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The iPhone 11 Camera, Part 1: A Completely New Camera

225 points by tomduncalf 7y ago

Havoc 7y ago
Camera is the one thing that has me on the edge of should I get a new one. Everything else...could probably rock my 7+ for another year or two. Maybe do a battery replacement.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  I do love the OLED screens. They are very pretty.
  - webwielder2 7y ago
    I ache for an OLED iPad.
    - lukeholder 7y ago
      Yeah, but I'd rather a super high refresh rate over that. LCD does that better at the moment.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    I'm not a fan. My iPhone X got burn-in surprisingly quickly, even though the screen was only on a couple of hours a day. My work iPhone is a 6, so it's LED, and even though I keep its screen on eight hours a day, there's no burn-in.
    - wil421 7y ago
      I’ve had one a year and use it a lot. Never any burn in. Where do you see burn in? Light or dark screens?
      - reaperducer 7y ago
        Everywhere. Most prominent are the unlock icon and the flashlight icon and the camera, but there are others; and some text. Any time there is an area of flat color, or gradient color it really shows.
        wil421 7y ago
        Have you tried taking it to an Apple store? I have an iPhone XS and I am 100% certain this doesn’t happen on mine.
        GhettoMaestro 7y ago
        Agreed. The reported behavior sounds more like defective hardware. I have my original iPhone X from launch and have used it for hours a day. Battery is a little beat up, but the screen is still perfect.
  - foobiekr 7y ago
    Am I the only one who sees visible flickering on the iPhone XS OLED screen? Fine white lines on a black background are terrible. It reminds me of using an Amiga in interlaced mode.
    - baddox 7y ago
      That's probably what is usually referred to as "black smearing," which affects most (all?) OLED screens when using a completely black background.
- Ardon 7y ago
  I know its a common comment about iPhones, but wait till next year, for the next design refresh. If your phone is mostly serving you well, may as well hold out for the biggest possible upgrade.
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    I can see that argument, but on the other hand, the first iteration of an iPhone design refresh tends to be the one with the most problems (antennagate, bendgate, etc.) The 11 Pro seems to be peak maturity for the "iPhone X cycle" and has been reviewed very favorably in all respects, it might be worth just getting one rather than betting on an unknown quantity.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  The battery in the new phones is pretty spectacular, at least according to reviews, even when comparing it to last year's models.
  - Havoc 7y ago
    Well thinking is more that at 2+ years I can fell my current one is no longer holding a charge well. Thanks to battery gate I could fix that for a reasonable price
  - IkmoIkmo 7y ago
    Yeah I was really blown away by that. +4 hours. We're getting into territory of having virtually no 'range anxiety' with your phone. On my S10 I now have a cheap $5 charging pad at the office, and I never really think about charging anymore when I get home. Only on vacation trips I still have to budget my battery.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Can confirm from personal experience. Had to charge my XS Max at the end of the day with normal-heavy usage, because it would go down to around 15%. With light usage, it would be once every 1.5 days. With 11 Pro Max, I charge once every 1.5-2 days with regular usage. This is truly amazing to me, because I never have to worry about my battery dying midway through the day, and it feels extremely freeing.
    - davidf18 7y ago
      I'm on a yearly upgrade plan and now have the 11 Pro Max. The extra battery life is very helpful. But, if you are taking lots of pictures or about 15 mins of video, the battery seems to drain quickly, by about 45% as I was doing today. The fast charge with the 18 W adapter is also very helpful.
      - kalleboo 7y ago
        On my 11 Pro Max, on Sunday I shot around 1 hour of 4K video in Filmic Pro, and about 5000 RAW photos in Camera+. The battery was down to 10% after 10 hours (6 hours of "screen on"), which is miles and miles better than my XS which would have probably lasted about a third as long under the same workload. https://i.imgur.com/O9W2QI4.png https://i.imgur.com/O9W2QI4.png
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  Camera, battery, durability. No flashy new features, but they hit a lot of important marks for things I care about improving. Now if they can just make it smaller next year. EDIT - I should mention that the UWB radios might be cool once there's a significant feature using it. In terms of future-proofness, it's a handy thing to get even if it didn't launch with any important functionality.
- cheschire 7y ago
  I was in the market for a new DSLR, but their software just hasn’t kept up. The iPhone 11 pro blew me away with the night mode photography, and the simulated bokeh that can be modified in post because of the depth camera is downright genius. And the most important feature, it’s always with me, unlike the DSLR. I’ve been using my wife’s hand-me-down phones for a decade now. This was the first phone I bought for myself, and really it was a camera that has a phone feature, not the other way around.
  - heisenbergs 7y ago
    Same. I actually bought a last gen Sony RX100 VII and the difference in quality is negligible, other than the Sony having 20MP and the iphone only 12. This means the tiny iphone 11 pro sensor can produce similar results to a 1in top-of-the-line compact camera. This is mind-boggling. After comparing them, I'm convinced that it's only a matter of time until phones are going to catch up to full frame cameras. Software these days is more important than the raw hardware it seems...
    - stickydink 7y ago
      Do you think, or, is there any hint that, camera manufacturers are developing this kind of thing? What could a DSLR with iPhone-level software achieve?
