16 ms·

I just can't help but notice all phone cameras right now are incredibly close in quality, and the differences don't really matter anymore. The software experien

• mxuribe 10y ago
  If that's true, curious if sony ever chooses to, or is forced to ("forced" due to a disruption to their supply chain, I mean) raise prices on that component, that would pretty much raise the price for everyone's phones. (Or at least everyone who relies on that component.) In biology, to fend off this type of dependency, i think they call that genetic diversity; I'm sure there's a name for the same in supply chain management.
  • gambiting 10y ago
    The sensor is probably $1 each when bought in trays anyway, so even if they increased their prices 100%, manufacturers would just soak up the cost.
    • sz4kerto 10y ago
      They're around $5.
  • jrockway 10y ago
    Fujifilm and Canon still make their own sensors. Fuji's seem pretty good. Canon can't compete, opting to sell DSLRs to people already locked into their system.
    • shen 10y ago
      This is not true. Fuji's X-Trans sensors are just Sony sensors with a X-Trans filter instead of a Bayer filter. The latest Canon sensors (5D mkIV) lose to the Sony sensors at base ISO but pull ahead at higher ISOs.
      • jrockway 10y ago
        Ah, I had no idea. I guess that's how Fuji came out of nowhere with great sensors from the start, that behave very much like Sony's sensors ;)
  • wluu 10y ago
    There are a few other manufacturers, but Sony has pretty much cornered the market. Much in the same way Intel has when it comes to CPUs. I know Aptina[1] has made sensors used in smartphones in the past. And was also the initial manufacturer for sensors used by Nikon in their 1 series mirrorless cameras. Toshiba has manufactured some in the past, but sold their image sensor business to Sony[2] last year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptina [2] http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/4/9848222/sony-buys-toshiba-image-sensor-business http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/4/9848222/sony-buys-toshiba-...
• nkozyra 10y ago
  I can't agree with all phones being close in quality at all. Even some high level flagship devices have notably deficient cameras compared to the top of the list. Once you get into the sub $300 Android range, you can get wildly different results. Even the Nexus range had common camera complaints through 6. Based on what we're seeing here, there might be a viable competitor to the iPhone in this space, but that hasn't really been the case until now.
  • jeswin 10y ago
    > Based on what we're seeing here, there might be a viable competitor to the iPhone in this space, but that hasn't really been the case until now. Let's stop perpetuating this falsehood. Agreed that iPhones produce great results. But as you can see from the previous and current DxOMark results, there have been several cameras that had better image quality than the iPhone. High end Samsung and Sony cameras have been consistently good for a while.
    • nkozyra 10y ago
      I've owned a couple of those; when I say "this space" I mean top-of-the-line smartphones with great cameras. Those Samsung & Sony phones fulfilled only one of those parameters.
      • pawadu 10y ago
        I think what you are trying to say is that maybe some sub-300 android can already beat iphone in picture quality. what do you think of nexus 5x in that regard?
        • softawre 10y ago
          Seriously?
        • cloverich 10y ago
          I own a 5x. The camera will be the primary reason I upgrade before I really need to. Its mostly decent but occasionally bad: Out of focus (or incorrect focal point), extremely poor in low light, occasionally crashes (not doing anything fancy here). I think the phone overall is good, and I can't imagine using non-vanilla android. But prior to the Pixel announcement (and after owning this and last gen's Nexus) I'd started considering giving the iPhone a try based solely on the camera.
• jrockway 10y ago
  You can fuck up good sensor data in post-processing. I find the iPhone 6 and iPhone SE cameras to have too much noise reduction (or maybe JPEG compression) applied. Even in daylight, the images are very soft. I'm not expecting D810 quality, but I do find it suspect when artifacts appear in blue skies. There is plenty of light, there shouldn't be any noise. Then again, there are a lot of pixels packed into a very small space.
  • kejaed 10y ago
    With a 6s or SE or higher you can shoot DNG as well and compare to what Apple spits out of their image processor. I played around in Lightroom for a little bit and the differences were definitely there.
    • narfz 10y ago
      What App can actually save a DNG for me?
      • snuxoll 10y ago
        Lightroom Mobile is my current weapon of choice for this, also provides a basic processing interface + sync with Adobe CC so you can grab them from your desktop. There's plenty of others out there, but since I already have a CC subscription I just went with it (as it does require you have at minimum Lightroom CC).
