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The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry

174 points by Red_Tarsius 7y ago

zaroth 7y ago
What's the TAM for a new iPhone model, versus the TAM for a new SLR? I'm guessing the iPhone wins by at least 2 orders of magnitude. EDIT: At the end of TFA they have this chart [1] which shows while camera sales peaked at 121 million units in 2009, in 2019 it's 1.4 billion smartphones sold versus 15 million cameras. Camera performance continues to be a major differentiator / selling point and upgrade draw for smartphones. Therefore to draw in that next $100 billion in device sales, companies like Apple can spend orders of magnitude more dollars investing in the phone's camera performance than a legacy camera company can invest in their entire device. Another major factor is that the massive processing power of the phone can be leveraged for image capture, just as it can be leveraged for gaming, and web browsing. Users can amortize the cost of all that computing power and fast storage across the several major categories of tasks that a smartphone can perform. So a processor that makes perfect sense in a smartphone is going to be very hard to justify in a SLR, versus integrating the minimum set of ICs required to process the image, with a low-power processor to run a bare-bones UI. Likewise the BOM for the screen on a smartphone is worth investing hundreds of dollars into, whereas the screen on an SLR is kind of like the backup for the viewfinder. Finally, the raison d'être of a camera in 2019 is to share photos with friends and family, using perhaps the built-in Camera app, but most likely a dozen other social apps which all have their own custom UI, filters, and accoutrements. An SLR will simply never be as effortless and fun to use for this purpose as your smartphone. [1] - https://www.instagram.com/p/B2b8pEDIBDb/?utm_source=ig_embed https://www.instagram.com/p/B2b8pEDIBDb/?utm_source=ig_embed
jseliger 7y ago
The strangest thing is the camera industry's non-response to smartphones. There's a fellow named Tom Hogan who writes in extreme detail about the camera industry and noticed years ago that camera makers should open up their APIs and work much harder to integrate with smartphones. Here's one recent example of that message: http://dslrbodies.com/newsviews/are-customers-asking-for.html http://dslrbodies.com/newsviews/are-customers-asking-for.htm... Still, Apple discovered a user problem—stringing together multiple apps to create a one-step process—and is trying to solve it. Are the camera companies doing the same? Doesn't seem like it. So for now I can only dream about the camera that lets me load some variables into the EXIF data of an image (hashtags, caption, destination, resize choice, priority) while shooting, pushes that over to my phone via something like SnapBridge, and then because that phone app supports Shortcuts, allows me to say "Hey Siri, Output Images with Priority 1." Plus, when I get home be able to say to my computer "Hey Siri, Archive all Images." Camera makers have done some half-assed wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC integrations with smartphones, but for the most part the camera still lives on its own, still uses out-of-date SoCs, and generally behaves like the year is 2005, not 2019. The various cameras I've used aren't even smart enough to do simple things like transfer a selected image to a given social network whenever the camera gets within range of a wifi access point it knows. And almost none of the camera makers seem to be serious about working on this problem. It's like Sony missing the iPod (a useful analogy because Sony is in the camera industry and, apart from its imaging sensor division, has missed the wave yet again). Edit I forgot to add that I believe Sony just introduced a new $1400 flagship camera, the a6600. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6975583891/sony-a6000-a6100-a6300-a6400-a6500-a6600-what-s-the-difference-and-which-should-i-buy https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6975583891/sony-a6000-a610.... It has a 4-5 year old sensor in it and software that is even older. Kitted out from scratch with high quality lenses, it's probably $2,500 – $3,000. Imagine how many iPhones Apple would sell if the sensor were not much changed from the 6s and the camera software not changed at all.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Not to mention how every phone camera geotags every image automatically, but that's still a bulky $500 add-on for DSLRs, if it's even available for your model.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Ideally cameras should pick up location from the shooter's smartphone through a Bluetooth link.
    - bmarquez 7y ago
      The Sony a6400 does this if the Sony app is running on the smartphone, but it drains the camera's battery fairly quickly.
      - mschuster91 7y ago
        For what its worth the Sony hot-shoe actually has dedicated GPS pins but there is no GPS mouse available (and Sony won't react if you ask for specs). The only thing that is available are external GPS recorders which you have to read out and semi-automatically merge with your photo library. What an absolute clusterfuck.
    - floatboth 7y ago
      Photo management tools like digiKam can pick up locations from GPX tracks (e.g. recorded with OsmAnd on your phone) and sync with the photos by time.
  - kenhwang 7y ago
    My 5 year old DSLR has GPS tagging for every photo. I mostly keep it off because it kills the battery. I suspect most serious photographers don't care about geotagging.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      I guess it depends what you mean by serious. I often find it very useful to know where a picture was taken. Direction would be nice too. Battery life is a general problem for GPS but if I can have GPS on a watch I’m not sure it would drain a big DSLR camera battery all that much.
jtolmar 7y ago
At this point, shouldn't a digital camera just be a smartphone with a weird form factor? (Pile of optics and a viewfinder?)
- freetime2 7y ago
  I would love to see Apple take a shot at this. It probably doesn’t make sense for them to invest the R&D in a rapidly shrinking market, though. Samsung tried building Android-based cameras a few years back, struggled to gain any sort of market share, and got out of the interchangeable lens camera market altogether. It’s a shame too because the cameras got really good reviews.
jdhn 7y ago
I love how the author broke down the user journey for capturing images with a smartphone vs a camera, seems like there's still a lot of room to improve the UX of shooting with a dedicated camera. I wonder why camera makers haven't attempted to smartphone-ify (bad term, I know) their cameras yet, or have they tried and failed at it?
- mc32 7y ago
  They are mostly hardware engineering companies (who were previously optics companies), so transitioning to a software focus is going to be fraught with missteps and half hearted attempts. Beyond prosumer DSLRs and prosumer Mirrorless there is an opinion among professional photogs that these software enhancements are gimmicks and are not pure photography, although I kind of doubt that being anything but a footnote in decisionmaking since if you feel that way you can simply not use that feature.
- jjav 7y ago
  > smartphone-ify Not sure exactly what you meant, but that sounds terrible. On my Nikon DSLR I can adjust just about any setting using physical buttons, very fast, most often without even taking my eye off the viewfinder. The camera UX is optimized for speed and efficiency. On a phone, I'd be scrolling through touch screen menus to do anything. By the time a shot is taken the subject is long gone (unless it's static scenery).
  - Cakez0r 7y ago
    I think there is still a lot of room for improvement with camera UX. It boggles my mind that all cameras don't have 3 dials as standard - one for iso, one for shutter and one for aperture.
adrr 7y ago
I don’t get why the camera industry doesn’t implement phone camera technologies into the cameras. They could easily do smart HDR features and merge multiple exposures into an image. Also they could make exposure smarter which smarter phone cameras tend to nail. Sure you can fix most of it with raw files but that inconvenience is why i reach for my phone instead of DSLR especially when taking pictures of my kids.
- CptFribble 7y ago
  Some cameras do the multiple exposure combo thing: see the Panasonic G85. For pro tier cameras, the problem is that no software manipulation can ever read the mind of the photographer and what they want, so you have to have a way to opt out of in-body post processing or there will definitely be times you're fighting the camera to get what you want. On professional shoots or at fast moving events like a wedding, no professional will tolerate their camera having a mind of its own and editing the files in a possibly-unpredictable way. So if that's the case, why even include the options at all? Professional photographers have the technical skills to get what they want from the camera by turning the normal ISO/shutter/aperture knobs and don't need those headaches. Casual users don't know or care what's possible and just want a photo that "looks good" which usually means in focus and a little extra saturation. "Prosumers" or "techy users" are the hardest to pin down, but that market may be disappearing anyway.
- bitL 7y ago
  Look up camera industry margins/profits, world-class SWEng salaries and you have your answer. Also look up how many gens behind their chip manufacturing process is to keep costs low.
- CarVac 7y ago
  The inconvenience of processing raw files is why I wrote my own software [0] to do the tonemapping to truly make a wide dynamic range scene look natural on a low dynamic range display. Now I spend mere seconds processing each raw image, and they look way better than I can get with the default processing on a smartphone. When you have the benefit of a large sensor, you don't actually need multishot HDR capture; even older cameras have plenty of dynamic range, as long as you expose properly. Now if only there were a camera with a beefy processor that I could port my software to run on... [0] https://github.com/CarVac/filmulator-gui https://github.com/CarVac/filmulator-gui
btrettel 7y ago
I'm not an expert on optics, but one thing I remember from my high school photography class (using film, perhaps dating myself a bit) is that smaller depth of field basically requires a large sensor. I guess you could imitate this automatically with software, but it's probably not a coincidence that every photo in the linked page has very large depth of field. To me, this would be a fair reason to prefer a more "normal" camera. Edit: The article linked below says I'm wrong about why phone cameras have wide depth of field. Based on skimming it, I'm right in that phone cameras will have wide depth of field, but it's due to the the small focal length. https://fstoppers.com/education/no-larger-sensors-do-not-produce-shallower-depth-field-254158 https://fstoppers.com/education/no-larger-sensors-do-not-pro...
- bigdubs 7y ago
  they're getting really close simulating shallow depth of field with depth sensors and computational photography, but in the same way there is no replacement resolution-wise for 8x10 and other large formats, its better just to use the real thing
  - mc32 7y ago
    If people demand it they may simulate medium format. But yeah seeing large prints from LF or MF cameras the whole image looks very different, more immersive of the scene.
    - i_am_proteus 7y ago
      The available resolution of LF, even from "only" 4x5, beats full-frame digital handily. It's also simultaneously cheaper (dollars) and more expensive (time).
    - foldr 7y ago
