Peter wrote:
While a €5k DSLR+lens might give you f2 (or less, etc) in reality nearly all lenses are sharpest around f8, so this is where most landscape/architecture/etc pics are done, and you don’t approach the diffraction limit until around f22
I don’t think any of that is necessarily true, the effects of diffraction are influenced by the size of the imaging area. The reality is everything just got smaller, the sweet spot for the various advantages/disadvantages of a particular size moved.
My 4/3rd Lumix powers up at infinity with the pancake lens provided it’s set to MF. After many disappointments with automatic cameras focusing on the bugs on the windscreen, this is my proven solution. Every so often I flick the power to off and on again to make sure, power lever surrounding the shutter button so need to look at the camera. If only those other pesky buttons would reset to default in the same way!
Not sure if landscape (scenery) mode is a reliable way to force infinity on other cameras?
Not sure if landscape (scenery) mode is a reliable way to force infinity on other cameras?
I wonder how “infinity” is implemented. It can’t be a mechanical stop on the lens IMHO because such a stop would prevent autofocus working at infinity.
Peter wrote:
and then the size of the “hole” is about the same as a phone lens*, so you are then shooting with a “phone camera”… you just need reasonably good light, but every phone user discovers that very quickly
That’s a good point. And even then the tiny pixel size reduces the amount of light even further.This is where I would like to see an order of magnitude improvement in sensor performance. The benefit of the tiny lens is that it does have f/1.8 performance i.e. there is almost no light lost in the glass of the lens.
Peter wrote:
phones do a massive amount of processing on their images, and you can see this if you zoom in 1:1 (the pic has massive artefacts (sic) of every known kind)
This is a moving target though as both iPhone and Samsung now offer RAW photography.
Peter wrote:
That video was not shot with a bare phone; if you look at the background (where it is not black ) you immediately see it was shot from a proper stabilized mount
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
That’s pretty impressive! It’s also an achilles heel as any processing the camera wants to do afterwards, will need to be applied to all that data. The phone has an easier job in that respect. This obviously doesn’t apply when shooting RAW.
Who will have the viewing conditions to appreciate the 6000×4000 pixel perfect image of the A9? I know it looks nice, but …. is it energy misspent and are phones starting to eat into the DSLR market too having killed the compact camera.
This is where I would like to see an order of magnitude improvement in sensor performance.
I think they are up against the noise floor. They can make silicon structures very small today. But a pixel needs to collect a large number of photons to make a low noise image. That’s why the later phones have fewer pixels (say 12M versus previous 16M) and have bigger pixels. You get a better low light performance (the weakest thing about phone cameras) and better colours etc.
This is a moving target though as both iPhone and Samsung now offer RAW photography.
They do but have you seen the images? They are not like DSLR RAW images which you can just convert straight to Jpeg and get a great result. They are really quite bad and need a lot of tweaking. The only advantage IMHO is that you can avoid applying what the phone applies to get a “modern-user facebook look” result i.e. tons of unsharp mask and in some cases heavy colour enhancement (Samsungs especially over-do the colours). One key thing is that sharpening should only ever be applied to the final resolution at which the image will be viewed (e.g. if producing a 800×500px image for a website, you need to resize it first to 800×500 and only then apply the unsharp mark or whatever) and this is where a RAW image is useful.
Who will have the viewing conditions to appreciate the 6000×4000 pixel perfect image of the A9?
A few people have 4K screens but I suspect many watch stuff on their 4K TVs which the TV shops are full of nowadays. I have a 1600×1200 “pro” screen which is colour corrected and yes the resolution is way wasted on that. Actually it was very difficult to see the difference between the 12MP image from a Nokia 808 (40MP sensor, averaging to 12MP) and an image from a DSLR, assuming good light conditions, on that screen. But (I now have a Pentax K1 DSLR) these huge images can be cropped and, due to the amazing dynamic range, can have shadows brought up, etc. If you try that on a phone pic, you mostly get rubbish.