• arkitaip 10y ago
  Software is key and one of the selling point of Google made phones, like the Nexus 4, was the promise of a lightweight android installation with minimal apps. On my Nexus 4, this is no longer the case as you cannot remove Google's apps and they frequently require updates [1]. Add the fact that the really cool new Android features, e.g. Google Now, are poorly supported outside the US, and I'm not sure my next phone will be a Google phone. [1] Current list of these unremovable apps on my Nexus 4: Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Presentations, Cloud Print, E-mail, Google Now, Google Drive, Google Earth, Google Indic Keyboard, Google Keep, Google News & Weather, Google Play Books, Google Play Movies, Google Play Music, Google Play Games, Google Play News kiosk, Google street view, Google talkback, Google text to speech, Google+, Hangouts, Google Wifi connectivity, Youtube.
  • JBiserkov 10y ago
    Your point is still valid, but I think you can at least disable the built-in apps. This way the won't require updates and will not clutter your apps list. They still take up space on the internal storage though.
  • tdkl 10y ago
    The Pixel phone also reserves a copy of the system partition, so you can update faster (all those 2 times per year that a big update happens), so double the bloat.
    • chrisper 10y ago
      Two times per year? There is an update every month, even if it's just a security update.
      • tdkl 10y ago
        Big update, the one which actually takes a long time. Still having less usable userspace for those couple minutes saved is insane.
        • 10y ago
• untog 10y ago
  Which makes it all the more amazing that Sony smartphones don't take great photos. If there's one area they ought to absolutely own, it's this.
  • izacus 10y ago
    Yeah, that's very strange. My Z5 Compact, for all its upsides, makes terrible photos. Which is strange, since reviewers were positive about it.
  • Ambroos 10y ago
    I'm not sure about that. DxO rates Sony's very highly, and they're by far the most objective of all the camera ratings. Sony gets a lot of hate online from people comparing full-resolution pictures at 100%. Sony has been using 23MP/25MP sensors in their own phones for a while, but in auto mode images are supersampled to 8MP. In manual mode you can use the full resolution. People always compare the full 25MP pictures at 100% to full 12MP pictures from other devices at 100%. And at that point, they will indeed look a bit less good and less detailed. At Sony's default 8MP things actually do look great. And their camera apps are pretty good too.
    • untog 10y ago
      For me (the owner of both a Z3C and Z5C) the photos don't even come close to the quality of an iPhone. I don't have any objective measure for that, just my own experience - I will always use an iPhone if I can. Perhaps just as importantly, it takes at least four seconds for the camera app to activate and be ready to take a photo. Simply put, the software is awful.
    • rifung 10y ago
      I used to have a Sony Xperia Z3C and I feel like the photos were acceptable for me. The bigger issue to me was that the cameras were significantly slower than the iPhone camera. I suppose this is only an issue depending on what you're taking but I mainly only take pictures of my cats who never stay in one position for long.
  • solidr53 10y ago
• nakedrobot2 10y ago
  Not only that, nearly all of them use the IMX377 :) That said, there is TREMENDOUS variance in image quality, even if you're using the same sensor. The ISP and color tuning process is extraordinarily complex and severely subjective; the noise filtering and encoding processes are incredibly difficult as well. And then there is Autofocus; HDR blending; when to do HDR at all; video stabilization; and so on and so on.
  • kejaed 10y ago
    Can't forget the quality of the optics, either.
• SunboX 10y ago
  What's nice from a photographers view: The Lumia 950 offers RAW image files (DNG, 16 MP). That's what I want to get. But I can understand, that a normal user wants to get automatically optimised pictures (even if a tool like Lightroom can do the job a lot better).
  • bitJericho 10y ago
    I have the Lumia 929 and it offers both jpg and raw at the same time. That means I get the best of both worlds. It also does a second or so of video before the pic is taken, which is pretty cool.
• newscracker 10y ago
  That's a very simplistic view, IMO. The sensor is just one part of the camera. The lens assembly and the image processor play an equally important role (or even better roles) to get a good picture in the end. Even the type of flash makes a big difference. This is why Apple's cameras have had good quality despite using lower megapixel sensors compared to the competition.