      There are no real differences beyond those arising from differences in aperture and focal length. For example, here are two very similar shots, one shot on a DX format DSLR and the other shot on 4x5 film: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4v6yNyRkl5uUThuRm9tVWhGNUE https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4v6yNyRkl5uUThuRm9tVWhGNU... https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4v6yNyRkl5ua1BlMzNHVlRUUHc https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4v6yNyRkl5ua1BlMzNHVlRUUH... The one exception would be movements: most 4x5 cameras can do tilt and shift, whereas tilt/shift lenses for DSLRs are very expensive and specialist.
leeoniya 7y ago
> Thanks to all the CMOS sensor advancements, we now have cameras that can produce amazing dynamic range and very little noise i shoot with a pretty recent APS-C Nikon D7500 & good glass these days and i can tell you that its dynamic range is still nothing compared to what a new (or even older) iphone can get by bracketing a shot at 960fps and stacking it automatically for you. i would happily sacrifice half its resolution for the kind of dynamic range you effortlessly get with an iphone. i had a good Fuji mirrorless X-T2 and its low latency electronic viewfinder sucked the battery dry in an hour and lagged + looked like shit in low light. sad.
- CarVac 7y ago
  The dynamic range is there in a raw file. You just need to apply tonemapping the way cell phones do it. My 2008-era 1Ds3 still crushes a modern phone (I have a Pixel 2) in dynamic range when processed properly, and a D7500 is even better still, not to mention the latest full-frame models like the D850 and such. Phones do, counterintuitively, have the advantage in extreme low light because they're able to stack multi-second exposures very reliably. But then again, I'm comparing my phone against a 2008 camera... the very best latest full frame cameras might be on par (at an extreme depth of field disadvantage though).
  - cookingrobot 7y ago
    From what I can find the 1DsIII has a dynamic range of 8.8 stops and the iPhone 11 has 10 stops. Have you found measurements otherwise? Single exposure cameras are really no match for computational photography in this area because it gives an effectively infinite dynamic range. You can take the equivalent of a long exposure photo for every shadow on a sunny day.
    - kaffeemitsahne 7y ago
      But then when something moves, it will look weird, right?
      - 7y ago
intolerabletech 7y ago
I'm so ignorant about cameras but have been curious... Smartphone manufacturers keep adding additional lens. Is that simply to compensate for not being a standalone camera? Am I complete idiot for looking at standalone mirrorless/DSLRs and wondering if Google's smart tech + Pixel 4's multiple lens are going to eventually eclipse standalone cameras? (My goal is to eventually carry a camera and non-smartphone).
- CarVac 7y ago
  It's to compensate for not having interchangeable lenses.
  - ghemsley 7y ago
    It is also to assist the computational photography features with the task of simulating the effects of a larger sensor. Generally speaking, information from multiple lenses/sensors is used to apply the selective defocus effect in portrait mode.
tjr225 7y ago
And yet the photos I take on my 7 year old mirror-less camera look eons better than anything I take on my iPhone?
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  The best camera is the one you have with you, and everyone usually has their smartphone with them.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    That is an expression, but there have been a lot of good photographs I've seen where I only have my phone. I take it and think "this does not do the scene justice, it looks like crap."
    - kenhwang 7y ago
      I know that feeling. So many times I come across a great scene, snap a photo with my phone, and instantly regret not bringing my DSLR with me.
    - freetime2 7y ago
      In my case my favorite landscape photo that I’ve ever taken was shot with a smartphone at sunset. I would love to print it and hang it on my wall, but there’s just not enough detail for a large print. I’m glad that my smartphone performed as well as it did, but wish I had brought a more substantial camera on that trip.
- jrockway 7y ago
  I feel the same way. I keep seeing these amazing iPhone pictures in giant subway ads and on blogs like this... but never get similar results myself. To some extent, I fear that "the eye" of the public has simply forgotten what sort of photographs are possible, and are happy with snapshots taken in perfect conditions, which do look OK on phone cameras. Remember the old architectural style with tilt-shift lenses, where tall things would imposingly loom over you with perfectly parallel lines? You can remove the "distortion" from tiling your camera up in software, but it tends to look pretty terrible compared to a camera on a tripod that is perfectly level and is just taking the image from the bottom of the image circle. Remember how it's nighttime half the time, but you never see good pictures taken at night? Stars exist, waves bend into glass, and the moon can glow over your mountains and valleys. But not if you're holding your camera in your hand and have a fingerprint on the lens. So we don't see those pictures anymore. Even product photos in ads look pretty bad a lot of the time. You can get a white table and take a snapshot with your cell phone, but it looks like you did. Maybe it doesn't matter, though. Ultimately, the problem the camera industry has is that very few people need to take perfect pictures in tough conditions. Fine art, wildlife, sports... phone cameras just don't yield as good of results as a larger camera. But not many people are taking that kind of picture. They just want to say "hey friends, I went to this place, look at it" or "look at my friend here". And a phone camera is great for that. It's the perfect balance; it takes up 0 space (since you were carrying a phone anyway), and the image quality is good enough. Smaller dedicated cameras (like an RX100) just don't provide much of a leap in quality.
starky 7y ago
Maybe because this is something very close to my wheelhouse, but this article seems to be overly wordy for something obvious. Smartphones are simply more convenient than a standalone camera can ever be. Add on top of that the incredible computational imaging capabilities that have been developed over the past few years and the quality of images you can get from the size of optics and pixels that these devices have is amazing and more than good enough for 99% of people. There is nothing that the camera industry can do to access this market in any meaningful way. The standalone photographic camera industry is going to be reduced to professionals and enthusiasts that need/want things like reliability and ruggedness, long focal lengths, creative control, and the process of taking a photograph. Sony and Fuji are really the only two companies that really get the current camera market IMO. Sony is putting out technologically amazing cameras that are bringing smart auto-focus systems, high resolutions, video, etc. that catch the eyes of tech enthusiast photographers and professionals alike. Fuji is selling a whole experience of the art of photography. Canon and Nikon are selling to... Canon and Nikon users. At the same time, these companies also obviously don't get it. I still can't figure out why someone hasn't added computational photography and a smartphone-like user interface for the enthusiast crowd (Why are you still not listening Sony? Your cameras were literally built on Android!). Why do we still have to mess about with camera tethering when it should be seamless to have photos transfer to a device for professional shoots, or to your smartphone for posting to social media?
- greggman2 7y ago
  Sony does offer a bunch of over priced, buggy, bad UX, not fun to use on the camera "apps", at least on some series of cameras. https://www.playmemoriescameraapps.com/portal/ https://www.playmemoriescameraapps.com/portal/ They are almost universally features you can get on your phone cheaper or even free with much better UX. Maybe at the resolution or raw area or some other dimension they might be better. You can also tether to your phone but why would you? It's just too tedious. I don't think anything is going to save cameras. I keep one which I pretty much only use for super telephoto (400-800mm) and for ultra wide/fisheye. If a phone optically offered both of those things built in I'd stop using that camera completely. Note: A snap-on 3rd party lens system would not get me to switch but a built in mount might (if Apple or Google or Samsung, ideally Apple, designed some kind of mount for lens I'd totally by them). In fact I'm a little surprised Apple hasn't already done this. I can imagine 2 or 3 tiny notches or mag-divits or something in the back or edge of the case near the lens that external lenses attach to. Apple could offer 2 or 4 lenses and maybe a ring light and easily pull in another billion a year as all the instagrammers go buy them all.
lrajlich 7y ago
This author made a small amount of fame a few years back (2012) claiming the dx format is dead. He was obviously wrong about that. He’s wrong about this, too.
- Rapzid 7y ago
  I must have missed the memo that the prosumer and enthusiast photographer groups are drying up. I know a oddly large number of enthusiasts and would-be pros around town and they all own DSLRs.. Half of my good friends own expensive Sony point and shoots.. Nikon's stock is down over 2013 but I'm not seeing the end days reflected in that. AMD was down for ages but computers didn't go out of fashion. I recon smart phones will kill for-purpose cameras the same year they kill the PC gaming industry.
  - matwood 7y ago
    > Nikon's stock is down over 2013 but I'm not seeing the end days reflected in that. I would not point to Nikon as the DSLR bellwether (and I'm a Nikon shooter). Nikon has moved into mirrorless at a glacial pace. The Nikon 1 system was a joke. If I didn't have so much Nikon glass, I would have moved on to Sony years ago. The new Nikon Z bodies give me hope, but the Z6 and new Z50 made some weird decisions particularly around memory cards. The Z6 uses the XQD which are super expensive and the Z50 eschewed dual slots which I make use of in d7100. The new Z mount also means I'm probably going to end up replacing many of my lenses anyway.
Terretta 7y ago
The photos in the article illustrate two things at once: - How amazing the iPhone XS Max cameras already are - How far there is to go before they feel as “photographic” as something shot with a big lens big sensor DSLR. The curve moved a lot with the iPhone 11 and the latest Android devices, but if you shoot thousands of iPhone photos and then pick back up your full frame Nikon D4 or Sony A9 with some big glass (say, an 85mm 1.2 or a 24mm 1.2), you’ll realize something was missing. This generation of smart phone pictures are a little like listening to music from speakers by Bose. All the fancy duct work sounds like a pretty good simulation of real drivers, but there’s just less there there.
- freetime2 7y ago
  I worry about how we will look back on today’s computational photography in a few years. Early computer graphics impressed everyone when they first came out, but haven’t aged as well as hand drawn animation or practical special effects of the same era. How will we look back on today’s artificially blurred backgrounds and impossibly HDR photographs in a decade or two?
freetime2 7y ago
Most of the images in that article were outdoors with lots of natural light, stationary subjects, wide angle compositions, and a large depth of field. Basically ideal conditions for smartphone photography. I find that in many everyday situations my smartphone just doesn’t cut it. Trying to take photos of my kids running around at dusk or indoors, for example. Or trying to take a decent portrait. I bought an A7iii to take photos in these situations, and I’m really glad that I did. I don’t always take it out with me and there are lots of situations where my smartphone strikes the right balance between quality and convenience. But my a7iii has allowed me to capture great images that I will cherish for the rest of my life and probably wouldn’t have been able to take with my smartphone.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- vosper 7y ago
