23 ms·

iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King?

281 points by gok 7y ago

downerending 7y ago
Yeah, well, I wish it had one eye, in the form of a headphone jack.
- system2 7y ago
  Still fighting for this? It is long gone and I am very happy without it too. I use the original iPhone earplugs, works perfectly fine for call and music. I have a Bluetooth headset and if I am dying for music I use that one for more bass.
  - downerending 7y ago
    Jacks aside, you really need to get some quality headphones. The ones Apple delivers are beyond awful.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > beyond awful They're fine.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  If only it could be a one-handed king as well…
- qubex 7y ago
  I honestly find it hard to believe that people are still bemoaning the ‘loss’ of the headphone jack. I stopped using it well before it was removed, probably sometime while using an iPhone 6 Plus/6S Plus (so 2015-2016). It was an absolutely obsolete interface and clearly a weak point for water resistance and structural integrity. If you really want to use headphones you can use a pigtail on the Lightening connector or plug them into a bluetooth adapter. EDIT: Fine, there are people who still want headphone jacks. I’m not the one who decided to remove them and I’m glad they did, but I can’t give them back to you.
  - Lio 7y ago
    > If you really want to use headphones you can use a pigtail on the Lightening connector or plug them into a bluetooth adapter. How fast will this wear out the Lightning socket? Since Apple put the springs in the socket and not the plug (like USB-C) when that socket wears out the phone is a right off.
    - qubex 7y ago
      Right off the bat, I think you mean write-off. ;)
      - Lio 7y ago
        Ah the beauty of being dyslexic. Occasionally I substitute the wrong spelling of words, especially when replying on a phone for some reason. Well at least you understood the point I was trying to convey.
    - kayoone 7y ago
      I've been using the adapter in my car for 2 years, twice a day, no problems so far. Lightning is far more resilient to this than USB-C ports in my Macbook for example, which have become pretty loose over the years of plugging in chargers and monitors.
      - Lio 7y ago
        It's the lead that becomes loose not the port with USB-C so you can change the cable you use to connect to your monitor and it will be like new again.
    - asdff 7y ago
      It really depends on how you treat my phone. My iphone 5 took a lot of abuse, and I had to use a rubber band to apply pressure on the port to get it to charge by the end of its life. So far my SE1 is holding up.
  - nradov 7y ago
- Ghjklov 7y ago
  Who is flagging this? It's an amusing post and pretty much harmless.
- kayoone 7y ago
  By now i think these are just troll comments. This is a pretty good phone for the money, it is still possible to connect wired headphones if that is what you desire.
- cl3m 7y ago
  You right but nobody care. Here is the only petition I found that is still open and you'll see support is abysmal: https://www.change.org/p/apple-apple-bring-the-headphone-jack-back https://www.change.org/p/apple-apple-bring-the-headphone-jac...
  - Daneel_ 7y ago
    You really think a change.org petition is going to do anything? I'm certainly not under that impression, hence why I'm not bothering to sign it. Those of us who cherish our headphone jacks still desperately want them back, there's just no great avenue to express our rage. I want my headphone jack. I have $1K+ headphones that are effectively collecting dust because I can't plug them into my phone.
    - bscphil 7y ago
      Maybe the answer is trivially "the sort of person who can afford to buy $1k+ headphones", but this comment makes me immediately think "what sort of person buys $1K headphones and then buys a phone they can't use the headphones with?". More seriously, why don't you get a better phone? (Or carry around an audio player?)
      - nonamenoslogan 7y ago
        Or use the 3.5mm to Lightning adapter. Maybe not 'perfect,' but your $1000 headphones would make sound with one.
        asdff 7y ago
        Took a road trip last summer with an iphone X as the audio and GPS, boy what an annoyance. GPS drains battery like nothing else, so I had to keep cutting music to charge the damn phone. Why couldn't apple make a pass through charging dongle, this one is so dumb.
fulafel 7y ago
Is this related to Halide the language that Google also uses to implement computation photography? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halide_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halide_(programming_language)
- sandofsky 7y ago
  No.