      - rodgerd 7y ago
        Olympus and Sony have been the most aggressive about sticking clever software in their cameras, so they'd be the ones most likely to invest more in computational photography. The problems for camera manufacturers around this, though are: 1. Their market is incredibly, loudly regressive about a lot of this stuff. A noisy chunk of the photography market is really hostile to workflows that don't mimic hundred year old darkroom processes. Doing in-camera is an abomination. Automation is an abomination, etc. 2. Building the compute in to the camera is non-trivial. You've already got a lot of compute power focusing on running the complexities of things like continuous AF tracking (e.g. on top-end Olympus that's 4 of the 8 cores available). A lot of compute budget is used for things phone cameras are rubbish at. At some point things like heat become a problem. 3. Data volumes are hard: Olympus are "only" dealing with a 20 MPix image. Sony are dealing with 24 - 60 MPix images. Olympus do that at up to 60 frames/s (20 with AF), and to read the data within the constraints of shutter speeds of 1/16000 s. That is... a lot of data compared to the relatively modest rates on an iPhone. Oh, and while iPhone users are generally OK with a bit of lag, DSLR users get really pissy if you're making them wait for that. Latency needs to be very low. 4. Physics is hard: A Sony sensor is a 24 x 35 mm hunk of silicon. Quite apart from the challenges of the data volume, reading a chunk of CMOS that large has been a challenge. Sony have done a lot of clever things to work around those limits, but still... (Olympus have been able to do high frame rates longer than anyone else in part because their sensors are smaller)
- gnicholas 7y ago
  I was on a 7+ since they came out, and it was the first iPhone I held onto for 3 years. I love my 11 Pro. I never wanted to get a phone as big as the Plus, but I wanted the bokeh since I take a lot of photos of my kids. I'm glad to have a non-plus-size phone. I didn't get the X or XS because I was holding out hope for a notchless phone. This year I moved up because it seemed like the total package justified the move. The 11 Pro's camera is so much better. The edge detection in Portrait Mode is better on the 11 Pro (I think it's the hardware, not just iOS 13). Night Mode is unbelievable. Video has improved also (I think this was mostly due to XS upgrades, but there are other 11 Pro benefits that I mostly won't use, like simultaneously capturing video from multiple cameras). I haven't done the .2 update yet, but the deep fusion stuff is pretty cool from what I'm seeing others post online. I think folks like Brian X. Chen (NYT), who say this is an optional upgrade if your iPhone is less than 5 years old have it wrong. I can definitely see skipping this if you're on an XS or X. But 8 or older? It's a very noticeable upgrade. And if you're not on a Plus (i.e., capable of Portrait Mode), it's a huge upgrade if you use your camera much. And that's before getting to all the other features like wireless charging and the UWB chip for enhanced tracking. Oh, and the battery is noticeably better than my 7+, which had great battery life (and was warranty-swapped by Apple a year or two ago, so the battery was not a full 3 years old when I upgraded to the 11 Pro). The 11 Pro is the first iPhone I've had that I do not need to charge overnight. I just charge it periodically during the day, once every 36-48 hrs.
chooseaname 7y ago
I wonder how much of the image processing Apple could back port to iPhone 8/X, XS, XR if they wanted to? Those phones are extremely powerful still. And Apple has touted the power of their neural engine ever since the 8/X.
- itg 7y ago
  Yeah, I was disappointed they did not bring night sight to older iPhones. Google has made night sight available to all models of Pixel phones.
  - chooseaname 7y ago
    Take Deep Fusion. Even if that were to take a little longer, have it run over my photos at night while I'm plugged in.
    - sandofsky 7y ago
      But then when you go back to review old photos, they're going to look different than the first time you reviewed it. That's going to be confusing. Also, if you're going to share a photo, you're likely going to do it the same day you took it.
      - semerda 7y ago
        No it won’t. The framing will be identical. That’s how the DSLR world works. The viewfinder is used for framing & exposure check and then the rest is done behind the scenes.
        munmaek 7y ago
        A photo has more elements than just framing. It would be disorienting and customer-hostile to have your photos randomly change overnight. About 60-75% of the time I take photos, I share them soon after or within a few hours. Having to wait to let them be processed overnight would be obnoxious. And it's not particularly helpful to compare people taking photos on their phone to the DSLR world. (Coming from someone with a nikon d200, d300 sitting on his shelf). Totally different use cases, totally different usage expectations.
rolltiide 7y ago
the biggest thing to me seems the be the user experience of applying these 'smart' technologies. for example, photoshop's liquify feature can now directly isolate eyes, noses, lips, cheek bones, facial structures etc without you needing to be good at using the liquify brushes but ios is now doing this kind of thing automatically and integrates the editing right there either in the photo by default or in an integrated editing app
markdown 7y ago
OT but I looked at the app they sell (Halide Camera) and as far as I can tell, it's an app for iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. Is there a similar app for older phones?
- sharkjacobs 7y ago
  I use Halide on my iPhone SE, so the app is still fairly backwards compatible It obviously doesn't have the features related to multiple lenses and smart HDR, but it is my go to camera app.
  - markdown 7y ago
    Good to know!
- cehrlich 7y ago