  How old is your smartphone? My wife just upgraded from an iPhone 6S to an 11 Pro and that new camera is impressive. Things have come a long way even in just the last few years, we should assume they’ll keep getting better for at least a little bit yet.
  - why-oh-why 7y ago
    I just got an 11 Pro for the camera. A lot improved but it’s not a panacea. Blurry photos are still likely in the evening. Photos straight into the sun actually worsened because of the HDR (that I can’t disable anymore), making the sun and nearby clouds look like they have a “shadow”
  - freetime2 7y ago
    It’s an iPhone X, so about 2 years old. No doubt the iPhone 11 Pro is better. But Sony is due to release the a7iv next year and they have been improving their cameras with each generation, too (though not as fast as smartphone cameras).
    - matwood 7y ago
speedplane 7y ago
Futurists have been talking about computers or "AI" creating artwork for many years. They traditionally reference music, visual arts, and occasionally written prose, but these en-devours have hardly caught on beyond niche whimsical amusements. It's pretty clear that the first type of "art" created by computers or "AI" on a large scale is photography. Today, smart cameras don't just assist with objective factors like lighting and focus, they make subjective decisions on which areas to highlight, skin tones, shadows, parts of the scene to blur, and a variety of other details that are typically in the realm of artistic component of photography. As a society, we have essentially determined what a "good" photo is, and have programmed that into each camera that we carry in our pocket. There are many upsides to this, but it raises an obvious question: are these cameras really being programmed to create the "best" images, or are we being programmed to believe that the images they create are the "best"? Automation and AI are not a one way street; we don't just create machines that think like us, the machines we create change the way we think.
rland 7y ago
Big sensor, more photons per mm^2. There will not ever be a computational substitute for a quadrillion additional photons. The camera industry is totally backwards, though. That is true.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
This rather long article describes the past, not necessarily the future. Basically, what the author identifies and yet misses is that most phones these days are no longer phones. A normal camera has similar capabilities except it has better optics and happens to not have a 4g/5g chip in it (typically) or be used for taking calls. The status quo of the last 15 years is basically convergence of devices around a form factor that fits in your pocket that is good enough but frankly a bit awkward for many things. They've gotten uncomfortably big and yet are still uncomfortably small for many things (like typing). You only have one phone and the myth companies like Apple are built on is that that one phone comes from them and is the center of your life. However, making phone hardware is getting so cheap now that you can produce fairly decent ones for around 100$. Manufacturers like Apple have been looking to expand in the camera domain to justify higher prices. If you look at the most expensive phones, their number one feature is always the camera. The next logical step from a technical point of view is separating those two again. After all, if phones are cheap, there's no good reason why any camera can't be a phone as well. The only reason that's not happening is that traditional camera manufacturers (like most electronics manufacturers) are lousy at software. Eventually one of them will figure it out. Another thing that I've been expecting to happen is that Apple will figure out that selling just 1 device to people with too much money is bad business. Right now they have a one size fits all phone and that's it. You buy it and then you replace it after a few years. The next logical step here is to own multiple devices and start treating them more as accessories to be used in different contexts. The phone you use while biking to work might be different than what you use while you are sitting on the bus or at home. It might not even be a phone. It's like owning just one pair of shoes for jogging, weddings, office, and gardening. Once companies figure out how to make switching from one device to the next seamless, there's an enormous amount of potential for all sorts of specialized devices to be sold that seamlessly integrate. Including high end cameras.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > I've been expecting ... that Apple will figure out that selling just 1 device to people with too much money is bad business. ... You buy it and then you replace it after a few years. Creating a device that every person needs to replace after a few years is a very sound business model. The issue is how many years you generally need to replace it. Apple used to be able to convince folks to replace their phone every two years. Now a two year old phone is not bad at all, and many people are moving to a three year cycle or even longer. This is significant, if 50% of folks move from replacing their phones every 2 years to 3, that's a 16% drop in sales. Apple's real challenge is to keep innovating to convince folks to keep to shorter phone life-spans. However, as Moore's law keeps it's pace towards the graveyard, that will be be harder and harder to do.
crystaln 7y ago
I am not sure why I would read or anyone would write such a thorough account of an obvious and largely beneficial technological trend. I do appreciate the art tho and did skim the entire article. Smartphones take astoundingly better pictures than almost anyone needs or wants, and will only get better. There will always be some market for dedicated cameras, however for most people they do not add any value.
ur-whale 7y ago
The real interesting question raised by this article is it points out the difference of innovation speed between traditional camera makers and phone makers. Why does such a difference exist? [edit]: Is it industry culture? Is it because the DSLR camera market is too small to finance the innovation? Is it lack of imagination? I mean the size of the DSLR platform lends itlsef to way more computing power / features than a smartphone with the huge constraint on size and power consumption.
IkmoIkmo 7y ago
> And here we are, still wondering why the digital camera market is collapsing. Of course it is collapsing No, nobody is still wondering that, not for many years. And indeed, of course it is. That should've been the end of an article that could've been quite prophetic in 2007/8, not a few months shy of 2020.
cateye 7y ago
There are a lot of comments like: "isn't it a good idea to integrate a smartphone with DSLR". But it has been already done in 2013: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-DSLR-NX,23129.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-DSLR... Also https://zx1.zeiss.com/ https://zx1.zeiss.com/ is coming (not soon) with a fixed 35mm f/2 lens, a 37.4MP sensor, built-in 512 GB SSD storage, integrated Adobe Lightroom and wifi to share. Also remember https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/hasselblad-true-zoom https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/hasselblad-tr... and https://www.redhydrogen.com/ https://www.redhydrogen.com/ So, I don't think there is an obvious solution. Just integrating a mobile Operating system in a DSLR doesn't solve the underlying problems. How many customers want to put a sim card in their camera to have a really convenient way of sharing to social media? Do users really want to edit and grade their photo's on a 6 inch display? How many users find the pocket size form factor of an iPhone outweighing all the photo quality advantages of a bigger lens? So, maybe the conclusion is that these are different markets whereby the casual camera mass market will use a smartphone and prosumer and professional camera market don't have the same needs like smart image processing or sharing on instagram.
schuke 7y ago
I've always wondered if Apple could just make a camera. Or perhaps an attachment via USB-C that has bigger lens and sensors. That'll be Game Over for the Japanese consumer camera industry.
watertom 7y ago
What’s that old saying “the things you see when you don’t have a camera”. Now I always have a camera. I gave up my film DSLR in 1998, I gave up my digital DSLR in 2012, ago and went to a superzoom, now I’m giving up my superzoom for an iPhone 11. I’d rather become an expert with the a limited camera I always have, versus being an expert with an almost unlimited camera I rarely have. What’s funny is that I’m taking better pictures with the iPhone than I’ve ever taken before.
ekianjo 7y ago
> But that’s just the start of the problem. Once beginners get their first camera system, they quickly realize that their expenses and time commitment do not stop there. All of a sudden, their computers are not fast enough to post-process those high-resolution images and video. Their storage is insufficient. Their computer screens that used to handle web browsing and occasional gaming just fine, are no longer good enough – they now need IPS monitors and screen calibration tools for a consistent editing experience. That's the biggest difference between a market where casual users just want to take "pictures" vs the semi-pro market where users actually start caring about the process in itself rather than just the final outcome. It's not like "one size fits all" at all. I use both DSLRs, Mirrorless and smartphones to take pictures and I know when I want to use which. I also know that a DSLR picture is going to take more time to edit and all but I enjoy the process and I also find the picture is massively better than anything I can take with a smartphone: there's not even a metric where the best phone can compare with a medium-priced DLSR. I also know that my DLSR pictures will still look great 10 years from now while my smartphones pics are for instant consumption only and a good 75% of them are borderline junk (too much noise when it gets darker, distorsion, not taken exactly at the right moment, slightly blur, etc). For me this is the same difference between people who buy computers just because they need one and hardcore gamers who assemble the best piece of hardware they can get their hands to because they have very specific needs or wishes. Looking thru a huge list of hardware options, comparing prices, is also fun if you are in the right mindset - and this is not "for all people".
- floatboth 7y ago
  > my smartphones pics are for instant consumption only ehh, I have a photo from the iPhone 4 printed out and hanging on the wall, still very happy with some shots I took with it :) > too much noise when it gets darker To be fair, many older DSLRs (Canon 600D) have horrendous performance at high ISO too, while smartphones have Night Sight type stitching of multiple exposures, but these require steady hands and non-moving subjects of course.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    DSLRs have also got better with time as smartphones improved too. Their dynamic range for one has improved dramatically in the past 5 years.
Lio 7y ago
Weirdly I use my iPhone for photos but I don’t enjoy the process. I still have my Nikon DLSR set up but when I want to “do photography” for fun these days I use a Fuji X100F. This is a somewhat limit camera although I can get fixed focal lengths from 28-100mm eqv. and it has some other neat tricks. I hardly ever shoot RAW now and if I do I process the RAW in camera. This means I can’t take ever possible shot but I really enjoy working with the camera flaws and all. It’s only for fun so you get what you can. What I don’t get is why the camera makers haven’t expanded on the creative options for their systems. Why aren’t they offering flash systems with better integration than say Godox? Why don’t they offer control of flash colour temperature for balancing? What about photo stacking in JPGs?
