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Unfortunately, camera manufacturers have been very slow to adopt computational photography techniques in professional grade bodies. We're just now starting to s

Unfortunately, camera manufacturers have been very slow to adopt computational photography techniques in professional grade bodies. We're just now starting to see things like image stacking (usually called "digital ND filter" or other such nonsense). I'd like to see in-camera HDR, better processing, etc. Hopefully the camera industry steps up the quality of it's software before it collapses into obscurity. Right now the only thing keeping it afloat is the fact that we haven't found good ways to take the effects of large apertures and longer focal lengths. I feel like the moment phone manufacturers are able to convincingly fake something like an 85mm f/1.4, we're just going to be done with full-frame cameras.

aikinai 7y ago
It’s not just the look of the larger aperture and longer focal lengths, The sharpness is abysmal. I can’t stand that watercolor look that every smartphone photo has. Also dynamic range, but that’s much easier to fake.
- dylan604 7y ago
  It's easier to fake, but it's still not the same. By that, I mean that the final image might have that look, but you can't do anything with it after the fact. With a RAW image with true dynamic range, you can do whatever you want with it and change it up as you wish. The compression on the images is also another thing contributing to the watercolor look and lack of sharpness. Cell phone cameras are worried about space constraints on the device itself and across the network.
  - falcrist 7y ago
    Most phones I've dealt with actually allow you to output raw image files. I'm not saying they have the same dynamic range as my A7iii, but they're not compressed or color-value limited like JPEG.
- falcrist 7y ago
  True, but there are going to be ways to make smartphone images sharper. You can already do some work in Lightroom to mostly bridge the gap. IMO professional camera manufacturers need to get ahead of that by putting computational photography techniques in their full frame bodies.
  - sudosysgen 7y ago
    Yes, but ultimately no matter how much computational photography and odd filter arrays you throw it, the diffraction limit will kill you with a 2mm wide smartphone camera.
ska 7y ago
are able to convincingly fake something like an 85mm f/1.4, If that were the case we have a good long time then, most likely; Really what you are talking about is how you can't beat the physics of large sensors and lenses; for now 'faking it' isn't anywhere close, but also the techniques being pursued aren't likely to get there. I suspect in-camera processing though is a bit of a dead end for pro and prosumer cameras because your laptop/desktop is going to be able to do a much better job, and your camera just isn't going to have a good workflow for post-processing and organizing photos. For phone camera use it makes more sense, because people are rarely doing much more than delete these two, crop this one a little and send it to mom. Don't get me wrong, phone cameras are having a ton of effort put into them and have way more resources than conventional cameras - but the effort is almost entirely being put into making something small and light work pretty well under most circumstances, not into making something great. What's more important is that most people don't care for most applications. More people use to buy "good" cameras because their other options were poor or nonexistent. A top of the line current phone camera may not be great, but it's good enough for most people. I don't know what this means. It could well kill off the "prosumer" market and leave professional cameras an expensive niche product. It just likely won't be because phone cameras got as good at creating pictures.
- falcrist 7y ago
  Yea. You can't beat the physics of big optics... but there ARE ways to get around some of the limitations of smaller optics. You can fake depth of field, use image stabilization and image stacking to gather more light with a smaller aperture, utilize "super resolution" and/or neural network techniques to get or fake more detail, etc. I'd love to see some of the awesome work being put into phones carry over into full-frame cameras before the whole pro-sumer market and a bunch of the pro market dissolve.
  - ska 7y ago
    Image stabilization and stacking both started in SLR's before phone cameras were doing it. The best image stabilization is still opto-mechanical, of course. Nobody fakes depth of field that well, and super resolution (the algorithmic kind, not the real kind) doesn't work that well either. We've been doing research in those areas for 25+ years now, and while some real progress has been made it's not magic. Phone cameras are doing a lot of heroic stuff to get around the limitations of their optics, and it results in "hey, that's not bad". Nothing wrong with that! But I don't see why you would want to see that stuff in a digital SLR, say, though - if you take your photography seriously enough to lug that thing around, you're doing post processing on a computer anyway, and you can do all that stuff better there (at least in theory). Now if you were asking why photo processing software on your desktop wasn't absorbing or improving on everything in the phones, that would make more sense to me.
detaro 7y ago
IMHO, they should mostly optimize the bits of the pipeline that are needed to capture the kind of data needed (e.g. recording short high speed bursts etc), and maybe make ad-hoc data transfer of the camera nicer. More flexibility to do it on another device and update the software there quickly, while keeping the camera platform stable, and the battery life jump downwards from DSLR to mirrorless is already painful enough.
fock 7y ago
I don't think the convincing fake will ever happen anytime soon (no ML will give you that pixel-perfect sharpness gradient along each strand of air on a 30MP image). Generally speaking I also haven't seen a phone picture yet, which beats my cams at sharpness (which is simple physics...). It's pixelpeeping ofc but I can happily look at my pictures right from the raw converter w/o any sharpening or AI-magic applied and they are sharp and crisp. Do that with you phone-raw or jpeg. You'll spot a difference even on a phone screen... Also, I don't think that these things should be put in camera software as a feature (making them subject to obsolescense as phones...) but instead they should just add a very basic scripting API (=tool) so you can store all the things you need for postprocessing and control capture (like the lua-scripts on CDHK).
- falcrist 7y ago
  I think it's important to bear in mind that the phone doesn't have to beat the full-frame camera at this game. It only needs to be "good enough". The fact that the phone is much more convenient to carry and use already gives it a huge leg up. What's the saying? "The best camera is the one you have with you" If someone can make a phone that gives convincing fake bokeh and covers wide, normal, and tele focal lengths while producing images that are even remotely comparable to a "real" camera in an 8x10 print... that person will demolish what's left of the camera industry.
  - ska 7y ago
    "The best camera is the one you have with you" Right, which is why the low end consumer camera market has basically died. For average use, a phone is already "good enough". So another plausible path is that the damage has already been done, and what is left of the prosumer and pro level stuff will remain stable. Note, I'm not saying that I think that is what will happen, I haven't thought about it much. But there is nothing in current tech development that suggests the phones will bridge that gap (to prosumer level image quality) any time soon...
    - falcrist 7y ago
      I think you might be right. A lot of the damage already has been done... but the pro and prosumer camera markets are still shrinking pretty quickly. It's a concerning trend, which makes me hope that camera manufacturers get ahead of the trend by introducing features that I feel are lacking in "real" cameras.
rimliu 7y ago
I've swithched to Olympus about a year ago and was surprised to find out they are doing some nifty things. Alas, with all that FF hype they are not getting much attention, despite having some smazing things to offer.
sudosysgen 7y ago
An 85 1.4 vs an equivalent smartphone lens is literally in the 100s of times more light. It's quite crazy, I don't think it'll ever be doable. Anyways, smartphone cameras are and will be for a long time stuck because of their diffraction limited sensors due to low lens diameters.

