers-by take photos, the context is that we are posing in front of a church in Europe or something, and space can be limited.
I can't very well ask people to take a photo and but first to take 20 paces back and then do a crouch!
My wife wants to see our shoes as well as the church spires in the same photo. Maybe a 35mm or even 28mm would work well in our case.
PaulHoule · 1d ago
Definitely thinking of getting another prime but a ‘normal’ one with autofocus doesn’t really do anything I can’t with my zooms, I like 7artisans primes and might get one that is crazy wide but those are manual focus and take more skill —- I was so happy to get home and see I nailed this one
Just got their 10mm M43 (~20mm equivalent) and it's doing a good job[0] - focus peaking on the OM helps a lot with manual focus and aged eyes.
[0] Excepting that it's still wide enough to capture your fingers when adjusting focus or aperture[1] or holding the lens.
[1] Which is the wrong way around to "normal" - clockwise should close the aperture, not open it!
FredPret · 1d ago
I find that photos from a prime look better in some undefinable way. Maybe it's because there's more light coming through, or maybe it's just easier for them to make a prime with great optics than a zoom with great optics.
I shoot on manual with auto-ISO straight to JPG (I don't have time for RAW editing), so my prime photos tend to have lower ISO's and I end up with a faster shutter.
amluto · 20h ago
I’m suspicious that a lot of the apparent inherent benefit of a prime lens is that it can’t zoom, which forces the person holding it to think a little bit more about composition.
It would be an amusing experiment to compare a prime lens to a zoom lens that it somehow fixed to the same focal length. Maybe level the playing field a little bit by applying distortion correction to both lenses.
scottapotamas · 1d ago
There’s a lot more to it, but I attribute a lot of ‘better in some way’ to microcontrast followed by how the lens handles the transition to out of focus detail.
PaulHoule · 1d ago
Yeah, back when I had a Canon my only lens was a wide angle prime. I really like that Sony 90mm prime, DxO says it is Sony's best lens and I think it is.
Ever since I started shooting sports indoors (often w/ that 90mm prime or a 135mm prime) and started to depend on noise reduction I process everything with DxO and tend to use a lot of sharpening and color grading. One day I went out with the kit lens by accident and set the aperture really small and developed the "Monkey Run Style" for hyperrealistic landscapes that look like they were shot with a weird Soviet camera.
The lens I walk around with the most and usually photograph runners with is the Tamron 28-200 which is super-versatile for events and just walking around, I used it for the last two albums here
but for the Forest Frolic I used my 16-35mm Zeiss but it was tough because it was raining heavily -- I was lucky to have another volunteer who held an umbrella for me, but I couldn't lean in. The last one (Thom B) was not color graded because I'd had some bad experiences color grading sports when I got the color of the jersey wrong but now I use color grades that are less strong -- at Trackapalooza the greens just came out too strident and I had to bring them down.
To give you some idea of how powerful noise reduction is, this shot
was done in ISO 80,000 with that Tamron -- I wouldn't say it looks perfectly natural for a picture of cat that was not standing still in a room in a basement that is amazing.
FredPret · 1d ago
Incredible, in the 90's I could barely take a picture of my dog in broad daylight, and it cost money for the film, and I had to wait forever to get the photos back, and then the dog was blurry.
I have no nostalgia for film, I could not afford to take 1500 film photos at a sports event -- even a photo like this which doesn't seem that remarkable
wouldn't have come out that good handheld with a 35mm back in the day.
AuryGlenz · 12h ago
All your points are true, but primes tend to have more character as well. I’m no optical engineer so I can’t speak as to why, but it seems like they have more choices on prime design than they do on zooms.
Pro tip: 28mm on full frame (or equivalent) is exactly the same focal length as iPhone 1x ;)
sudosysgen · 20h ago
On many Sony models, you can set the camera to aperture priority instead of auto, set ISO to Auto ISO, and then change the max ISO to whatever you want; this is what I do in your situation.
roesel · 16h ago
If I set aperture priority to "maximum possible light in", I often have an issue that when there is insufficient light, the camera decreases shutter speed instead of cranking up the ISO (to the set upper limit), which would be much more desireable. This results in blurry images due to the longer exposure. I would much more prefer a grainy image over a blurred one in this case.
Do you know if there is any option of setting a limit on shutter speed while in aperture mode?
(I understand I can go full manual, but that just doesn't allow for the same point-and-shoot experience in changing light conditions.)
Yes, many cameras have a setting called "ISO Auto Min SS" which lets you set a focal length - minimum shutter speed multiplier.
dale_glass · 1d ago
There's always micro four thirds. I think it's a bit of an underappreciated format, really. It can have really compact cameras, and also they tend to have quite a lot of fancy tech in them.
PaulHoule · 1d ago
If I transition from semi-pro to pro I am thinking of picking one of those up because the 300mm lens is the equivalent of a 600mm and good for taking pictures of birds but fits in a reasonable backpack. Built in focus-stacking is another advantage over my Sony.
Mirrorless APS-C platforms pushed micro 4/3 out, similar footprint with APS-C sensors is hard to beat.
dale_glass · 1d ago
True, but I think micro 4/3 still can be a good deal smaller. It's just that a fair amount of the cameras didn't make good use of that.
Retr0id · 20h ago
There are also great deals on used micro 4/3 lenses
tormeh · 11h ago
An APS-C lens is just going to be bigger than an M43 lens. That means you can carry more lenses for an M43 camera. I have an Olympus/OM camera plus three lenses and charger, and it all fits in my flight carry-on luggage together with a laptop, underwear, and an extra set of clothes. APS-C and full-frame are cool, but they're annoying to carry around. For travel, nothing beats M43.
piva00 · 9h ago
They are a bit smaller but, to me, not that much of a difference when I compare my old Olympus M43 setup to my current Fuji X ones. Haven't really experienced any portability issues (also tend to carry the camera + 3 lenses when traveling), at the same time I do not use long lenses so I can agree with you there might be size advantages for those cases.
lambdasquirrel · 17h ago
> but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in
And so, the reasons why Fuji and point-and-shoots are popular. Lots of “serious” photography enthusiasts don’t really get this and call Fujis “hype” cameras but it’s like bashing Wordpress because most people don’t want to learn AWS to post cat pics.
> The iPhone is always in my pocket
Rationale for both point-and-shoots as well as Leica (also hated by lots of serious camera people ;)).
Ancapistani · 13h ago
This is the opposite of my experience.
I went from a D300s kit with about $10k of lenses to Fuji. I had an X100s, then an X-E2, and now an X-Pro3.
The X-Pro3 especially is light, has excellent physical controls, and very much feels like a vintage Leica. It's what I'd consider an "art camera" -- not what I'd choose if I were shooting weddings regularly, but perfect for street photography, family stuff, and perfectly capable of higher-end commercial work if you're willing to put up with its quirks.
The quirks are the point, though.
SchemaLoad · 15h ago
They were popular. Are they still? Just observationally there are two groups left, phone users, and people with very expensive complex setups. Everyone who would have bought those simple cameras moved on to using phones.
lambdasquirrel · 14h ago
By the numbers, the casual cameras are having a quiet turnaround.
Fuji and Ricoh can hardly keep their X100 and GR cameras stocked. Fuji added extra production capacity in China because it exceeded their expectations. I brought them up specifically because the serious camera people rag on them for being hype cameras, but I see plenty of everyday people with them. Go to places like the High Line in NY and there’s folks with A6700s and various X-mount cameras in addition to the serious full-frame mounts. Leica is doing financially well because of their Q series.
I think five years ago you could say it was just two groups, but by the numbers and by what I see in the streets, the point and shoots have been prematurely declared dead. Fuji and Sony are meanwhile figuring out how to sell APS-C to a more casual crowd, after the other old players effectively left that market.
skhr0680 · 11h ago
I'm a semi-retired pro and acting like Fujifilm are "hype" is really ignorant. They are a smart company who have a long history of making great pro-grade cameras and lenses.
ileonichwiesz · 8h ago
You’d be surprised. Point-and-shoot cameras have become extremely popular with young people in the past ~2 years or so because of the nostalgia factor.
aosaigh · 1d ago
I think these are good points. It boils down to: are you interested in photography or do you just want to have photographs? If it's the former, get a camera. If it's the latter, stick with the phone.
rainsford · 20h ago
I sort of agree, but I also think there is lot that goes into taking interesting photos as an art beyond the technical capabilities of the camera you are using. Certainly a good camera can produce a better end product and can enable dimensions of creative freedom that's more difficult with a smartphone. But the process of picking an interesting subject, figuring out the angle and composition of the frame, finding the right light and time of day, etc, are all independent of the camera you're using and something you can explore with just the smartphone you already have in your pocket.
1659447091 · 15h ago
> are you interested in photography or do you just want to have photographs?
If it's the former, take the time to understand not only your gear but also light and image processing (whether digital or film). If it's the latter, and you are a stickler for pixels get a digital camera, if not stick with the phone.
I'm interested in photography, but I won't buy a digital camera. My last film camera was a Minolta 700si (in the 90's) and a camera bag full of lens and flashes and other gadgets (filters shades etc), but was a far cry from the $10k professional camera with professional studio film processing. If you understand your gear, light, and how the images are going to be output (film or digital processing) you can get great images from whatever you are woking with.
Photography vs Photographs isn't about how many pixels a camera has or other limitations of a camera. It's what you do with it. Back in the day I preferred black & white film because I could control the entire processing cycle (I wasn't very good at color processing when the local camera shop could do it faster and better). Now I like the challenge of Photography with the limitations of a phone. Does that make it not "real" Photography? or not a real interest in Photography?
To me that where the difference is for "photography", a phone and dedicated digital camera are still digital. They are still processed and captured with the same medium, so learn it and understand it.
One might have greater ability to capture more light and thus not need the same amount of processing or setup, but it's still processed and produced from digital pixels. Both allow for any amount of post processing, but you have to know how to shoot with the device especially if there are more light capture limitations like a phone. If you just want photographs, put either in auto mode and you get what you get. Paying more for a dedicated camera just makes it easier to do, that doesn't make it "photography" over a more physically limited but still digital, phone camera.
datadrivenangel · 1d ago
I differentiate between photos for memory and records, and Photos for Photography as an art form.
AuryGlenz · 12h ago
I get what you’re saying, but I was a wedding photographer for ten years and that’s a job where ideally you’re doing both. That carried over to my personal life.
Not that I don’t ever take snapshots - I do - but instead of just taking a picture of your kid from eye level, you can get down on their level and wait until their head is turned so they’re shortlit from light from the window.
Of course, in that job you also quickly learn that the moment trumps everything. A technically awful photo of a great genuine smile or someone falling in the lake or whatever is usually better than an incredibly composed and lit photo of a person just sitting there…usually.
brianmcc · 6h ago
>> The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
This is why my Canon 80D sits and gathers dust. Too many family moments fluffed, vs my Android's basically 100% hit rate. Yes this is largely a skill issue on my part, which is sad, but modern phone photos are more than adequate these days.
scosman · 19h ago
Also:
- your entry level mirrorless is ~$300 of camera HW vs ~$80 of camera HW on the phone (very very rough estimate of sensor+lens BOM)
- the mirrorless doesn't have any of the physical constraints of being tiny and fitting in a pocket, which directly impact image quality
iPhones cameras are really amazing given the constraints.
flkiwi · 18h ago
Phone cameras don't come close to any of my "real" cameras with my decades of experience shooting and composing ... but phone cameras absolutely obliterate anything I was shooting with a film camera as a beginner back when film was a thing. I have also arguably learned far more about photography with my phone, because of its portability and zero cost experimentation, than I have with ANY "real" camera.
But, perhaps most importantly, along the lines of what others have noted: you know, my phone camera may not be as good, but I have zero complaints about the impromptu photos of my kid growing up that I could never have caught with anything else.
grapesodaaaaa · 18h ago
I would add that part of the reason it’s ~$80 of hardware is absolutely economies of scale.
It’s a lot easier to pump out quality parts for less money when you order 10 million of them and potentially helped finance a factory to build them.
jpalawaga · 18h ago
i mean, he didn't say that the iphone camera was bad, just that it doesn't stand up to dedicated gear (which it doesn't, but a lot of people will tell you, especially apple's "shot on iphone" marketing campaign, that it will).
WhyNotHugo · 8h ago
iPhone's picture quality has degraded substantially in recent models. Photos with a newer model look cooler, but fake and unrealistic. There's so much post-processing that photos looks completely artificial.
For example, take a photo of someone standing in front of a landscape. It looks like you took a photo on a green-screen and photoshopped the landscape behind the subject.
poulpy123 · 8h ago
> and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
Well, you don't need to teach photography to passerby, just to tell them to look there and push this button. It's not more complicated than on a phone, maybe even less. But it may look more intimidating to old a camera, it's true
brianmcc · 5h ago
Then they half press the shutter button and achieve only a brief moment of auto focus :-D
nomel · 20h ago
Has the HDR workflow improved? I'm not talking about the ugly tone mapping, I mean proper bit-preserving HDR, out of the camera.
All the displays I own are HDR, and something like a picture of a sunset, or even landscape, is so much better on my phone than my older Canon DSLR.
kridsdale1 · 18h ago
2025 Lightroom and Photoshop have a vastly better HDR workflow for working with RAW and exporting to AVIF or JPEG with embedded HDR luminance map that shows up correctly on iOS or in Chrome on MacOS with the display set to HDR. I don’t know about Android or windows.
I have re-exported files that I took in 2007 with the Nikon D7 that I kept the raw files for. They are vastly improved with modern processing (and noise reduction) vs what I exported from the same negative back then. The bit depth was always high enough.
wrboyce · 11h ago
My 35mm SLR, which is older than me (and I’m pretty old!), takes better photos than my iPhone 16 Pro!
markhalonen · 1d ago
I've had passer-bys take group photos with a real camera, no problem. What issues do you run into?
FredPret · 1d ago
"Which button do I press" comes up every time; other times it's focus or zoom level that's out.
On the iPhone, ~everyone on the planet instinctively knows how to do it.
deathanatos · 15h ago
I usually just tell people.
> "Which button do I press"
The Big One.
> focus
It's automatic. (If I'm handing a stranger my camera.)
> zoom level
This is maybe the hardest one, I guess, … but I do think most people have seen enough TV cop dramas to instinctively know. Or, they can just take the photo at the zoom I've handed them, and it won't be a big deal. Walking forward a few steps is also like zooming.
eddd-ddde · 1d ago
Curious what camera model you have. I've been meaning to get into photography and I'm looking for a decent starter camera.
FredPret · 1d ago
I bought a Canon RP which came with a 24-105mm zoom. I think it was CAD 1000 a couple of years ago, but it looks like that has inflated to around double now.
- small, especially if you put a 50mm prime lens on it (which costs ~ CAD 150 by the way)
- light
- full frame sensor (fundamentally better photo quality, but need bigger lenses to zoom)
- battery life is OK but not great. You can easily get through a full day of touristing with one spare battery though.
dnisbet · 10h ago
I have an RP and it's great, but I still reach for my M50 slightly more often, being a fair bit smaller with the 22mm ef-m on it and maybe more familiarity with it by me.
_tik_ · 15h ago
It depends on your budget and interests. In terms of sensor size, Micro Four Thirds (from Olympus and Panasonic) is generally the most affordable, but it comes with a smaller sensor. APS-C offers a middle ground, while Full Frame is the most popular and typically delivers the best image quality.
Personally, I use Sony APS-C the most because of its smaller size, lighter weight, and more affordable lenses. Among APS-C systems, Sony and Fuji offer the widest lens selection. Fuji gear tends to be overpriced now, but it does have a stylish look.
Micro Four Thirds lenses are usually cheaper and more lightweight.
If you're shooting fast-moving subjects like birds or Formula 1 racing, Canon and Nikon are the most popular choices. They offer a wide range high performance lenses designed for demanding situations.
nop_slide · 19h ago
Get a Fuji
throwawaybob420 · 18h ago
Can’t go wrong with Fuji. It’s fucking expensive now though
crinkly · 1d ago
100% agree. I went on holiday at the start of this year and took my iPhone 15 Pro with me. I bought a mirrorless camera and went back because I was that disappointed with it. No joke. I regret using a phone for most of my family photos for the last 10-15 years and should have just used my old D3100 instead.
mirsadm · 13h ago
I think the processing is getting worse. I look at photos I took with my Nexus 6P and they look much nicer than my Pixel 7/9Pro photos. At some point everybody decided that the most important thing about photos is preserving as much dynamic range and having no noise. This makes the photos look fake and unpleasant.
crinkly · 12h ago
Yeah agree with that. I’ve got a backup pixel 7A. That does some horrible things to photos.
throwawaybob420 · 18h ago
It’s really a night a day difference once you spend just a little amount of time learning your camera. I always show people the difference in quality with two photos of my wife and kids during Fourth of July.
One shot is with my iphone15, the other with my Fujifilm xt5. It’s such a stark difference
AuryGlenz · 12h ago
Do you show them on a monitor or large prints or on your phone?
I’ve long thought the main “issue” with people not realizing the difference is that they’re just looking at photos on their phones, where the images are so small it’s harder to appreciate the difference. I rarely try to take photos apart from snapshots with my phone because I’ll invariably be really disappointed when I view them on my monitor.
tap-snap-or-nap · 8h ago
Yes, my D3100 took way better pictures than any of my phone cameras, there is no comparison with the output quality. I did find them bulky and it is much easier socially to take pictures with a phone camera.
jiggawatts · 9h ago
> Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
I got myself a Nikon D800 over a decade ago when they were first released, and left it in 14-bit RAW mode since then. Technically these are "SDR" photos, but the captured dynamic range is closer to 1000-nit HDR. For a decade, I had to crush these to fit into sRGB SDR JPGs, which is throwing away most of the goodness.
A few months ago I took all of my 5-star pictures in Lightroom and used its new HDR processing mode to export them as 16-bit PNG files. I then turned those into a 2160p HDR video and played it on an OLED 75" television.
It blew my tiny mind!
The quality was simply jawdropping. It was like travelling back in time to all of those holidays and looking out through a window at reality itself.
This is why I go on regular online rants about how frustrating it is that the only way to share the full output quality of a modern digital full-frame camera is by uploading a HDR "movie" of the pictures to YouTube.
This is post fails to disclose an important detail, which is that the photographer was not standing in the same spot for all photos.
For iPhone golf player shot, they were standing closer to the players and using a wide-angle lens. For the “beginner photographer” shot they were standing farther away and using a longer focal length lens. You can tell by the size of the trees in the background. This difference in positioning, not “because iPhone,” is why the player’s faces are distorted on the left.
These details might not matter to random folks grabbing snapshots. But I expect something posted to HN to actually contain useable detailed information, rather than vague “looks worse” comparisons with an obvious thumb on the scale.
markhalonen · 3h ago
It is true that I was standing closer and using a wide-angle lens with the iPhone. But it wasn't on purpose to tip the scales, I was just taking an iPhone photo as I've done many times.
So it would be a fairer comparison to use a longer focal length, but it's also true that I am the Average Joe, and Average Joe took a better photo with the camera, because it guided me in that direction more than the iPhone did.
indoordin0saur · 2h ago
You were guided to stand where you were because of the lens on the camera. If your lens was a 23mm you would have stood in the same spot as you did with the phone.
nehal3m · 2h ago
I agree with this. The comparison is one tool versus another and the way you would naturally apply them figures into that equation. There's a million apples-to-apples pixel peeping technical tallies, this compares experiences as a whole.
bonoboTP · 2h ago
> But it wasn't on purpose to tip the scales, I was just taking an iPhone photo as I've done many times.
It tipped the scales and the post became overwhelmingly misleading, attributing the "distortion" to the camera, instead of the distance and zoom.
markhalonen · 2h ago
Right but at the same time, Average Joe will take better photos with a digicam because they'll behave exactly like I did and make the same mistakes, so arguably it's very naive but also an accurate depiction of the average idiot who clicks a shutter
mattlutze · 1h ago
You posted a camera comparison blog post to a nerd site, and there's plenty of camera nerds here. You might find that it's not the audience you were looking for, if you weren't intending to be objective or rigorous in your comparison.
But also, very fun to see the Copper Country featured on hacker news!
bonoboTP · 1h ago
I don't see why they'd stand at a different distance based on phone vs digicam. You can also zoom in with phones.
ezst · 12h ago
To me, the "hotdog skin complexion" aspect is a dead giveaway for when a photo was taken on an iPhone. It's so over the top and unrefined that I wonder how not only Apple let it happen, but seemingly entertain it/make it worse over generations of devices? Certainly such photos won't "age well"? And it's not like it has to be this way because of technological limitations, take Pixel photos, for instance, they get their colors much more balanced and faithful.
silisili · 12h ago
Same with Pixel, which actually did it years before I'd presume.
I'm white as ghost. Pixels are determined to make me looked tan for absolutely no reason. I mean, maybe I look 'better', arguably, but it's not me. Is that what people want?
I bought the kid some newfangled Polaroid type thing, and she uses that way more than phones anymore for photos. Maybe the kids will be ok.
dialup_sounds · 10h ago
Google made an publicized effort to better represent darker skin tones, which may explain the tan. It probably thinks you're overexposed and desaturated instead of pale.
And turn out hot-dog-coloured people by the score"
trallnag · 7h ago
That's basically what the USA are. Although Brazil is probably a better example.
globular-toast · 10h ago
I would bet that they are user testing the processing algorithms and that people actually prefer the slightly more saturated picture.
It's similar to the loudness war in music. Slightly louder/more saturated looks subjectively better when compared side by side. Apply this slight increase over and over again and you get something that no longer reflects reality.