- no_gravity 7y ago
  How much better are the photos you get out of the Fuji then the ones you get out of your iPhone? The Fuji X100F is about 3 times as heavy then a usual smartphone. So carrying it around would quadruple the weight of my "camera equipment". I wish somebody would run around with a pocket camera and a phone for a day and then write a blog posts with comparison shots.
  - Lio 7y ago
    That’s an interesting question. For convenience you can’t beat a smartphone. I only take the Fuji with me when I’m specifically in the mood to take photos. I don’t blog but if you do then maybe the camera you have with you is the best choice. On the question of quality again it’s interesting. The latest generation of smart phones are reputedly very good so I don’t know what the difference is. The other thing is that with the X100F you get lots of control but no training wheels. Smartphones lack control over what picture you get but you’ll still probably get something pretty most of the time. The Fuji has stuff like a leaf shutter so it will let you do certain tricks with flash exposure you can’t easily do in post. It also has really good film simulation and a good optical/digital view finder. Now that’s pretty specific so if it’s not something you think you need a smartphone will again be more useful.
  - subpixel 7y ago
ggm 7y ago
I enjoy using my Fuji x20 and if I could afford it I would get a xt3 or similar. It's not always about the result, sometimes it's about how you got there. That said, my phone takes awesome snaps
sealthedeal 7y ago
Seems to me, the biggest argument is iPhone camera is 12MP baseline DSLR is 24. If you are 100% certain you need that additional clarity in your photos (maybe landscape) then you go with DSLR. Otherwise the smartphone is the way to go for all your family photos and videos, etc. I would be VVV nervous if I was a camera manufacturer...
- sealthedeal 7y ago
  *not just family photos, I’m assuming most consumers use it for that. Or I’m just biased because I have a 5 week old lol.
- fma 7y ago
  Megapixel is not the only thing that determines how good a photo will look. That was a game played by manufacturers, just like how back in the day with CPU people tried to measure a computer quality based on Mhz and Ghz.
  - pkolaczk 7y ago
    All other things being equal, megapixels do count. DSLRs have both better quality in terms of dynamic range and noise AND more MP. More MP means more details, less grainy, nicer noise patterns, more cropping flexibility. 12 MP is good for internet, but not for high quality prints to hang on the wall. 12 MP from a Bayer filter is not even true 12 MP, but interpolated, much closer to 6-8 real MP.
fock 7y ago
Was to a birthday of a person just having his first child. There were photos of his childhood/life, not stellar, but just sentimental, physical pictures of his life. Judging from what is sold in all the crap decoration stores around, people have a real longing for this kind of sentimental stuff. I think a lot of them will awake horrified in 10-20 years, when they notice that all this sentimental stuff is basically horridly groce and barely printable, because they just bought an iPhone every year or two because of the camera, instead of just doing the (sustainable) thing of using their phones for what they're good at and getting a small camera for catering to sentimentality (think Sony RX100 - class). And yeah, basically if it's just sentimentality, maybe a rough, blotty sketch of reality might suffice, but given that photos are kind of unnecessary from this angle, I somehow find trading quality and money for arguable convenience sort of schizophrenic. As for the aspect of getting pictures of the camera: my cheap big-C-things have an alright app for that, I think it even does raw-files. A USB-cable/card-reader certainly also does the job. Seeing this, as it is, I wonder how many people really need higher quality _and_ high troughput. The small minority of one-person-online-only-celebrity-cos might profit from convenience and fast turn-around times of even better smartphone cameras, but this is a really small minority. Everyone else doesn't really need both. Professionals (aka selling pictures compared to selling some lifestyle) will still need the quality and all the sentimental people who think they need to shoot crappy photos, would be better served by other things for their obvious long-term-needs. Still, seeing how much emphasis marketing places on plainly overpriced smartphone cameras, it's a fair guess, that the latter group today is mainly concerned with their ephemeral and completely commercialized social-media presence noone will remember tomorrow.
- foldr 7y ago
  Modern smartphones take much better photos than 35mm compact cameras ever did. People have way more family photos of way better quality than they ever used to.
  - guidoism 7y ago
    I completely agree. But there was a period of several years, maybe 2010-2016 when they didn't. And especially at the beginning of that time, oh, I remember cringing when I saw friends' baby pictures they took at the time with their phones. I'm culpable of jumping ship to the new but worse technology too early myself, but in this instance I didn't stop carrying my "real" camera until the iPhone 6s.
pjc50 7y ago
Key pullquote after a lot of waffle on the meaning of "phone": > Why should anyone who wants to take decent pictures suffer through the pain of spending thousands of dollars on a camera system, many hours of learning how to use the camera and how to post-process images from it, when the alternative is to use a small, portable and idiot-proof device that they have in their pockets at all times? Smartphones are amazing now at producing decent pictures in adverse circumstances. The amount of manual effort required to produce an equivalent with a DSLR in post processing is therefore going up. Is there room for a iCamera, with the smartphone processing but large interchangeable lenses? Maybe. Are the camera companies able to build it? No.
dharma1 7y ago
I wish there was an external usb-c video/stills camera module that would work with smartphones and still fit in your pocket. Something the size of a matchbox. Just the sensor (and maybe fast storage) on the camera module, everything else on the phone - battery, processing, software, display - all on the phone. Would be great if it supported raw stills and video, or at least 10bit h265. Camera manufacturers can't make competitive software, and usually end up gimping cameras because they have different competing product lines. Just give us an external sensor with either a good fast fixed lens, or a reasonable lens mount, to hook up to a phone/tablet, those do everything else better than a camera. Usb-c has good enough bandwidth and can provide enough power to the external sensor module. For stills mobile phones with small sensors are already pretty close to DSLR quality, for video it will be a while - the small sensor/pixel size means lots of noise and you can't fix it with multiple exposure averaging like you can with stills. Similarly faking shallow DOF for video is a much harder task than for stills
- nikhizzle 7y ago
  You are describing the dxo one.
  - dharma1 7y ago
    If it was open source (or had some way for users to keep improving it) and had 4k video with a 10bit codec, I would be all over it. Now it looks abandoned by dxo
overcast 7y ago
Smartphones win on convenience. Standalone wins on focal lengths, and low light performance from large sensors that smartphones will NEVER be able to overcome. If you don't need those features, then you're not the target audience, and can stick with a smartphone.
BeetleB 7y ago
There are 2 reasons for the decline of the DSLR camera. The first is the complete lack of innovation. Without any meaningful APIs, end users cannot do much with their DSLR. There's no app store where I can buy apps to enhance my DSLR. There's a lot of room for creative photography if we could only program our own DSLRs. Smartphones, on the other hand, often do provide such APIs. This is how you get people doing astrophotography on a smartphone with a vastly inferior sensor. The other reason is much more banal. For various reasons, people jumped to the DSRL bandwagon thinking that would make for better photos compared to more compact cameras (false for most people). DSLRs never should have become as popular as they did. In the film days you had simple compact cameras and SLRs. Only enthusiasts bought SLRs. That was the case in the early digital days, but then around 2005 people suddenly decided to switch to DSLRs, despite their not benefiting from them. Over a decade later, people have realized that the eagerness with which they jumped to SLRs was misguided, and are now back to using something convenient. Unfortunately, camera manufacturers assumed this temporary rise in interest in DSLRs would be permanent.
- cthalupa 7y ago
  >The first is the complete lack of innovation. Without any meaningful APIs, end users cannot do much with their DSLR. There's no app store where I can buy apps to enhance my DSLR. I disagree here entirely. The DSLR "app" market predates and has been the inspiration for all of these apps we see on phones. Photoshop filters, lightroom presets and actions, etc. All of the stuff that that inspired things like instagram filters have been around for decades now, and have consistently always been a step ahead on power and quality. You don't run them on camera, but... you wouldn't want to! When you're shooting with a DSLR you're shooting for consumption at higher resolutions than you can see on your LCD display. You want to be able to look at things in more detail than you could ever do on the camera itself. >The other reason is much more banal. For various reasons, people jumped to the DSRL bandwagon thinking that would make for better photos compared to more compact cameras (false for most people) You're right here, but I don't think people actually wised up to this. If we're talking specifically about DSLRs, mirrorless cameras are just better for most people at this point - Sony has almost single handedly rendered DSLRs obsolete for the vast majority of use cases where people need prosumer or professional cameras. If we're talking about prosumer+ cameras in general, it's even simpler than your reasons: Most of the people taking pictures with their phones are doing so for people who are consuming them on their phones. You simply don't need a DSLR or mirrorless or medium format camera when everyone viewing your pictures is also using a phone. People aren't getting photos printed, and they're not viewing them on monitors. I'm really impressed with my iPhone 11 Pro camera - it works fantastic! - for viewing photos on the phone. But throw it up on my 4K monitor, and the pictures don't compare at all to my old D5300, much less my a7r 3 or even my rx100 m7 (assuming good shooting conditions and manual mode - the 11 Pro auto settings are quite good and significantly better than the 5300, and in some situations seem to be about as good as the rx100). I haven't gotten any printed to put up on display, but just seeing how poorly they compare when I'm looking at them in Lightroom, I wouldn't want to. The way the majority of people consume photography has changed, and the requirements for producing photos for that medium has changed with it.
scotty79 7y ago
Half of the camera should be on your smartphone. Lens, sensor, power, some buffer and some hardware gimmicks may stay on the camera, rest should be moved to smartphone. Whole UI, image processing, nn processing, storage, editing, basically all of software and computing power necessary should all be on smartphone. From the point of view of the camera user, smartphone should be detachable lcd viewfinder. Or from the point of smartphone user, camera should be beefy detachable lens and flash you can put on a tripod nearby when composing the shot. People want better lenses and lightning for their smartphones. If they are wireless it's even better.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