- xuki 7y ago
  No, it's a reference to silver halide in analog photography. Halide is a camera app on iPhone.
ghostpepper 7y ago
This seems like a cool feature. Is there something comparable on flagship Android phones?
- thesandlord 7y ago
  Are there any flagship android phones with a monocular camera setup? Seems like every new phone, even at the $400 "mid-tier" price point, has at least two cameras. Even phones like the Pixel 3A which have a single lens use the "dual-pixel" tech to get better depth info.
- haditab 7y ago
  Portrait mode in Pixel2 did the same thing and imo opinion worked better than portrait mode in the dual-camera iphone 7 plus (I know iphone 7 plus is older but that's the only dual camera iphone I had access to at the time).
  - renewiltord 7y ago
    No, the Pixel 2 and iPhone XR do the same thing. They use DPAF. In the post, you'll see that the XR's depth map actually smoothly follows the ground into the background. The Pixel 2 will do that too and it will work for inanimate objects as well.
- renewiltord 7y ago
  The portrait mode feature is present. See this for example: https://imgur.com/a/xyMH4Io https://imgur.com/a/xyMH4Io but it uses the tech they describe from iPhone XR, i.e. the slight difference in the angle that it hits two parts of the sensor is used as an input to detect depth https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/learning-to-predict-depth-on-pixel-3.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/learning-to-predict-depth-...
- danielbarla 7y ago
  I have no references to back this up, but I did have some odd results with setting my Huawei P9's camera to "aperture mode" (this was a while back, the actual mode's name might have been different). Essentially what you'd expect is that the subject should be crisp, but anything further away or closer should blur significantly. I assumed that this was done as expected, via the lens. But certain scenes would have this "effect" applied wrong; things that should have been out of focus in the background were in focus, while simultaneously things at the same distance were blurred elsewhere, and so on. I quickly became convinced it was a software effect, and the algorithm was simply guessing the depth wrong. While it looked great most of the time, it only took a few of these oddball Escher-esque photos to put me off it for good (since you generally only notice it afterwards, when it's too late to retake). EDIT: Actually, having now gone through this article, it has some really good examples of how this can go wrong (e.g. dog with "crown" instead of background tree), and how odd it can feel.
renewiltord 7y ago
The portrait modes on these are getting really good. The blur is pretty convincing looking. The only open-source software I know that does similar stuff is body-pix which does matting, but I don't think it generates a smooth depth map like this thing. It would be cool because then you can do a clever background blur for your Zoom backgrounds with v4l2-loopback webcam. By the way, I decided to also quick summarize the usual HN threads that have the trigger word iPhone in it: - No headphone jack --- Actually this is good because ecosystem built for it ----- Don't think ecosystem is good. Audio drops out ------- Doesn't happen to me. Maybe bad device. ----- Don't want to be locked in. Want to use own device. ------- That's not Apple philosophy. Don't know why surprised. --------- I have right to my device ----------- cf. Right to Repair laws ------- Can use own device with dongle. --------- Don't want dongle. Have to get dongle for everything. Annoying. ----------- Only need one dongle. ------------- If only audio, but now can't charge. ----------- Use dongle purse. --- Apple quality have drop continuous. Last good Macbook was 2012. ----- Yes. Keyboard is useless now. Have fail. Recalled. ------- I have no problem with keyboard. --------- Lucky. ------- Also touchpad have fail. Think because Foxconn. ------- Yes. Butterfly? More like butterfly effect. Press key, hurricane form on screen. ----- Yes. Yes. All Tim Cook. Bean Counter. ----- Yes. Many root security violation these days. ------- All programmers who make security violate must be fired. --------- Need union so not fired if manager make security violation. ----------- Don't understand why no union. ------------- Because Apple and Google have collude to not poach. See case. ------- Yes. Security violation is evidence of lack of certification in industry. --------- Also UIKit no longer correctly propagate event. --- Phone too big anyway. No one make any small phone anymore. ----- See here, small phone. ------- Too old. Want new small phone. Had iPhone 8. Pinnacle of small beauty. ------- That's Android. No support more than 2 months. --------- Actually, support 4 months. ----------- Doesn't matter. iPhone support 24 centuries and still going. Queen have original. --------- Yes, and battery on Android small. --- Will buy this phone anyway. Support small phone. ----- No. This phone is also big. No one care about small hand. ------- Realistically, phone with no SSH shell dumb. I use N900 on Maemo. --- Who care? This press release. Just advertisement. ----- Can dang remove clickbait. What is one-eye anyway? Meaningless. Phone no have eye. --- Also, phone not available in Bielefeld. --- Phone only have 128 GB? Not enough. Need 129 GB. ----- 64 GB enough for everyone. ------- "640 KB enough for everyone" - Bill Fence, 1923
soylentgraham 7y ago
The article/advert misses this information out; is this depth estimation a model in the OS somewhere, or part of the vision api, coremedia api (where the stereo->depth frames are), or just inside the camera app and not exposed to developers?