This is complicated with pictures of people because people want them to look "good", not accurate.
marcus_holmes · 16h ago
I got interested in photography during my travels, and my wife is very interested in it.
I bought a decent camera. I really enjoyed playing with it, and spent some happy hours learning about it. I even took some decent photos (well, I liked them anyway).
But in the end, carrying it became a chore and trying to take off-the-cuff photos during adventures took too long. I found that we needed to go for specific "photography adventures" with the camera, with the intent of taking photographs with the camera, in order to use it. If we were going for a trip without the specific aim of taking photographs it was just easier to use the phone cameras.
Also the camera photos were stuck on the camera, while the phone photos were instantly usable in social media, and shareable from the Google/Apple Photos. I have a portable drive folder somewhere with all the camera photos, but I never see them. The phone photos are a search away.
I think it's the difference between "being a photographer" and "taking photos". I am not a photographer, I just want to take some photos and share them with my friends. They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again. All the comments in the article are accurate but meaningless in this context.
On the other had, if you're a photographer and want to take a photograph that someone will hang on their wall, all the comments in the article are accurate and relevant.
bonoboTP · 1h ago
> Also the camera photos were stuck on the camera, while the phone photos were instantly usable in social media, and shareable from the Google/Apple Photos. I have a portable drive folder somewhere with all the camera photos, but I never see them. The phone photos are a search away.
Seems like you don't really care much about those photos then. If you have them on a portable drive, how long would it take to do a drag-and-drop to put them on Google photos? 40 seconds + waiting for the upload? It's really minimal amount of friction.
> They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again
Sure, no need to do anything else for such snaps. But it's also nice to keep some long term photos to show your kids or grandkids. Like people did from the 70s up till the 00s. In fact, there are inexpensive services that help you arrange your photos in quality printed book-form albums, similar in principle to the physical photo albums of the past, where individual printed photos were glued. I find that picking such a book off the shelf happens much more readily than any urge to load up an external hdd to view photos on a screen.
TorKlingberg · 6h ago
> the camera photos were stuck on the camera
I'm surprised no camera manufacturer has created an easy way to get all your photos to Google Photos / iCloud/ Dropbox / etc. They have some wireless photo transfer things, but they're clunky and unusable. Just connect the camera to WiFi and auto-upload everything to the service of my choice. I'm guessing it's a mix of:
* Camera manufacturers are hardware companies and can't do software and cloud stuff.
* It wouldn't interact well with swapping SD cards, which is what all the pros want.
* The camera would need to stay powered when off to upload photos. Current cameras have a hard power switch.
acherion · 16h ago
Why can't you be both? I am an amateur photographer, but it doesn't mean that I carry my camera with me everywhere that I go. I see photography as a hobby, so when I feel like I want to do "hobby things" I bring a camera with me. I prepare myself to do so. It doesn't mean that I don't use my phone camera at all (in fact I upgraded my phone purely for the "better camera").
If you are just taking snapshots to share with friends, then it makes sense to not bring the camera. But if it's your hobby, where you sit down and take time and care to take a photo, then it's a different game altogether.
I don't often print my photos out and put them on a wall, but I do have my own photography blog where I post the photos I take (with a camera). I think the article is still relevant to that kind of scenario too.
I think the purpose of this kind of page is to outline differences between taking a snapshot and taking a photo. This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time. It also attempts to combat the prevalent myth that more megapixels = better photos. Yes that myth still exists in 2025.
marcus_holmes · 12h ago
yeah agree. I decided I wasn't a photographer, though I'm still interested in it.
> This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time.
"Never argue with idiots. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Seriously, are there people who think that iPhones are just as good as dedicated cameras, and can still tie their own shoelaces?
aosaigh · 1d ago
These are some good examples. I'd love more on this.
I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone.
I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc.
But I've come to the conclusion that once you start look closely there's absolutely no comparison.
One thing I've started doing is creating custom photo books from all my photos. It's really helped me focus my photography. When doing this though I've noticed how edited phone photos are, as well as how poor the quality actually is (particularly in low light).
The quality issue is understandable (it's physics). The editing issue is a bit more insidious I think.
All in all, if you just want to view phone photos on your phone, they look great. But if you're actually interested in photography and printing, you should get a dedicated camera.
rconti · 18h ago
I took my Fuji XT-2 and 27mm pancake lens on a recent trip, after leaving it at home the previous few. Every time, I find the Fuji takes more work and skill than I have to develop good photos after the fact. I too often blow out the sky, for example.
Unfortunately, the less I use it, the worse I get. So snagging my "nice" camera for a vacation, then spending a lot of time making sure I lug it around and use it, and then having the results be, frankly, bad, is really frustrating. In particular, I have quite a few photos that are.. either blurry, or out of focus, and it's hard to tell which. I am pretty careful to ensure I hold the camera still, and have a sufficient shutter speed, but I'm definitely messing something up.
I need to take more time to practice at home rather than capturing a thousand frames over 3 weeks and hoping they're good (like the bad old days of film!)
kalaksi · 11h ago
If you have sufficient shutter speed (also depends if you have image stabilization), then I think the issue is probably focus.
I also have a fuji camera. In manual mode, you can have focus indicator showing e.g. red dots in the in-focus areas. Another way is to use "focus check" button which is basically a quick digital zoom to check the focus yourself.
Regarding blown-out sky, I often use the HDR auto mode which effectively automatically lowers the exposure 1 stop and then raises it in post, so trading some shadows for highlights. You lose some control but it makes shooting easier.
I also use the display indicator / blinkies for blown out parts so I can easily see when something is overexposed.
comradesmith · 12h ago
Carry the camera with you through your daily life.
markhalonen · 1d ago
digicams are making a huge comeback among young adults. Even a pocket digicam is a big step up from iPhone imo.
rangestransform · 16h ago
The CCD digicams that are trending aren’t known for the technical quality of their sensors of lenses or whatnot, but the CCD low dynamic range aesthetic
aosaigh · 1d ago
I have a Ricoh GIII which is astonishing for its size. That said, it’s expensive so probably not an entry level pocket camera.
rangestransform · 16h ago
The GR III? I’m curious how the autofocus is on it, I tried one out at B&H but I think the autofocus was busted
dusted · 7h ago
I'm generally annoyed with the amount of processing going on in modern phone cameras, they often take pictures that "look fine" on the screen, until you zoom in to native resolution and discovered most of it is some fever-dream of approximations, it's amazing that we (people) are accepting this.. Lots of fine memories degraded by cheating cameras..
It's annoying especially because at a glance, the pictures taken by my S24+ look just fine, and it sometimes makes me not pull out the aging DSLR.. but then when I get the pictures onto my PC and want to actually look at them.. I always regret my mistake.. Even a 10 year old DSLR on automatic no-flash mode kicks its butt so bad it's not even a comparison..
OldfieldFund · 7h ago
I believe the biggest problem here is that the author of the blog was using the ultra-wide-angle lens. I can tell by how the players are "leaning" and how the software is "fixing" the curvature of the photo. 90% sure of it. I always use the "regular" lens, and the pictures are much better.
You can also set styles in the camera settings to fix these problems: incorrect AI white balance and lighting.
mahmoudhossam · 7h ago
It's because the consumption side has completely changed. Most people now don't even own a PC so they're not likely to even notice this problem.
dusted · 6h ago
probably.. I was at a range and took a quick snap of my target, because I wanted to review it in a bit calmer environment.. I remember standing there, seeing the bullet holes in the paper, and I distinctly recall two holes that had multiple hits. When I opened the picture on the phone to look, lo and behold, those were generic bullet holes, they except, not mine.. I zoomed in and nope, they're fake.. I have had so many experiences with this on different Samsung phones.. that stuff is just OFF, like, a picture of my kid in low light, and the phone just decided part of his face was probably the wallpaper, so it just put wallpaper pattern there instead of skin.. I've been over every setting I can dig up, can't find anything that should do this..
nmstoker · 9h ago
The colour corrections are also annoying when you're trying to take photos of things like cuts and bruises as you want an accurate record (eg to show a doctor) but instead it effectively says "let me clean that up for you" and you're left with the blemishes you wanted diminished!
Saline9515 · 8h ago
This is why I enjoy analog camera - aside from the fact that any 100$ camera can take crisp photos, they don't try to be perfect and add creative and artistic aspects to photography. Each film has its own color balance and sensitivity, each lens will render light differently, you can choose between them to create the aesthetics you want. I enjoy it more, and take really good family pictures with it!
StrLght · 1d ago
Photos taken on an iPhone are good, unless you:
* zoom in
* print them
* watch them on a bigger screen
Sometimes I compare photos I've taken over 10 years ago with Sony NEX-5 with photos I take today with an iPhone. There's no competition, APS-C from 15 years ago is still solid.
Anyway, the best camera is the one you have with you, so in that sense iPhone is great.
sgt · 11h ago
I was waiting for someone to say that ("The best camera is the one in your pocket"). Well.. I've always agreed with that. But maybe it's time to dig out that old DSLR again. It can always be in a camera bag in the car, ready for action.
lifestyleguru · 10h ago
I have an opposite experience. Most old photos are made with cheap compact auto focus cameras and always somehow blurry and pale, at that time that was the camera "you have in your pocket". Photos with modern smartphone are always superior.
jonathantf2 · 10h ago
They LOOK worse but they have a sort of nostalgic, "real" feel about them without all the extra post processing. Maybe it's because my eyesight isn't the best but my friend recently took a little digital camera to a festival and the pictures off of that are the ones we all posted.
jpatten · 8h ago
I’m sure that Apple did tons of A/B testing, focus groups etc. with different image processing parameters to arrive at the settings that their phones use for photos, and from these comments it’s clear that a lot of people prefer the iPhone photos. When I was in grad school (in the pre-iPhone era) I photographed lots of weddings on the weekends, and one thing I noticed during the process was that people often have a set idea of what good photos look like. This idea of a “good” photo is often not tied to what the scene in front of them looks like. For example a “good” photo that includes a sunset will show a highly saturated orange/red sky, even if that’s not what the sky looks like at the moment the photo is taken.
Personally, I carry around a Ricoh GR3, and shoot random shots with the iPhone, but when it really matters I’ll use the Ricoh. The way the iPhone flattens the lighting is what bugs me the most. Recently I was at a kid’s birthday party and each kid had a cupcake with a candle in it. The room was a bit dark, and the Ricoh photo showed that each kids face was illuminated just a bit by the candle in their cupcake… The color temperature of the candle light is warmer than that of the room light. The photo makes you feel like you’re really there. My friend shot a photo on her iPhone at the same time and we compared afterwards. In her photo, every kid’s face is well lit and the candle effect is gone. She likes her shot better and I like mine. Some people want a shot that reflects what they saw, and some people want a shot that looks like what they think good photos look like.
mcdeltat · 5h ago
I have found that non-photographer people have generally have absolutely no sense of what makes a good photo. They don't care about composition, lighting, colours, detail, or ambience. Their mental/emotional impression of what the photo represents is more important than the photo itself
Neywiny · 8h ago
MKBHD does a phone camera tournament (yearly?) and I believe at least once he found that people prefer a brighter image, even if that didn't match reality. No source or proof, just something I vaguely remember
ben7799 · 3h ago
This article is mediocre because smartphone is perfectly happy to take pictures that look like the "beginner photographer" pictures. You just have to know what you're doing.
- Don't use the super wide lens and stand too close to people
- Use the super easy edit features to fix distortion
- Pay attention to lighting & exposure
- Don't just accept the iPhones default settings
If you want toned down contrast and color smartphones are perfectly happy to do that.
Otherwise.. I do configure my fancy digital camera to capture reduced contrast and color saturation compared to the defaults on a smartphone. So a lot of the time my samples would look like his.
Average people want contrast + saturation turned up like crazy. This is why the defaults ship that way. This is why a lot of the beginner non-phone digital cameras often shipped with the defaults that way. This is why TVs ship with the brightness/contrast/saturation boosted. The average person might look at your more subtle photo and appreciate it as better than theirs but then they will go right back to being super happy with their high contrast/saturation images.
hatthew · 18h ago
My only significant gripe with phone cameras is that they oversharpen everything. Sharpening can subjectively make things look better as long as you don't zoom in too much, but has one significant problem: desaturation. In high-detail high-contras areas, e.g. the foreground grass, the sharpening pushes many of the pixels towards black or white, which are, notably, not green. This has the overall effect of desaturating these textures, and is the impetus for
Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.
CarVac · 17h ago
Unfortunately, if the phone camera images are processed without oversharpening, the results are extremely soft.
Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing.
vladvasiliu · 8h ago
> Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing.
Not just phones. Most wide-angles for "serious cameras" have distortion and rely on digital correction. See [0] for an extreme example in the form of a 16mm Canon, which is much less wide than the iPhone lens.
Yeah, and even with sharpening it's noticeably softer when you zoom in on the photo.
For fisheye, I guess it would have been more accurate to say: the perspective distortion is present in both photos and is stronger for the iphone photo due to a shorter effective focal length, and there is no noticeable fisheye/barrel distortion in the iphone photo.
patrakov · 10h ago
Regarding the focal length difference, which is very well illustrated by the first two photographs, I would frame this point differently from what the article does.
Disclaimer: I don't have an iPhone 16, but my Poco X4 Pro 5G suffers from the same "fisheye" issue with its 25mm-equivalent lens. And I am not a professional photographer.
It is not a "bad camera" issue, but a composition issue forced by the short focal length second and the users' aversion to cropping the image first. You can easily avoid this issue by shooting at 2x digital zoom (or cropping) and going 2x further from the scene. And 2x zoom (with the corresponding decrease in the resolution of the resulting files) is how I shoot the majority of my photos.
So yes, I effectively have a 3MP camera, not 12MP (and not the hyper-marketed 108MP AI camera), and, for many purposes, it's still good enough.
P.S. Composition matters a lot. The right photo has the right proportions between the players and the trees in the background. The inclusion of the yellow golf flag in the "beginner photographer's" photo is also what makes the scene more complete artistically and worth hanging on the wall.
Lanrei · 9h ago
Focal length wouldn't even be an issue if the photographer was taking the photos from the same position. The fish-eye effect is literally because the photographer is closer. Cropping a photo with a different focal length will give the same composition and difference will be the distortion introduced by the camera and the image processing.
Terretta · 5h ago
100% -- "zoom with your feet"
To your point, back up to where you'd shoot the long lens, then crop back. Thanks to the 48mp, there's room to crop, it'll be fine.
FWIW, this crop is what every* camera with a sensor smaller than full frame is already doing to get "reach" from smaller glass, whether we realize it or not.
* By and large.
kube-system · 16h ago
The distortion of faces near the edges of iPhone photos is, in my opinion, the biggest issue with iPhone photos. So much so that I avoid being at the edges of group photos specifically for this reason. And it gets worse as you approach the edge of the frame. If you are barely in-frame, you will look like you've gained 30lbs and you've just had a stroke.
thefluffytoucan · 4h ago
Easily solved. Next time have the photographer use the telephoto camera and make them step back a bit so everyone fits in the frame and the faces at the edges will be perfectly fine.
kube-system · 37m ago
That’s a technical solution but not always socially viable for most of the situations where someone else is volunteering to take a group photo that I just happen to be in. And taking a picture of a big group in telephoto is often space constrained.
lambdasquirrel · 14h ago
Yeah, and it’s an interesting problem because for a lot of casual photos, most people won’t care. But once you do care, there’s suddenly no recourse.
Folks will say it’s just the focal length. But can you crop when your sensor is already that small?
atonse · 1d ago
I just started looking at photos and videos we took on vacation. I have an iPhone 16 Pro.
And when I use the Photos app on my Apple TV to review a couple videos I took, I'm surprised at the weird, wavy quality I'm seeing in them. It's really strange.
I will compare this to the videos I took with my Sony a6700. But until then, I'm surprised at how odd the videos looked on a large OLED TV. Might be compression from iCloud or something. Can't quite explain it otherwise.
I have no shortage of friends who asked me why I bothered to buy a real camera, but if you're a hobbyist photographer, it's nice to use a real camera and have full control. There are apps that do let you do this on a smartphone, and it's definitely more convenient.
But there's something about the real photos (with real Bokeh) that still look much better to me.
neogodless · 1d ago
When I owned an S21 Ultra, I found the photos were horribly paintbrushed due to excessive machine-learning. They look nice on a little screen, but pixel peeping is terrible.
Using a OnePlus 12 now, and find the photos much less overprocessed (and wavy).
Toutouxc · 1d ago
iCloud videos look terrible on Apple TV, the first time it caught me by surprise too. The originals are significantly nicer.
datadrivenangel · 1d ago
I upgraded to the 16p instead of buying a new wide angle lens. The real bokeh is definitely nicer though.
teiferer · 13h ago
My expectation is that in a few years from now, the raw photo taken by the mobile camera will merely serve as an input to some AI image generator which will then produce a top-quality pro photographer grade image at whatever resolution you like with whatever changes you command ("without all those 1000s of tourisms in front of the Louvre except my wife"). The photo will be fake but will capture the scene that you have in mind better than any pro photographer could.
Have yet to see AI doing anything remotely close to real life image even now.
dwayne_dibley · 13h ago
uncertain what to think about this comment. Are you living under a rock?
CranberryDefuse · 12h ago
In 2021, Samsung introduced a feature called Moon Mode that, without the user's knowledge, substituted an artificial intelligence image of the moon for a moon photo.
Samsung recently pushed Oneui (their skin over android) I think version 8 to my 3.5 years phone (s22 ultra). Menus and light design changes are barely noticeable, but - they also revamped photo app.
Now every single picture taken is much sharper and better looking, the darker it gets the bigger the difference. Also 10x physical zoom produces much better photos in all conditions. It feels like I just got a new phone with amazing new cameras, I'd say dxomark score should be revisited.
Now maybe they tackled some hardware reserves via better algorithms, its all possible. Or, slightly more probably, some tiny little AI is ironing out pictures on a level not detectable by mere viewing by eye. I don't complain, camera is #1 priority for me on phone as an amateur photo enthusiast, and basically I don't need to upgrade phone for quite a few years. The results are really really good and I haven't seen anything noticeable in few hundred snaps, often done after sunset.
purerandomness · 3h ago
OkCupid (the original one, before they sold out) had a great article showing how your perceived attractiveness changes significantly, based on the camera you're using to take your profile pictures [1]
Interesting discussion here, I particularly like that people have recognized that the people who use phones to take pictures and the people who use cameras to take pictures often have different goals.
There are lots of areas where there is a ‘convenience’ / ‘art’ split. One I recognized early was houses that were ‘architected’ and those that were just ‘built’. Looking at cabins from the 1800’s vs houses you can really see a cabin is practical, it is focused on utility that is easily built with a wide variety of materials at hand and skill sets of the builders. Whereas homes that were architected and built used a lot of craftspeople, bespoke materials, etc.
My dad was a professional photographer and he would take pictures and I would take pictures and his looked great and mine looked ‘ordinary’? I was just capturing the view in a given direction and he was composing a view to have various elements in relation to make a picture.
Phone cameras are “free” in that you bought a phone and it happened to come with a camera, and you carry it with you everywhere because phone. So a lot of the image capturing that is done is what you see. People do compose shots, and I’ve seen great photographs from phone cameras. But it is pretty clear that a photographer using a phone works harder to get their shot than someone who just wants a snapshot, and it goes the other way too, a person who just wants a snapshot works a lot harder to figure out how an SLR works, “just to take a picture” while the photographer seems to effortlessly bring it up to take a wonderful shot.
So if you take the whole set of people who are using a tool, you optimize for the largest portion of that population which is where the culture aspects kick in it seems. People grabbing snapshots with ‘one button activation’ vs people taking photographs composing with scenes and light.
throwawaybob420 · 17h ago
The amount of people who get really defensive when people actually point out that, no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera is kinda crazy.
Aurornis · 17h ago
> no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera
9 times out of 10 when I see someone making this claim it’s engagement bait. They know it triggers people and generates interactions.
I think most people are well aware that they’re not the same. The point usually made is that it’s amazing that we can get such good photos out of something that fits in our pockets. In well-lit scenes you really can get some impressive image quality out of those tiny devices.
cultofmetatron · 17h ago
I take a iphone and a nikon z5 with me. in their defense, if you dont' know what you're doing, the iphone will consistently take better photos. my z5 photo beat it any day but I had to learn how to be intentional with it in order to get that difference.
Waterluvian · 16h ago
I’m not sure I’ve seen a single actual case of this. But I also haven’t seen a single actual case of anyone having any loud opinions about their phones for many many years now. I might just be finally old.
makeitdouble · 18h ago
It was a nice analysis of wide angle lenses, what processing is needed to adjust for the physical limitations, and on processing picture.
From there:
> Real cameras capture shadow more accurately.
> professional cameras
That's saying that real cameras don't use wide angle lenses nor have an image processing pipeline, and professionals of the field have adequately labeled cameras.
This kinda makes the whole piece so shallow and weirdly ideological, when it doesn't need to be. People interested enough in the craft will spend time knowing their gear, the strength and limitations, and work with it.
Phone cameras now give more and more access to the underlying mechanisms and RAW formats. There's of course tons of photos I'd want to put in my wall coming from my phone, they're just really great for subjects that properly match the lenses strengths. iPhones or Pixel phones aren't perfect or ideal in all conditions, but what camera is ?
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Aachen · 4h ago
The author identified their own problem: "The fish eye iPhone lens creates distortion". If you don't want distortion from the ultrawide camera, don't use ultrawide. The traditional camera didn't have an ultrawide lens on it either (or if it does, it's less wide)
Most other points also seem contrived to me. Not all: skin color really seems better on the traditional camera. Whether that's due to the phone not being able to use the main camera, though, I wouldn't know...