  Halide is available for older iPhones. If I remember correctly, any iPhone running iOS 11 or newer can run Halide. However Deep Fusion related stuff is limited to the iPhone 11, and there are a few other features that similarly require certain iPhone models.
- sandofsky 7y ago
  Technically we support all the way back to the iPhone 5S, but those devices don't support RAW, so you're really using it for its interface and access to manual controls. I mean, I'm biased, but I'd say that's compelling even without RAW. As far as technical features, things get really interesting with an iPhone 6S and later. That's when Apple added RAW support, which requires a third-party app. On depth capable devices (7 Plus, 8 Plus, X/XS/11), we have detailed depth visualizations. Anyways, we're generally forward looking, we'd be crazy not to serve most of the folks out there running older phones.
  - markdown 7y ago
    Oh ok, thanks. The very first thing you see in the App Store listing is "The best camera app for iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro", hence my assumption.
ThouYS 7y ago
fantastic article, loved the obvious effort put into it!
notadoc 7y ago
My iPhone 11 Pro pictures look like they've been put through an artistic painting filter when you zoom in on them, it looks strange and smudged.
- smokey_the_bear 7y ago
  I also seem to have more trouble taking non-blurry pictures of my kids with my 11 pro vs my old 7. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but it's frustrating.
- acchow 7y ago
  Can you show some zoomed-in examples?
  - cthalupa 7y ago
    https://spectre.cam/full-res/Full%20Size%20Comparison%20for%20Semantic%20Stuff.jpg https://spectre.cam/full-res/Full%20Size%20Comparison%20for%... This one from the article is a pretty good example. It looks like a photorealistic painting when you zoom in, and not just on the sky, like they point out in the article - the whole thing does. I'm really impressed with the 11 pro for stuff that gets viewed on the same medium it was created in, but the trade offs are very apparent when you look at things on a computer monitor.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - coder543 7y ago
      Those photos aren't straight out of the iPhone's image processing pipeline. From the article: > If we distort the contrast in an image, we can bring out the ‘watercolor artifacts’ in the clouds I think you missed that sentence. You posted the "distort the contrast" examples, which were hand edited to exaggerate any artifacts in the photo the iPhone had output. This is the photo that the iPhone gave the photographer: https://miro.medium.com/max/1800/1*oZgBZGHyxwMevHKiGfATiQ.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/max/1800/1*oZgBZGHyxwMevHKiGfATiQ.jp...
suyash 7y ago
Great review about the new iPhone, however as a normal camera phone user, I really don't care about the finer details in pictures. Any of the modern smartphones camera are pretty good for me.
ballenf 7y ago
> For a while now, you haven’t been the one taking your photos. That’s not a slight at you, dear reader: When your finger touches the shutter button, to reduce perceived latency, the iPhone grabs a photo it has already taken before you even touched the screen. I wonder if there’s a line where copyright could attach to the developer who wrote the code instead of the thumb owner.
- mc32 7y ago
  Nah, there was a guy (a photographer) who set up a camera system that was triggered by passers by. There was a lawsuit[1] as to whether it was legal and who owned the photo (one of the subjects happened to be very orthodox, and I guess photos are forbidden), anyhow New York decided the work belonged to the photographer who set up the auto trigger system. It was dismissed as being an artistic expression by the photographer. There was also a photographer who was in Britain for some show. He wanted to do some photography but wasn’t allowed as he was only there as a tourist and didn’t have a work permit, so he handed his camera to his daughter. He then set up an exhibit with her work. I’m not sure who “owns the rights” but he assigned them to her so as not run afoul of his visa. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia#Lawsuit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia#Laws...
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    And there’s this case about a nature photographer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
willis936 7y ago
Now that multiple sensors are standard, I wish sensor fusion would get some attention. It isn’t clear to me that there are not significant gains from capturing from three camera sensors at once. The big tradeoff in image fusion using only one sensor is loss of temporal precision. You could gain some of that back while maintaining the gains in spatial accuracy if data from multiple sensors is used. Apple’s camera app at least demonstrates that they’re capable of getting multiple camera video streams into main memory simultaneously by showing the out-of-frame view. Maybe that’s the preview/lead-in for AppleTech Pro sensor fusion TM 2020.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > Now that multiple sensors are standard, I wish sensor fusion would get some attention. Sensor fusion has been a hot area of research in robotics for at least a decade. Why do you feel it gets no attention?
  - willis936 7y ago
    Because it doesn’t (in the consumer space). Everyone who needs to use kalman filtering and sensor fusion does, but if it isn’t necessary then it isn’t used, even if it could result in better products.
josephjrobison 7y ago
That’s a great way to sell an app, as 3/4 the way down I shelled out $7 for their two apps.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  There are so many third party Camera apps that it is genuinely difficult to tell whether any of them actually add value or do things that the built-in app cannot - beyond the ability to do "instagram" style filters.
  - ayoisaiah 7y ago
    They do add value. You cannot, for example, shoot RAW or manually control the camera with the built-in app.
    - LeoPanthera 7y ago
      Sure. I get that part. The tricky part is which of the many many apps do that well.
tiffanyh 7y ago