It’s the same with 4K video – it’s mostly wasted because you cannot host it anywhere at a reasonable price, so – like with the huge still pics, say a 20MB jpeg – all you can do is be a sad bastard and watch it playing on your PC at home 
Peter wrote:
They are not like DSLR RAW images which you can just convert straight to Jpeg and get a great result. They are really quite bad and need a lot of tweaking.
Raw is just Raw, unless of course it’s not actually raw… 
Either you not getting the raw data, or more likely you don’t have the precise/correct information to accurately process the data into the same colorspace. That could all be easily fixed, if someone wanted to fix it.
It’s hard to explain without examples, and I have just sold the S6 on Ebay (my backup phone is now the T705 tablet which has both a SIM card and VOIP) and the S7 can’t do RAW for some reason, but the phone RAW images were surprisingly poor in resolution.
It could any numbers of things, Peter wrote:
but the phone RAW images were surprisingly poor in resolution.
It could be any number of things, what algorithm (e.g. rl deconvolution) and the amount of sharpening used to create the JPG. My point is if Samsung or someone else really took it seriously, you would have access to the other bits of the puzzle, or the data would be properly calibrated, depending what the problem is.
Peter wrote:
One key thing is that sharpening should only ever be applied to the final resolution at which the image will be viewed
Plenty of others don’t subscribe to this, I don’t know exactly why but I don’t either.
Peter wrote:
They do but have you seen the images? They are not like DSLR RAW images which you can just convert straight to Jpeg and get a great result. They are really quite bad and need a lot of tweaking.
No, I haven’t actually. I don’t have a DSLR to compare. I’ll give it a go soon out of interest (iPhone 7).
Peter wrote:
Actually it was very difficult to see the difference between the 12MP image from a Nokia 808 (40MP sensor, averaging to 12MP) and an image from a DSLR, assuming good light conditions, on that screen.
But (I now have a Pentax K1 DSLR) these huge images can be cropped and, due to the amazing dynamic range, can have shadows brought up, etc. If you try that on a phone pic, you mostly get rubbish.
If you sum it up, the pro’s of a DSLR are:
- ability to zoom in i.e. no need to physically position close to the subject
- usable depth of field
- low light performance
- fast-moving action in below average light
- dedicated controls for iso/aperture/shutter setup
With phones some of these are a long way from a DSLR still, however the differences are diminishing year over year with the latest phones:
- now a 2X zoom lens on the phone (and a 1X)
- now depth of field effect, plus the ability to adjust it afterwards
- slow improvements in low light performance
- better apps with iso/shutter control i.e. 645 PRO Mk III
Do we need to mention compact camera’s? The only pro there is probably the 10X+ zoom you get.The smartphone killed the compact camera. Is DSLR next?
Interesting graph; not surprising… Interesting film camera sales peaked in 1997-99!
I think the main thing with phones for “serious” work is lack of an iris so no direct aperture control, and the camera dimensions will always limit the image quality for a given light level. But perhaps 99% of phone users are OK with that; 22.5% of pics go straight on FB and the rest get lost (due to HD crashes etc) within around the time the average PPL gives up flying And phone pics are OK most of the time, for casual messing about.
Secondary are image stabilisation, which new DSLRs do superbly, but most phones do it in software which is ok but an order of magnitude less good than moving the sensor around mechanically. That trades-off directly with low light performance because if you want to shoot at say 1/5 sec handheld, you need good stabilisation. That will come to all 4K-capable phones because with a 4K sensor you cannot stabilise 4K in software (no pixels to throw away) so have to waggle the sensor around.
I reckon a global shutter will come eventually, across the board. It solves a lot of issues.
Compacts are on their way out, but IMHO it is largely due to not wanting to carry two similar size things (phone and a compact) and because the low end compacts (say below €200) are basically crap. But €400 gets you a good one. But that one won’t be exactly pocket sized.
The DSLR market is in decline too but with compacts more or less gone, it will never die because the only other option is a phone…