These pictures simply need to be compared with reality if you want to know which camera is better. I can't tell what the shape of the leftmost person's head is. I noticed the difference, found the iPhone version more flattering, but then read the text and saw that the iPhone is apparently distorting it. A reader can't judge how close it is to reality. Continue reading, and matching reality is now bad: the traditional camera can't properly capture the background (or light in the foreground of the later child picture) and the author thinks that's good. Blurring and darkening is something you can always still add in, I'd say that a camera performed better if it delivered a picture close to reality and you can work with that data to highlight any aspect you want. The camera doesn't have to force that upon you
KempyKolibri · 12h ago
The new(ish) Adobe Project Indigo attempts to rectify some of these - it generally captures pictures in a more SLR-ish manner, even when it outputs HDR. It does RAW capture and has decent control options if you want that.
However, it's a battery hog and can be a bit sluggish to get going, and there are some weird interactions with the built in photos app (if you crop the photo after the fact in the Photos app it pushes all the colour towards purple in the thumbnail, but not in the actual image).
I'm already happy enough with the image quality that I can overlook these flaws, which will hopefully get fixed over time. People should try it to see what they think.
Lord-Jobo · 7h ago
Im grateful I can still shoot raw on my pixel 8 and edit myself from there. But at that point I will just grab the dslr. A used canon eos 100d is like, startlingly cheap on eBay, I think I picked mine up for $150 a few years ago with a decent lens and it still demolishes any smartphone without much effort.
karel-3d · 12h ago
My phone is too old for this app :(
nixass · 1d ago
I'm always sad when I pull up holidays photos on my monitor. Even though Pixels make great photos, they're great only on small OLED screens.
Gonna clean the dust out of Nikon D3200 with proper lens and use that instead. Casual photos will be made byy wife anyway
Sayrus · 1d ago
On my Pixel, I'm always torn with using GCam or another camera app. GCam photos are definitely better on small screens, but every time you zoom in, you get AI artifacts, letters that shouldn't be here. It basically reconstructs the image from the original and blurrier photo. The other apps without these transformation lead to better quality on zoomed photos but the overall preview looks less good. This is especially true when digital zoom is involved.
In case it isn't obvious due to the zoom and lack of context:
- The texture on the top and windshield don't exist, it's plain gray.
- The letters on the card actually read something, here it's gibberish. Sometimes half a letter, sometimes a texture that doesn't exist.
makeitdouble · 17h ago
It might not be for everyone, but digging in the camera controls helped tremendously for me.
In particular, manual focus with the actual focus scale (no tap around on some surrogate object) and in-focus indicator, control to set a lower ISO in scenes where the phone wants to pull a faster image, or set a higher shutter speed even on darker situations.
Or on the pro line you get the option to stop automatic lens switching, which gives a lot more control (stay on the best lens/sensor and adjust for it yourself, instead of the phone trying to be clever)
All in all it stops being a point and shoot, and there will be a more missed pictures because of wrong settings, but the highs are also a lot higher in my experience. And it can go back to the "all auto" mode anytime.
os2warpman · 8h ago
> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall?
No.
I have numerous smartphone photos printed and framed. On both walls and horizontal surfaces.
There does not exist a greater pixel-peeping gearslut than I, but that's just a hobby. Hobbies only dominate my wallet, not my life.
sturza · 1d ago
Computerized phone photography is not for desktop viewing, printing, etc.
It appears to look "amazing" on phone displays - probably optimized for that.
rjh29 · 18h ago
And nowadays unless you professionally shooting photos for a billboard, bedroom poster or newspaper advert - that is clearly enough. 99%+ of photo viewing is done on a phone or tablet screen.
criddell · 6h ago
Even looking at the photos on the web page, I do see some differences, but both look fine to me. I'd love an A/B version where I can overlay the two photos and click back-and-forth quickly. But then if I need to do that to spot the differences, maybe it doesn't matter?
If my phone photos did bother me, I would turn on RAW mode and do the processing myself.
My "real" camera is a 15 year old Canon Rebel XSi. It's big and can't do a lot of the things my iPhone can and the photos are about the same quality (which is impressive because the Rebel is only 12 megapixels).
shmeeed · 7h ago
I have no idea why you're being downvoted. It's the simple truth.
prmoustache · 5h ago
Ironically I have a few framed photos, from mobile (because that is what I had in the pocket), digital and film cameras but most photos that I have framed are Polaroid and Instax ones. An instant camera is a major PITA to carry, the film are expensive, a lot of pictures end up bad because of limitations of the media, the colors are often not very neutral but you are 100% sure that you end up with physical photos after every take, and thus some good memories. While smartphone pictures are more likely to end up in a family whatsapp group, I have tons of mobile and digital pictures I don't even remember I have taken and they mostly just take up space in my NAS and backup storage. Nowadays I never travel without either my Polaroid, Instax Wide or Lomo Instant Square Glass. It is also a great way to make gifts. I tried portable printers. It is nice to make gifts but it was just a hassle to even connect and launch the print most of the time.
pmontra · 11h ago
The average person does not know anything about all of this.
I start with TV sets. The usual way to chose one was walking into a shop, looking at dozen of TVs tuned on the same channel, picking the ones that subjectively looked best then check the price and size. Did we (average people) cared about the inner workings of the TV? Nearly zero.
Enter cheap compact digital cameras (200-300 Euro or Dollars.) We didn't have a chance to take pictures to compare cameras and even if we did it would take too much time. We read reviews, trust them, shop from home. Most people would buy the model with the highest number of Megapixel.
Enter smartphones. On average there are people that will buy an iPhone no matter what and people that will not buy an iPhone no matter what. Then they would use the camera inside the phone and would possibly notice that its pictures looked better or worse than their previous phone, especially in dark places.
And about camera vs phone: the phone is always in the pocket, the camera is always at home unless somebody goes on vacation in some scenic place and plans to take a lot of pictures. Half of them will be taken with the phone anyway.
I do have a compact camera. It's some Sony model with 30x optical zoom. It's great to take shots of animals without having to get close and scare them away (so no picture.) It's definitely better than my phone but my phone is not so bad too and it's more convenient to use. Furthermore those compact cameras lost many manual settings that would make them more useful. Sometimes it's easier to pin the autofocus of my phone on a subject than to make my camera understand that it must focus to something instead of doing its best to focus on the surroundings. And I won't digress on how long it takes to take a picture with cameras and send it to somebody on WhatsApp.
So, those 5 golf players look better on the camera but their picture will be taken and shared with a phone 99.9999% of the times.
patrakov · 10h ago
> So, those 5 golf players look better on the camera but their picture will be taken and shared with a phone 99.9999% of the times.
The point not in the article is that a phone camera, when used correctly (i.e., not defaulting to 1x zoom, maintaining a proper distance from the subject, and choosing wisely what's in the background), can produce photos of the same kind as a real camera in terms of composition. And that's what should be shared 99.9999% of the time. The extra resolution does not matter online, as most people will not zoom beyond what the platform, such as DeviantArt, offers as the default viewing experience - which is approximately 50% of the screen width, i.e., 1920 pixels on 4K displays.
pmontra · 5h ago
It's worse than that. I bet that the vast majority of those pictures are viewed only on a phone screen, at whatever resolution WhatsApp, iMessage or Messenger transcode them, but not much more than a few centimeters wide. I add the Instagram and FB apps to the list, always on phones.
markhalonen · 1d ago
woah I am the author. I don't even have analytics set up on this site, but hope everyone enjoys it!
dataflow · 1d ago
Feedback: I absolutely love the idea of doing analysis like this, but it's incredibly frustrating to be shown photos that were clearly taken at different times when the subjects naturally don't look exactly the same. Like for example who's to say that player isn't actually leaning? The second photo sure doesn't prove anything. And comparing them side by side feels like an exercise in frustration.
I would probably (if possible) repeat this idea but with photos taken at the same time, with cameras as close to each other as possible. If at all possible I would also try to use as similar of a lens as possible, if only as a 3rd comparison point to compare the other two to.
multiplegeorges · 1d ago
The building shot perfectly illustrates all his points, very little difference between them.
The child in the surf is almost identical. Maybe a few ms of difference, look at the foot position.
The facial structure differences in the players were striking despite not being identical shots.
markhalonen · 1d ago
you'll have to believe me when I say they are not leaning. They were just standing there posing for the photo.
Would love for someone else to get more scientific about it, but I think the results would be the same.
dataflow · 19h ago
> you'll have to believe me when I say they are not leaning. They were just standing there posing for the photo.
I mean, if believing your words were enough to convey the message, then there'd be no point in taking the second photo and comparing them.
The point here isn't whether you're telling the truth (of course you are), it's about being able to see what's going on and get an intuitive feel for what changes and what stays the same. When I said "who's to say they're not leaning" my point wasn't to call you a liar; it was to say that that question is what immediately arises in your audience's brain, and it's completely distracting. Trust can't correct for the visual discrepancy, even if I had taken for the photo myself.
fallinghawks · 1d ago
I was pretty irked by that as well. The change from smiling to not smiling affects face shape. But at least the building and car photos were stationary enough to illustrate the fisheye quality.
sturza · 1d ago
One observation i'd expected to see is sensor size versus apparent focal length - this might be at least one of the reasons for distorsion. iPhone camera is ±7mm, which is ±4x crop factor in 35mm terms - but it's marketed as ±26mm.
ticklemyelmo · 6h ago
Much of the criticism of the Iphone photos is the fisheye effect. This is exaggerated, because you took the photos from different distances. If the Iphone photos were taken at the same distance, a cropped version of the Iphone photo would have identical perspective.
shinycode · 1d ago
There is apps like Halide or Photon that have a Process Zero or TrueRaw mode that is more natural. Of course a phone is just an other tool with different constraints. I gave up paying 2 or 3 times the price of my phone for a dedicated camera. I like the lightness and integrated software to edit photos and share them on the spot. I made that sacrifice knowing I’ll never have the same quality but I don’t have to carry a big camera now.
But for passionate people who want the best you can’t replace a dedicated camera with a phone
datadrivenangel · 1d ago
What kind of camera was used for the non-iphone shots?
markhalonen · 1d ago
sony a6400 with sigma 30mm f/1.4, but then the child one is a 2004 Digicam I think a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W5
turnsout · 1d ago
I like the comparisons! I think it's 100% fair to compare the "out of the box" images from the iPhone to other cameras. With that said, some notes:
I think a lot of the differences you're seeing are the result of FOV differences; the iPhone camera is a ~24mm equivalent, which is much wider than most people would shoot on a dedicated camera. That wide-angle distortion is just a natural part of the 24mm focal length, but not really the iPhone's fault.
The other effects you're seeing are related to Apple's default image processing, which, at this point, most people would agree is too aggressive. This difference goes away if you shoot in ProRAW and process your photos in an app that allows you to dial down (or ideally turn off) local tone mapping.
If you have an iPhone that shoots 48MP ProRAW, don't be afraid to crop the image significantly, which increases the effective focal length and makes the image look more like a dedicated camera. It also increases the apparent bokeh, which is actually quite noticeable on close-ups. With the RAW you can then quickly edit the image to end up colors which are much more faithful and natural.
If anyone out there doesn't have a Pro model, they can shoot RAW photos in 3rd party camera apps, including Lightroom, which is free.
p0w3n3d · 4h ago
I'd love to see indoor photos comparison. These photos all are taken outside where there's no need to do additional lighting from the camera, and using "some Sony 2004" camera is not a feasible solution in this case, because the flash would ruin everything, making people on the photo looking like a south park style stickers. I'd say that the software behind phone cameras copes well inside buildings, but standard cameras need additional help.
mrob · 11h ago
I prefer all the iPhone examples. The wider angle lens gives more of a 3D appearance, and the greater depth of field means I have greater choice in where to look instead of the photographer trying to force me to look where they want me to.
shmeeed · 7h ago
That's an interesting take that reflects how subjective viewing habits are. I definitely know what you mean, and there's a kind of (mostly casual or documentary) photograph where it makes sense to say that.
But in a more classical sense, directing the viewer's look is what composition in photography is all about.
jlarocco · 3h ago
In some situations an iPhone can't even compete. For example in low light, or in the rain, or with wet hands, or for getting certain focus and bokeh effects.
I love having a camera on my phone for the convenience, but when I want to take good pictures I take out my camera.
mikewarot · 5h ago
I thought the article was parody/sarcasm at first.
I've got an old Nikon D5100 DSLR which I sometimes pull out and take photos with, and a cheap $200 Motorola phone, which does amazingly well, if there's plenty of light and the subject happens to take up most of the frame (and can thus focus)
Getting a good photo with the Nikon is easier for me, but I've had a lot of practice. The main issue is getting things to focus in macro land.
tverbeure · 20h ago
My biggest gripe is with iPhone photos today is the way small details get mangled beyond recognition. Small text looks like it was sent through a hallucinating LLM (which it probably was!)
rconti · 18h ago
It feels like things are going backwards. I was never much of a pixel peeper, but in my last few iphones, 14/15/16 pro, I'm regularly noticing the airbrushing of all of the things.
cunidev · 20h ago
I recently switched to an imported phone with a bulky 1" sensor (Vivo X100 Ultra) and although far from my Sony mirrorless, the quality of shots and color science went up dramatically compared to my older Pixel 9 Pro (way overprocessed) and iPhone 13 (way oversaturated and pretty low-res). This is not to say there's no AI or strong computational component to it, but larger and more expensive sensors, which still have not found their way in mainstream phones, do bring massive advantage if they are not killed by excessive AI processing (as, sadly, I saw multiple times when test-driving Samsung Ultra phones)
Ironically enough, the Vivo ("Zeiss") color science also looks more accurate than most phones I've owned, and is pretty flexible at editing time.
breadwinner · 1d ago
Most of the issues noted are because of the wide angle lens of the iPhone. The more expensive iPhones (the Pro models) have 3 lenses one of which can produce photos similar to a traditional camera.
tylermw · 1d ago
Yes, the distortion noted in the article is also seen in wide angle lenses on traditional cameras.
markhalonen · 1d ago
The iPhone photo in the blog is iPhone 16 Pro which has the 3 lenses (I am the author).
breadwinner · 1d ago
And which lens was used?
markhalonen · 1d ago
which lens on my iPhone? Just the camera app like everyone else. For the good photo, it's a 30mm lens on Sony a6400 (45mm equivalent)
saithier · 19h ago
There are three different lenses on the iPhone 16 Pro. Which one gets used is determined by the "zoom" level you pick. The "0.5x" picks the widest angle lens, the "1x" and "2x" use the same lens, and the "5x" uses the third lens.
If you wish to reduce optical distortion and can get farther away from the subject, you'll want to pick the "5x" zoom. Think somebody else here said it was a 105mm equivalent, which sounds about right.
Intermediate values are obviously crops... although given that the 0.5x and the 1x lens are both 48mp sensors (IIRC), and the resulting image is typically 12mp, it doesn't make as big of a quality difference as one might ordinarily think.
breadwinner · 1d ago
Yes, but on the camera app, you should set 3x to use the longest lens. This will avoid distortion.
Zak · 19h ago
It appears the long lens on that phone is 120mm-equivalent ("5x") and any intermediate zoom is just cropping. A 2x "zoom" (crop) would get pretty close to the field of view of the author's dedicated camera lens, but with further reduced image quality.
Actually using the iPhone telephoto for a group photo like the one shown in the article would require the photographer to stand a considerable distance from the subjects, and then we might start noticing a little perspective distortion from the 45mm-equivalent lens on the Sony.
datadrivenangel · 1d ago
For mid to long ranges, a dedicated camera with A Big Lens is still the way to go, but for wide angle and landscapes the better iphone cameras are very competitive.
sturza · 1d ago
Similar to what? IQ? Amount of light capture? The first is a function of the second.
For 28 Years Later, note that while the iPhone sensor did in fact ultimately collect the photons for the movie, they attached substantial professional-grade glass to the front to augment the phone camera.
tehnub · 19h ago
My understanding is that all that extra gear is mainly to enable more ergonomic manual control for things like focus. The matte box and ND filter are probably the biggest boosts to image and motion quality, and there are affordable ways to get those on your phone.
bdamm · 20h ago
I see iPhone pictures posted on walls all the time, because most people aren't pretentious.
The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
Don't underestimate the power of the subject's comfort and state of mind. Gramma is happy to get the picture, she doesn't care how it got taken.
creddit · 19h ago
> The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
What an odd thing to infer. Just a really large leap.
its-summertime · 19h ago
> Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
Considering there are 2 photos of the same subjects, this reasoning becomes very order-dependent, we don't know the order of the photos taken, so we shouldn't be judging the photos on things affected by that.
throwanem · 19h ago
We should, however, so judge the claim that the photos are directly comparable, as is attempted here.
I honestly can't tell what the site author is trying to do. Criticizing oversaturation is reasonable. Claiming the camera is responsible for differences in pose and composition is madness.
its-summertime · 16h ago
The claim is that the pose hasn't changed, but how the camera represents the pose has, due to distortion, perspective, et al.
throwanem · 10h ago
I understand that that's the claim, yes. The author does an unsatisfactory job of defending it, which is extremely strange considering on how many axes an image out of a dedicated camera is palpably preferable to that from a phone, with its physical constraints and computational compensations.
I do shoot with both because I'm not foolish enough to think good work can't be forced from poor tools, but I know the difference between a camera that works with me, and a phone that mostly won't. This author appears not really to understand that difference clearly, identifying accurately some flaws and differences resulting from real constraints, and inventing others from accidents of poor test procedure such as obvious changes in pose between serially taken shots.
It's a confusing way to advertise his "Candid9" service to photographers; as one of those it leaves me hoping he's better as a programmer, and as a programmer it leaves me wondering why I should trust someone with such a questionable grasp of my problem domain has produced software that will successfully serve my needs.
I mean, when I do street work, I just get a phone number or email address and that works fine. What do I need with a QR code that requires a printer to produce? Good grief, I'm the only one I know who still runs on paper, I own three printers, and I haven't found a credible way to like QR codes! What does all this extra complication add for anyone involved, except some Michigander who wants a piece of what I'm doing for no good reason I can see?
markhalonen · 5h ago
most hn comment of all time. The whole point of the product is that giving someone a QR code ticket is easier than collecting email or phone number, which makes a big difference at high volume.
throwanem · 4h ago
What kind of volume are you doing? I see three examples. Hell, I get more people than that stopping me to ask for pictures or try to hire me for event work when they see how I use a camera, most days when I'm just out for a walk.
Really, what it looks like to me is just that you have a product that costs ~nothing to operate and seems like it sort of makes sense for smallish wedding-and-anniversary party venues - but you've discovered too late what a nightmare that market is and that the fit's not actually that great, so you're pitching to people like me to try to salvage with a pivot, not realizing that the ask to add a Wal Mart style belt mounted printer to my kit in order to produce these QR code tickets is really just never going to happen.
It's bizarre to me in what world you live where this constitutes "easier," but I also don't care. You want to intermediate and transactionalize a relationship so ephemeral it can already be nearly overlooked even to exist, and where your presence is unneeded and unwelcome - and mine is the most HN comment ever? But it does explain why no one in your sample shots is smiling.
markhalonen · 3h ago
> What kind of volume are you doing?
Most I've done is 60 group photos in an hour at a trade show.
> Really, what it looks like to me is just that you have a product that costs ~nothing to operate
Correct
> and seems like it sort of makes sense for smallish wedding-and-anniversary party venues
I would say the intended use case is destination venues like a upscale golf course or hotel.
> the ask to add a Wal Mart style belt mounted printer to my kit
Not how it works. If you looked at the website, you'd see that you print and cut the tickets at home before hand on a normal printer.
> It's bizarre to me in what world you live where this constitutes "easier," but I also don't care
Handing someone a ticket is easier than collecting their email.
> You want to intermediate and transactionalize a relationship so ephemeral it can already be nearly overlooked even to exist, and where your presence is unneeded and unwelcome - and mine is the most HN comment ever?
I have unlimited confidence and patience. Hit me with the snarkiest rebuttal you can muster!
throwanem · 3h ago
I did look at the website, of course. How else could I have critiqued your comparison of phone and discrete cameras?
At a rate of one a minute in a destination venue, sure, this makes sense, assuming you could land that kind of deal reliably. So why are you trying to sell it to street photographers like me, who do things differently, with different desiderata and different needs? And if you are going to try to do that, then don't you think you might be wise to listen when a putative customer explains how you have failed to earn their money?
markhalonen · 3h ago
@throwanem I think I hit the depth limit so replying here. I would be happy to chat about how a street photographer could use Candid9, but do know that I've made plenty of money in other businesses and this is a fun passion project for me, so I'm not begging on my knees for someone to use my side project.
throwanem · 3h ago
There's no depth limit, it's just that the reply link takes a few minutes to show up at depth. You can always reply from the comment view (click the timestamp) until the reply window (iirc 14 days) has closed. I don't care about Candid9; as I said, there's no place for it in anything I do. If it matters to you to pitch effectively to street photographers, I assume you would want to find out what we care about. If not, why pitch us at all? Unfortunately for me, it's too goddamned hot right now to go outside and live, and I'm bored of doing house chores. Good luck.
markhalonen · 2h ago
I don't really understand the current street photographers as I don't know how they would ever make money. Basically if you're already a street photographer, then you aren't motivated by money, which the pitch of Candid9 is that you'll make money. So pre-existing street photographers paradoxically are not the target market.
throwanem · 2h ago
Right, at which point I cease to understand why the "For independent photographers" tab reads as if trying to pitch me a gig-economy style addon to an existing practice. I can't speak for the market you are trying to target, but I would wonder whether you miss people like them by hitting people like me.