174 points by Red_Tarsius 7y ago

What's the TAM for a new iPhone model, versus the TAM for a new SLR? I'm guessing the iPhone wins by at least 2 orders of magnitude. EDIT: At the end of TFA they have this chart [1] which shows while camera sales peaked at 121 million units in 2009, in 2019 it's 1.4 billion smartphones sold versus 15 million cameras. Camera performance continues to be a major differentiator / selling point and upgrade draw for smartphones. Therefore to draw in that next $100 billion in device sales, companies like Apple can spend orders of magnitude more dollars investing in the phone's camera performance than a legacy camera company can invest in their entire device. Another major factor is that the massive processing power of the phone can be leveraged for image capture, just as it can be leveraged for gaming, and web browsing. Users can amortize the cost of all that computing power and fast storage across the several major categories of tasks that a smartphone can perform. So a processor that makes perfect sense in a smartphone is going to be very hard to justify in a SLR, versus integrating the minimum set of ICs required to process the image, with a low-power processor to run a bare-bones UI. Likewise the BOM for the screen on a smartphone is worth investing hundreds of dollars into, whereas the screen on an SLR is kind of like the backup for the viewfinder. Finally, the raison d'être of a camera in 2019 is to share photos with friends and family, using perhaps the built-in Camera app, but most likely a dozen other social apps which all have their own custom UI, filters, and accoutrements. An SLR will simply never be as effortless and fun to use for this purpose as your smartphone. [1] - https://www.instagram.com/p/B2b8pEDIBDb/?utm_source=ig_embed https://www.instagram.com/p/B2b8pEDIBDb/?utm_source=ig_embed

jseliger 7y ago

The strangest thing is the camera industry's non-response to smartphones. There's a fellow named Tom Hogan who writes in extreme detail about the camera industry and noticed years ago that camera makers should open up their APIs and work much harder to integrate with smartphones. Here's one recent example of that message: http://dslrbodies.com/newsviews/are-customers-asking-for.html http://dslrbodies.com/newsviews/are-customers-asking-for.htm... Still, Apple discovered a user problem—stringing together multiple apps to create a one-step process—and is trying to solve it. Are the camera companies doing the same? Doesn't seem like it. So for now I can only dream about the camera that lets me load some variables into the EXIF data of an image (hashtags, caption, destination, resize choice, priority) while shooting, pushes that over to my phone via something like SnapBridge, and then because that phone app supports Shortcuts, allows me to say "Hey Siri, Output Images with Priority 1." Plus, when I get home be able to say to my computer "Hey Siri, Archive all Images." Camera makers have done some half-assed wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC integrations with smartphones, but for the most part the camera still lives on its own, still uses out-of-date SoCs, and generally behaves like the year is 2005, not 2019. The various cameras I've used aren't even smart enough to do simple things like transfer a selected image to a given social network whenever the camera gets within range of a wifi access point it knows. And almost none of the camera makers seem to be serious about working on this problem. It's like Sony missing the iPod (a useful analogy because Sony is in the camera industry and, apart from its imaging sensor division, has missed the wave yet again). Edit I forgot to add that I believe Sony just introduced a new $1400 flagship camera, the a6600. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6975583891/sony-a6000-a6100-a6300-a6400-a6500-a6600-what-s-the-difference-and-which-should-i-buy https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6975583891/sony-a6000-a610.... It has a 4-5 year old sensor in it and software that is even older. Kitted out from scratch with high quality lenses, it's probably $2,500 – $3,000. Imagine how many iPhones Apple would sell if the sensor were not much changed from the 6s and the camera software not changed at all.

reaperducer 7y ago
Not to mention how every phone camera geotags every image automatically, but that's still a bulky $500 add-on for DSLRs, if it's even available for your model.
- nradov 7y ago
  Ideally cameras should pick up location from the shooter's smartphone through a Bluetooth link.
  - bmarquez 7y ago
    The Sony a6400 does this if the Sony app is running on the smartphone, but it drains the camera's battery fairly quickly.
    - mschuster91 7y ago
      For what its worth the Sony hot-shoe actually has dedicated GPS pins but there is no GPS mouse available (and Sony won't react if you ask for specs). The only thing that is available are external GPS recorders which you have to read out and semi-automatically merge with your photo library. What an absolute clusterfuck.
  - floatboth 7y ago
    Photo management tools like digiKam can pick up locations from GPX tracks (e.g. recorded with OsmAnd on your phone) and sync with the photos by time.
- kenhwang 7y ago
  My 5 year old DSLR has GPS tagging for every photo. I mostly keep it off because it kills the battery. I suspect most serious photographers don't care about geotagging.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I guess it depends what you mean by serious. I often find it very useful to know where a picture was taken. Direction would be nice too. Battery life is a general problem for GPS but if I can have GPS on a watch I’m not sure it would drain a big DSLR camera battery all that much.

jtolmar 7y ago

At this point, shouldn't a digital camera just be a smartphone with a weird form factor? (Pile of optics and a viewfinder?)

freetime2 7y ago
I would love to see Apple take a shot at this. It probably doesn’t make sense for them to invest the R&D in a rapidly shrinking market, though. Samsung tried building Android-based cameras a few years back, struggled to gain any sort of market share, and got out of the interchangeable lens camera market altogether. It’s a shame too because the cameras got really good reviews.

jdhn 7y ago

I love how the author broke down the user journey for capturing images with a smartphone vs a camera, seems like there's still a lot of room to improve the UX of shooting with a dedicated camera. I wonder why camera makers haven't attempted to smartphone-ify (bad term, I know) their cameras yet, or have they tried and failed at it?

mc32 7y ago
They are mostly hardware engineering companies (who were previously optics companies), so transitioning to a software focus is going to be fraught with missteps and half hearted attempts. Beyond prosumer DSLRs and prosumer Mirrorless there is an opinion among professional photogs that these software enhancements are gimmicks and are not pure photography, although I kind of doubt that being anything but a footnote in decisionmaking since if you feel that way you can simply not use that feature.
jjav 7y ago
> smartphone-ify Not sure exactly what you meant, but that sounds terrible. On my Nikon DSLR I can adjust just about any setting using physical buttons, very fast, most often without even taking my eye off the viewfinder. The camera UX is optimized for speed and efficiency. On a phone, I'd be scrolling through touch screen menus to do anything. By the time a shot is taken the subject is long gone (unless it's static scenery).
- Cakez0r 7y ago
  I think there is still a lot of room for improvement with camera UX. It boggles my mind that all cameras don't have 3 dials as standard - one for iso, one for shutter and one for aperture.

adrr 7y ago

I don’t get why the camera industry doesn’t implement phone camera technologies into the cameras. They could easily do smart HDR features and merge multiple exposures into an image. Also they could make exposure smarter which smarter phone cameras tend to nail. Sure you can fix most of it with raw files but that inconvenience is why i reach for my phone instead of DSLR especially when taking pictures of my kids.

CptFribble 7y ago
Some cameras do the multiple exposure combo thing: see the Panasonic G85. For pro tier cameras, the problem is that no software manipulation can ever read the mind of the photographer and what they want, so you have to have a way to opt out of in-body post processing or there will definitely be times you're fighting the camera to get what you want. On professional shoots or at fast moving events like a wedding, no professional will tolerate their camera having a mind of its own and editing the files in a possibly-unpredictable way. So if that's the case, why even include the options at all? Professional photographers have the technical skills to get what they want from the camera by turning the normal ISO/shutter/aperture knobs and don't need those headaches. Casual users don't know or care what's possible and just want a photo that "looks good" which usually means in focus and a little extra saturation. "Prosumers" or "techy users" are the hardest to pin down, but that market may be disappearing anyway.
bitL 7y ago
Look up camera industry margins/profits, world-class SWEng salaries and you have your answer. Also look up how many gens behind their chip manufacturing process is to keep costs low.
CarVac 7y ago
The inconvenience of processing raw files is why I wrote my own software [0] to do the tonemapping to truly make a wide dynamic range scene look natural on a low dynamic range display. Now I spend mere seconds processing each raw image, and they look way better than I can get with the default processing on a smartphone. When you have the benefit of a large sensor, you don't actually need multishot HDR capture; even older cameras have plenty of dynamic range, as long as you expose properly. Now if only there were a camera with a beefy processor that I could port my software to run on... [0] https://github.com/CarVac/filmulator-gui https://github.com/CarVac/filmulator-gui

btrettel 7y ago

I'm not an expert on optics, but one thing I remember from my high school photography class (using film, perhaps dating myself a bit) is that smaller depth of field basically requires a large sensor. I guess you could imitate this automatically with software, but it's probably not a coincidence that every photo in the linked page has very large depth of field. To me, this would be a fair reason to prefer a more "normal" camera. Edit: The article linked below says I'm wrong about why phone cameras have wide depth of field. Based on skimming it, I'm right in that phone cameras will have wide depth of field, but it's due to the the small focal length. https://fstoppers.com/education/no-larger-sensors-do-not-produce-shallower-depth-field-254158 https://fstoppers.com/education/no-larger-sensors-do-not-pro...

bigdubs 7y ago
they're getting really close simulating shallow depth of field with depth sensors and computational photography, but in the same way there is no replacement resolution-wise for 8x10 and other large formats, its better just to use the real thing
- mc32 7y ago
  If people demand it they may simulate medium format. But yeah seeing large prints from LF or MF cameras the whole image looks very different, more immersive of the scene.
  - i_am_proteus 7y ago
    The available resolution of LF, even from "only" 4x5, beats full-frame digital handily. It's also simultaneously cheaper (dollars) and more expensive (time).
  - foldr 7y ago
    There are no real differences beyond those arising from differences in aperture and focal length. For example, here are two very similar shots, one shot on a DX format DSLR and the other shot on 4x5 film: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4v6yNyRkl5uUThuRm9tVWhGNUE https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4v6yNyRkl5uUThuRm9tVWhGNU... https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4v6yNyRkl5ua1BlMzNHVlRUUHc https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4v6yNyRkl5ua1BlMzNHVlRUUH... The one exception would be movements: most 4x5 cameras can do tilt and shift, whereas tilt/shift lenses for DSLRs are very expensive and specialist.

leeoniya 7y ago

> Thanks to all the CMOS sensor advancements, we now have cameras that can produce amazing dynamic range and very little noise i shoot with a pretty recent APS-C Nikon D7500 & good glass these days and i can tell you that its dynamic range is still nothing compared to what a new (or even older) iphone can get by bracketing a shot at 960fps and stacking it automatically for you. i would happily sacrifice half its resolution for the kind of dynamic range you effortlessly get with an iphone. i had a good Fuji mirrorless X-T2 and its low latency electronic viewfinder sucked the battery dry in an hour and lagged + looked like shit in low light. sad.

