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0 pointsjrockway9y ago0 comments

The iPhone is apparently the phone of choice for photographers, who know what an f stop is. I believe that spec is for them, everyone wants their f/1.2 L lens or whatever. Look at all of Apple's recent iPhone ads; they are all about the photos you can take (if you are willing to re-edit them in Photoshop to remove all the denoise and compression artifacts, which they even mention in the ads with a white-on-white disclaimer).

Small sensors are getting better. I am shocked at how good the image quality is on my RX100 (with a "one inch" sensor; one inch refers to the size of vacuum tube that would contain such a sensor if it were 1960 or something, no dimension is anywhere near one inch). I'm not going to give up 4x5 for it, but it's way better than a phone.

That said, the camera bump is ugly. Why can't they use a telephoto design (your 500mm SLR lens isn't 500mm long, remember).

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TheOtherHobbes9y ago

The photo quality is - strange. It's not truly sharp or clean, especially in the far distance, and there's an odd softness and a hint of waxy sheen to it.

It's a look Nikon used to have ten or so years ago, and to me it suggests over-aggressive noise removal.

To be fair it's very good for a tiny camera, and amazing considering the state of the art ten years ago.

But I wonder if it's starting to fall into uncanny valley: the closer it gets to pro performance, the more obvious it becomes that it's not there yet.

evan_9y ago

> if you are willing to re-edit them in Photoshop to remove all the denoise and compression artifacts

They did mention that you'll be able to capture raws with the iPhone camera now, which will hopefully alleviate some of that.

fluxquanta9y ago

>Small sensors are getting better.

They are, but they will also hit a physical wall at some point (if not already), and you'll continue trading "natural" dynamic range and low noise for software interpolated dynamic range and smoothing, which as others have noted, starts looking like Madame Tussaud's museum.

Then again, if Apple really wanted to impress me with their camera skills they would have to develop a medium format mirrorless digital camera for less than $5k. One can dream, I suppose.

jrockwayOP9y ago

I tend to agree with you, and wrote a long rant to this effect here: https://plus.google.com/+JonathanRockway/posts/QTxqczHGm5d

Basically, pixels are so small these days that even tiny amount of camera motion is going to blur a point of light between two pixels. I'm not sure how much that matters, but I think it does. So you can't make the sensors small and increase the detail you get. 20MP is the best you are going to do with full-frame, much less APS-C or 1" or iPhone size. Maybe image stabilization fixes all of this.

I took some photos on an airplane of a lightning storm today with a 1" sensor camera. ISO 5000, .5 second exposure hand-held, and they're pretty sharp. Not portfolio sharp, but good enough for some Internet Points probably. My iPhone did not do well, however. (I tried that first, then realized, hey I have a better camera with me.)

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