I guess maybe it could be worth clarifying your copy, but who'd care? I do street work when I do it because I like meeting people and because it makes people smile. If I wanted money also out of it, I'd more likely just drop my hat on the sidewalk or something.
I still don't see why the comparison page (the one originally linked here, the iPhone 16/mirrorless shootout) treats variations in pose and composition as equivalent with those caused by camera physics, which was what originally caught my interest in any case.
markhalonen · 2h ago
Yes one use-case is a gig-economy street photography practice, which does already exist in places like the Brooklyn Bridge, Candid9 makes that easier.
Another use-case perhaps in your case is to do it for free and do higher volume and market your money-making services? I agree that it is fun and mood-lifting to take portraits, but also it would be cool to make it sustainable.
but yeah overall Candid9 is a hammer looking for a nail right now.
hnuser123456 · 19h ago
All these photos also seem to be taken at a further distance at a higher zoom with the digicam. Use 2x mode on iphone and step back a bit and the perspective/distortion should be similar. 12mp is still plenty. Also, they didn't mention if they turned off face smoothing on the iphone.
Google a couple years ago, however, made a big stink that they were forcing an always-on filter to "enhance" the appearance of dark skin on Pixels, so yeah you might need a real camera to get accurate photos of subjects with darker skin if you have a pixel.
jeffbee · 18h ago
There isn't an "accurate photo" that you can objectively adjudicate. All digital camera outputs are highly processed to get appealing results. The fact that you think Real Tone on the Google Pixel was "a big stink" only tells us about you, not Google.
hnuser123456 · 15h ago
It would have made more sense if they explained it as part of an overall tonemap accuracy update. Which does probably produce better overall results to be fair.
throwawaybob420 · 18h ago
what? You can literally objectively see how much more “normal” they look on an actual camera. Especially the guy on the left, he looks atrocious on the iPhone
jonny_eh · 19h ago
How else to justify spending thousands on a device that can only shoot pictures?
throwawaybob420 · 18h ago
Do you know how childish you sound? That specialized equipment that does one thing really really fucking well is expensive? Is this supposed to be a gotcha
Mashimo · 12h ago
> a 2004 Sony Digicam with a paltry 5.1 MP
thousands rubbles?
throwanem · 19h ago
Competence. But you're right something is off here.
givinguflac · 5h ago
I find this article to be lacking. Perhaps I missed it, but it seems to me the author was shooting in the default settings and not ProRAW which is head and shoulders better. Also, seriously with the “leaning”? You can’t crop/rotate to make them look identical for comparison?
ksynwa · 9h ago
As a permanently amateur photographer my favourite aspect of this comparison is portrait photographs. Beginner cropped frame DSLRs with a high aperture prime lens take so much better portrait pictures than any phone camera. Now I understand that it is not really fair to compare a specialised equipment with a phone camera. But it is a testament to how timeless and beautiful a prime len's bokeh is. Phones try to simulate it with depth estimation but it never looks good to me.
m463 · 2h ago
this is a little confusing because "beginner" shows worse composition in each case, for example the trees growing out of the heads of the subjects.
thefluffytoucan · 6h ago
Colors are always subjective, so it’s totally fair to not like them.
But why does the article compare what I assume is the iPhone’s ultra wide angle lens (incorrectly referred to as a “fish eye” lens) with a different focal length on a different camera without specifying what exactly it is being compared to? That’s apples to oranges.
Distortion from focal length can only be meaningfully judged in combination with sensor size and subject distance.
Example: iPhone 16 Pro ultra wide focal length is 13mm (equivalent to full frame). So the comparison shots need to be taken from the same spot and with another 13mm equivalent focal length, for example a full frame camera with a 13mm lens or a micro four-thirds camera with a 6.5mm lens.
neomantra · 9h ago
Has anyone used this Candid9 service or QR code photo sharing workflow? Does it work well?
I happen to be making a RPi Camera for Burning Man and was incorporating a QR code workflow into it. With a thermal printer for either a low-res pic or a QR code to print or snap. I devised something along the lines of this service, but dead simple URL generation to filename+hash in an S3 bucket.
markhalonen · 5h ago
I am the creator of Candid9 and I have taken about 290 photos of strangers and distributed them via candid9 QR codes. Happy to chat about it!
actuallyalys · 17h ago
I basically agree with the author that the iPhone's camera is inferior to dedicated cameras, at least in the hands of a photographer who's learned to use them. To me it's striking that there's even a question. My first camera as a child was a cheap film camera[0], and the first digital cameras I saw firsthand, as cool as they were at the time, had even worse quality. Now smartphones have much better quality for people pointing and shooting and do it while crammed into a device that does many other things.
Now, I'd hate for dedicated cameras to go away. I love shooting on SLRs, digital and film. I see smartphone cameras not as pretenders to the throne but as democratizing tools lowering the barrier for entry and a great way to get shots when you don't have your dedicated camera.
[0]: for the record, the issue with the camera was that it was cheap and I didn't know what I was doing, not that it was film.
hettygreen · 3h ago
What is a good digital camera that can be carried around in a pocket easily?
spamjavalin · 11h ago
I always see smart phone pictures printed on walls. Also all these photos look the same pretty much. News flash no one really cares about perfect - only good enough.
Almondsetat · 1d ago
Framing is different because of bad lens choice on the photo part (why always shoot wide angle??) and this skews the results immensely and unfairly (composition is the most important thing in a photo).
Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.
markhalonen · 1d ago
"you will have the average complexion and you will like it" rofl
Almondsetat · 1d ago
who are you quoting?
markhalonen · 1d ago
it seems you accept having your skin color changed by the iPhone algorithm... I do not accept that so was making light of it
Almondsetat · 1d ago
All cameras imprint their own color signature to photos, so I really don't understand what you're talking about. Some people buy exclusively Canon cameras because their JPEG profiles give "good" skin tones straight out of the camera. Does that mean they are "accepting" Canon's opinion of what skin should look like?
Yes. Everyone does, with every manufacturer, and Apple evidently has determined their visual style. At least they also provide you with an optional semi-raw output you can freely edit if you so desire.
aosaigh · 1d ago
Not really. Look at the sky, it's very different between the two. This is something I've noticed constantly with iPhones in particular. To the point where I don't bother trying to take photos that focus on the sky or sunset as it heavily processes the results (extreme oranges and deep blues).
Almondsetat · 1d ago
Those are the colors people like. Go and look at how photographers usually try to make skies more dramatic for clients in all kind of photoshoots (weddings, events, postcard pictures, etc.). That's what the market wants. You can disagree, but it's not like smartphone companies are incompetent and don't know how photography works (not that you have made this claim)
aosaigh · 1d ago
I don’t think we disagree. It’s the broader point of phones now doing the editing for you. If you enjoy photography then this is “worse” as you would prefer to do that yourself in Lightroom. If you don’t enjoy photography this is “better” as your result look great without additional effort (for me it’s the former).
shmeeed · 5h ago
Well, you could just as well shoot RAW with the iPhone and fiddle with it in Lightroom. It just so seems that few people, even few amateur photographers, are doing that...?
Almondsetat · 1d ago
Phones have always been designed for "normal" people, nonetheless manufacturers are actually giving pros more tools than ever. Smartphone photography might have been less processed in the early 2010s, but the outputs were difficult to edit and jpeg only. At least nowadays the big players allow you to shoot also in raw formats. Before smartphones, "normal" people who wanted to take photos without bothering too much would have simply shot in JPEG and blindly trusted the color decisions from the camera manufacturer, or by the chemical engineers at the film/development/printing factory.
aosaigh · 1d ago
I also think there’s something special about looking through a viewfinder.
Even in new cameras (where the viewfinder itself is a tiny screen) something happens when you frame a photo this way, that doesn’t happen when you use the back display (or a phone).
I don’t know if it’s down to physically using one eye, or the psychology of bringing your eye to the camera’s eye, but it feels different (and I like it)
ivell · 1d ago
"in the iPhone photo, the player is "leaning". His (long) feet are on the left and his head is on the right of the image. In the right image, the image accurately portays his balanced and confident stance. "
The subject seems to have moved. His expression is different, how he holds the stick is different. Hard to believe that the stance remained the same meanwhile.
markhalonen · 1d ago
the player in green has a substantial lean as well. Download the photo and crop and you can see it.
drcongo · 1d ago
There's so much wrong with this article it's difficult to know where to start, but the fact that they didn't bother to take the photos at the same time with an equivalent focal length makes the entire thing pointless.
markhalonen · 1d ago
How do you take a 45mm focal length photo with iPhone?
drcongo · 1d ago
I said "equivalent" - the 2x lens is a 48mm equivalent so that difference would be almost invisible to most people.
jdelman · 18h ago
I see lots of framed iPhone pictures. I have a few in my house. They’re not big, but they’re pictures of happy moments that are worth printing. Using the 5x lens helps, but good composition, cropping, and fine tuning colors does as well.
olivermuty · 1d ago
The best camera is the one you have with you!
j00pY · 11h ago
Absolutely. My DLSR almost never comes out which is a shame, but even on special trips I don't want to lug an extra camera around and have to worry about damaging that, so my phone has been my primary camera for 10+ years.
dale_glass · 1d ago
That's not a particularly great test, because every camera will be great outside in the sunlight, and those photos are some of the least technically challenging ones you can take. Even a phone from 15 years ago won't be that bad at it.
Modern computational photography does a great job of dealing with tricky conditions though.
markhalonen · 1d ago
iPhones always take "decent" photos even under tricky conditions, but they never take great photos. I would take 10 great photos over 100 decent photos myself.
Ancapistani · 13h ago
They really don't.
I regularly take photos outside, at night, in ambient light with my Fujifilm X-Pro3 and 56mm f/1.2. I'm stretching the limits of it a bit, using high ISO and as low a shutter speed as I can get away with.
In the same lighting conditions, an iPhone will basically take 3-5 shots and composite them together in software. The result, predictably, is unusable for most moving subjects.
roywiggins · 6h ago
> The fish eye iPhone lens creates distortion
Fisheye lenses are a specific thing, iPhone lenses aren't fisheye lenses.
jillesvangurp · 13h ago
I have a Pixel 6 Pro. I played a bit with it's raw format when I got it. It's fairly impressive; especially for night time photography. When that came out, both Apple and Google sourced their sensors from Sony. I think that's still the case. At the hardware level, there's not that much difference between cameras in different phones. Most of the differences are created in software.
The dng files that come out of my Pixel phone down sample from 50 mega pixels to 12.5. You can't access the original 50 mega pixels. So each pixel has information from 4 "real" pixels. That's fairly effective for getting rid of noise. I took some night shots with it and it holds up pretty well. It actually makes Google's night vision AI mode a bit less impressive because the starting point isn't that bad.
My other camera is a Fuji X-T30. The lenses and sensor are clearly better on that one if you look at the raw files. More detail, dynamic range, etc. But at night it's kind of weak (noise). And if you are into that, Fuji's film emulation produces pretty pleasing jpg files without a lot of work. I shoot raw so I tend to ignore that. But it's a somewhat fair comparison because in both cases there isn't much post processing. Except the Fuji isn't doing a lot of AI trickery and is just relying on a good results that come out of the camera and applying a prefab tone mapping that resembles what film used to do.
The difference of course is that with the Fuji, you are making lots of creative choices with focal range, depth of field of the lens (aperture), shutter speeds, and ISO while you are shooting. You don't really have that with a smart phone (though you can have some control). The iphone and pixel phones fake some of this stuff and some people like the portrait mode with the fake bokeh. Lens quality is amazing given the size of phones these days. But it's not the same as shooting with a proper lens and they do have some real physical limitations.
And if you shoot raw, you gain a lot of control over tone mapping etc. Not for everyone of course. But also not the end of the world with the right software. I use Darktable for this and if you dial that in properly, it's not actually a lot of work.
That being said, my pixel takes decent photos without a lot of effort and there is value in that. I have it with me by default and that is invaluable. I only use the Fuji a few times per year. But there's less art to using a smart phone. Point and tap on the button and hope for the best.
whatever1 · 14h ago
To my knowledge none of the photo oriented cameras of the market have the processing capabilities of a modern iPhone.
These things can casually record 4k 60 for as long as your storage can survive with the best OIS. Night mode photo check. HDR mode check.
I wish Apple was selling their processing hardware to camera vendors.
brokenmachine · 13h ago
a6700 can do quality 4k120 for as long as you want and has IBIS, HDR and real lenses.
I know what I'd rather take pictures with.
landgenoot · 13h ago
Isn't that because the processing is not supposed to happen in-camera?
dejongh · 12h ago
After reading the article I might dust off my DSLR, however the fact that I have my iPhone with me most of the time will never change - so more than 99% of my photos/videos will be captured by that thing.
amelius · 10h ago
The trees look better in the iPhone photo. In fact, the leftmost player's hair looks like it blends with the trees and becomes a different hairdo.
quest88 · 1d ago
The differences are subtle to me. I see them but it doesn’t prevent me or my family from printing and hanging iPhone photos. I want to hang fun photos from family vacation for the memories.
markhalonen · 1d ago
I was born in 95, so my childhood is well documented by my mothers digicam. When I look back at the photos, it is very obvious they are way better than iPhone photos that many parents are taking today.
sturza · 1d ago
While i don't disagree, it's good to take into consideration the way people took photos back then vs now. I'd argue that today they are more of a commodity than they were back then, so people thought more before they took the shot(at least for some photos).
dangus · 17h ago
The opening statement of the article is almost insulting in how badly it abuses correlation, causation, and the concept of cause and effect.
It effectively states that people don’t print photos anymore because phones produce bad photos.
But back in the film camera days you literally had to develop and print the photos to see them. There was no universal device for viewing photos that you always had on you.
can16358p · 18h ago
iPhone camera is perfect for getting an instant/algoritmically-processed HDR-enabled photo that looks nice on the phone screen and social media. Oh it's also great for macro due to physically being small.
For everything else, actual camera hands down!
Though for its size and availability iPhone camera is great!
PaulHoule · 1d ago
Shouldn't this be "bad"? BTW, as an independent photog I have been looking for something like this, even thinking about making it myself.
joelccr · 1d ago
TFA has the title in quotes, as though it is a reply to someone saying it. Must have got lost on submission
chimeracoder · 1d ago
Yeah, removing the quotes from the title in the submission (which may have been done automatically or by a mod) completely changes the meaning of the title as read.
kittikitti · 18h ago
It's a genre of clickbait titles that I support since the content actually supports the opposite, for journalistic effect. It's very funny when people who never read the content and share an article are exposed.
kazinator · 18h ago
Beginner Photographer's pictures would compare better if they used a wider depth of field so the background objects are sharp, like the iPhone pics.
But, conversely, how do you do the narrow(er) depth-of-field in the iPhone when you want it?
jrockway · 17h ago
The iPhone blurred background is completely synthetic. It uses multiple cameras to build a depth map of the scene, and then blurs whatever isn't at the depth of the subject of the photo.
If you're asking "how do you do", you can select "portrait" when taking the photo, or go to the photo in your gallery after the fact, pick "edit", pick "portrait", and choose a fake aperture ("f/1.4") and focus point to use. The results are ... mid.
Melatonic · 8m ago
You can also get decent real bokeh by using the main lens and focusing it as close as it can go (place the subject the correct distance) or do the same thing using the 5x telephoto
can16358p · 8h ago
It also fails miserable with long hairs unless it's all tightly tied up.
Though still good to see how it turns out otherwise for a small phone in your pocket.
retinaros · 6h ago
results arent mid they would be equivalent to the beginner photographer in article.
jrockway · 4m ago
I mean, you can try it. I took a random photo in my library, my self and a friend taking a selfie at a museum. I added the blur and there is no way to make both of us sharp while having the background blurred. Our depths are that different (inches), I suppose. At least with a DSLR you could correct this before taking the picture (by adjusting the composition of the shot). Doing it after the fact with a questionable depth map... not as good.
One could take the depth map and use it to mask off two areas to keep sharp, which would potentially have better-than-real-camera results. The iPhone does not do this, however. You'd have to write your own program to do it.
geldedus · 5h ago
that's not what "bokeh" means ; that's only out of focus blur of the background
aalert · 8h ago
Portraits that you'd get from a nice 85mm f1.2 or f1.4 on a full frame camera cannot be replaced with iphone images (yet!) imho. Any color grading can probably be reproduced in post.
bloomingeek · 1d ago
I've been a Nikon user for decades, once I purchased a digital Nikon SLR, I was in heaven. Now, with my cell phone camera taking really nice pics, I don't carry the SLR as much. If I want to print and hang a photo, if it's a close up shot, I use my phone. If it's a larger view pic, I use my SLR.
userbinator · 17h ago
At least the "real" camera won't be hallucinating detail that isn't there.
If you read through the thread on that top story, it wasn't a hallucination. There was really a leaf in the shot.
deneb150 · 1d ago
iPhones have wide angle lenses but they are NOT fish eye lenses as stated a couple times in the article. They definitely distort things but a fish eye lens distorts things in a very different curved way rather than keeping lines straight like a regular wide angle lens.
bombcar · 1d ago
I see what he’s saying, but I also see all the iPhone photos printed and hung on the wall.
todotask2 · 9h ago
I would framed it up with the photos taken with Halide P0 app.
muppetman · 11h ago
I've seen plenty of smart phone photos on walls. Heaps.
I get the author knows what he's talking about/looking at, but most of us don't. I couldn't tell you which of those was iPhone vs Expensive Camera if you didn't tell me. Maybe I could guess but I'd have to examine.
This is the same as me being incredulous that the author has (made up example) a $20 cheap router his ISP gave him vs my lovingly handcrafted config on my home VyOS router.
At the end of the day both work...
jajko · 10h ago
Both work for you since you have no idea about actual photography. The second the article loaded on my small screen and I knew it was iphone vs real camera, without seeing description I knew photo on the left was from iphone.
Apple is 'famous' for at least a decade to (by default and basically nobody turns it off) overdo saturation towards red spectrum so that every single photo looks like its taken in golden hour (last hour before sunset). Every single one. Skin tones are affected correspondingly, looking artificial. You may not see it, its glaringly obvious to anybody who even scratched surface of photography (I never got deeper and still).
I get it, people like that 'instagram' look, but when its coming from all directions it loses all beauty and its just plasticky looking people.
Apple has some properly good hardware (and corresponding sw processing), they didn't have to resort to overdoing it so much (also very aggressively removing any skin blemishes and moles which all goes back to above). At the end, apple photos and people on them look too artificial. If you like it as such that's fine, but it doesn't represent reality, at least far less than other phones and proper camera photography.
pizlonator · 17h ago
This article is evidence of iPhone cameras being really amazing intermingled with lots of words about things
BadJo0Jo0 · 1d ago
Wasn't there a phone with a lens mount system using that maker's existing lens eco system? I cant remember the maker. Sony? Nikon?
Zak · 19h ago
No. Sony and Olympus both made interchangeable-lens cameras with no screen or viewfinder meant to pair with phones. Realme made a prototype phone that can take an attachment to mount Leica M-mount lenses: https://petapixel.com/2025/03/04/realmes-ultra-phone-concept...
wigster · 4h ago
i prefer the other. death by auto filter
otikik · 13h ago
I prefer what the author calls “hot dog skin” in the examples
ingohelpinger · 6h ago
stop using phone cameras and lets go back to analog.
crinkly · 1d ago
They are good until they aren't.
In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible.
It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.
mullingitover · 17h ago
If we’re going to berate mobile phone cameras I’d like to offer my take as someone who uses off camera lighting: it’s bullshit that we still don’t have any way of doing flash sync. I want to be able to control my Godox three point lighting system. I can trigger it with my Canon P that was made in the 1950s (which has no electronics whatsoever!), but not my iPhone that’s over 60 years newer.
viccis · 13h ago
A couple of things, some of which are difficult topics to broach:
1. Every dude here is pretty unattractive, so the question is which camera gives them enough camera makeup to hide it. If you shake your head at this, take a peek at this: https://i.imgur.com/vdD5r8M.jpeg Every dude is mewing for his life in the latter photo
2. They aren't making the same face for each shot, so all of this is a waste of time. That's so much more important.
3. The only real difference is just the background being blurred or not. Otherwise it's a totally different pose for each guy.
kolololos · 8h ago
The best camera is the one which you have with you
epicureanideal · 19h ago
Why can’t the fisheye distortion be removed with software?
ruuda · 19h ago
It can, but the result of doing that is not a rectangular picture. You can crop it again, but then you lose a big part of the edges.
epicureanideal · 12h ago
Anyone out there feel like making an app that fixes the distortion and then fills in the missing edges of the rectangle with generative ai? I’d sure enjoy using such an app.
ubermonkey · 6h ago
I've been a pretty enthusiastic amateur photographer for a long time, though COVID broke a good part of that habit.
Even so, though, 5 or 7 years ago it became clear that I could absolutely use some iPhone shots as part of my travel sets. Yeah, you could tell they weren't from the full-frame Sony, but the delta was small enough that it was okay. Now that delta is narrower.
But the BULK of the photos I end up sharing are still from a real camera. Some of that is the lack of distortion, and some of that is likely the intentionality of Using A Camera vs. whipping out one's phone, and a good chunk of is the level of control a competent shutterbug has with a proper camera that is mostly absent, or at least harder to manipulate, on a phone (aperture, shutter, ISO, etc).
Thaxll · 1d ago
All recent smartphone camera are good.
badgersnake · 13h ago
> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall?