aikinai 7y ago

It’s not just the look of the larger aperture and longer focal lengths, The sharpness is abysmal. I can’t stand that watercolor look that every smartphone photo has. Also dynamic range, but that’s much easier to fake.

dylan604 7y ago
It's easier to fake, but it's still not the same. By that, I mean that the final image might have that look, but you can't do anything with it after the fact. With a RAW image with true dynamic range, you can do whatever you want with it and change it up as you wish. The compression on the images is also another thing contributing to the watercolor look and lack of sharpness. Cell phone cameras are worried about space constraints on the device itself and across the network.
- falcrist 7y ago
  Most phones I've dealt with actually allow you to output raw image files. I'm not saying they have the same dynamic range as my A7iii, but they're not compressed or color-value limited like JPEG.
falcrist 7y ago
True, but there are going to be ways to make smartphone images sharper. You can already do some work in Lightroom to mostly bridge the gap. IMO professional camera manufacturers need to get ahead of that by putting computational photography techniques in their full frame bodies.
- sudosysgen 7y ago
  Yes, but ultimately no matter how much computational photography and odd filter arrays you throw it, the diffraction limit will kill you with a 2mm wide smartphone camera.

ska 7y ago

are able to convincingly fake something like an 85mm f/1.4, If that were the case we have a good long time then, most likely; Really what you are talking about is how you can't beat the physics of large sensors and lenses; for now 'faking it' isn't anywhere close, but also the techniques being pursued aren't likely to get there. I suspect in-camera processing though is a bit of a dead end for pro and prosumer cameras because your laptop/desktop is going to be able to do a much better job, and your camera just isn't going to have a good workflow for post-processing and organizing photos. For phone camera use it makes more sense, because people are rarely doing much more than delete these two, crop this one a little and send it to mom. Don't get me wrong, phone cameras are having a ton of effort put into them and have way more resources than conventional cameras - but the effort is almost entirely being put into making something small and light work pretty well under most circumstances, not into making something great. What's more important is that most people don't care for most applications. More people use to buy "good" cameras because their other options were poor or nonexistent. A top of the line current phone camera may not be great, but it's good enough for most people. I don't know what this means. It could well kill off the "prosumer" market and leave professional cameras an expensive niche product. It just likely won't be because phone cameras got as good at creating pictures.

