Will a phone ever be anywhere as good as a DSLR?

We finally have a new option – the Samsung S20. There are two others in the line.

However, reading the detail, it’s not an obvious improvement. They are still messing with the same tiny 12MP cameras, and the 64MP one has small pixels. Also one has to wonder which of these can deliver RAW, since the S10 can do RAW from only one of its cameras.

So really very little is coming for photography, and I doubt any of these will equal the old Nokia 808 from 2012

Very interesting.

The technology is getting better all the time, although clearly much more in the image processing direction (producing nice looking ready to use jpegs) than the raw imaging direction. There is only so much silicon and glass one can stuff in a phone which is 7mm thick. Nokia made an amazing camera in 2011 but the phone was about 15mm thick (around the camera) and nowadays almost nobody would buy that.

My observations from the two videos:

• It is easy to set up a photo which viewed full frame looks identical between a DSLR and a phone. You just need to pick something not too contrasty, and with no special factors like movement, low light, etc. Also, there is the old saying that if you want good photos, buy an airline ticket Sacrilege to camera anoraks but true. I am sure that if everyone was asked to dig out their “best” pic ever it would probably be one they took with some cheap phone. I have a load of food pics here and most were taken with the Samsung S7. A few were taken with the Pentax K1 and 24-70 (about €3k) and you can tell which they were from the filename, but not easily, in most cases, by looking at the pic.

• In the 1st video he does reveal that the Iphone pics were extracted as jpeg while the DSLR was used in RAW, so obviously they tweaked the DSLR pics to look the same as the ex-Iphone jpegs, which is a bit naughty. It would not happen by coincidence; you will almost never get any ex-camera jpeg to look like an unprocessed ex-camera RAW. The K1 is one exception where both are very close, but that’s because I have the jpeg mode set to no enhancement. The whole point of RAW is that, much of the time, at least, you tweak the image to take care of shadows, highlights, fix the white balance, etc. And where he shows DSLR pics with too-dark shadows, that is just where he didn’t do this right. Someone may actually want very dark shadows, of course.

• For family pics you don’t need a DSLR; in fact people (especially women ) tend to get really nervous if the pic might be too sharp, and assume that any “big camera” will take sharp pics. And immediacy (catching the moment) is by far the most important and that applies pretty well to all pics of people… unless somebody is having a portrait done after a €500 professional makeover.

• For a better comparison, try some dodgy situations, like “supposedly white” objects (snow, a wedding dress) illuminated by coloured light (blue sky, lamps, etc). RAW is the only way to do that if you want a really good result. Of course phones can do RAW too, but not necessarily from all their cameras or in every mode; this is something to check out.

• The Canon DSLR he is using is clearly crap for video – as most DSLRs are. Even stabilised DSLRs tend to not stabilise video. I think not making use of the fantastic sensors DSLRs have is a wasted opportunity which will bring the demise of the DSLR business much sooner. DSLR fanboys make all kinds of excuses for why DSLR video capability being crap is right and proper… Sony seems to be the main company which makes DSLRs that do good video, but they have IMHO poor ergonomics.

• The variable bokeh on the Apple relies on computational identification of the foreground object boundary, and works way better on the bald-head-man subject he is using than on a hairy head With hair, you don’t want to zoom in too much because you can see the artefacts. Apple do the same in their promotions; avoid complex foreground objects.

• The DSLR should have been stabilised; for example my Pentax K1 has really awesome stabilisation, getting sharp images at say 1/10 handheld. He is using a cheap DSLR…

I am sure DSLRs are going to become an even more marginal product. With probably under 10M/year sold across all brands you are looking at production runs of the order of 100k. Not yet too bad for production but they aren’t going to get cheaper. Jessops have more or less gone bust…

As he shows there are real benefits in shooting in RAW and this is arguably even more true with a phone – notwithstanding Apple’s excellent smart (e.g. their pretty well judged application of HDR) jpeg processing. This is why I am sticking with the old S7. The RAWs from that are identical to the ones from the S9; something Samsung wouldn’t want people to know. For trips to scenic places (but not ultra scenic i.e. no need for a DSLR) I bought a Canon G7X which works because I nearly always walk around with a waist pack, and it way outperforms any phone likely to exist for many years. But that market (pocket cameras) is also pretty dead now – some graphs posted further back in this thread.

One irritating thing I came across is that some cameras output RAW in some weird new format, not standard DNG. This is OK if you rent Lightroom as a part of the Adobe suite, for a tenner a month, for ever.