CarVac 7y ago
The dynamic range is there in a raw file. You just need to apply tonemapping the way cell phones do it. My 2008-era 1Ds3 still crushes a modern phone (I have a Pixel 2) in dynamic range when processed properly, and a D7500 is even better still, not to mention the latest full-frame models like the D850 and such. Phones do, counterintuitively, have the advantage in extreme low light because they're able to stack multi-second exposures very reliably. But then again, I'm comparing my phone against a 2008 camera... the very best latest full frame cameras might be on par (at an extreme depth of field disadvantage though).
- cookingrobot 7y ago
  From what I can find the 1DsIII has a dynamic range of 8.8 stops and the iPhone 11 has 10 stops. Have you found measurements otherwise? Single exposure cameras are really no match for computational photography in this area because it gives an effectively infinite dynamic range. You can take the equivalent of a long exposure photo for every shadow on a sunny day.
  - kaffeemitsahne 7y ago
    But then when something moves, it will look weird, right?
    - 7y ago

intolerabletech 7y ago

I'm so ignorant about cameras but have been curious... Smartphone manufacturers keep adding additional lens. Is that simply to compensate for not being a standalone camera? Am I complete idiot for looking at standalone mirrorless/DSLRs and wondering if Google's smart tech + Pixel 4's multiple lens are going to eventually eclipse standalone cameras? (My goal is to eventually carry a camera and non-smartphone).

CarVac 7y ago
It's to compensate for not having interchangeable lenses.
- ghemsley 7y ago
  It is also to assist the computational photography features with the task of simulating the effects of a larger sensor. Generally speaking, information from multiple lenses/sensors is used to apply the selective defocus effect in portrait mode.

tjr225 7y ago

And yet the photos I take on my 7 year old mirror-less camera look eons better than anything I take on my iPhone?

toomuchtodo 7y ago
The best camera is the one you have with you, and everyone usually has their smartphone with them.
- jrockway 7y ago
  That is an expression, but there have been a lot of good photographs I've seen where I only have my phone. I take it and think "this does not do the scene justice, it looks like crap."
  - kenhwang 7y ago
    I know that feeling. So many times I come across a great scene, snap a photo with my phone, and instantly regret not bringing my DSLR with me.
  - freetime2 7y ago
    In my case my favorite landscape photo that I’ve ever taken was shot with a smartphone at sunset. I would love to print it and hang it on my wall, but there’s just not enough detail for a large print. I’m glad that my smartphone performed as well as it did, but wish I had brought a more substantial camera on that trip.
jrockway 7y ago
I feel the same way. I keep seeing these amazing iPhone pictures in giant subway ads and on blogs like this... but never get similar results myself. To some extent, I fear that "the eye" of the public has simply forgotten what sort of photographs are possible, and are happy with snapshots taken in perfect conditions, which do look OK on phone cameras. Remember the old architectural style with tilt-shift lenses, where tall things would imposingly loom over you with perfectly parallel lines? You can remove the "distortion" from tiling your camera up in software, but it tends to look pretty terrible compared to a camera on a tripod that is perfectly level and is just taking the image from the bottom of the image circle. Remember how it's nighttime half the time, but you never see good pictures taken at night? Stars exist, waves bend into glass, and the moon can glow over your mountains and valleys. But not if you're holding your camera in your hand and have a fingerprint on the lens. So we don't see those pictures anymore. Even product photos in ads look pretty bad a lot of the time. You can get a white table and take a snapshot with your cell phone, but it looks like you did. Maybe it doesn't matter, though. Ultimately, the problem the camera industry has is that very few people need to take perfect pictures in tough conditions. Fine art, wildlife, sports... phone cameras just don't yield as good of results as a larger camera. But not many people are taking that kind of picture. They just want to say "hey friends, I went to this place, look at it" or "look at my friend here". And a phone camera is great for that. It's the perfect balance; it takes up 0 space (since you were carrying a phone anyway), and the image quality is good enough. Smaller dedicated cameras (like an RX100) just don't provide much of a leap in quality.

starky 7y ago

Maybe because this is something very close to my wheelhouse, but this article seems to be overly wordy for something obvious. Smartphones are simply more convenient than a standalone camera can ever be. Add on top of that the incredible computational imaging capabilities that have been developed over the past few years and the quality of images you can get from the size of optics and pixels that these devices have is amazing and more than good enough for 99% of people. There is nothing that the camera industry can do to access this market in any meaningful way. The standalone photographic camera industry is going to be reduced to professionals and enthusiasts that need/want things like reliability and ruggedness, long focal lengths, creative control, and the process of taking a photograph. Sony and Fuji are really the only two companies that really get the current camera market IMO. Sony is putting out technologically amazing cameras that are bringing smart auto-focus systems, high resolutions, video, etc. that catch the eyes of tech enthusiast photographers and professionals alike. Fuji is selling a whole experience of the art of photography. Canon and Nikon are selling to... Canon and Nikon users. At the same time, these companies also obviously don't get it. I still can't figure out why someone hasn't added computational photography and a smartphone-like user interface for the enthusiast crowd (Why are you still not listening Sony? Your cameras were literally built on Android!). Why do we still have to mess about with camera tethering when it should be seamless to have photos transfer to a device for professional shoots, or to your smartphone for posting to social media?

greggman2 7y ago
Sony does offer a bunch of over priced, buggy, bad UX, not fun to use on the camera "apps", at least on some series of cameras. https://www.playmemoriescameraapps.com/portal/ https://www.playmemoriescameraapps.com/portal/ They are almost universally features you can get on your phone cheaper or even free with much better UX. Maybe at the resolution or raw area or some other dimension they might be better. You can also tether to your phone but why would you? It's just too tedious. I don't think anything is going to save cameras. I keep one which I pretty much only use for super telephoto (400-800mm) and for ultra wide/fisheye. If a phone optically offered both of those things built in I'd stop using that camera completely. Note: A snap-on 3rd party lens system would not get me to switch but a built in mount might (if Apple or Google or Samsung, ideally Apple, designed some kind of mount for lens I'd totally by them). In fact I'm a little surprised Apple hasn't already done this. I can imagine 2 or 3 tiny notches or mag-divits or something in the back or edge of the case near the lens that external lenses attach to. Apple could offer 2 or 4 lenses and maybe a ring light and easily pull in another billion a year as all the instagrammers go buy them all.

lrajlich 7y ago

This author made a small amount of fame a few years back (2012) claiming the dx format is dead. He was obviously wrong about that. He’s wrong about this, too.

Rapzid 7y ago
I must have missed the memo that the prosumer and enthusiast photographer groups are drying up. I know a oddly large number of enthusiasts and would-be pros around town and they all own DSLRs.. Half of my good friends own expensive Sony point and shoots.. Nikon's stock is down over 2013 but I'm not seeing the end days reflected in that. AMD was down for ages but computers didn't go out of fashion. I recon smart phones will kill for-purpose cameras the same year they kill the PC gaming industry.
- matwood 7y ago
  > Nikon's stock is down over 2013 but I'm not seeing the end days reflected in that. I would not point to Nikon as the DSLR bellwether (and I'm a Nikon shooter). Nikon has moved into mirrorless at a glacial pace. The Nikon 1 system was a joke. If I didn't have so much Nikon glass, I would have moved on to Sony years ago. The new Nikon Z bodies give me hope, but the Z6 and new Z50 made some weird decisions particularly around memory cards. The Z6 uses the XQD which are super expensive and the Z50 eschewed dual slots which I make use of in d7100. The new Z mount also means I'm probably going to end up replacing many of my lenses anyway.