I have a photo I took on my iPhone 6S on my wall. It’s a crop of a panorama taken from the top of a sand dune in Namibia.
deadbabe · 17h ago
Smartphone cameras have always been shit, the best thing about them is that you have them all the time.
But then I bought a Ricoh GrIIIx, which is very pocketable and takes amazing photos. Even has a handy remote view function through WiFi. I don’t bother with my phone anymore.
kittikitti · 18h ago
This is a great article, thank you for this. I will save it as a reference. I usually get unsolicited advice from people when I use my Fujifilm camera's about how a smartphone would shoot better. Even though I own one of the latest iPhone's, there's no comparison between the two.
I don't mind the comments but there's always someone. There's also people with the latest phones who come and brag about their photo quality. I'm always nice about it and give my talking points about the sensor sizes and the lenses as quickly as possible.
Sometimes they are more aggressive about it and start to question my competence. I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's as I'm usually in the middle of a few things during events. I liked how the article mentioned amateur photographer (which would describe me) so it addresses some of these concerns. It also uses examples of older cameras that are very affordable.
Next time someone is coping from Big Tech marketing about the camera on their smartphone, I'll show them this. All the "Pro"s use iPhone camera, right?
Mashimo · 12h ago
> Next time someone is coping from Big Tech marketing about the camera on their smartphone, I'll show them this.
I'm not sure anything good will come of showing them this article.
Just say "yeah" and move on.
9rx · 17h ago
> I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's
> "My phone takes better photos"
< "Yeah. I wish I could afford one."
Problem solved.
dangus · 17h ago
The actual answer is not to engage in the discussion.
“I prefer the photos I take from this camera.”
No comments yet
throwawaybob420 · 17h ago
Honestly those people are fucking worst. Somehow having an actual camera makes people feel…inadequate? Like cmon dude, let me take my photos why do you have to start saying “oh my phone takes better photos, and i can use it to watch YouTube”
hopelite · 18h ago
I wish the images had been taken at the same height. Especially when taking images of a person and evaluating their faces, taking one from a lower angle and another from a higher angle does not allow for good comparison.
I am also not exactly convinced that this supposed iPhone picture of those kids is actually an image taken at 1x.
vFunct · 1d ago
They're still over saturated. Skin tones always have a cosmetic/tanned look compared to real life. Mirrorless camera photos have a lot better output. You can see that even in the first sample comparison. If you look at the photo on the iPhone right when you took it, it doesn't look like the subject you just took a photo of. It's always over saturated compared to real life.
But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject.
But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects).
Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground.
BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)
aikinai · 1d ago
I never use flash and real cameras are still in a completely different league. There are tons of advantages, but I think the biggest different is dynamic range. Faces, hair, etc. look so dark on phone photos. And even if I try to manually push up the exposure and let it blow out the background, it will still never give me bright faces indoors.
Of course then there's the lack of detail and watercolor effect to try to fake detail, distortion, etc.
relaxing · 18h ago
> connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject
fucking hell
“fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.
Wedding photographers use bounce flash because indirect light is flattering and not everyone is supermodel-beautiful.
I don’t know where you’re partying that the ceilings aren’t painted white (they usually are because the problem of color cast on reflected light applies to normal room lights as well) but I’ll take color balance I can fix in post over harsh shadows from direct fill flash.
dragonwriter · 15h ago
> “fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.
“Specialist thinks the broader domain should universally adhere to the way things are optimized in their area of focus” is not an uncommon thing to see on HN, though its more commonly seen with specialists in different kinds of programming than photography.
relaxing · 9h ago
I know, and it sucks.
vFunct · 15h ago
Yah you can't fix color balance from bad color cast.
ALL photos look good with direct flash. Never use bounce flash. And indirect lighting is never flattering. EVER. Fire any photographer that ever uses bounce flash. Nobody wants their muddied color.
I was also a photo editor with thousands of photographer submissions. I can always tell which ones used bounce flash. A sure sign of unprofessional amateurness.
I get that people have a desire to maintain their lazy habits, but my job was to make sure they understood they sucked at photography.
relaxing · 8h ago
Yah, you can. Get out of the 80s or whatever decade you learned paparazzi style light was a good look.
For anyone reading, soft shadows from indirect light is why professional studio setups use beauty dishes, bounce cards, and big flash boxes or umbrellas with diffusers. Bounce flash is a way to create a little of that magic when you can’t get the entire rig to a shoot, as in wedding photography.
Pointing your on camera flash directly at the subject is the easiest route you can take. How does that make every other method lazy? (Note that I’m not calling direct flash lazy - it still takes skill to balance flash power vs aperture and speed. But every other method takes that and more.)
vFunct · 7h ago
Studio lighting isn’t natural lighting nor is it bounce flash lighting. I am specifically talking about amateurish event/wedding photographers that use bounce flash. Which have a iPhone use commonality. (You never use iPhones in studio.)
astura · 1d ago
I must be a blind, I literally just can't see what this guy is talking about.
I stopped reading at the first picture comparison. Iphone has a portrait mode that blurs the background. you wouldn't be able to tell the difference at the first photo or any photo of a beginner photographer that has blurred backgrounds.
anyway the major differentiator in photography is not the device but light.
MPSFounder · 20h ago
Is it just me or is color saturation a huge deal with iphones? I take a pic of myself, and it literally makes it portrait like and changes my skin (makes it smoother and more transluscent). I take a pic of the outdoors, and if there is text somewhere far away, it mangles it. I get iphones are mostly sold for social media influencers these days and beauty standards matter, but damn it I just want it to scan stuff and take photos of my family. There is a big problem with image fidelity.
wordofx · 12h ago
> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall?
I stopped reading here. Every photo on the walls in my house came from some smart phone.
throwaway314155 · 1d ago
I honestly can't see much of a difference that couldn't be explained by the photos not being taken simultaneously. I definitely can't tell enough of a difference that I wouldn't put the photo in a frame on the wall (which people almost certainly do, despite the author's assertion that "you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed")
Edit: Is this just a good bit of sarcasm/shitpost? If so, it's just a tad too subtle.
TuringNYC · 1d ago
For what it is worth, all my printed and framed photos were on the iPhone, despite having a great SLR camera.
The best camera is the one you actually have on-hand at the moment you need to take the photo and that often ends up the phone camera.
matwood · 1d ago
Bingo. You also need to know your camera. I have a d7100, a Z5, and the latest iPhone pro. For quick snapshots it's really hard to beat the iPhone. If I can get very close to something, the iPhone can also do some cool things.
My d7100 might be one of my favorite cameras of all time. I've taken very nice picks of birds mid-flight that would be very hard to do on a phone (impossible?). But, it's not a camera you pull out your pocket and start shooting snapshots. It takes time to learn and post-process.
They are all just tools, pick the right one for what you're doing. And sometimes the right one is the one you have with you :)
Mashimo · 12h ago
The color of their faces and shadow is what is noticeable for me.
wat10000 · 1d ago
I have smartphone photos on my walls. They look damned good.
Is this person going around asking all of their friends what kind of camera they used to take the photos they have on display? Or are they just sure they can tell from looking?
aikinai · 1d ago
You absolutely can tell from looking, and you don't even need to be trying. Whenever I show people photos from trips or of my kids or whatnot, they immediately notice the quality ask "You took this on your phone!?" (since I'm showing the photo from my phone library and that would be the default assumption). Sure, people are used to phone photos and they're fine, but even laymen who aren't thinking about judging photo quality immediately notice and appreciate the quality of a real camera photo.
dankwizard · 17h ago
It's subtle shitpost. He's playing the angle of camera bros that just can't accept any Tom, Dick, or Harry with an iphone could take a 95% comparable photo but don't call themselves photographers.
earth2mars · 1d ago
Someone didn't try the power of Google pixels phones. Recently, many of my iPhone friends and family envy the pictures taken from Google Pixel 9 pro vs their latest iPhones. It's hands down the best camera and image processing.
Ancapistani · 13h ago
I would be willing to bet I have photos in my archive that cannot be reproduced on any modern smartphone, that I took in ~2004 with a Nikon D70.
sturza · 1d ago
Have you seen them on desktop or compared to a 20yo sensor without computerized photography? The post is not about iPhone cameras per se, but about small phone sensors + computerized photography. The author probably has that iPhone.
aikinai · 1d ago
It's still not going to come anywhere close to a real camera. Phone cameras with their tiny sensors have physical limitations that cannot be overcome, I guess until the day they are regenerating the entire image with AI based on what it expects the scene should look like with a real camera.
jodrellblank · 2h ago
Imagining a Facebook Phone where you point the camera at your family to take a photo, and it recognises who is in the picture and replaces their faces with the best available photo of each them from their Facebook account. Or their "My chosen social media photo".
1: In a/b testing, nearly everyone including pixel peepers prefer a more vibrant photo.
2: the traditional perspective of "a photo should look as close as possible to what my eyes see if I drop the viewfinder" is increasingly uncommon and not pursued in the digital age by nearly anyone.
3: phone companies know the above, and basically all of them engage in varrying degrees of "crank vibrance until people start to look like clowns, apply a skin correction so you can keep the rest mega vibrant" with an extra dash of "if culturally accepted to the primary audience, add additional face filtering to improve how people look, including air-brushing and thinning of the face"
This is rightfully compared to the loudness wars and I think that's accurate. It really became a race to the bottom once we collectively decided that "accurate" photos were not interesting and we want "best" photos.
We enjoy the imperfections of cameras because they let us create art. Smartphone makers take advantage of that by, as you put it, cranking things to eleven to manipulate psychology rather than invest in more accurate platforms that require skill. The ease is the point, but ease rarely creates lasting art the creator is genuinely proud of or that others appreciate the merit behind.
No idea if this can happen with what modern smartphone cameras do to photos. If "AI" is involved then I would expect such issues to be possible because of the basic nature of them being random generators, just like how LLMs hallucinate stuff all the time. Other "enhancement" approaches might not produce issues like this.
Yes it is. I've seen that happen in real-time with the built-in camera viewfinder (not even taking a photo) on my mid-range Samsung phone, when I zoomed in on a sign.
It only changed one letter, and it was more like a strange optical warping from one letter to a different one when I pointed the camera at a particular sign in a shop, but it was very surprising to see.
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m5zsj7/ai_photo_ga...
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jbcl1l/iphone_16_p...
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/17bxcm8/iphone_15_n...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815
Not that that helps anyone who's affected, but that situation is more like if you'd have an .aip file, AI Photo storage format, where it invents details when you zoom in, and not a sensor (pipeline) issue
See https://www.runpulse.com/blog/why-llms-suck-at-ocr and its related HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42966958
Pre-LLM approaches handle unintelligible source data differently. You'll more commonly see nonsense output for the unintelligible bits. In some cases the tool might be capable of recognizing low confidence and returning an error or other indicator of a possible miss.
IMO, that's a feature. The LLM approach makes up something that looks right but may not actually match the source data. These errors are far harder to detect and more likely to make it past human review.
The LLM approach does mean that you can often get a more "complete" output from a low quality data source vs pre-LLM approaches. And sometimes it might even be correct! But it will get it wrong other times.
Another failure condition I've experienced with LLM-based voice transcription that I didn't have pre-LLM - running down the wrong fork in the road. Sometimes the LLM approaches will get a word or two wrong...words with similar phonetics or multiple meanings, that kind of thing. It may then continue down the path this mistaken context has created, outputting additional words that do not align to the source data at all.
For something as widespread as photography I'm not sure you can define a "we". Even pro photographers often have a hard time relating to each other's workflows because they're so different based on what they're shooting.
The folks taking pictures of paintings for preservation are going to be lighting, exposing, and editing very differently than the folks shooting weddings who will be shooting differently than the folks doing architecture or real estate shots. If you've ever studied under a photographer or studied in school you'll learn this pretty quickly.
There's a point to be made here than an iPhone is more opinionated than a camera, but in my experience most pro photographers edit their shots, even if it's just bulk application of exposure correction and an appropriate color profile. In that way a smartphone shot may have the composition of the shooter but not the color and processing choices that the shooter might want. But one can argue that fixed-lens compacts shooting JPG are often similarly opinionated. The difference of opinion is one of degrees not absolutes.
As an aside, this appeal to a collective form of absolute values in photography bothers me. It seems to me to be a way to frame the conversation emotionally, to create an "us vs them" dynamic. But the reality of professional photography is that there are very few absolute values in photography except the physical existence of the exposure triangle.
There's no such thing as "accurate photographs". I don't think we can even agree if two human perceive the same picture the same way.
I do think the average person today should learn about the basics of photography in school simply because of how much our daily lives are influenced by images and the visual language of others. I'd love to see addition to civics and social sciences classes that discuss the effects of focal lengths, saturation, and DOF on compositions. But I don't think that yearning for an "accurate photo" is the way.
Also in normal phone reviews, they always put pictures of different phones next to each other so that people can form their own opinion on what they prefer. How is the reader to know what it really looked like? The reviewer should compare it against what they actually saw and felt the mood was in the moment and give a verdict of which camera captured that
Of course nicer colors look nicer but that's not the camera's job: I can turn that up if I want it. For that to work well, the camera needs to know what's there in the first place
Eyeing the raw results from the pro capture mode vs. the automagic results of my five year old 300€ phone, it does an amazing job of removing sensor noise and improving lighting in ways that I usually can't replicate short of using a tripod and a whole lot of image stacking. The only exception is extreme contrasts, such as a full moon on a dark sky or rays of direct sunlight (at sunrise) on half of a rolling hill when the other half is still in complete shadow. Then the only solution is to take two pictures, one where you can see the dark bit and one where you can see the bright bit, and stitch them together
This is also why I get much better results on a phone than on any fancy camera with a smaller or different display. The phone matches what those to view the image get to see closely or exactly.
I would like to compare it to "cinema mode" on my television.
I sometimes turn on cinema mode, but although the colors have more subtlety, nuance and accuracy... dimness just doesn't compare as well as you think to a much brighter picture.
sigh.
That said, it's a little annoying that the apple camera app doesn't capture raw out-of-the-box.
If you want a photo to reminisce on, sure use a smartphone. In which case anything short of 1800s camera quality will do the job great. If you want to make a photo that might look good then do yourself a favour and get a cheap dedicated camera.
1. Difference in focal length/ position.
2. Difference in color processing
But…the article is fairly weak on both points?
1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or whatever the focal length is.
2. Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone and the other camera. It’s again, no different between the two.
It’s a poor article because it doesn’t focus on the actual material differences.
The phone will have a smaller sensor. It will have more noise and need to do more to combat it. It won’t have as shallow a depth of field.
The phone will also of course have different ergonomics.
But the things the post focuses on are kind of poor understandings of the differences in what they’re shooting and how their cameras work.
It is no secret that Apple does a lot of post processing on their mediocre photos to make them look good - more so than most other Androids - because, it's all software. But, from the article, it is understood that the author is trying to point out that Apple could've done a better job to represent skin tones more accurately atleast. The fish-eye defense for Apple is totally understandeable, but, why are we defending the weak skin tones? Every year, they keep launching and claiming grandoise statements "This is the best smartphone camera out there is".
And no, this is not a limitation of smartphone sensors. In fact, if you look at the latest Xperia series from Sony, they have the same software from their DSLRs translated into the smartphones that addresses the skintones perfectly well.
I hope we can skip past the biases and personal preferences we have towards Apple and treat them neutrally like any other manufacturer. This "Apple can do no wrong" narrative and attacking anyone who points out their flaws is just tired and boring at this point.
It the old days Apple used to somewhat pride themselves with taking more "realistic" photos. While Android had it the other way around and basically post processes a lot of things as well as colouring. Mostly used for Social Media like Instagram.
And then came iPhone X. They started changing the colour of Sky and sharpening a lot of things. To the point of a lot of Photos taken by my camera looks great but also looked fake.
Did the iOS/Android situation actually swap, or was the X an outlier? I have photos from a recent event taken entirely with phones, and the result mirrors my experience for the past many years.
iPhone (11-15 including Pro Max) photos look "normal". Very, very similar to what my eyes saw in terms of colors. Photos taken with Android phones (Pixel 9 Pro XL, recent Oppo or Samsung A series, etc.) look terribly unnatural. The blue of the sky, the green of the plants, the red of the dress, they look "enhanced" and unnatural, nothing like what my eyes saw. I can tell apart almost any iPhone vs. Android picture just by looking at the colors on the same display.
The resolution or sharpness are harder to judge with one look and I wasn't trying to compare quality. But the colors are too obvious to miss.
The phone processing is lagely shaped by social media culture. Camera makers also started to incorporate in-camera editing features on vlogger targeted models.
DSLRs had in camera lighting correction during shooting and post-processing since 2016 or so [0].
[0]: https://www.nikonimgsupport.com/eu/BV_article?articleNo=0000...
https://www.panasonic.com/uk/consumer/cameras-camcorders/lum...
Star filter is especially funny since it's used in k-drama opening/closing sequences.
Modern cameras like Nikon Z6/III can also do similar processing on camera during shoots to reduce post-processing load after the shoots to accelerate the production pipeline.
Color profiles vary per body at the least and are variable based on what post processing you do. I can load up Adobe Vivid and it'll look completely different than Adobe Portrait.
Shoot a Canon, Sony, and Fuji in JPG on the same scene (so same focal length and DOF) and auto white balance. Each body will output a different image.
The inverse are the professional photographers who work with pictures day in and out, they see everything.
I just don't have the eye for it, despite having a decent amateur setup.
BUT, yes, lots of people might look at a random photo on their phone and not notice skintones, or the fisheye etc. If you then give them a pile of 10 photos from a pro, versus 10 from an amateurs phone, they'll notice. Particularly if they're blown up a bit on a print or a decent screen.
It might not matter if you are just flicking through 20 shots on your phone, but as the article implies, we have perception of these things, even when it is the subconscious.
Checkout this book by the late† Bryan Peterson, where he shows photos taken by his students as well as his own of the same location, and explains the differences in techniques/settings:
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54228164-bryan-peters...
His Understanding series of books are also good (Exposure is worth checking out if you know nothing about camera settings):
* https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/82078.Bryan_Peterson
† April 2025: https://www.crottyfh.com/obituaries/bryan-peterson
Way back when, I bought a couple of his books, probably on the recommendation of someone or other in an online photography forum - 'Understanding Exposure' and 'Learning to see creatively'. The latter in particular was wonderful for someone who had the technical aspects of photography more or less sorted, but was - ahem - deficient in the artistic department.
Anyway, I felt his style was incredible - down-to-earth, but not afraid to go into a bit of background if needed - so I sent off a brief letter of thanks through his publisher.
Lo and behold, got a very nice letter back, thanking my for the kind words and encouraging me (I had mentioned that I shot both film and digital, seeing as at the time, a wonderful film camera like the F5 could be had for a fraction of what even an entry-level APS-C DSLR cost) to experiment A LOT using the DSLR, as the instant feedback provided would help my analog hit rate progress leaps and bounds.
I was already thinking a bit along those lines, but became a lot more conscious about trying to improve my skills using the DSLR upon his encouragement - and my photos improved a lot over the following years as a result.
Thanks, Bryan.
The professionals have learned to shut off that network.
And to be fair, the thrust of the article was "Why don't you see printed and frame iPhone photos", and these things that might be a bit subtle on an un-calibrated screen are going to be a big deal if you professionally print it.
I’m not defending the default color choices, I’m saying that they’re comparing apples to oranges because they’re comparing an output designed to be opinionated with one that’s designed to be processed after the fact. The iPhone is perfectly capable of outputting neutral images and raw files.
This is the opposite default to phones where the defaults are to be punchier, but where you can still select a neutral profile.
The argument is basically comparing defaults and claiming it’s endemic to the format.
Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable, they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.
I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.
Photography for me is about the physical and optical side of things. Choosing a lens for a situation, framing the shot, aperture, shutter, etc.
When I switched to digital I was seduced by post-processing, partly as a substitute for the look I could achieve with different films, but mostly I suspect because all those sliders and numbers and graphs are naturally attractive to a certain type of person :)
I eventually pretty much stopped taking photos.
Changing my workflow from post processing RAW photos (and barely ever looking at them again) to using in-camera JPEGs that I can immediately share, print, or whatever was enough to start me taking photos again regularly as a hobby.
More unexpectedly, in addition to the obvious time saving of removing the post processing step (aside from occasional cropping), the satisfaction benefit of the immediacy with which I can now print, share, display, etc. my favourite photos has been huge. It’s so much more rewarding getting photos right after you took them and actually doing something with them!
Now I’m not even sure I’d call all that digital image processing “photography”. Sure, it’s an art in its own right, and one some photographers enjoy, but the essence of photography lies somewhere else. I’d encourage everyone to try a camera with decent in camera JPEG production. You can always shoot Raw+JPEG if you’re scared to go full cold turkey.
I really don't think it is.
When I pick up a camera, my intent is one of two things: the experience of photography itself, or the best quality I can reasonably obtain. Neither of those goals are attained with a smartphone.
Every other time I take a photo, it's with a smartphone. It's easily good enough for the vast majority of use cases.
> Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable,
That's... absurd. Granted I lean toward a more "street photography" style, but it's exceptionally rare that I spend more then ~30s on a photo in Lightroom. Most of that time is spent cropping. White balance, exposure correction, etc. are all done in bulk.
> they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.
Sure - and why wouldn't you want to play with RAW as well? It's not like the profile the camera would have used isn't embedded in the RAW anyhow.
> I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.
I don't disagree with this at all. Of course there are edge cases; that's why I said "probably".
To put it another way: if you're shooting JPEGs regularly, you're almost certainly not doing it for the craft. There are very few reasons I can think of to choose a traditional camera if you're not going to take advantage of the improvements in ISO and dynamic range that it offers - and those are two things you give up[0] shooting JPEG.