Can law enforcement convict someone due to a Computational Photograph? Google & Apple are digitally altering photos so much so to “enhance them”, couldn’t it be agrued the evidence of a crime photo has been tempered due to computational photography.
- thanatos_dem 7y ago
  I doubt it. “Tampering” usually requires an intent to obscure or subvert. Computation photography applied broadly to all photos doesn’t have that. Definition from OED: “interfere with (something) in order to cause damage or make unauthorized alterations.” The “in order to” seems to imply intent. Not sure if there’s a different legal definition however.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  By the same logic should cropped photos or photos that have had the sliders mucked with count as altered?
  - tiffanyh 7y ago
    I don’t see how cropping would introduce “reasonable doubt”. But a face being computationally altered by the photo seems like that would introduce reasonable doubt that the alleged person didn’t not in fact do the crime.
- adrr 7y ago
  Wouldn’t every digital camera be guilty of that? White balance, lens correction profiles, noise reduction, compression.
  - bufferoverflow 7y ago
    Not if you shoot raw. Plus none of these modifications really alter the content of the photo.
- tomatotomato37 7y ago
  They'd have to throw out any digital picture taken in a JPG or GIF format, since those too require image "tampering" in order to get the size down
londons_explore 7y ago
I want to see a real teardown of these cameras... Show me the lenses. Put the coatings under an electron microscope. Cut the sensor in half, and measure the depth of the electron wells. Then on the electronics side, hook up a logic analyzer. Find the speed of those ADC's. Dump the default register values. And on the software side, feed in manufactured frames to find out exactly how the HDR algorithm works. Use high speed strobe lights to find out the exact shutter timings. Figure out if it uses the gyroscope or optical flow for frame stacking, and how many frames does it even use? Publish the bit depths and colour spaces of intermediate image pipeline stages. These 'technical' reports which really boil down to "we took some photos and they're quite crisp" really disappoint me.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  If you actually did a tear down like you just mentioned and documented it accordingly, it's hard to imagine you wouldn't recoup the cost of the phone several times over just by uploading the video to YouTube.
  - justinator 7y ago
    I think if blended the phone in a blender you could recoup your costs of the phone on Youtube. And that's probably the rub.
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    What about the cost of all this research? That has to take multiple days worth of a highly skilled team.
- knolan 7y ago
  There are companies doing this kind of thing: https://www.techinsights.com/products/def-1909-803 https://www.techinsights.com/products/def-1909-803 They'll charge you however.
gdubs 7y ago
This was a really thought-out, in-depth article. I really appreciated the artistic considerations. The camera has usually been my primary motivation for upgrading, and I'm tempted. I'm still sporting a 7+ with broken lenses. Which has meant mostly terrible cell-phone pics that occasionally due to a happy accident look like a "Holga" picture. The upside is that I went back to really actively using my DSLR, and I'm not sure anything really compares still. However, this article was pretty compelling. I think the title is accurate – these pictures no longer look like 'iPhone' pictures, which was a kind of brand identity more than a technical constraint. This feels like a refreshing shift. That said, they have a look. They remind me of Andreas Gursky photos – hyper realistic, super detailed, somewhat matte.
ruminasean 7y ago
I’m a professional photographer, for whatever that’s worth. Mostly it’s relevant because I have a camera in my hands all day for most of the week. I’m not a gadget guy, I don’t need the latest and greatest, but when I pick up new gear I want it to do the thing and do it well and to not need to be replaced within a few years because it’s completely obsolete. I picked up an iPhone 11 pro last week, upgrading from a 7. The camera really is great. What I keep thinking is that I’m finding it creepy. I’m not a luddite by any means, I’m all for innovation….I shoot with a Sony mirrorless camera as my main everyday, that felt to me like a massive change. I think what gets to me is I don’t know exactly what the iPhone camera is doing. When I press the “shutter button,” what exactly is happening? How many shots is it taking? Is it shooting on all three lenses? Is it recording audio even when I have Live Photo turned off? If I think I’m intentionally leaving something I don’t want to record out of the frame, how can I be sure that one of the other lenses isn’t also recording and including it? I just don’t feel like I’m sure about any of it anymore, with all the processing I hear about it doing, layering multiple shots together, shooting outside the frame. The tech is cool and all and I’m not prone to paranoia, but I just keep wondering.
- FreezerburnV 7y ago
  If it makes good photos, and the extra information isn’t being harvested to track you like Facebook would do, what does it matter what it’s actually doing under the hood? It probably is doing a lot of that because it can condense all that extra information into a picture that looks better to humans. But the tech of how it reaches that really shouldn’t matter or be creepy, it’s just processing a bunch of pixels to make something look nice. Just like your mirrorless camera, but with more frames put together to make the final result.
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    An example is, if the extra data is retained to improve post-processing capabilities, for example refocusing or a slight change in perspective, then you could inadvertently share files with more information than you think they contain. Remember the story of people cropping out their naked bottom half just to have it plain in the exif thumbnail.

