I just tested the iPhone X camera last weekend. While it’s still a long way to a D4 with a professional lense the results are incredible, for a phone camera anyway. Especially the RAW feature and the depth of field features of the lense are great.
the results are incredible
One would need to do comparative pics, with 1:1 zoom-ins.
Samsungs too have had RAW for some time, but the image processing in all phones is very highly tweaked to produce an attractive image at the finished size which is what 99% of people are interested in (with every trick in the book used, including variable amounts of colour correction, unsharp mark, etc, according the type of scene) so if one wants to get something out of RAW one needs to do quite a bit of work on it.
All consumer type cameras are the set in a way so the “normal user” get’s good results without editing. If you want to use RAW but do not want to edit each and every picture you simply work with presets in your RAW editor … Lightroom, Photoshop, Nikon Capture …whatever (I use Capture and Photoshop). For example i use the same level of “unsharp mask” for all pictures with one camera/lens.
Peter wrote:
And one wonders why people are happy with phone pics for everything these days? Mediocrity rules.
- it’s the best camera most people will ever own (sounds crazy from a traditional photography standpoint, but it’s true)
- you always carry it with you, enabling you to get shots you would simply never get with your DSLR … because it’s on the shelf at home
- If you/I put aside the purist mindset, in reality with most viewing distances, screens and angles, quality doesn’t really matter too much as the viewing conditions aren’t ideal
etc. etc.
I fully understand why people are happy…
Having said that, it’s probably also true that for a lot of people the iphone display is the best display they own and now with the new wide gamut/P3 photos look even more gorgeous
I fully understand why people are happy…
Indeed – as the old saying goes: the best camera is the one you have with you 
What surprises me is the lack of progress on quality in recent years. Presumably this is because Marketing judges there is no customer demand, against the technical tradeoffs (a thicker phone), and/or because everybody is using the same sensors, usually from Sony, so a competitive advantage cannot be achieved.
Actually the iPhone cameras made a big step forward and the quality (especially of the new 2-lens models) has reached astonishing quality. I do not know about other brands.
Peter wrote:
What surprises me is the lack of progress on quality in recent years
I’m still waiting on the next breakthrough in sensor technology that enables full frame low light performance in a 1/3" package. Until then I’m afraid we’ll have to be satisfied with incremental improvements… :(
Alexis wrote:
Actually the iPhone cameras made a big step forward and the quality (especially of the new 2-lens models) has reached astonishing quality
Agreed, but it already was quite good for the sensor size. What you see more and more is that the immense (graphical) processing power in the iPhone is brought into play with for example Portrait mode.
If it works like the ad shows, in real-time even in video, it is astonishing indeed and unheard of for a mobile phone until now:
Possibly unheard of in photography anywhere??
A question I’ve been wondering about is how the processing power in a DSLR compares to an (i)phone. I wonder if the balance is starting to tip heavily toward the phone.
It is indeed amazing how good the miniscule phone cameras, with their miniscule lenses, are.
However, there is an explanation for (almost) everything, and it is along these lines
If you look at that video, you see sections where the background is very dark or it is blurred (see the bit around 0:10) and these need very little bandwidth, enabling the data to be used on the woman’s face) you immediately see it was shot from a proper stabilised mount. It was at least one of these (I have one). The background pans very smoothly while the woman’s face is moving as she is walking. The result looks very slick. These are standard tricks for product promo videos, which produce footage no casual user gets. Any smooth panning also helps mpeg compression which again yields a better quality within the limited bandwidth. Most promo “action cam” footage these days is shot with a stabilised mount; starting with the original DJI Osmo it is a dirt cheap way to get a slick result, and the DJI phone mount works with any phone so you get high grade stabilisation even at 4K. Try shooting with the same phone a ski slope which is groomed, in fast motion, and the quality is nothing like the above video But even that ski pic is almost half sky so again would compress well Regarding processing power comparison, it might appear that e.g. a top end phone is faster than a top end DSLR, but e.g. the Sony A9 can shoot full frame at something like 20fps and I make that 3.8 gigabits/sec just getting the raw data off the sensor into RAM, and at the same time the camera is pulling it out of RAM and processing it into the images, while running autofocus etc. A phone shooting 4K at 60fps is “only” 500mbits/sec raw data.
* the now defunct Nokia 808’s lens was probably around a DSLR lens at f10 or so…
An issue I’ve not seen discussed (or not noticed if it has been) is the need for a point n shoot configuration when alone in the plane. My camera (a miniature SLR look alike with pancake lens) sits on the passenger seat and can be grasped and operated totally blind, as it were. No need to look at the camera, far less the viewfinder.
In my experience those magic shots last only a brief time. A regular SLR is far too bulky, a cellphone has to be looked at to find the release button and compact cameras are far too slow to capture the scene.
The one snag with this configuration, and with the cell phone cameras, are the numerous function buttons that get accidentally touched in this “quick, grab the camera” scenario. That’s why a proportion of my shots are irritatingly in B&W, widescreen and other unwanted modes. (I tell people it’s ‘artistic creativity’). If only there was a way to turn off all the controls except the shutter. The Nikon guys look at me in blank disbelief when I raise this idea at the CES.
Now I’m first to admit that my amateur results are poor compared with you photography pros. But I do get the shots, over a vast range of situations, when flying the plane is the absolute priority and capturing the scene very much peripheral to the reason that I’m there.
I think one issue is that modern cameras have no “infinity” setting which actually works properly. Old lenses, say 30+ years ago, could just be turned to the infinity stop and that was it. Modern ones all go past the stop, to enable autofocus to work on infinity subjects (the algorithm has to hunt past and then back again). And if you set the focus manually, it is easy to knock it… and autofocus often fails due to dirt on the windows, and some systems fail to work anyway with effects caused by the window material.
I get acceptable results using the Samsung S7 phone, which has exceptional fast focus performance due to having some vast number of focus sensor pixels. Way better than the S6, or any other phone I have used.
For the DSLR, the K1 is indeed bulky but it has outstanding stabilisation so even at 1/80 (the speed required to completely remove the prop) most pics, done handheld and often in a hurry, come out OK. I use the TAV mode (fixed shutter and aperture, auto ISO) almost exclusively.