0: You give up ISO in that you are discarding much of the information that you could use to push/pull process, which is very often preferable to very high ISO.
ETA: I just looked it up. In 2024, I kept 767 photos from my iPhone and 1,900 from my cameras. That includes multiple performances of my wife's dance studio, so the latter is heavily skewed by that. Excluding those, I kept 376. In other words, I appear to be taking my own advice here.
No you don't? Good in camera JPEGs will utilise push-pull processing, exposing for maximal dynamic range all for you. You don't lose the advantages of the better optics and sensor just because the JPEG is produced in camera.
Furthermore, JPEG supports ~8 stops of dynamic range while my X-Pro3's raw files support ~14 stops. You lose almost half your total DR when you shoot JPEG (with that camera).
>You lose almost half your total DR when you shoot JPEG
No because the camera is applying a tone curve that compresses that DR when producing the JPEG. You lose precision, not DR, but if you don't intend to process the image further it doesn't matter much.
Some people have a camera because they want to take better pictures than their smartphone but don't want to bother with post-processing, some have tried manual processing and found that the work/result balance was not doing it for them, some think that JPEGs look perfectly fine, some just don't have the time to do the processing... there are myriads of reason for which people would like to land somewhere between “let iOS do it” and “I systematically chose my ISO according to this Darktable script I developed these last years”.
The best camera, is the camera you have on you.
But even so, most are tuned to natural colours, and there is no beating low depth of field for bokeh/subject separation.
I would not be surprised if they don’t actually want accuracy in imaging at all, they want a positive impact on the user, and most people don’t want reality. If that means causing “hotdog skin” under some conditions or with some skin tones, or maybe even if most users prefer “hotdog skin”, while having an overall positive photo outcome for most other users; they will likely always choose to produce “hotdog skin”. They are also serving a far greater and, frankly an increasingly less light skinned audience than most understand. Maybe it’s just an effect of “whites” having given away their control over things as ever more “non-whites” become revert increasingly important and an ever increasing number and percentage of Apple’s users. Do Asians and Africans get “hotdog skin”? I don’t know the answer to that.
It is the narrow minded perspective of DSLR purist types that this stuff bothers, largely because they cannot look beyond the rim of their plate. Some platforms are for accuracy, others for impact and user experience.
People should maybe consider stop saying things like “this Apple is an absolutely horrible, awful, no good orange!”
It is the narrow minded perspective of DSLR purist types that this stuff bothers, largely because they cannot look beyond the rim of their plate.
You may want to stop saying “this Apple is a horrible, awful, no good orange.”
If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly.
The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing.
Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones.
The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image.
But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment.
(Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.)
It's a great camera in automatic mode most of the time, but not for that scenario.
It's the _distance_ that causes distortion, not the _lens_. You can prove this by doodling light rays on a sheet of paper. There is no lens that will get you a good photo at 1 meter from a person. They stand back 2 or 3 or more and then say "ho ho fish eye lens". I'm so sick of it
Someone agrees: https://petapixel.com/2021/08/02/lenses-dont-cause-perspecti...
For portraits the ideal length is 85mm equivalent which would be 3.5x, rumored to be on the next iphone pro. At this length there is minimal facial feature distortion without getting the flattening effect you get at longer focal lengths.
The angle, different focal lengths doesn't matter in rendering of the images. The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people. Moreover, we want to be liked as human beings, it's in our nature.
So, phone companies driven by both smaller sensors (that thing is way noisier when compared to a full frame sensor) and market pressure to reduce processing needed to be done by end users (because it inconveniences them), started to add more and more complicated post-processing in their cameras.
The result is this very article. People with their natural complications reduced, skin tones boosted on red parts, sharpened but flatter photos, without much perspective correction and sometimes looking very artificial.
Make no mistake, "professional" cameras also post process, but you can both see this processing and turn it off if you want, and the professional cameras corrects what lens fails at, but smartphones, incl. iPhone makes "happy, social media ready" photos by default.
As, again other commenter said, it's not a limitation of the sensor (sans the noise). Sony supplies most of the higher end sensors in the market, and their cameras or other cameras sporting sensors produced by them got the "best color" awards over and over again, and XPeria smartphones comes with professional camera pipelines after that small sensor, so they can take photos like what you see.
I personally prefer iPhone as my smartphone of my choice, but the moment I want to take a photo I want to spend time composing, I ditch default camera app and use Halide, because that thing can bypass Apple's post-processing, and even can apply none if you want.
Is nothing new.
When film was mass market almost no one developed their own photos (particularly colo(u)r). Instead almost all printing went through bulk labs who optimised for what people wanting to show to their family and friends.
What is different now is if someone cares about post processing to try and present their particular version of reality they can do it easily without the cost and inconvenience of having to setup and run a darkroom.
Many of the post-processing an informed person does on a digital photo is an emulation of a process rooted in a darkroom, yes.
On the other hand, some of the things cameras automatically does, e.g.: Skin color homogenization, selective object sharpening, body "aesthetic" enhancements, hallucinating the text which the lens can't resolve, etc. are not darkroom born methods, and they alter reality to the point of manipulation.
In film days, what we had as a run of the mill photographer was the selection of the film, and asking the lab "can you increase the saturation a bit, if possible". Even if you had your darkroom at home, you won't be able to selectively modify body proportions while keeping the details around untouched with the help of advanced image modification algorithms.
It's just far easier for anyone to do now.
When does that matter? It matters when I take pictures to remember what a moment was like. In particular, what the light was doing with the people or landscape at that point in time.
It's not so much that the familiar photographic workflows are more accurate, but they are more deterministic and I understand what they mean and how they filter those moments.
I still use my phone (easy has a quality of its own) but I find that it gives me a choice of either an opinionated workflow that overwhelms the actual moment (trying to make all moments the same moment) or a complex workflow that leaves me having to make the choices (and thus work) I do with a traditional camera but with much poorer starting material.
A traditional camera has the choice and can choose the most appropriate length; an Iphone is locked in to a fish-eye clearly put in there to overcome its inherent limitations.
So it doesn't really matter "if it's fair" or not, because it's not about a fair comparison, it's a demonstration that a traditional camera is just better. Why should the traditional camera use an inappropriate focal length just because the Iphone is forced to?
My iPhone pro has 3 lenses of 15,24 and 77mm equivalents. This is far fewer than many Android phones.
Even the cheapest iPhone 16E has a super sampling sensor which allows a cropped 50mm equivalent. (And yes that’s a digital crop but that’s why I mention a super sampling sensor)
So yes, unless they were shooting on a budget phone or a much older iPhone, they have a choice of focal lengths that would better match whatever camera they’re comparing to.
Comparing quality with non equivalent focal lengths is as pertinent as to mount a fisheye on the DSLR (because you can!) and then claim that the smartphone have less distortion.
I was about to disagree with you - but I think you're right. The photographer clearly took a couple steps back when they took the DSLR photo. You can tell by looking at the trees in the background - they appear much bigger in the DSLR photo because they're using a longer focal length.
I think a DSLR would struggle with the same perspective distortion if you put an ultrawide lens on it. It would have been a much more fair comparison if they took both photos from the same spot and zoomed in with the iphone.
The only workaround for the phone would be to still step back and take the image with the 24mm equivalent, then crop the image a whole lot to get an appropriate and equivalent view.
> I think a DSLR would struggle with the same perspective distortion if you put an ultrawide lens on it.
Note that "proper" lenses have more room for corrective elements in their lens stacks, so decent quality setups should experience less distortion than the tiny smartphone pancakes.
An ultrawide will never be good though, it's a compromise for making things fit or making a specific aesthetic.
Secondly, none of the points in the article are about optical distortion across the lens they’re all about perspective distortion. Corrective elements aren’t going to change that. None of the examples highlight barrel/pincushion distortion or the like as an offender.
If it were possible to switch out the lens on the iPhone, and the photographer had just chosen the wrong lens for the job, that would be a fair criticism of the article. But that's not what happened. The iPhone is just very limited when it comes to the lens, compared to a DSLR.
It is possible to "switch out the lens" on an iphone, because iPhones ship with multiple camera lenses. (Well, multiple entire cameras). The iphone 16 they're using here has 3 cameras. And yet, I'm pretty sure the photo of the boys was taken with the ultrawide for some reason. A lot of the distortion problems would go away if they took a few steps back and used one of the longer lenses - just like they did with the DSLR.
Most of the criticism comes down to not standing in the same spot for both photos (I’m unconvinced that the difference in jawlines, for example, is not because the subjects moved while the photographer did).
You can take a bad picture with any camera.
Most appropriate length for what? Some iPhones have multiple focal lengths, just like some "real camers" have fixed lenses with a fixed focal length (Fuxji x100 and the medium-format one whose model I can't remember, Leica something-or-other, Sony R1).
Plus, for what is a traditional camera "just better"? It's highly usage dependent.
I have both a bludgeon, which can be used as an interchangeable lens camera, and an iPhone. The first doesn't fit in my pocket, so sometimes the latter is the one I grab, since it's "better" for that specific use case.
Most appropriate length for portrait photography is well established to be somewhere between 50mm and 100mm (35mm equivalent). The lower end is often considered more "natural" for such photo type, while the longer focal lengths are considered more flattering.
An iPhone 16 Pro Max has three focal lengths, 12, 24 and 120 (35mm equivalent). The first two are much too short unless significantly cropped, and the last one is excessive and requires stepping way back and has the worst image sensor and likely worst compromise of a lens - a lot of lens chonk is elements to manage chromatic aberration and distortion, which smartphone lenses have no room for.
> ... just like some "real camers" have fixed lenses with a fixed focal length (Fuxji x100 and the medium-format one whose model I can't remember, Leica something-or-other, Sony R1).
People using fixed lenses do so because they prioritize a particular type of image or style, and decided to get an even better (and lighter) lens for that instead of carrying around a compromise they don't need.
> Plus, for what is a traditional camera "just better"?
When it comes to getting the best picture, a chonky camera always wins - although they have had some catch-up to do on the software side, physics and our current technical limitations do not care about pocketability.
But a less perfect picture is better than no picture because you left the "real camera" at home. The best camera is the one you have on you.
(Also note that this is not binary between a smarpthone and an Olympic DSLR setup. Good compact cameras with collapsing lenses and mirrorless with smaller lenses are a middleground.)
> An iPhone 16 Pro Max has three focal lengths, 12, 24 and 120 (35mm equivalent). The first two are much too short unless significantly cropped, and the last one is excessive and requires stepping way back and has the worst image sensor and likely worst compromise of a lens
This point contains one part of the solution: Zoom with your feet.
Back up your shooting position to where you'd shoot an 85mm or 105mm, take the shot with the 2x lens, then crop. (Unless there's tons of light, then the 5x and hold very still. Even then, shoot both 2x and 5x and compare. Next year's phone should update the 5x sensor as well.)
For the color problems the article highlights, shoot RAW and adjust in a raw development app. Otherwise, shoot using the new grid-based styles to make in-phone development adjustable later. Or use a different app – see below.
For the bokeh, consider shooting in portrait, with aperture dialed to a full-frame DSLR level of (granted fake) bokeh. This remains adjustable after the shot so it's safer to leave active than one might think.
Consider avoiding the iPhone's built-in camera app, consider shooting with an app that can skip the processing pipeline, like Lux's Halide, with “Process Zero” mode:
https://halide.cam/
https://www.lux.camera/introducing-process-zero-for-iphone/
The bottom line, of course:
> The best camera is the one you have on you.
Assign the iPhone 16's shutter button to Halide or ProCamera or one of the newer contenders to shoot everything.
Then to best enjoy your results, never shoot with a full frame using big glass and compare.
He has some good points, maybe, but in general it’s a pretty naive comparison.
How do I disable Colour processing?
On my Pixel RAW is also available, even moreso with the non-standard camera software.
You may have to enable it once in Settings -> Camera -> Formats; I've been using it so long I don't remember what the defaults are. But once you've done that, it's in the top right of the camera app - just tap where it says RAW.
Most of the photo examples here were somewhere between “I can’t tell a significant difference” and “flip a coin and you might find people who prefer the iPhone result more.”
Even less of a difference when they’re printed out and put in a 5x7” frame.
Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0. You already own one. You were going to buy a smartphone anyway for other things. So if we are going to sit and argue about quality we still have to figure out what dollar value these differences are worth to people.
And the “evidence” is supposedly that people aren’t getting their phone photos printed out. But let’s not forget the fact that you literally couldn’t see your film photos without printing them when we were using film cameras.
Many people buy a more expensive smartphone specifically for the better camera module. These are expensive devices! It's good marketing that you perceive that as "free", but in reality, I spend way less money on my fancy camera (new models every five years), than my iPhone-loving friends on their annual upgrades.
I've had a bunch of "high-end" digital SLRs and they (and the software processing the raw files) do plenty computational processing as well.
I completely agree that all else being equal it's possible to get photos with better technical quality from a big sensor, big lens, big raw file; but this article is more an example of "if you take sloppy photos with your phone camera you get sloppy photos".
You see similar when people are comparing APS-C, micro 4/3, or medium format lenses.
However, due to physics there is also no working around the quality issues of a small sensor. Photosites get less light and produce more noise, and automated noise suppression costs detail and sharpness.
I wonder whether tiny lenses of equivalent sharpness and clarity as their larger equivalents would be much more expensive or impossible to produce (sure, less material, but much finer precision required), but it probably doesn’t matter because the tiny sensor already loses enough sharpness that better lenses won’t contribute much.
At some point the wave-like nature of light starts to bite. Can't really go much smaller than a micron per pixel. So a millimeter sized chip gets you 1 megapixel. 50MP mean ~7mm. (back of the envelope caveats apply)
Only if you define quality as field of view.
For light-gathering ability and background separation/bokeh, you need a lower f/number on APS-C than on full-frame to be equivalent: A 35mm f/1.2 lens on a 24MP APS-C sensor will take pictures that look nearly identical to a 52.5mm f/1.8 lens on a 24MP full-frame sensor. (Assuming crop factor of 1.5.) Both will have an aperture size of 29.17mm (= 35mm/1.2 = 52.5mm/1.8), will capture a 37.9° x 25.8° FoV.
Almost all important properties of lenses are determined by field of view and the aperture diameter: Amount of light gathered, background blur, diffraction, and weight.
The illumination-per-area on the full-frame sensor will be 2.25x lower, but the area of the sensor is 2.25x larger so it cancels out such that both sensors will receive the same number of photons.
Background blur is determined by aperture diameter, field of view, and the distances to the subject and background. Since the two lenses have the same aperture size and field of view, you'd get the same amount of background blur for a given scene.
For many lenses (particularly telephoto lenses), the size and weight are primarily determined by the size of the front element, which needs to be at least as big as the aperture. For wide-angle lenses, you start needing a front element that's significantly wider than your aperture for geometry reasons -- the subject has to be able to see the aperture through the front element, so that relationship breaks down.
(Also with lenses where focal length << flange distance, you start to need extra optics to project the image back far enough. This can mean that a wide-angle lens can be more complicated to build for APS-C than for full-frame on the same mount. Take for example the Rokinon 16mm f/2 at 710g / 87mm long versus the Nikon AF-D 24mm f/2.8 at 268g and 46mm long. This isn't relevant to phone cameras, since those don't need to fit a moving mirror between the sensor and the lens like SLRs do. Phone camera makers can put the lens exactly as far from the sensor as makes sense for their design.)
Slow telephoto lenses for DSLRs are pretty much the only place where crop sensors have an advantage. DSLR autofocus sensors generally need f/5.6 or better. Thus, for a given field of view, you need a bigger aperture + front element for the full-frame lens than the "equivalent" crop-sensor lens -- e.g. a 300 f/5.6 with its 53.6mm front element is going to be heavier than a 200 f/5.6 with its 35.7mm front element. However, as mentioned above, the 300 f/5.6 on a full-frame camera will gather 2.25x as much light as the 200/5.6 on the APS-C sensor. Mirrorless cameras can typically autofocus with smaller relative apertures. This is why you see Sony selling an f/8 zoom and Canon selling f/11 primes for their mirrorless mounts -- this sort of lens just wasn't possible on DSLRs. On mirrorless, you could have a 300 f/8.4 full-frame lens that would be truly equivalent to the 200mm f/5.6 APS-C lens.
Most people enjoy chasing measurable specs and don't stop to understand what they're actually doing. So they'll go compare a 4/3 sensor's output at iso x to a full frame sensor at the same iso. They won't stop to think about what they're trying to achieve. If they want the same depth of field, they won't be able to use the same aperture. So, out in the field, something has to give. Either lengthen the exposure or raise the ISO. If we're talking high ISOs, you probably can't shoot much slower, so higher ISO it is. Differences are then much less shocking.
The other extreme is people chasing paper-thin focus, which, I guess, isn't as easy to obtain on smaller sensors. Yet, for some reason, they won't go to a larger format, either...
Medium format explodes the cost and again, the lenses I want aren't even available.
So you go for what you can get, given the marketplace and also given the lens system you have bought into.
I doubt anyone is going wildlife shooting with a large format camera, for example.
Not with true large format, but with the new Fuji medium format cameras it's starting to become reasonably possible to do faster work like wildlife at larger format sizes. The main issue remains, which is sensor readout speed, but the technology has gotten so much better that you can get results with things like birds-in-flight that are comparable to a FF DSLR camera from 10 years ago, with MF now, as far as speed, but at 3x-5x the effective resolution.
Cost is still prohibitive though, I recently upgraded and really considered the new Fuji 100MP MF line, but ended up with a Nikon Z8 in the end for wildlife. On my next iteration, I'll probably bite the bullet and go MF. If I could double the resolution and get similar speed, it'd be worth it, IMO. Especially at the sizes I typically print
By having a tiny sensor, the current iPhone pro has a range of 15-120mm.
Disclaimer: I work for a photo processing software.
Yes, you could get the same photo of the guy in the centre on the iPhone, but only by zooming in and cropping out everything else. I guess if you REALLY wanted you could run back, and zoom in. Better get a tripod to hold it steady since you're zooming in then.
So anyone but an expert will shoot with a much shorter lens when using the iPhone.
This is how crop factors work unless I'm really mistaken.
A 24mm equivalent will have almost the exact same perspective on any sized sensor, because that’s what equivalent means. It’s a relationship of sensor size to actual focal length.
A 16mm on a 1.5x APs-c is a 24mm equivalent on a 35mm. The iPhones base lens is something like 1.5mm but when related to its sensor, it’s roughly a 24mm equivalent.
There’s no cropping that needs to happen.
Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.
However:
- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)
- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine
Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
I remember hearing a story from a well known photographer about a trip he took with a few others, including his wife. They woke up early to head out on a small boat in a lake or something. He was lugging all this gear and having to put a lot of focus into tuning the settings on his camera, he was pretty miserable. Meanwhile, his wife was enjoying morning with no baggage and snapping pics with her phone. She ended up having the best picture of the day, while actually enjoying herself, by not being bogged down by the gear.
Dedicated cameras have their value, but it’s been decreasing for years, and requiring higher and higher levels of skill to make it worth it. Most people could improve their photos dramatically by learning about framing and light, while just using a phone. These things have a much bigger impact on the resulting photo. A professional with an iPhone will always take a better and more interesting picture than an amateur with a DSLR for this reason.
But, the dedicated camera photos are always massively higher resolution. You can zoom in on details and they look great, while phone photos seem to use AI upscailers and they look bad
We all go through a period of abusing HDR and saturation, but we usually get over it.
”The best camera is the one you have on you”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_Jarvis
I've seen people trying to take photos at an airshow using their phone camera. A small black dot in the centre of frame, rendered as an Impressionist oil smudge by post-processing. Was that worth even trying?
The best camera+lens combo is the one suited to the scene. Anything else isn't.
[1] takes lovely portraits and no focus to deal with
The past 2-4 years have been amazing for lenses: Sony's willingness to let other people make lenses has been an amazing win for photography.
Also, Sigma and Tamron (both Japanese) are putting out more higher quality lenses compared to a decade back. With optical quality rivaling Sony's own G Master series and the Zeissen.
If there is insufficient light, then by all means, the camera should adjust the shutter speed past the limit, but not until it has used all the available "reasonable" ISO range.
It's a shame I have to wrestle my Sony a6400 to get something even remotely close to this.
Sure, I could go into a menu and change it from the range of 1/60 or a second to 1/200th (or 1/250th, depending on the camera), but that was it. This is on Nikon, btw.
But yeah, give me more options damnit. It’s something that comes up so frequently when shooting that it blows my mind it’s not an option.
But usually when I have passers-by take photos, the context is that we are posing in front of a church in Europe or something, and space can be limited.
I can't very well ask people to take a photo and but first to take 20 paces back and then do a crouch!
My wife wants to see our shoes as well as the church spires in the same photo. Maybe a 35mm or even 28mm would work well in our case.
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114042752203552070
Just got their 10mm M43 (~20mm equivalent) and it's doing a good job[0] - focus peaking on the OM helps a lot with manual focus and aged eyes.
[0] Excepting that it's still wide enough to capture your fingers when adjusting focus or aperture[1] or holding the lens.
[1] Which is the wrong way around to "normal" - clockwise should close the aperture, not open it!
I shoot on manual with auto-ISO straight to JPG (I don't have time for RAW editing), so my prime photos tend to have lower ISO's and I end up with a faster shutter.
It would be an amusing experiment to compare a prime lens to a zoom lens that it somehow fixed to the same focal length. Maybe level the playing field a little bit by applying distortion correction to both lenses.