- RavlaAlvar 7y ago
  In all probability, there will be no true depth sensing capability in SE, thus developer would not be able to access the api. The portrait mode is likely to be implemented with monocular depth estimation using deep learning.
  - soylentgraham 7y ago
    Of course it's a depth-from-mono model, it says so in the article. Apple's "true depth" is an estimate from two cameras, that's not actually real depth either but it's exposed to developers. Also in the article "We’re happy that this depth data — both the human matte and the newfangled machine-learned depth map — was exposed to us developers, though."
- sandofsky 7y ago
  Author here. In the article, we mentioned it's a neural network, and the results are accessible to developers. We left out further details because this isn't an implementation guide.
  - soylentgraham 7y ago
    Could you give me a hint here which of their API's it's using? There's a few "depth" frame interfaces in iOS for various devices and googling which apply to which devices rarely yields much. (I wish the apple docs would hint as to which devices apply to which APIs)
diogenescynic 7y ago
I really wish there was an iPhone SE Plus. This is just too small, but everything else is perfect.
- kgwgk 7y ago
  This is the iPhone SE Plus and it's too large. In the original SE format it would be perfect.
  - gjs278 7y ago
    indeed. i’m using a new SE now I have to keep using my other hand to help adjust when I need to reach.
  - diogenescynic 7y ago
    I meant I want an the SE Plus model that follows the “Plus” sizing format of other iPhones. The iPhone Plus models were 6.2” tall and 3” wide, whereas the iPhone SE is 5.4” tall and 2.6” wide.
    - kgwgk 7y ago
      I know, I know :-) I was just venting my frustration.
      - diogenescynic 7y ago
        I assumed I was wrong and that was why I was being downvoted so I had to re-check the specs. All good.
karolist 7y ago
My Pixel 2 XL I'm typing this on also has just one camera and does pretty amazing DoF for portraits, SE is definitely not the first phone to do this in software alone.
- renewiltord 7y ago
  No, that device does it using the thing called DPAF https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/10/portrait-mode-on-pixel-2-and-pixel-2-xl.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/10/portrait-mode-on-pixel-2-a... The iPhone XR technique described in the link does that too. And it'll usually be better (than the monocular thing).
  - CarVac 7y ago
    The Pixel 2 uses true monocular depth estimation for the front camera.
    - renewiltord 7y ago
      Completely forgot about the front camera. Thank you.
- jes5199 7y ago
  bet it still lags when you try to open the app menu
  - karolist 7y ago
    no... latest Android, one of the snappiest Android phones I had. But I understand where you're coming from, it's typical experience with most Android manufacturers sadly, especially with Samsung where it turns into lagging abandonware 2 years in. I'll stick with it unless Pixel 5 is a compelling upgrade and returns the fingerprint scanner back.
Luc 7y ago
The visual artefacts (white spikes) on the woman's shoulder are pretty bad. Unacceptably bad, I would say.
- playeren 7y ago
  > Shot on an iPhone XS in 2018
  - Luc 7y ago
    So they included it _because_ it looks bad? If so, I didn't catch that!