225 points by tomduncalf 7y ago

Camera is the one thing that has me on the edge of should I get a new one. Everything else...could probably rock my 7+ for another year or two. Maybe do a battery replacement.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
I do love the OLED screens. They are very pretty.
- webwielder2 7y ago
  I ache for an OLED iPad.
  - lukeholder 7y ago
    Yeah, but I'd rather a super high refresh rate over that. LCD does that better at the moment.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I'm not a fan. My iPhone X got burn-in surprisingly quickly, even though the screen was only on a couple of hours a day. My work iPhone is a 6, so it's LED, and even though I keep its screen on eight hours a day, there's no burn-in.
  - wil421 7y ago
    I’ve had one a year and use it a lot. Never any burn in. Where do you see burn in? Light or dark screens?
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      Everywhere. Most prominent are the unlock icon and the flashlight icon and the camera, but there are others; and some text. Any time there is an area of flat color, or gradient color it really shows.
      - wil421 7y ago
        Have you tried taking it to an Apple store? I have an iPhone XS and I am 100% certain this doesn’t happen on mine.
        GhettoMaestro 7y ago
        Agreed. The reported behavior sounds more like defective hardware. I have my original iPhone X from launch and have used it for hours a day. Battery is a little beat up, but the screen is still perfect.
- foobiekr 7y ago
  Am I the only one who sees visible flickering on the iPhone XS OLED screen? Fine white lines on a black background are terrible. It reminds me of using an Amiga in interlaced mode.
  - baddox 7y ago
    That's probably what is usually referred to as "black smearing," which affects most (all?) OLED screens when using a completely black background.
Ardon 7y ago
I know its a common comment about iPhones, but wait till next year, for the next design refresh. If your phone is mostly serving you well, may as well hold out for the biggest possible upgrade.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  I can see that argument, but on the other hand, the first iteration of an iPhone design refresh tends to be the one with the most problems (antennagate, bendgate, etc.) The 11 Pro seems to be peak maturity for the "iPhone X cycle" and has been reviewed very favorably in all respects, it might be worth just getting one rather than betting on an unknown quantity.
bdcravens 7y ago
The battery in the new phones is pretty spectacular, at least according to reviews, even when comparing it to last year's models.
- Havoc 7y ago
  Well thinking is more that at 2+ years I can fell my current one is no longer holding a charge well. Thanks to battery gate I could fix that for a reasonable price
- IkmoIkmo 7y ago
  Yeah I was really blown away by that. +4 hours. We're getting into territory of having virtually no 'range anxiety' with your phone. On my S10 I now have a cheap $5 charging pad at the office, and I never really think about charging anymore when I get home. Only on vacation trips I still have to budget my battery.
- filoleg 7y ago
  Can confirm from personal experience. Had to charge my XS Max at the end of the day with normal-heavy usage, because it would go down to around 15%. With light usage, it would be once every 1.5 days. With 11 Pro Max, I charge once every 1.5-2 days with regular usage. This is truly amazing to me, because I never have to worry about my battery dying midway through the day, and it feels extremely freeing.
  - davidf18 7y ago
    I'm on a yearly upgrade plan and now have the 11 Pro Max. The extra battery life is very helpful. But, if you are taking lots of pictures or about 15 mins of video, the battery seems to drain quickly, by about 45% as I was doing today. The fast charge with the 18 W adapter is also very helpful.
    - kalleboo 7y ago
      On my 11 Pro Max, on Sunday I shot around 1 hour of 4K video in Filmic Pro, and about 5000 RAW photos in Camera+. The battery was down to 10% after 10 hours (6 hours of "screen on"), which is miles and miles better than my XS which would have probably lasted about a third as long under the same workload. https://i.imgur.com/O9W2QI4.png https://i.imgur.com/O9W2QI4.png
wlesieutre 7y ago
Camera, battery, durability. No flashy new features, but they hit a lot of important marks for things I care about improving. Now if they can just make it smaller next year. EDIT - I should mention that the UWB radios might be cool once there's a significant feature using it. In terms of future-proofness, it's a handy thing to get even if it didn't launch with any important functionality.
cheschire 7y ago
I was in the market for a new DSLR, but their software just hasn’t kept up. The iPhone 11 pro blew me away with the night mode photography, and the simulated bokeh that can be modified in post because of the depth camera is downright genius. And the most important feature, it’s always with me, unlike the DSLR. I’ve been using my wife’s hand-me-down phones for a decade now. This was the first phone I bought for myself, and really it was a camera that has a phone feature, not the other way around.
- heisenbergs 7y ago
  Same. I actually bought a last gen Sony RX100 VII and the difference in quality is negligible, other than the Sony having 20MP and the iphone only 12. This means the tiny iphone 11 pro sensor can produce similar results to a 1in top-of-the-line compact camera. This is mind-boggling. After comparing them, I'm convinced that it's only a matter of time until phones are going to catch up to full frame cameras. Software these days is more important than the raw hardware it seems...
  - stickydink 7y ago
    Do you think, or, is there any hint that, camera manufacturers are developing this kind of thing? What could a DSLR with iPhone-level software achieve?
    - rodgerd 7y ago
      Olympus and Sony have been the most aggressive about sticking clever software in their cameras, so they'd be the ones most likely to invest more in computational photography. The problems for camera manufacturers around this, though are: 1. Their market is incredibly, loudly regressive about a lot of this stuff. A noisy chunk of the photography market is really hostile to workflows that don't mimic hundred year old darkroom processes. Doing in-camera is an abomination. Automation is an abomination, etc. 2. Building the compute in to the camera is non-trivial. You've already got a lot of compute power focusing on running the complexities of things like continuous AF tracking (e.g. on top-end Olympus that's 4 of the 8 cores available). A lot of compute budget is used for things phone cameras are rubbish at. At some point things like heat become a problem. 3. Data volumes are hard: Olympus are "only" dealing with a 20 MPix image. Sony are dealing with 24 - 60 MPix images. Olympus do that at up to 60 frames/s (20 with AF), and to read the data within the constraints of shutter speeds of 1/16000 s. That is... a lot of data compared to the relatively modest rates on an iPhone. Oh, and while iPhone users are generally OK with a bit of lag, DSLR users get really pissy if you're making them wait for that. Latency needs to be very low. 4. Physics is hard: A Sony sensor is a 24 x 35 mm hunk of silicon. Quite apart from the challenges of the data volume, reading a chunk of CMOS that large has been a challenge. Sony have done a lot of clever things to work around those limits, but still... (Olympus have been able to do high frame rates longer than anyone else in part because their sensors are smaller)
gnicholas 7y ago
I was on a 7+ since they came out, and it was the first iPhone I held onto for 3 years. I love my 11 Pro. I never wanted to get a phone as big as the Plus, but I wanted the bokeh since I take a lot of photos of my kids. I'm glad to have a non-plus-size phone. I didn't get the X or XS because I was holding out hope for a notchless phone. This year I moved up because it seemed like the total package justified the move. The 11 Pro's camera is so much better. The edge detection in Portrait Mode is better on the 11 Pro (I think it's the hardware, not just iOS 13). Night Mode is unbelievable. Video has improved also (I think this was mostly due to XS upgrades, but there are other 11 Pro benefits that I mostly won't use, like simultaneously capturing video from multiple cameras). I haven't done the .2 update yet, but the deep fusion stuff is pretty cool from what I'm seeing others post online. I think folks like Brian X. Chen (NYT), who say this is an optional upgrade if your iPhone is less than 5 years old have it wrong. I can definitely see skipping this if you're on an XS or X. But 8 or older? It's a very noticeable upgrade. And if you're not on a Plus (i.e., capable of Portrait Mode), it's a huge upgrade if you use your camera much. And that's before getting to all the other features like wireless charging and the UWB chip for enhanced tracking. Oh, and the battery is noticeably better than my 7+, which had great battery life (and was warranty-swapped by Apple a year or two ago, so the battery was not a full 3 years old when I upgraded to the 11 Pro). The 11 Pro is the first iPhone I've had that I do not need to charge overnight. I just charge it periodically during the day, once every 36-48 hrs.