Ever since I started shooting sports indoors (often w/ that 90mm prime or a 135mm prime) and started to depend on noise reduction I process everything with DxO and tend to use a lot of sharpening and color grading. One day I went out with the kit lens by accident and set the aperture really small and developed the "Monkey Run Style" for hyperrealistic landscapes that look like they were shot with a weird Soviet camera.
The lens I walk around with the most and usually photograph runners with is the Tamron 28-200 which is super-versatile for events and just walking around, I used it for the last two albums here
https://www.yogile.com/537458/all
but for the Forest Frolic I used my 16-35mm Zeiss but it was tough because it was raining heavily -- I was lucky to have another volunteer who held an umbrella for me, but I couldn't lean in. The last one (Thom B) was not color graded because I'd had some bad experiences color grading sports when I got the color of the jersey wrong but now I use color grades that are less strong -- at Trackapalooza the greens just came out too strident and I had to bring them down.
To give you some idea of how powerful noise reduction is, this shot
https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lv32zudu2c2d
was done in ISO 80,000 with that Tamron -- I wouldn't say it looks perfectly natural for a picture of cat that was not standing still in a room in a basement that is amazing.
BTW your yogile album is private.
https://www.yogile.com/forest-frolic-2025#21m
https://www.yogile.com/trackapalooza-2025#21m
https://www.yogile.com/thom-b-2025#21m
I have no nostalgia for film, I could not afford to take 1500 film photos at a sports event -- even a photo like this which doesn't seem that remarkable
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114401857009398302
wouldn't have come out that good handheld with a 35mm back in the day.
Do you know if there is any option of setting a limit on shutter speed while in aperture mode?
(I understand I can go full manual, but that just doesn't allow for the same point-and-shoot experience in changing light conditions.)
Lagniappe: https://youtube.com/shorts/shLpGFTQeNQ
And so, the reasons why Fuji and point-and-shoots are popular. Lots of “serious” photography enthusiasts don’t really get this and call Fujis “hype” cameras but it’s like bashing Wordpress because most people don’t want to learn AWS to post cat pics.
> The iPhone is always in my pocket
Rationale for both point-and-shoots as well as Leica (also hated by lots of serious camera people ;)).
I went from a D300s kit with about $10k of lenses to Fuji. I had an X100s, then an X-E2, and now an X-Pro3.
The X-Pro3 especially is light, has excellent physical controls, and very much feels like a vintage Leica. It's what I'd consider an "art camera" -- not what I'd choose if I were shooting weddings regularly, but perfect for street photography, family stuff, and perfectly capable of higher-end commercial work if you're willing to put up with its quirks.
The quirks are the point, though.
Fuji and Ricoh can hardly keep their X100 and GR cameras stocked. Fuji added extra production capacity in China because it exceeded their expectations. I brought them up specifically because the serious camera people rag on them for being hype cameras, but I see plenty of everyday people with them. Go to places like the High Line in NY and there’s folks with A6700s and various X-mount cameras in addition to the serious full-frame mounts. Leica is doing financially well because of their Q series.
I think five years ago you could say it was just two groups, but by the numbers and by what I see in the streets, the point and shoots have been prematurely declared dead. Fuji and Sony are meanwhile figuring out how to sell APS-C to a more casual crowd, after the other old players effectively left that market.
If it's the former, take the time to understand not only your gear but also light and image processing (whether digital or film). If it's the latter, and you are a stickler for pixels get a digital camera, if not stick with the phone.
I'm interested in photography, but I won't buy a digital camera. My last film camera was a Minolta 700si (in the 90's) and a camera bag full of lens and flashes and other gadgets (filters shades etc), but was a far cry from the $10k professional camera with professional studio film processing. If you understand your gear, light, and how the images are going to be output (film or digital processing) you can get great images from whatever you are woking with.
Photography vs Photographs isn't about how many pixels a camera has or other limitations of a camera. It's what you do with it. Back in the day I preferred black & white film because I could control the entire processing cycle (I wasn't very good at color processing when the local camera shop could do it faster and better). Now I like the challenge of Photography with the limitations of a phone. Does that make it not "real" Photography? or not a real interest in Photography?
To me that where the difference is for "photography", a phone and dedicated digital camera are still digital. They are still processed and captured with the same medium, so learn it and understand it.
One might have greater ability to capture more light and thus not need the same amount of processing or setup, but it's still processed and produced from digital pixels. Both allow for any amount of post processing, but you have to know how to shoot with the device especially if there are more light capture limitations like a phone. If you just want photographs, put either in auto mode and you get what you get. Paying more for a dedicated camera just makes it easier to do, that doesn't make it "photography" over a more physically limited but still digital, phone camera.
Not that I don’t ever take snapshots - I do - but instead of just taking a picture of your kid from eye level, you can get down on their level and wait until their head is turned so they’re shortlit from light from the window.
Of course, in that job you also quickly learn that the moment trumps everything. A technically awful photo of a great genuine smile or someone falling in the lake or whatever is usually better than an incredibly composed and lit photo of a person just sitting there…usually.
This is why my Canon 80D sits and gathers dust. Too many family moments fluffed, vs my Android's basically 100% hit rate. Yes this is largely a skill issue on my part, which is sad, but modern phone photos are more than adequate these days.
- your entry level mirrorless is ~$300 of camera HW vs ~$80 of camera HW on the phone (very very rough estimate of sensor+lens BOM)
- the mirrorless doesn't have any of the physical constraints of being tiny and fitting in a pocket, which directly impact image quality
iPhones cameras are really amazing given the constraints.
But, perhaps most importantly, along the lines of what others have noted: you know, my phone camera may not be as good, but I have zero complaints about the impromptu photos of my kid growing up that I could never have caught with anything else.
It’s a lot easier to pump out quality parts for less money when you order 10 million of them and potentially helped finance a factory to build them.
For example, take a photo of someone standing in front of a landscape. It looks like you took a photo on a green-screen and photoshopped the landscape behind the subject.
Well, you don't need to teach photography to passerby, just to tell them to look there and push this button. It's not more complicated than on a phone, maybe even less. But it may look more intimidating to old a camera, it's true
All the displays I own are HDR, and something like a picture of a sunset, or even landscape, is so much better on my phone than my older Canon DSLR.
I have re-exported files that I took in 2007 with the Nikon D7 that I kept the raw files for. They are vastly improved with modern processing (and noise reduction) vs what I exported from the same negative back then. The bit depth was always high enough.
On the iPhone, ~everyone on the planet instinctively knows how to do it.
> "Which button do I press"
The Big One.
> focus
It's automatic. (If I'm handing a stranger my camera.)
> zoom level
This is maybe the hardest one, I guess, … but I do think most people have seen enough TV cop dramas to instinctively know. Or, they can just take the photo at the zoom I've handed them, and it won't be a big deal. Walking forward a few steps is also like zooming.
I went with the recommendation of Ken Rockwell who is both experienced and opinionated, and said to buy that one at the time. https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/recommended-cameras.htm
He was right!
- small, especially if you put a 50mm prime lens on it (which costs ~ CAD 150 by the way)
- light
- full frame sensor (fundamentally better photo quality, but need bigger lenses to zoom)
- battery life is OK but not great. You can easily get through a full day of touristing with one spare battery though.
Personally, I use Sony APS-C the most because of its smaller size, lighter weight, and more affordable lenses. Among APS-C systems, Sony and Fuji offer the widest lens selection. Fuji gear tends to be overpriced now, but it does have a stylish look.
Micro Four Thirds lenses are usually cheaper and more lightweight.
If you're shooting fast-moving subjects like birds or Formula 1 racing, Canon and Nikon are the most popular choices. They offer a wide range high performance lenses designed for demanding situations.
One shot is with my iphone15, the other with my Fujifilm xt5. It’s such a stark difference
I’ve long thought the main “issue” with people not realizing the difference is that they’re just looking at photos on their phones, where the images are so small it’s harder to appreciate the difference. I rarely try to take photos apart from snapshots with my phone because I’ll invariably be really disappointed when I view them on my monitor.
I got myself a Nikon D800 over a decade ago when they were first released, and left it in 14-bit RAW mode since then. Technically these are "SDR" photos, but the captured dynamic range is closer to 1000-nit HDR. For a decade, I had to crush these to fit into sRGB SDR JPGs, which is throwing away most of the goodness.
A few months ago I took all of my 5-star pictures in Lightroom and used its new HDR processing mode to export them as 16-bit PNG files. I then turned those into a 2160p HDR video and played it on an OLED 75" television.
It blew my tiny mind!
The quality was simply jawdropping. It was like travelling back in time to all of those holidays and looking out through a window at reality itself.
This is why I go on regular online rants about how frustrating it is that the only way to share the full output quality of a modern digital full-frame camera is by uploading a HDR "movie" of the pictures to YouTube.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44725774
For iPhone golf player shot, they were standing closer to the players and using a wide-angle lens. For the “beginner photographer” shot they were standing farther away and using a longer focal length lens. You can tell by the size of the trees in the background. This difference in positioning, not “because iPhone,” is why the player’s faces are distorted on the left.
These details might not matter to random folks grabbing snapshots. But I expect something posted to HN to actually contain useable detailed information, rather than vague “looks worse” comparisons with an obvious thumb on the scale.
So it would be a fairer comparison to use a longer focal length, but it's also true that I am the Average Joe, and Average Joe took a better photo with the camera, because it guided me in that direction more than the iPhone did.
It tipped the scales and the post became overwhelmingly misleading, attributing the "distortion" to the camera, instead of the distance and zoom.
But also, very fun to see the Copper Country featured on hacker news!
I'm white as ghost. Pixels are determined to make me looked tan for absolutely no reason. I mean, maybe I look 'better', arguably, but it's not me. Is that what people want?
I bought the kid some newfangled Polaroid type thing, and she uses that way more than phones anymore for photos. Maybe the kids will be ok.
https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/real-tone/
Big enough to take the world and all it's got
Keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out hot-dog-coloured people by the score"
It's similar to the loudness war in music. Slightly louder/more saturated looks subjectively better when compared side by side. Apply this slight increase over and over again and you get something that no longer reflects reality.
This is complicated with pictures of people because people want them to look "good", not accurate.
I bought a decent camera. I really enjoyed playing with it, and spent some happy hours learning about it. I even took some decent photos (well, I liked them anyway).
But in the end, carrying it became a chore and trying to take off-the-cuff photos during adventures took too long. I found that we needed to go for specific "photography adventures" with the camera, with the intent of taking photographs with the camera, in order to use it. If we were going for a trip without the specific aim of taking photographs it was just easier to use the phone cameras.
Also the camera photos were stuck on the camera, while the phone photos were instantly usable in social media, and shareable from the Google/Apple Photos. I have a portable drive folder somewhere with all the camera photos, but I never see them. The phone photos are a search away.
I think it's the difference between "being a photographer" and "taking photos". I am not a photographer, I just want to take some photos and share them with my friends. They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again. All the comments in the article are accurate but meaningless in this context.
On the other had, if you're a photographer and want to take a photograph that someone will hang on their wall, all the comments in the article are accurate and relevant.
Seems like you don't really care much about those photos then. If you have them on a portable drive, how long would it take to do a drag-and-drop to put them on Google photos? 40 seconds + waiting for the upload? It's really minimal amount of friction.
> They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again
Sure, no need to do anything else for such snaps. But it's also nice to keep some long term photos to show your kids or grandkids. Like people did from the 70s up till the 00s. In fact, there are inexpensive services that help you arrange your photos in quality printed book-form albums, similar in principle to the physical photo albums of the past, where individual printed photos were glued. I find that picking such a book off the shelf happens much more readily than any urge to load up an external hdd to view photos on a screen.
I'm surprised no camera manufacturer has created an easy way to get all your photos to Google Photos / iCloud/ Dropbox / etc. They have some wireless photo transfer things, but they're clunky and unusable. Just connect the camera to WiFi and auto-upload everything to the service of my choice. I'm guessing it's a mix of:
* Camera manufacturers are hardware companies and can't do software and cloud stuff.
* It wouldn't interact well with swapping SD cards, which is what all the pros want.
* The camera would need to stay powered when off to upload photos. Current cameras have a hard power switch.
If you are just taking snapshots to share with friends, then it makes sense to not bring the camera. But if it's your hobby, where you sit down and take time and care to take a photo, then it's a different game altogether.
I don't often print my photos out and put them on a wall, but I do have my own photography blog where I post the photos I take (with a camera). I think the article is still relevant to that kind of scenario too.
I think the purpose of this kind of page is to outline differences between taking a snapshot and taking a photo. This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time. It also attempts to combat the prevalent myth that more megapixels = better photos. Yes that myth still exists in 2025.
> This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time.
"Never argue with idiots. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Seriously, are there people who think that iPhones are just as good as dedicated cameras, and can still tie their own shoelaces?
I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone.
I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc.
But I've come to the conclusion that once you start look closely there's absolutely no comparison.
One thing I've started doing is creating custom photo books from all my photos. It's really helped me focus my photography. When doing this though I've noticed how edited phone photos are, as well as how poor the quality actually is (particularly in low light).
The quality issue is understandable (it's physics). The editing issue is a bit more insidious I think.
All in all, if you just want to view phone photos on your phone, they look great. But if you're actually interested in photography and printing, you should get a dedicated camera.
Unfortunately, the less I use it, the worse I get. So snagging my "nice" camera for a vacation, then spending a lot of time making sure I lug it around and use it, and then having the results be, frankly, bad, is really frustrating. In particular, I have quite a few photos that are.. either blurry, or out of focus, and it's hard to tell which. I am pretty careful to ensure I hold the camera still, and have a sufficient shutter speed, but I'm definitely messing something up.
I need to take more time to practice at home rather than capturing a thousand frames over 3 weeks and hoping they're good (like the bad old days of film!)
I also have a fuji camera. In manual mode, you can have focus indicator showing e.g. red dots in the in-focus areas. Another way is to use "focus check" button which is basically a quick digital zoom to check the focus yourself.
Regarding blown-out sky, I often use the HDR auto mode which effectively automatically lowers the exposure 1 stop and then raises it in post, so trading some shadows for highlights. You lose some control but it makes shooting easier. I also use the display indicator / blinkies for blown out parts so I can easily see when something is overexposed.
It's annoying especially because at a glance, the pictures taken by my S24+ look just fine, and it sometimes makes me not pull out the aging DSLR.. but then when I get the pictures onto my PC and want to actually look at them.. I always regret my mistake.. Even a 10 year old DSLR on automatic no-flash mode kicks its butt so bad it's not even a comparison..
You can also set styles in the camera settings to fix these problems: incorrect AI white balance and lighting.
* zoom in
* print them
* watch them on a bigger screen
Sometimes I compare photos I've taken over 10 years ago with Sony NEX-5 with photos I take today with an iPhone. There's no competition, APS-C from 15 years ago is still solid.
Anyway, the best camera is the one you have with you, so in that sense iPhone is great.
Personally, I carry around a Ricoh GR3, and shoot random shots with the iPhone, but when it really matters I’ll use the Ricoh. The way the iPhone flattens the lighting is what bugs me the most. Recently I was at a kid’s birthday party and each kid had a cupcake with a candle in it. The room was a bit dark, and the Ricoh photo showed that each kids face was illuminated just a bit by the candle in their cupcake… The color temperature of the candle light is warmer than that of the room light. The photo makes you feel like you’re really there. My friend shot a photo on her iPhone at the same time and we compared afterwards. In her photo, every kid’s face is well lit and the candle effect is gone. She likes her shot better and I like mine. Some people want a shot that reflects what they saw, and some people want a shot that looks like what they think good photos look like.
- Don't use the super wide lens and stand too close to people
- Use the super easy edit features to fix distortion
- Pay attention to lighting & exposure
- Don't just accept the iPhones default settings
If you want toned down contrast and color smartphones are perfectly happy to do that.
Otherwise.. I do configure my fancy digital camera to capture reduced contrast and color saturation compared to the defaults on a smartphone. So a lot of the time my samples would look like his.
Average people want contrast + saturation turned up like crazy. This is why the defaults ship that way. This is why a lot of the beginner non-phone digital cameras often shipped with the defaults that way. This is why TVs ship with the brightness/contrast/saturation boosted. The average person might look at your more subtle photo and appreciate it as better than theirs but then they will go right back to being super happy with their high contrast/saturation images.
Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.
Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing.
Not just phones. Most wide-angles for "serious cameras" have distortion and rely on digital correction. See [0] for an extreme example in the form of a 16mm Canon, which is much less wide than the iPhone lens.
[0] https://photographylife.com/reviews/canon-rf-16mm-f-2-8/2
For fisheye, I guess it would have been more accurate to say: the perspective distortion is present in both photos and is stronger for the iphone photo due to a shorter effective focal length, and there is no noticeable fisheye/barrel distortion in the iphone photo.
Disclaimer: I don't have an iPhone 16, but my Poco X4 Pro 5G suffers from the same "fisheye" issue with its 25mm-equivalent lens. And I am not a professional photographer.
It is not a "bad camera" issue, but a composition issue forced by the short focal length second and the users' aversion to cropping the image first. You can easily avoid this issue by shooting at 2x digital zoom (or cropping) and going 2x further from the scene. And 2x zoom (with the corresponding decrease in the resolution of the resulting files) is how I shoot the majority of my photos.
So yes, I effectively have a 3MP camera, not 12MP (and not the hyper-marketed 108MP AI camera), and, for many purposes, it's still good enough.
P.S. Composition matters a lot. The right photo has the right proportions between the players and the trees in the background. The inclusion of the yellow golf flag in the "beginner photographer's" photo is also what makes the scene more complete artistically and worth hanging on the wall.
To your point, back up to where you'd shoot the long lens, then crop back. Thanks to the 48mp, there's room to crop, it'll be fine.
FWIW, this crop is what every* camera with a sensor smaller than full frame is already doing to get "reach" from smaller glass, whether we realize it or not.
* By and large.
Folks will say it’s just the focal length. But can you crop when your sensor is already that small?
And when I use the Photos app on my Apple TV to review a couple videos I took, I'm surprised at the weird, wavy quality I'm seeing in them. It's really strange.
I will compare this to the videos I took with my Sony a6700. But until then, I'm surprised at how odd the videos looked on a large OLED TV. Might be compression from iCloud or something. Can't quite explain it otherwise.
I have no shortage of friends who asked me why I bothered to buy a real camera, but if you're a hobbyist photographer, it's nice to use a real camera and have full control. There are apps that do let you do this on a smartphone, and it's definitely more convenient.
But there's something about the real photos (with real Bokeh) that still look much better to me.
Using a OnePlus 12 now, and find the photos much less overprocessed (and wavy).
Moon-gate: Samsung fans are mad about AI-processed photos of the moon : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds...)
Now every single picture taken is much sharper and better looking, the darker it gets the bigger the difference. Also 10x physical zoom produces much better photos in all conditions. It feels like I just got a new phone with amazing new cameras, I'd say dxomark score should be revisited.
Now maybe they tackled some hardware reserves via better algorithms, its all possible. Or, slightly more probably, some tiny little AI is ironing out pictures on a level not detectable by mere viewing by eye. I don't complain, camera is #1 priority for me on phone as an amateur photo enthusiast, and basically I don't need to upgrade phone for quite a few years. The results are really really good and I haven't seen anything noticeable in few hundred snaps, often done after sunset.
[1] "Don’t Be Ugly By Accident!": https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/dontbeuglybyacciden... (mirror)
There are lots of areas where there is a ‘convenience’ / ‘art’ split. One I recognized early was houses that were ‘architected’ and those that were just ‘built’. Looking at cabins from the 1800’s vs houses you can really see a cabin is practical, it is focused on utility that is easily built with a wide variety of materials at hand and skill sets of the builders. Whereas homes that were architected and built used a lot of craftspeople, bespoke materials, etc.
My dad was a professional photographer and he would take pictures and I would take pictures and his looked great and mine looked ‘ordinary’? I was just capturing the view in a given direction and he was composing a view to have various elements in relation to make a picture.
Phone cameras are “free” in that you bought a phone and it happened to come with a camera, and you carry it with you everywhere because phone. So a lot of the image capturing that is done is what you see. People do compose shots, and I’ve seen great photographs from phone cameras. But it is pretty clear that a photographer using a phone works harder to get their shot than someone who just wants a snapshot, and it goes the other way too, a person who just wants a snapshot works a lot harder to figure out how an SLR works, “just to take a picture” while the photographer seems to effortlessly bring it up to take a wonderful shot.
So if you take the whole set of people who are using a tool, you optimize for the largest portion of that population which is where the culture aspects kick in it seems. People grabbing snapshots with ‘one button activation’ vs people taking photographs composing with scenes and light.
9 times out of 10 when I see someone making this claim it’s engagement bait. They know it triggers people and generates interactions.
I think most people are well aware that they’re not the same. The point usually made is that it’s amazing that we can get such good photos out of something that fits in our pockets. In well-lit scenes you really can get some impressive image quality out of those tiny devices.
From there:
> Real cameras capture shadow more accurately.
> professional cameras
That's saying that real cameras don't use wide angle lenses nor have an image processing pipeline, and professionals of the field have adequately labeled cameras.
This kinda makes the whole piece so shallow and weirdly ideological, when it doesn't need to be. People interested enough in the craft will spend time knowing their gear, the strength and limitations, and work with it.
Phone cameras now give more and more access to the underlying mechanisms and RAW formats. There's of course tons of photos I'd want to put in my wall coming from my phone, they're just really great for subjects that properly match the lenses strengths. iPhones or Pixel phones aren't perfect or ideal in all conditions, but what camera is ?
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Most other points also seem contrived to me. Not all: skin color really seems better on the traditional camera. Whether that's due to the phone not being able to use the main camera, though, I wouldn't know...