Terretta 7y ago

The photos in the article illustrate two things at once: - How amazing the iPhone XS Max cameras already are - How far there is to go before they feel as “photographic” as something shot with a big lens big sensor DSLR. The curve moved a lot with the iPhone 11 and the latest Android devices, but if you shoot thousands of iPhone photos and then pick back up your full frame Nikon D4 or Sony A9 with some big glass (say, an 85mm 1.2 or a 24mm 1.2), you’ll realize something was missing. This generation of smart phone pictures are a little like listening to music from speakers by Bose. All the fancy duct work sounds like a pretty good simulation of real drivers, but there’s just less there there.

freetime2 7y ago
I worry about how we will look back on today’s computational photography in a few years. Early computer graphics impressed everyone when they first came out, but haven’t aged as well as hand drawn animation or practical special effects of the same era. How will we look back on today’s artificially blurred backgrounds and impossibly HDR photographs in a decade or two?

freetime2 7y ago

Most of the images in that article were outdoors with lots of natural light, stationary subjects, wide angle compositions, and a large depth of field. Basically ideal conditions for smartphone photography. I find that in many everyday situations my smartphone just doesn’t cut it. Trying to take photos of my kids running around at dusk or indoors, for example. Or trying to take a decent portrait. I bought an A7iii to take photos in these situations, and I’m really glad that I did. I don’t always take it out with me and there are lots of situations where my smartphone strikes the right balance between quality and convenience. But my a7iii has allowed me to capture great images that I will cherish for the rest of my life and probably wouldn’t have been able to take with my smartphone.

deleted 7y ago
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vosper 7y ago
How old is your smartphone? My wife just upgraded from an iPhone 6S to an 11 Pro and that new camera is impressive. Things have come a long way even in just the last few years, we should assume they’ll keep getting better for at least a little bit yet.
- why-oh-why 7y ago
  I just got an 11 Pro for the camera. A lot improved but it’s not a panacea. Blurry photos are still likely in the evening. Photos straight into the sun actually worsened because of the HDR (that I can’t disable anymore), making the sun and nearby clouds look like they have a “shadow”
- freetime2 7y ago
  It’s an iPhone X, so about 2 years old. No doubt the iPhone 11 Pro is better. But Sony is due to release the a7iv next year and they have been improving their cameras with each generation, too (though not as fast as smartphone cameras).
  - matwood 7y ago

speedplane 7y ago

Futurists have been talking about computers or "AI" creating artwork for many years. They traditionally reference music, visual arts, and occasionally written prose, but these en-devours have hardly caught on beyond niche whimsical amusements. It's pretty clear that the first type of "art" created by computers or "AI" on a large scale is photography. Today, smart cameras don't just assist with objective factors like lighting and focus, they make subjective decisions on which areas to highlight, skin tones, shadows, parts of the scene to blur, and a variety of other details that are typically in the realm of artistic component of photography. As a society, we have essentially determined what a "good" photo is, and have programmed that into each camera that we carry in our pocket. There are many upsides to this, but it raises an obvious question: are these cameras really being programmed to create the "best" images, or are we being programmed to believe that the images they create are the "best"? Automation and AI are not a one way street; we don't just create machines that think like us, the machines we create change the way we think.

rland 7y ago

Big sensor, more photons per mm^2. There will not ever be a computational substitute for a quadrillion additional photons. The camera industry is totally backwards, though. That is true.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

This rather long article describes the past, not necessarily the future. Basically, what the author identifies and yet misses is that most phones these days are no longer phones. A normal camera has similar capabilities except it has better optics and happens to not have a 4g/5g chip in it (typically) or be used for taking calls. The status quo of the last 15 years is basically convergence of devices around a form factor that fits in your pocket that is good enough but frankly a bit awkward for many things. They've gotten uncomfortably big and yet are still uncomfortably small for many things (like typing). You only have one phone and the myth companies like Apple are built on is that that one phone comes from them and is the center of your life. However, making phone hardware is getting so cheap now that you can produce fairly decent ones for around 100$. Manufacturers like Apple have been looking to expand in the camera domain to justify higher prices. If you look at the most expensive phones, their number one feature is always the camera. The next logical step from a technical point of view is separating those two again. After all, if phones are cheap, there's no good reason why any camera can't be a phone as well. The only reason that's not happening is that traditional camera manufacturers (like most electronics manufacturers) are lousy at software. Eventually one of them will figure it out. Another thing that I've been expecting to happen is that Apple will figure out that selling just 1 device to people with too much money is bad business. Right now they have a one size fits all phone and that's it. You buy it and then you replace it after a few years. The next logical step here is to own multiple devices and start treating them more as accessories to be used in different contexts. The phone you use while biking to work might be different than what you use while you are sitting on the bus or at home. It might not even be a phone. It's like owning just one pair of shoes for jogging, weddings, office, and gardening. Once companies figure out how to make switching from one device to the next seamless, there's an enormous amount of potential for all sorts of specialized devices to be sold that seamlessly integrate. Including high end cameras.

speedplane 7y ago
> I've been expecting ... that Apple will figure out that selling just 1 device to people with too much money is bad business. ... You buy it and then you replace it after a few years. Creating a device that every person needs to replace after a few years is a very sound business model. The issue is how many years you generally need to replace it. Apple used to be able to convince folks to replace their phone every two years. Now a two year old phone is not bad at all, and many people are moving to a three year cycle or even longer. This is significant, if 50% of folks move from replacing their phones every 2 years to 3, that's a 16% drop in sales. Apple's real challenge is to keep innovating to convince folks to keep to shorter phone life-spans. However, as Moore's law keeps it's pace towards the graveyard, that will be be harder and harder to do.

crystaln 7y ago

I am not sure why I would read or anyone would write such a thorough account of an obvious and largely beneficial technological trend. I do appreciate the art tho and did skim the entire article. Smartphones take astoundingly better pictures than almost anyone needs or wants, and will only get better. There will always be some market for dedicated cameras, however for most people they do not add any value.

ur-whale 7y ago

The real interesting question raised by this article is it points out the difference of innovation speed between traditional camera makers and phone makers. Why does such a difference exist? [edit]: Is it industry culture? Is it because the DSLR camera market is too small to finance the innovation? Is it lack of imagination? I mean the size of the DSLR platform lends itlsef to way more computing power / features than a smartphone with the huge constraint on size and power consumption.

IkmoIkmo 7y ago

> And here we are, still wondering why the digital camera market is collapsing. Of course it is collapsing No, nobody is still wondering that, not for many years. And indeed, of course it is. That should've been the end of an article that could've been quite prophetic in 2007/8, not a few months shy of 2020.

cateye 7y ago

There are a lot of comments like: "isn't it a good idea to integrate a smartphone with DSLR". But it has been already done in 2013: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-DSLR-NX,23129.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-DSLR... Also https://zx1.zeiss.com/ https://zx1.zeiss.com/ is coming (not soon) with a fixed 35mm f/2 lens, a 37.4MP sensor, built-in 512 GB SSD storage, integrated Adobe Lightroom and wifi to share. Also remember https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/hasselblad-true-zoom https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/hasselblad-tr... and https://www.redhydrogen.com/ https://www.redhydrogen.com/ So, I don't think there is an obvious solution. Just integrating a mobile Operating system in a DSLR doesn't solve the underlying problems. How many customers want to put a sim card in their camera to have a really convenient way of sharing to social media? Do users really want to edit and grade their photo's on a 6 inch display? How many users find the pocket size form factor of an iPhone outweighing all the photo quality advantages of a bigger lens? So, maybe the conclusion is that these are different markets whereby the casual camera mass market will use a smartphone and prosumer and professional camera market don't have the same needs like smart image processing or sharing on instagram.

schuke 7y ago

I've always wondered if Apple could just make a camera. Or perhaps an attachment via USB-C that has bigger lens and sensors. That'll be Game Over for the Japanese consumer camera industry.

watertom 7y ago

What’s that old saying “the things you see when you don’t have a camera”. Now I always have a camera. I gave up my film DSLR in 1998, I gave up my digital DSLR in 2012, ago and went to a superzoom, now I’m giving up my superzoom for an iPhone 11. I’d rather become an expert with the a limited camera I always have, versus being an expert with an almost unlimited camera I rarely have. What’s funny is that I’m taking better pictures with the iPhone than I’ve ever taken before.

ekianjo 7y ago

> But that’s just the start of the problem. Once beginners get their first camera system, they quickly realize that their expenses and time commitment do not stop there. All of a sudden, their computers are not fast enough to post-process those high-resolution images and video. Their storage is insufficient. Their computer screens that used to handle web browsing and occasional gaming just fine, are no longer good enough – they now need IPS monitors and screen calibration tools for a consistent editing experience. That's the biggest difference between a market where casual users just want to take "pictures" vs the semi-pro market where users actually start caring about the process in itself rather than just the final outcome. It's not like "one size fits all" at all. I use both DSLRs, Mirrorless and smartphones to take pictures and I know when I want to use which. I also know that a DSLR picture is going to take more time to edit and all but I enjoy the process and I also find the picture is massively better than anything I can take with a smartphone: there's not even a metric where the best phone can compare with a medium-priced DLSR. I also know that my DLSR pictures will still look great 10 years from now while my smartphones pics are for instant consumption only and a good 75% of them are borderline junk (too much noise when it gets darker, distorsion, not taken exactly at the right moment, slightly blur, etc). For me this is the same difference between people who buy computers just because they need one and hardcore gamers who assemble the best piece of hardware they can get their hands to because they have very specific needs or wishes. Looking thru a huge list of hardware options, comparing prices, is also fun if you are in the right mindset - and this is not "for all people".

floatboth 7y ago
> my smartphones pics are for instant consumption only ehh, I have a photo from the iPhone 4 printed out and hanging on the wall, still very happy with some shots I took with it :) > too much noise when it gets darker To be fair, many older DSLRs (Canon 600D) have horrendous performance at high ISO too, while smartphones have Night Sight type stitching of multiple exposures, but these require steady hands and non-moving subjects of course.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  DSLRs have also got better with time as smartphones improved too. Their dynamic range for one has improved dramatically in the past 5 years.

