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.
makeitdouble · 10m 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 ?
dagmx · 10h 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.
FredPret · 10h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
- 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 · 34m 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 · 41m 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 · 42m 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).
PaulHoule · 9h 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 · 2h 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.
FredPret · 8h ago
I love the idea of that 90mm prime.
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.
zensavona · 25m ago
Pro tip: 28mm on full frame (or equivalent) is exactly the same focal length as iPhone 1x ;)
PaulHoule · 8h 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
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.
scottapotamas · 7h 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 · 7h 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 · 6h 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.
amluto · 2h 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.
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.
dale_glass · 10h 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 · 9h 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.
piva00 · 10h ago
Mirrorless APS-C platforms pushed micro 4/3 out, similar footprint with APS-C sensors is hard to beat.
dale_glass · 9h 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 · 2h ago
There are also great deals on used micro 4/3 lenses
nomel · 2h 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 · 40m 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.
saaspirant · 36m ago
Which camera do you have?
aosaigh · 10h 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 · 2h 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.
datadrivenangel · 10h ago
I differentiate between photos for memory and records, and Photos for Photography as an art form.
eddd-ddde · 9h 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 · 8h 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.
nop_slide · 1h ago
Get a Fuji
throwawaybob420 · 2m ago
Can’t go wrong with Fuji. It’s fucking expensive now though
markhalonen · 10h ago
I've had passer-bys take group photos with a real camera, no problem. What issues do you run into?
FredPret · 8h 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.
crinkly · 10h 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.
hatthew · 34m 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.
aosaigh · 10h 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 · 37m 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!)
markhalonen · 10h ago
digicams are making a huge comeback among young adults. Even a pocket digicam is a big step up from iPhone imo.
aosaigh · 10h 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.
kazinator · 16m 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?
StrLght · 10h 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.
can16358p · 28m 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!
atonse · 10h 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 · 10h 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 · 10h ago
iCloud videos look terrible on Apple TV, the first time it caught me by surprise too. The originals are significantly nicer.
datadrivenangel · 10h ago
I upgraded to the 16p instead of buying a new wide angle lens. The real bokeh is definitely nicer though.
bdamm · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
hnuser123456 · 1h 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 · 22m 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.
its-summertime · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
jonny_eh · 1h ago
How else to justify spending thousands on a device that can only shoot pictures?
throwanem · 1h ago
Competence. But you're right something is off here.
kittikitti · 3m 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?
nixass · 11h 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 · 10h 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.
tverbeure · 1h 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 · 36m 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.
sturza · 11h ago
Computerized phone photography is not for desktop viewing, printing, etc.
It appears to look "amazing" on phone displays - probably optimized for that.
rjh29 · 41m 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.
cunidev · 2h 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.
markhalonen · 11h ago
woah I am the author. I don't even have analytics set up on this site, but hope everyone enjoys it!
dataflow · 11h 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 · 10h 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.
fallinghawks · 9h 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.
markhalonen · 10h 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 · 1h 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.
sturza · 11h 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.
shinycode · 10h 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 · 11h ago
What kind of camera was used for the non-iphone shots?
markhalonen · 10h 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 · 10h 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.
aosaigh · 10h 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)
hopelite · 14m 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.
ivell · 10h 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 · 10h ago
the player in green has a substantial lean as well. Download the photo and crop and you can see it.
drcongo · 10h 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 · 10h ago
How do you take a 45mm focal length photo with iPhone?
drcongo · 9h ago
I said "equivalent" - the 2x lens is a 48mm equivalent so that difference would be almost invisible to most people.
dale_glass · 10h 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 · 10h 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.
olivermuty · 11h ago
The best camera is the one you have with you!
epicureanideal · 1h ago
Why can’t the fisheye distortion be removed with software?
ruuda · 1h 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.
breadwinner · 11h 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 · 10h ago
Yes, the distortion noted in the article is also seen in wide angle lenses on traditional cameras.
markhalonen · 10h ago
The iPhone photo in the blog is iPhone 16 Pro which has the 3 lenses (I am the author).
breadwinner · 10h ago
And which lens was used?
markhalonen · 10h 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 · 53m 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.
relaxing · 5m ago
Please, stop posting about cameras. You’re embarrassing yourself and everyone else.
breadwinner · 9h ago
Yes, but on the camera app, you should set 3x to use the longest lens. This will avoid distortion.
Zak · 1h 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 · 10h 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 · 10h 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 · 1h 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.
quest88 · 11h 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 · 10h 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 · 10h 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).
Almondsetat · 10h 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 · 10h ago
"you will have the average complexion and you will like it" rofl
Almondsetat · 10h ago
who are you quoting?
markhalonen · 10h 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 · 10h 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 · 10h 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 · 10h 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 · 10h 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).
Almondsetat · 10h 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.
PaulHoule · 11h 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.
kittikitti · 18s 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.
joelccr · 11h ago
TFA has the title in quotes, as though it is a reply to someone saying it. Must have got lost on submission
chimeracoder · 10h 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.
bloomingeek · 10h 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.
BadJo0Jo0 · 8h 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 · 1h 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...
bombcar · 11h ago
I see what he’s saying, but I also see all the iPhone photos printed and hung on the wall.
crinkly · 10h 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.
deneb150 · 10h 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.
Thaxll · 11h ago
All recent smartphone camera are good.
vFunct · 10h 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 · 10h 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.
MPSFounder · 1h 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.
astura · 10h ago
I must be a blind, I literally just can't see what this guy is talking about.
throwaway314155 · 11h 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 · 11h 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 · 10h 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 :)
wat10000 · 10h 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 · 10h 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.
earth2mars · 11h 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.
sturza · 11h 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 · 10h 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.
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 ?
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.
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.
”The best camera is the one you have on you”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_Jarvis
- 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.
[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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the iPhone, ~everyone on the planet instinctively knows how to do it.
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.
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!)
But, conversely, how do you do the narrow(er) depth-of-field in the iPhone when you want it?
* 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.
For everything else, actual camera hands down!
Though for its size and availability iPhone camera is great!
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).
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Ironically enough, the Vivo ("Zeiss") color science also looks more accurate than most phones I've owned, and is pretty flexible at editing time.
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.
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)
I am also not exactly convinced that this supposed iPhone picture of those kids is actually an image taken at 1x.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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?