These pictures simply need to be compared with reality if you want to know which camera is better. I can't tell what the shape of the leftmost person's head is. I noticed the difference, found the iPhone version more flattering, but then read the text and saw that the iPhone is apparently distorting it. A reader can't judge how close it is to reality. Continue reading, and matching reality is now bad: the traditional camera can't properly capture the background (or light in the foreground of the later child picture) and the author thinks that's good. Blurring and darkening is something you can always still add in, I'd say that a camera performed better if it delivered a picture close to reality and you can work with that data to highlight any aspect you want. The camera doesn't have to force that upon you
However, it's a battery hog and can be a bit sluggish to get going, and there are some weird interactions with the built in photos app (if you crop the photo after the fact in the Photos app it pushes all the colour towards purple in the thumbnail, but not in the actual image).
I'm already happy enough with the image quality that I can overlook these flaws, which will hopefully get fixed over time. People should try it to see what they think.
Here is an example of what that looks like: https://imgur.com/Q4J5BHi
In case it isn't obvious due to the zoom and lack of context:
- The texture on the top and windshield don't exist, it's plain gray.
- The letters on the card actually read something, here it's gibberish. Sometimes half a letter, sometimes a texture that doesn't exist.
In particular, manual focus with the actual focus scale (no tap around on some surrogate object) and in-focus indicator, control to set a lower ISO in scenes where the phone wants to pull a faster image, or set a higher shutter speed even on darker situations.
Or on the pro line you get the option to stop automatic lens switching, which gives a lot more control (stay on the best lens/sensor and adjust for it yourself, instead of the phone trying to be clever)
All in all it stops being a point and shoot, and there will be a more missed pictures because of wrong settings, but the highs are also a lot higher in my experience. And it can go back to the "all auto" mode anytime.
No.
I have numerous smartphone photos printed and framed. On both walls and horizontal surfaces.
There does not exist a greater pixel-peeping gearslut than I, but that's just a hobby. Hobbies only dominate my wallet, not my life.
If my phone photos did bother me, I would turn on RAW mode and do the processing myself.
My "real" camera is a 15 year old Canon Rebel XSi. It's big and can't do a lot of the things my iPhone can and the photos are about the same quality (which is impressive because the Rebel is only 12 megapixels).
I start with TV sets. The usual way to chose one was walking into a shop, looking at dozen of TVs tuned on the same channel, picking the ones that subjectively looked best then check the price and size. Did we (average people) cared about the inner workings of the TV? Nearly zero.
Enter cheap compact digital cameras (200-300 Euro or Dollars.) We didn't have a chance to take pictures to compare cameras and even if we did it would take too much time. We read reviews, trust them, shop from home. Most people would buy the model with the highest number of Megapixel.
Enter smartphones. On average there are people that will buy an iPhone no matter what and people that will not buy an iPhone no matter what. Then they would use the camera inside the phone and would possibly notice that its pictures looked better or worse than their previous phone, especially in dark places.
And about camera vs phone: the phone is always in the pocket, the camera is always at home unless somebody goes on vacation in some scenic place and plans to take a lot of pictures. Half of them will be taken with the phone anyway.
I do have a compact camera. It's some Sony model with 30x optical zoom. It's great to take shots of animals without having to get close and scare them away (so no picture.) It's definitely better than my phone but my phone is not so bad too and it's more convenient to use. Furthermore those compact cameras lost many manual settings that would make them more useful. Sometimes it's easier to pin the autofocus of my phone on a subject than to make my camera understand that it must focus to something instead of doing its best to focus on the surroundings. And I won't digress on how long it takes to take a picture with cameras and send it to somebody on WhatsApp.
So, those 5 golf players look better on the camera but their picture will be taken and shared with a phone 99.9999% of the times.
The point not in the article is that a phone camera, when used correctly (i.e., not defaulting to 1x zoom, maintaining a proper distance from the subject, and choosing wisely what's in the background), can produce photos of the same kind as a real camera in terms of composition. And that's what should be shared 99.9999% of the time. The extra resolution does not matter online, as most people will not zoom beyond what the platform, such as DeviantArt, offers as the default viewing experience - which is approximately 50% of the screen width, i.e., 1920 pixels on 4K displays.
I would probably (if possible) repeat this idea but with photos taken at the same time, with cameras as close to each other as possible. If at all possible I would also try to use as similar of a lens as possible, if only as a 3rd comparison point to compare the other two to.
The child in the surf is almost identical. Maybe a few ms of difference, look at the foot position.
The facial structure differences in the players were striking despite not being identical shots.
Would love for someone else to get more scientific about it, but I think the results would be the same.
I mean, if believing your words were enough to convey the message, then there'd be no point in taking the second photo and comparing them.
The point here isn't whether you're telling the truth (of course you are), it's about being able to see what's going on and get an intuitive feel for what changes and what stays the same. When I said "who's to say they're not leaning" my point wasn't to call you a liar; it was to say that that question is what immediately arises in your audience's brain, and it's completely distracting. Trust can't correct for the visual discrepancy, even if I had taken for the photo myself.
I think a lot of the differences you're seeing are the result of FOV differences; the iPhone camera is a ~24mm equivalent, which is much wider than most people would shoot on a dedicated camera. That wide-angle distortion is just a natural part of the 24mm focal length, but not really the iPhone's fault.
The other effects you're seeing are related to Apple's default image processing, which, at this point, most people would agree is too aggressive. This difference goes away if you shoot in ProRAW and process your photos in an app that allows you to dial down (or ideally turn off) local tone mapping.
If you have an iPhone that shoots 48MP ProRAW, don't be afraid to crop the image significantly, which increases the effective focal length and makes the image look more like a dedicated camera. It also increases the apparent bokeh, which is actually quite noticeable on close-ups. With the RAW you can then quickly edit the image to end up colors which are much more faithful and natural.
If anyone out there doesn't have a Pro model, they can shoot RAW photos in 3rd party camera apps, including Lightroom, which is free.
But in a more classical sense, directing the viewer's look is what composition in photography is all about.
I love having a camera on my phone for the convenience, but when I want to take good pictures I take out my camera.
I've got an old Nikon D5100 DSLR which I sometimes pull out and take photos with, and a cheap $200 Motorola phone, which does amazingly well, if there's plenty of light and the subject happens to take up most of the frame (and can thus focus)
Getting a good photo with the Nikon is easier for me, but I've had a lot of practice. The main issue is getting things to focus in macro land.
Ironically enough, the Vivo ("Zeiss") color science also looks more accurate than most phones I've owned, and is pretty flexible at editing time.
If you wish to reduce optical distortion and can get farther away from the subject, you'll want to pick the "5x" zoom. Think somebody else here said it was a 105mm equivalent, which sounds about right.
Intermediate values are obviously crops... although given that the 0.5x and the 1x lens are both 48mp sensors (IIRC), and the resulting image is typically 12mp, it doesn't make as big of a quality difference as one might ordinarily think.
Actually using the iPhone telephoto for a group photo like the one shown in the article would require the photographer to stand a considerable distance from the subjects, and then we might start noticing a little perspective distortion from the 45mm-equivalent lens on the Sony.
To your point, take six steps back and use the 5x zoom on an iPhone Pro and you'll get a much better effect.
As they say, the best camera is the one you have in your pocket. Physics means it can never replace a large sensor with a large lens...
... But Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, The Beach, Trainspotting, 127 Hours) was quite happy to film 28 Years Later entirely on the iPhone 15 Pro Max [1].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/28-years-later-danny-boyles-new-...
The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
Don't underestimate the power of the subject's comfort and state of mind. Gramma is happy to get the picture, she doesn't care how it got taken.
What an odd thing to infer. Just a really large leap.
Considering there are 2 photos of the same subjects, this reasoning becomes very order-dependent, we don't know the order of the photos taken, so we shouldn't be judging the photos on things affected by that.
I honestly can't tell what the site author is trying to do. Criticizing oversaturation is reasonable. Claiming the camera is responsible for differences in pose and composition is madness.
I do shoot with both because I'm not foolish enough to think good work can't be forced from poor tools, but I know the difference between a camera that works with me, and a phone that mostly won't. This author appears not really to understand that difference clearly, identifying accurately some flaws and differences resulting from real constraints, and inventing others from accidents of poor test procedure such as obvious changes in pose between serially taken shots.
It's a confusing way to advertise his "Candid9" service to photographers; as one of those it leaves me hoping he's better as a programmer, and as a programmer it leaves me wondering why I should trust someone with such a questionable grasp of my problem domain has produced software that will successfully serve my needs.
I mean, when I do street work, I just get a phone number or email address and that works fine. What do I need with a QR code that requires a printer to produce? Good grief, I'm the only one I know who still runs on paper, I own three printers, and I haven't found a credible way to like QR codes! What does all this extra complication add for anyone involved, except some Michigander who wants a piece of what I'm doing for no good reason I can see?
Really, what it looks like to me is just that you have a product that costs ~nothing to operate and seems like it sort of makes sense for smallish wedding-and-anniversary party venues - but you've discovered too late what a nightmare that market is and that the fit's not actually that great, so you're pitching to people like me to try to salvage with a pivot, not realizing that the ask to add a Wal Mart style belt mounted printer to my kit in order to produce these QR code tickets is really just never going to happen.
It's bizarre to me in what world you live where this constitutes "easier," but I also don't care. You want to intermediate and transactionalize a relationship so ephemeral it can already be nearly overlooked even to exist, and where your presence is unneeded and unwelcome - and mine is the most HN comment ever? But it does explain why no one in your sample shots is smiling.
Most I've done is 60 group photos in an hour at a trade show.
> Really, what it looks like to me is just that you have a product that costs ~nothing to operate
Correct
> and seems like it sort of makes sense for smallish wedding-and-anniversary party venues
I would say the intended use case is destination venues like a upscale golf course or hotel.
> the ask to add a Wal Mart style belt mounted printer to my kit
Not how it works. If you looked at the website, you'd see that you print and cut the tickets at home before hand on a normal printer.
> It's bizarre to me in what world you live where this constitutes "easier," but I also don't care
Handing someone a ticket is easier than collecting their email.
> You want to intermediate and transactionalize a relationship so ephemeral it can already be nearly overlooked even to exist, and where your presence is unneeded and unwelcome - and mine is the most HN comment ever?
I have unlimited confidence and patience. Hit me with the snarkiest rebuttal you can muster!
At a rate of one a minute in a destination venue, sure, this makes sense, assuming you could land that kind of deal reliably. So why are you trying to sell it to street photographers like me, who do things differently, with different desiderata and different needs? And if you are going to try to do that, then don't you think you might be wise to listen when a putative customer explains how you have failed to earn their money?
I guess maybe it could be worth clarifying your copy, but who'd care? I do street work when I do it because I like meeting people and because it makes people smile. If I wanted money also out of it, I'd more likely just drop my hat on the sidewalk or something.
I still don't see why the comparison page (the one originally linked here, the iPhone 16/mirrorless shootout) treats variations in pose and composition as equivalent with those caused by camera physics, which was what originally caught my interest in any case.
Another use-case perhaps in your case is to do it for free and do higher volume and market your money-making services? I agree that it is fun and mood-lifting to take portraits, but also it would be cool to make it sustainable.
but yeah overall Candid9 is a hammer looking for a nail right now.
Google a couple years ago, however, made a big stink that they were forcing an always-on filter to "enhance" the appearance of dark skin on Pixels, so yeah you might need a real camera to get accurate photos of subjects with darker skin if you have a pixel.
thousands rubbles?
But why does the article compare what I assume is the iPhone’s ultra wide angle lens (incorrectly referred to as a “fish eye” lens) with a different focal length on a different camera without specifying what exactly it is being compared to? That’s apples to oranges.
Distortion from focal length can only be meaningfully judged in combination with sensor size and subject distance.
Example: iPhone 16 Pro ultra wide focal length is 13mm (equivalent to full frame). So the comparison shots need to be taken from the same spot and with another 13mm equivalent focal length, for example a full frame camera with a 13mm lens or a micro four-thirds camera with a 6.5mm lens.
I happen to be making a RPi Camera for Burning Man and was incorporating a QR code workflow into it. With a thermal printer for either a low-res pic or a QR code to print or snap. I devised something along the lines of this service, but dead simple URL generation to filename+hash in an S3 bucket.
Now, I'd hate for dedicated cameras to go away. I love shooting on SLRs, digital and film. I see smartphone cameras not as pretenders to the throne but as democratizing tools lowering the barrier for entry and a great way to get shots when you don't have your dedicated camera.
[0]: for the record, the issue with the camera was that it was cheap and I didn't know what I was doing, not that it was film.
Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.
Yes. Everyone does, with every manufacturer, and Apple evidently has determined their visual style. At least they also provide you with an optional semi-raw output you can freely edit if you so desire.
Even in new cameras (where the viewfinder itself is a tiny screen) something happens when you frame a photo this way, that doesn’t happen when you use the back display (or a phone).
I don’t know if it’s down to physically using one eye, or the psychology of bringing your eye to the camera’s eye, but it feels different (and I like it)
The subject seems to have moved. His expression is different, how he holds the stick is different. Hard to believe that the stance remained the same meanwhile.
Modern computational photography does a great job of dealing with tricky conditions though.
I regularly take photos outside, at night, in ambient light with my Fujifilm X-Pro3 and 56mm f/1.2. I'm stretching the limits of it a bit, using high ISO and as low a shutter speed as I can get away with.
In the same lighting conditions, an iPhone will basically take 3-5 shots and composite them together in software. The result, predictably, is unusable for most moving subjects.
Fisheye lenses are a specific thing, iPhone lenses aren't fisheye lenses.
The dng files that come out of my Pixel phone down sample from 50 mega pixels to 12.5. You can't access the original 50 mega pixels. So each pixel has information from 4 "real" pixels. That's fairly effective for getting rid of noise. I took some night shots with it and it holds up pretty well. It actually makes Google's night vision AI mode a bit less impressive because the starting point isn't that bad.
My other camera is a Fuji X-T30. The lenses and sensor are clearly better on that one if you look at the raw files. More detail, dynamic range, etc. But at night it's kind of weak (noise). And if you are into that, Fuji's film emulation produces pretty pleasing jpg files without a lot of work. I shoot raw so I tend to ignore that. But it's a somewhat fair comparison because in both cases there isn't much post processing. Except the Fuji isn't doing a lot of AI trickery and is just relying on a good results that come out of the camera and applying a prefab tone mapping that resembles what film used to do.
The difference of course is that with the Fuji, you are making lots of creative choices with focal range, depth of field of the lens (aperture), shutter speeds, and ISO while you are shooting. You don't really have that with a smart phone (though you can have some control). The iphone and pixel phones fake some of this stuff and some people like the portrait mode with the fake bokeh. Lens quality is amazing given the size of phones these days. But it's not the same as shooting with a proper lens and they do have some real physical limitations.
And if you shoot raw, you gain a lot of control over tone mapping etc. Not for everyone of course. But also not the end of the world with the right software. I use Darktable for this and if you dial that in properly, it's not actually a lot of work.
That being said, my pixel takes decent photos without a lot of effort and there is value in that. I have it with me by default and that is invaluable. I only use the Fuji a few times per year. But there's less art to using a smart phone. Point and tap on the button and hope for the best.
These things can casually record 4k 60 for as long as your storage can survive with the best OIS. Night mode photo check. HDR mode check.
I wish Apple was selling their processing hardware to camera vendors.
I know what I'd rather take pictures with.
It effectively states that people don’t print photos anymore because phones produce bad photos.
But back in the film camera days you literally had to develop and print the photos to see them. There was no universal device for viewing photos that you always had on you.
For everything else, actual camera hands down!
Though for its size and availability iPhone camera is great!
But, conversely, how do you do the narrow(er) depth-of-field in the iPhone when you want it?
If you're asking "how do you do", you can select "portrait" when taking the photo, or go to the photo in your gallery after the fact, pick "edit", pick "portrait", and choose a fake aperture ("f/1.4") and focus point to use. The results are ... mid.
Though still good to see how it turns out otherwise for a small phone in your pocket.
One could take the depth map and use it to mask off two areas to keep sharp, which would potentially have better-than-real-camera results. The iPhone does not do this, however. You'd have to write your own program to do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365510
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482085
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39926633 (sanity prevails)
I get the author knows what he's talking about/looking at, but most of us don't. I couldn't tell you which of those was iPhone vs Expensive Camera if you didn't tell me. Maybe I could guess but I'd have to examine.
This is the same as me being incredulous that the author has (made up example) a $20 cheap router his ISP gave him vs my lovingly handcrafted config on my home VyOS router.
At the end of the day both work...
Apple is 'famous' for at least a decade to (by default and basically nobody turns it off) overdo saturation towards red spectrum so that every single photo looks like its taken in golden hour (last hour before sunset). Every single one. Skin tones are affected correspondingly, looking artificial. You may not see it, its glaringly obvious to anybody who even scratched surface of photography (I never got deeper and still).
I get it, people like that 'instagram' look, but when its coming from all directions it loses all beauty and its just plasticky looking people.
Apple has some properly good hardware (and corresponding sw processing), they didn't have to resort to overdoing it so much (also very aggressively removing any skin blemishes and moles which all goes back to above). At the end, apple photos and people on them look too artificial. If you like it as such that's fine, but it doesn't represent reality, at least far less than other phones and proper camera photography.
In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible.
It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.
1. Every dude here is pretty unattractive, so the question is which camera gives them enough camera makeup to hide it. If you shake your head at this, take a peek at this: https://i.imgur.com/vdD5r8M.jpeg Every dude is mewing for his life in the latter photo
2. They aren't making the same face for each shot, so all of this is a waste of time. That's so much more important.
3. The only real difference is just the background being blurred or not. Otherwise it's a totally different pose for each guy.
Even so, though, 5 or 7 years ago it became clear that I could absolutely use some iPhone shots as part of my travel sets. Yeah, you could tell they weren't from the full-frame Sony, but the delta was small enough that it was okay. Now that delta is narrower.
But the BULK of the photos I end up sharing are still from a real camera. Some of that is the lack of distortion, and some of that is likely the intentionality of Using A Camera vs. whipping out one's phone, and a good chunk of is the level of control a competent shutterbug has with a proper camera that is mostly absent, or at least harder to manipulate, on a phone (aperture, shutter, ISO, etc).
I have a photo I took on my iPhone 6S on my wall. It’s a crop of a panorama taken from the top of a sand dune in Namibia.
But then I bought a Ricoh GrIIIx, which is very pocketable and takes amazing photos. Even has a handy remote view function through WiFi. I don’t bother with my phone anymore.
I don't mind the comments but there's always someone. There's also people with the latest phones who come and brag about their photo quality. I'm always nice about it and give my talking points about the sensor sizes and the lenses as quickly as possible.
Sometimes they are more aggressive about it and start to question my competence. I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's as I'm usually in the middle of a few things during events. I liked how the article mentioned amateur photographer (which would describe me) so it addresses some of these concerns. It also uses examples of older cameras that are very affordable.
Next time someone is coping from Big Tech marketing about the camera on their smartphone, I'll show them this. All the "Pro"s use iPhone camera, right?
I'm not sure anything good will come of showing them this article.
Just say "yeah" and move on.
“I prefer the photos I take from this camera.”
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I am also not exactly convinced that this supposed iPhone picture of those kids is actually an image taken at 1x.
But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject.
But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects).
Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground.
BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)
Of course then there's the lack of detail and watercolor effect to try to fake detail, distortion, etc.
fucking hell
“fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.
Wedding photographers use bounce flash because indirect light is flattering and not everyone is supermodel-beautiful.
I don’t know where you’re partying that the ceilings aren’t painted white (they usually are because the problem of color cast on reflected light applies to normal room lights as well) but I’ll take color balance I can fix in post over harsh shadows from direct fill flash.
“Specialist thinks the broader domain should universally adhere to the way things are optimized in their area of focus” is not an uncommon thing to see on HN, though its more commonly seen with specialists in different kinds of programming than photography.
ALL photos look good with direct flash. Never use bounce flash. And indirect lighting is never flattering. EVER. Fire any photographer that ever uses bounce flash. Nobody wants their muddied color.
I was also a photo editor with thousands of photographer submissions. I can always tell which ones used bounce flash. A sure sign of unprofessional amateurness.
I get that people have a desire to maintain their lazy habits, but my job was to make sure they understood they sucked at photography.
For anyone reading, soft shadows from indirect light is why professional studio setups use beauty dishes, bounce cards, and big flash boxes or umbrellas with diffusers. Bounce flash is a way to create a little of that magic when you can’t get the entire rig to a shoot, as in wedding photography.
Pointing your on camera flash directly at the subject is the easiest route you can take. How does that make every other method lazy? (Note that I’m not calling direct flash lazy - it still takes skill to balance flash power vs aperture and speed. But every other method takes that and more.)
https://www.cined.com/iphone-15-pro-lab-test-rolling-shutter...
anyway the major differentiator in photography is not the device but light.
I stopped reading here. Every photo on the walls in my house came from some smart phone.
Edit: Is this just a good bit of sarcasm/shitpost? If so, it's just a tad too subtle.
The best camera is the one you actually have on-hand at the moment you need to take the photo and that often ends up the phone camera.
My d7100 might be one of my favorite cameras of all time. I've taken very nice picks of birds mid-flight that would be very hard to do on a phone (impossible?). But, it's not a camera you pull out your pocket and start shooting snapshots. It takes time to learn and post-process.
They are all just tools, pick the right one for what you're doing. And sometimes the right one is the one you have with you :)
Is this person going around asking all of their friends what kind of camera they used to take the photos they have on display? Or are they just sure they can tell from looking?