chooseaname 7y ago

I wonder how much of the image processing Apple could back port to iPhone 8/X, XS, XR if they wanted to? Those phones are extremely powerful still. And Apple has touted the power of their neural engine ever since the 8/X.

itg 7y ago
Yeah, I was disappointed they did not bring night sight to older iPhones. Google has made night sight available to all models of Pixel phones.
- chooseaname 7y ago
  Take Deep Fusion. Even if that were to take a little longer, have it run over my photos at night while I'm plugged in.
  - sandofsky 7y ago
    But then when you go back to review old photos, they're going to look different than the first time you reviewed it. That's going to be confusing. Also, if you're going to share a photo, you're likely going to do it the same day you took it.
    - semerda 7y ago
      No it won’t. The framing will be identical. That’s how the DSLR world works. The viewfinder is used for framing & exposure check and then the rest is done behind the scenes.
      - munmaek 7y ago
        A photo has more elements than just framing. It would be disorienting and customer-hostile to have your photos randomly change overnight. About 60-75% of the time I take photos, I share them soon after or within a few hours. Having to wait to let them be processed overnight would be obnoxious. And it's not particularly helpful to compare people taking photos on their phone to the DSLR world. (Coming from someone with a nikon d200, d300 sitting on his shelf). Totally different use cases, totally different usage expectations.

rolltiide 7y ago

the biggest thing to me seems the be the user experience of applying these 'smart' technologies. for example, photoshop's liquify feature can now directly isolate eyes, noses, lips, cheek bones, facial structures etc without you needing to be good at using the liquify brushes but ios is now doing this kind of thing automatically and integrates the editing right there either in the photo by default or in an integrated editing app

markdown 7y ago

OT but I looked at the app they sell (Halide Camera) and as far as I can tell, it's an app for iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. Is there a similar app for older phones?