Lio 7y ago

Weirdly I use my iPhone for photos but I don’t enjoy the process. I still have my Nikon DLSR set up but when I want to “do photography” for fun these days I use a Fuji X100F. This is a somewhat limit camera although I can get fixed focal lengths from 28-100mm eqv. and it has some other neat tricks. I hardly ever shoot RAW now and if I do I process the RAW in camera. This means I can’t take ever possible shot but I really enjoy working with the camera flaws and all. It’s only for fun so you get what you can. What I don’t get is why the camera makers haven’t expanded on the creative options for their systems. Why aren’t they offering flash systems with better integration than say Godox? Why don’t they offer control of flash colour temperature for balancing? What about photo stacking in JPGs?

no_gravity 7y ago
How much better are the photos you get out of the Fuji then the ones you get out of your iPhone? The Fuji X100F is about 3 times as heavy then a usual smartphone. So carrying it around would quadruple the weight of my "camera equipment". I wish somebody would run around with a pocket camera and a phone for a day and then write a blog posts with comparison shots.
- Lio 7y ago
  That’s an interesting question. For convenience you can’t beat a smartphone. I only take the Fuji with me when I’m specifically in the mood to take photos. I don’t blog but if you do then maybe the camera you have with you is the best choice. On the question of quality again it’s interesting. The latest generation of smart phones are reputedly very good so I don’t know what the difference is. The other thing is that with the X100F you get lots of control but no training wheels. Smartphones lack control over what picture you get but you’ll still probably get something pretty most of the time. The Fuji has stuff like a leaf shutter so it will let you do certain tricks with flash exposure you can’t easily do in post. It also has really good film simulation and a good optical/digital view finder. Now that’s pretty specific so if it’s not something you think you need a smartphone will again be more useful.
- subpixel 7y ago

ggm 7y ago

I enjoy using my Fuji x20 and if I could afford it I would get a xt3 or similar. It's not always about the result, sometimes it's about how you got there. That said, my phone takes awesome snaps

sealthedeal 7y ago

Seems to me, the biggest argument is iPhone camera is 12MP baseline DSLR is 24. If you are 100% certain you need that additional clarity in your photos (maybe landscape) then you go with DSLR. Otherwise the smartphone is the way to go for all your family photos and videos, etc. I would be VVV nervous if I was a camera manufacturer...

sealthedeal 7y ago
*not just family photos, I’m assuming most consumers use it for that. Or I’m just biased because I have a 5 week old lol.
fma 7y ago
Megapixel is not the only thing that determines how good a photo will look. That was a game played by manufacturers, just like how back in the day with CPU people tried to measure a computer quality based on Mhz and Ghz.
- pkolaczk 7y ago
  All other things being equal, megapixels do count. DSLRs have both better quality in terms of dynamic range and noise AND more MP. More MP means more details, less grainy, nicer noise patterns, more cropping flexibility. 12 MP is good for internet, but not for high quality prints to hang on the wall. 12 MP from a Bayer filter is not even true 12 MP, but interpolated, much closer to 6-8 real MP.

fock 7y ago

Was to a birthday of a person just having his first child. There were photos of his childhood/life, not stellar, but just sentimental, physical pictures of his life. Judging from what is sold in all the crap decoration stores around, people have a real longing for this kind of sentimental stuff. I think a lot of them will awake horrified in 10-20 years, when they notice that all this sentimental stuff is basically horridly groce and barely printable, because they just bought an iPhone every year or two because of the camera, instead of just doing the (sustainable) thing of using their phones for what they're good at and getting a small camera for catering to sentimentality (think Sony RX100 - class). And yeah, basically if it's just sentimentality, maybe a rough, blotty sketch of reality might suffice, but given that photos are kind of unnecessary from this angle, I somehow find trading quality and money for arguable convenience sort of schizophrenic. As for the aspect of getting pictures of the camera: my cheap big-C-things have an alright app for that, I think it even does raw-files. A USB-cable/card-reader certainly also does the job. Seeing this, as it is, I wonder how many people really need higher quality _and_ high troughput. The small minority of one-person-online-only-celebrity-cos might profit from convenience and fast turn-around times of even better smartphone cameras, but this is a really small minority. Everyone else doesn't really need both. Professionals (aka selling pictures compared to selling some lifestyle) will still need the quality and all the sentimental people who think they need to shoot crappy photos, would be better served by other things for their obvious long-term-needs. Still, seeing how much emphasis marketing places on plainly overpriced smartphone cameras, it's a fair guess, that the latter group today is mainly concerned with their ephemeral and completely commercialized social-media presence noone will remember tomorrow.

foldr 7y ago
Modern smartphones take much better photos than 35mm compact cameras ever did. People have way more family photos of way better quality than they ever used to.
- guidoism 7y ago
  I completely agree. But there was a period of several years, maybe 2010-2016 when they didn't. And especially at the beginning of that time, oh, I remember cringing when I saw friends' baby pictures they took at the time with their phones. I'm culpable of jumping ship to the new but worse technology too early myself, but in this instance I didn't stop carrying my "real" camera until the iPhone 6s.

pjc50 7y ago

Key pullquote after a lot of waffle on the meaning of "phone": > Why should anyone who wants to take decent pictures suffer through the pain of spending thousands of dollars on a camera system, many hours of learning how to use the camera and how to post-process images from it, when the alternative is to use a small, portable and idiot-proof device that they have in their pockets at all times? Smartphones are amazing now at producing decent pictures in adverse circumstances. The amount of manual effort required to produce an equivalent with a DSLR in post processing is therefore going up. Is there room for a iCamera, with the smartphone processing but large interchangeable lenses? Maybe. Are the camera companies able to build it? No.

dharma1 7y ago

I wish there was an external usb-c video/stills camera module that would work with smartphones and still fit in your pocket. Something the size of a matchbox. Just the sensor (and maybe fast storage) on the camera module, everything else on the phone - battery, processing, software, display - all on the phone. Would be great if it supported raw stills and video, or at least 10bit h265. Camera manufacturers can't make competitive software, and usually end up gimping cameras because they have different competing product lines. Just give us an external sensor with either a good fast fixed lens, or a reasonable lens mount, to hook up to a phone/tablet, those do everything else better than a camera. Usb-c has good enough bandwidth and can provide enough power to the external sensor module. For stills mobile phones with small sensors are already pretty close to DSLR quality, for video it will be a while - the small sensor/pixel size means lots of noise and you can't fix it with multiple exposure averaging like you can with stills. Similarly faking shallow DOF for video is a much harder task than for stills

nikhizzle 7y ago
You are describing the dxo one.
- dharma1 7y ago
  If it was open source (or had some way for users to keep improving it) and had 4k video with a 10bit codec, I would be all over it. Now it looks abandoned by dxo

overcast 7y ago

Smartphones win on convenience. Standalone wins on focal lengths, and low light performance from large sensors that smartphones will NEVER be able to overcome. If you don't need those features, then you're not the target audience, and can stick with a smartphone.

BeetleB 7y ago

There are 2 reasons for the decline of the DSLR camera. The first is the complete lack of innovation. Without any meaningful APIs, end users cannot do much with their DSLR. There's no app store where I can buy apps to enhance my DSLR. There's a lot of room for creative photography if we could only program our own DSLRs. Smartphones, on the other hand, often do provide such APIs. This is how you get people doing astrophotography on a smartphone with a vastly inferior sensor. The other reason is much more banal. For various reasons, people jumped to the DSRL bandwagon thinking that would make for better photos compared to more compact cameras (false for most people). DSLRs never should have become as popular as they did. In the film days you had simple compact cameras and SLRs. Only enthusiasts bought SLRs. That was the case in the early digital days, but then around 2005 people suddenly decided to switch to DSLRs, despite their not benefiting from them. Over a decade later, people have realized that the eagerness with which they jumped to SLRs was misguided, and are now back to using something convenient. Unfortunately, camera manufacturers assumed this temporary rise in interest in DSLRs would be permanent.

cthalupa 7y ago
>The first is the complete lack of innovation. Without any meaningful APIs, end users cannot do much with their DSLR. There's no app store where I can buy apps to enhance my DSLR. I disagree here entirely. The DSLR "app" market predates and has been the inspiration for all of these apps we see on phones. Photoshop filters, lightroom presets and actions, etc. All of the stuff that that inspired things like instagram filters have been around for decades now, and have consistently always been a step ahead on power and quality. You don't run them on camera, but... you wouldn't want to! When you're shooting with a DSLR you're shooting for consumption at higher resolutions than you can see on your LCD display. You want to be able to look at things in more detail than you could ever do on the camera itself. >The other reason is much more banal. For various reasons, people jumped to the DSRL bandwagon thinking that would make for better photos compared to more compact cameras (false for most people) You're right here, but I don't think people actually wised up to this. If we're talking specifically about DSLRs, mirrorless cameras are just better for most people at this point - Sony has almost single handedly rendered DSLRs obsolete for the vast majority of use cases where people need prosumer or professional cameras. If we're talking about prosumer+ cameras in general, it's even simpler than your reasons: Most of the people taking pictures with their phones are doing so for people who are consuming them on their phones. You simply don't need a DSLR or mirrorless or medium format camera when everyone viewing your pictures is also using a phone. People aren't getting photos printed, and they're not viewing them on monitors. I'm really impressed with my iPhone 11 Pro camera - it works fantastic! - for viewing photos on the phone. But throw it up on my 4K monitor, and the pictures don't compare at all to my old D5300, much less my a7r 3 or even my rx100 m7 (assuming good shooting conditions and manual mode - the 11 Pro auto settings are quite good and significantly better than the 5300, and in some situations seem to be about as good as the rx100). I haven't gotten any printed to put up on display, but just seeing how poorly they compare when I'm looking at them in Lightroom, I wouldn't want to. The way the majority of people consume photography has changed, and the requirements for producing photos for that medium has changed with it.

scotty79 7y ago

Half of the camera should be on your smartphone. Lens, sensor, power, some buffer and some hardware gimmicks may stay on the camera, rest should be moved to smartphone. Whole UI, image processing, nn processing, storage, editing, basically all of software and computing power necessary should all be on smartphone. From the point of view of the camera user, smartphone should be detachable lcd viewfinder. Or from the point of smartphone user, camera should be beefy detachable lens and flash you can put on a tripod nearby when composing the shot. People want better lenses and lightning for their smartphones. If they are wireless it's even better.

deleted 7y ago

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