falcrist 7y ago
Yea. You can't beat the physics of big optics... but there ARE ways to get around some of the limitations of smaller optics. You can fake depth of field, use image stabilization and image stacking to gather more light with a smaller aperture, utilize "super resolution" and/or neural network techniques to get or fake more detail, etc. I'd love to see some of the awesome work being put into phones carry over into full-frame cameras before the whole pro-sumer market and a bunch of the pro market dissolve.
- ska 7y ago
  Image stabilization and stacking both started in SLR's before phone cameras were doing it. The best image stabilization is still opto-mechanical, of course. Nobody fakes depth of field that well, and super resolution (the algorithmic kind, not the real kind) doesn't work that well either. We've been doing research in those areas for 25+ years now, and while some real progress has been made it's not magic. Phone cameras are doing a lot of heroic stuff to get around the limitations of their optics, and it results in "hey, that's not bad". Nothing wrong with that! But I don't see why you would want to see that stuff in a digital SLR, say, though - if you take your photography seriously enough to lug that thing around, you're doing post processing on a computer anyway, and you can do all that stuff better there (at least in theory). Now if you were asking why photo processing software on your desktop wasn't absorbing or improving on everything in the phones, that would make more sense to me.

detaro 7y ago

IMHO, they should mostly optimize the bits of the pipeline that are needed to capture the kind of data needed (e.g. recording short high speed bursts etc), and maybe make ad-hoc data transfer of the camera nicer. More flexibility to do it on another device and update the software there quickly, while keeping the camera platform stable, and the battery life jump downwards from DSLR to mirrorless is already painful enough.

fock 7y ago

I don't think the convincing fake will ever happen anytime soon (no ML will give you that pixel-perfect sharpness gradient along each strand of air on a 30MP image). Generally speaking I also haven't seen a phone picture yet, which beats my cams at sharpness (which is simple physics...). It's pixelpeeping ofc but I can happily look at my pictures right from the raw converter w/o any sharpening or AI-magic applied and they are sharp and crisp. Do that with you phone-raw or jpeg. You'll spot a difference even on a phone screen... Also, I don't think that these things should be put in camera software as a feature (making them subject to obsolescense as phones...) but instead they should just add a very basic scripting API (=tool) so you can store all the things you need for postprocessing and control capture (like the lua-scripts on CDHK).

falcrist 7y ago
I think it's important to bear in mind that the phone doesn't have to beat the full-frame camera at this game. It only needs to be "good enough". The fact that the phone is much more convenient to carry and use already gives it a huge leg up. What's the saying? "The best camera is the one you have with you" If someone can make a phone that gives convincing fake bokeh and covers wide, normal, and tele focal lengths while producing images that are even remotely comparable to a "real" camera in an 8x10 print... that person will demolish what's left of the camera industry.
- ska 7y ago
  "The best camera is the one you have with you" Right, which is why the low end consumer camera market has basically died. For average use, a phone is already "good enough". So another plausible path is that the damage has already been done, and what is left of the prosumer and pro level stuff will remain stable. Note, I'm not saying that I think that is what will happen, I haven't thought about it much. But there is nothing in current tech development that suggests the phones will bridge that gap (to prosumer level image quality) any time soon...
  - falcrist 7y ago
    I think you might be right. A lot of the damage already has been done... but the pro and prosumer camera markets are still shrinking pretty quickly. It's a concerning trend, which makes me hope that camera manufacturers get ahead of the trend by introducing features that I feel are lacking in "real" cameras.

rimliu 7y ago

I've swithched to Olympus about a year ago and was surprised to find out they are doing some nifty things. Alas, with all that FF hype they are not getting much attention, despite having some smazing things to offer.

sudosysgen 7y ago

An 85 1.4 vs an equivalent smartphone lens is literally in the 100s of times more light. It's quite crazy, I don't think it'll ever be doable. Anyways, smartphone cameras are and will be for a long time stuck because of their diffraction limited sensors due to low lens diameters.