sharkjacobs 7y ago
I use Halide on my iPhone SE, so the app is still fairly backwards compatible It obviously doesn't have the features related to multiple lenses and smart HDR, but it is my go to camera app.
- markdown 7y ago
  Good to know!
cehrlich 7y ago
Halide is available for older iPhones. If I remember correctly, any iPhone running iOS 11 or newer can run Halide. However Deep Fusion related stuff is limited to the iPhone 11, and there are a few other features that similarly require certain iPhone models.
sandofsky 7y ago
Technically we support all the way back to the iPhone 5S, but those devices don't support RAW, so you're really using it for its interface and access to manual controls. I mean, I'm biased, but I'd say that's compelling even without RAW. As far as technical features, things get really interesting with an iPhone 6S and later. That's when Apple added RAW support, which requires a third-party app. On depth capable devices (7 Plus, 8 Plus, X/XS/11), we have detailed depth visualizations. Anyways, we're generally forward looking, we'd be crazy not to serve most of the folks out there running older phones.
- markdown 7y ago
  Oh ok, thanks. The very first thing you see in the App Store listing is "The best camera app for iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro", hence my assumption.

ThouYS 7y ago

fantastic article, loved the obvious effort put into it!

notadoc 7y ago

My iPhone 11 Pro pictures look like they've been put through an artistic painting filter when you zoom in on them, it looks strange and smudged.

smokey_the_bear 7y ago
I also seem to have more trouble taking non-blurry pictures of my kids with my 11 pro vs my old 7. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but it's frustrating.
acchow 7y ago
Can you show some zoomed-in examples?
- cthalupa 7y ago
  https://spectre.cam/full-res/Full%20Size%20Comparison%20for%20Semantic%20Stuff.jpg https://spectre.cam/full-res/Full%20Size%20Comparison%20for%... This one from the article is a pretty good example. It looks like a photorealistic painting when you zoom in, and not just on the sky, like they point out in the article - the whole thing does. I'm really impressed with the 11 pro for stuff that gets viewed on the same medium it was created in, but the trade offs are very apparent when you look at things on a computer monitor.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - coder543 7y ago
    Those photos aren't straight out of the iPhone's image processing pipeline. From the article: > If we distort the contrast in an image, we can bring out the ‘watercolor artifacts’ in the clouds I think you missed that sentence. You posted the "distort the contrast" examples, which were hand edited to exaggerate any artifacts in the photo the iPhone had output. This is the photo that the iPhone gave the photographer: https://miro.medium.com/max/1800/1*oZgBZGHyxwMevHKiGfATiQ.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/max/1800/1*oZgBZGHyxwMevHKiGfATiQ.jp...

suyash 7y ago

Great review about the new iPhone, however as a normal camera phone user, I really don't care about the finer details in pictures. Any of the modern smartphones camera are pretty good for me.

ballenf 7y ago

> For a while now, you haven’t been the one taking your photos. That’s not a slight at you, dear reader: When your finger touches the shutter button, to reduce perceived latency, the iPhone grabs a photo it has already taken before you even touched the screen. I wonder if there’s a line where copyright could attach to the developer who wrote the code instead of the thumb owner.

mc32 7y ago
Nah, there was a guy (a photographer) who set up a camera system that was triggered by passers by. There was a lawsuit[1] as to whether it was legal and who owned the photo (one of the subjects happened to be very orthodox, and I guess photos are forbidden), anyhow New York decided the work belonged to the photographer who set up the auto trigger system. It was dismissed as being an artistic expression by the photographer. There was also a photographer who was in Britain for some show. He wanted to do some photography but wasn’t allowed as he was only there as a tourist and didn’t have a work permit, so he handed his camera to his daughter. He then set up an exhibit with her work. I’m not sure who “owns the rights” but he assigned them to her so as not run afoul of his visa. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia#Lawsuit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia#Laws...
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  And there’s this case about a nature photographer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

willis936 7y ago

Now that multiple sensors are standard, I wish sensor fusion would get some attention. It isn’t clear to me that there are not significant gains from capturing from three camera sensors at once. The big tradeoff in image fusion using only one sensor is loss of temporal precision. You could gain some of that back while maintaining the gains in spatial accuracy if data from multiple sensors is used. Apple’s camera app at least demonstrates that they’re capable of getting multiple camera video streams into main memory simultaneously by showing the out-of-frame view. Maybe that’s the preview/lead-in for AppleTech Pro sensor fusion TM 2020.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> Now that multiple sensors are standard, I wish sensor fusion would get some attention. Sensor fusion has been a hot area of research in robotics for at least a decade. Why do you feel it gets no attention?
- willis936 7y ago
  Because it doesn’t (in the consumer space). Everyone who needs to use kalman filtering and sensor fusion does, but if it isn’t necessary then it isn’t used, even if it could result in better products.

josephjrobison 7y ago

That’s a great way to sell an app, as 3/4 the way down I shelled out $7 for their two apps.

LeoPanthera 7y ago
There are so many third party Camera apps that it is genuinely difficult to tell whether any of them actually add value or do things that the built-in app cannot - beyond the ability to do "instagram" style filters.
- ayoisaiah 7y ago
  They do add value. You cannot, for example, shoot RAW or manually control the camera with the built-in app.
  - LeoPanthera 7y ago
    Sure. I get that part. The tricky part is which of the many many apps do that well.

tiffanyh 7y ago

Can law enforcement convict someone due to a Computational Photograph? Google & Apple are digitally altering photos so much so to “enhance them”, couldn’t it be agrued the evidence of a crime photo has been tempered due to computational photography.

thanatos_dem 7y ago
I doubt it. “Tampering” usually requires an intent to obscure or subvert. Computation photography applied broadly to all photos doesn’t have that. Definition from OED: “interfere with (something) in order to cause damage or make unauthorized alterations.” The “in order to” seems to imply intent. Not sure if there’s a different legal definition however.
bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
By the same logic should cropped photos or photos that have had the sliders mucked with count as altered?
- tiffanyh 7y ago
  I don’t see how cropping would introduce “reasonable doubt”. But a face being computationally altered by the photo seems like that would introduce reasonable doubt that the alleged person didn’t not in fact do the crime.
adrr 7y ago
Wouldn’t every digital camera be guilty of that? White balance, lens correction profiles, noise reduction, compression.
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  Not if you shoot raw. Plus none of these modifications really alter the content of the photo.
tomatotomato37 7y ago
They'd have to throw out any digital picture taken in a JPG or GIF format, since those too require image "tampering" in order to get the size down

londons_explore 7y ago

I want to see a real teardown of these cameras... Show me the lenses. Put the coatings under an electron microscope. Cut the sensor in half, and measure the depth of the electron wells. Then on the electronics side, hook up a logic analyzer. Find the speed of those ADC's. Dump the default register values. And on the software side, feed in manufactured frames to find out exactly how the HDR algorithm works. Use high speed strobe lights to find out the exact shutter timings. Figure out if it uses the gyroscope or optical flow for frame stacking, and how many frames does it even use? Publish the bit depths and colour spaces of intermediate image pipeline stages. These 'technical' reports which really boil down to "we took some photos and they're quite crisp" really disappoint me.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
If you actually did a tear down like you just mentioned and documented it accordingly, it's hard to imagine you wouldn't recoup the cost of the phone several times over just by uploading the video to YouTube.
- justinator 7y ago
  I think if blended the phone in a blender you could recoup your costs of the phone on Youtube. And that's probably the rub.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  What about the cost of all this research? That has to take multiple days worth of a highly skilled team.
knolan 7y ago
There are companies doing this kind of thing: https://www.techinsights.com/products/def-1909-803 https://www.techinsights.com/products/def-1909-803 They'll charge you however.

gdubs 7y ago

This was a really thought-out, in-depth article. I really appreciated the artistic considerations. The camera has usually been my primary motivation for upgrading, and I'm tempted. I'm still sporting a 7+ with broken lenses. Which has meant mostly terrible cell-phone pics that occasionally due to a happy accident look like a "Holga" picture. The upside is that I went back to really actively using my DSLR, and I'm not sure anything really compares still. However, this article was pretty compelling. I think the title is accurate – these pictures no longer look like 'iPhone' pictures, which was a kind of brand identity more than a technical constraint. This feels like a refreshing shift. That said, they have a look. They remind me of Andreas Gursky photos – hyper realistic, super detailed, somewhat matte.

ruminasean 7y ago

I’m a professional photographer, for whatever that’s worth. Mostly it’s relevant because I have a camera in my hands all day for most of the week. I’m not a gadget guy, I don’t need the latest and greatest, but when I pick up new gear I want it to do the thing and do it well and to not need to be replaced within a few years because it’s completely obsolete. I picked up an iPhone 11 pro last week, upgrading from a 7. The camera really is great. What I keep thinking is that I’m finding it creepy. I’m not a luddite by any means, I’m all for innovation….I shoot with a Sony mirrorless camera as my main everyday, that felt to me like a massive change. I think what gets to me is I don’t know exactly what the iPhone camera is doing. When I press the “shutter button,” what exactly is happening? How many shots is it taking? Is it shooting on all three lenses? Is it recording audio even when I have Live Photo turned off? If I think I’m intentionally leaving something I don’t want to record out of the frame, how can I be sure that one of the other lenses isn’t also recording and including it? I just don’t feel like I’m sure about any of it anymore, with all the processing I hear about it doing, layering multiple shots together, shooting outside the frame. The tech is cool and all and I’m not prone to paranoia, but I just keep wondering.

FreezerburnV 7y ago
If it makes good photos, and the extra information isn’t being harvested to track you like Facebook would do, what does it matter what it’s actually doing under the hood? It probably is doing a lot of that because it can condense all that extra information into a picture that looks better to humans. But the tech of how it reaches that really shouldn’t matter or be creepy, it’s just processing a bunch of pixels to make something look nice. Just like your mirrorless camera, but with more frames put together to make the final result.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  An example is, if the extra data is retained to improve post-processing capabilities, for example refocusing or a slight change in perspective, then you could inadvertently share files with more information than you think they contain. Remember the story of people cropping out their naked bottom half just to have it plain in the exif thumbnail.