    - playeren 7y ago
      > If so, I didn't catch that! The reasoning for including the picture is in the actual _text_ of the article. I do not wish to antagonize people who have trouble reading, but I also think they shouldn't be surprised when they miss out on material information.
      - Luc 7y ago
        All that and a roasting too! Thanks so much.
safgasCVS 7y ago
When I got my first iPhone (an XR) I remember the first 3 weeks I kept playing around with portrait mode. Now a year in, looking at the photos in my iCloud stream I haven’t used the feature in more than 9 months. I had to read this article to remind myself the feature still existed. Similar story with Touch ID.
- syntheticcorp 7y ago
  Do you mean 3D Touch instead of Touch ID? I agree that 3D Touch isn’t that useful or an everyday feature, I believe it’s now discontinued
leejo 7y ago
The article alludes to something I've noticed since upgrading from the 5c to an 11 pro last year - The computational aspect and/or current hardware limitations mean these phones can shoot images that look great on the phone. I mean, you scroll past images on Instagram, look at your own photos on the phone you took them with, look at your images on your Instagram feed on other people's phones or on the Instagram web app, and yeah they look pretty good. Get them on something bigger though? Look a little closer? Use decent resolution monitor? A reasonable sized print? They look bad. I'm not even talking about pixel peeping here, which is bullshit. I mean they look overprocessed. Like the machine took a course in photoshop on YouTube and didn't finish it. The examples in the article show this, they're full of little mistakes that don't happen when you have proper hardware - larger aperture lenses on larger sensors. Proper graduated neutral density filters to prevent halos. Sensors with large enough area/photosites to give better dynamic range or better high ISO performance. Real camera movements to tilt/shift/rise/fall/swing. I mean, most of this is boring technicality stuff that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of "is this an interesting photo" type considerations. It's more a case of computational photography is currently trying to climb out of its uncanny valley. It'll get there eventually. For now we're still at the point of "Eventually, anyone that values photos will carry a standalone camera." I say this as someone who shoots mostly with an iPhone, but still carries around a 4x5 camera when it matters. Edit: to expand on this a bit I've just uploaded some images I shot with the 11 pro a couple of weeks after I bought it back in October: https://leejo.github.io/2020/04/28/off_season_ibiza/ https://leejo.github.io/2020/04/28/off_season_ibiza/ # the caveat is that I was still figuring the phone/camera out but wanted to see "what it could do out of the box" - and yeah, the images look good on the screen with very minor lens corrections and levels in lightroom, but look overprocessed even with my attempts to pull that back: the sky in the photos looks added in, there are halos around parts of the images where HDR is trying and failing, the sharpening is too aggresive (real life doesn't have "sharp" edges), and so on. When you view these at larger sizes than seen in the blog post they look much worse.
- foldr 7y ago
  >larger aperture lenses on larger sensors Nitpick: smart phone cameras have very wide apertures (f̶2̶.̶2̶ f1.8 in the case of the iPhone SE).
Causality1 7y ago
Sometimes I think I'm cocked in the head because I still completely fail to see any point at all in bokeh images. It's rather like phone manufacturers dedicating hardware and bleeding edge software to the production of fish-eye images.
- michaelt 7y ago
  A keen photographer would point you to an image like [1] as bokeh removing 'clutter' and 'distraction'. Cues you would get from depth perception seeing the same thing in person. Like so many things in art, these are all subjective judgements and a matter of taste. If you want a more objective reason, crisp-subject-blurred background is associated with high quality because it's what professional portrait photographs often look like [2] It's not the be all and end all of photography, of course - few people would want their selfie with the Eiffel tower to blur out the Eiffel tower! [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aperture_and_bokeh.jpg#/media/File:Aperture_and_bokeh.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aperture_and_bokeh.j... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=the+queen&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=the+queen&tbm=isch
  - bluedino 7y ago
    Paintings work the same way - https://paintingportraittips.com/homepage-old/portrait-painting-techniques/ https://paintingportraittips.com/homepage-old/portrait-paint...
- jp555 7y ago
  Bokeh (I assume you actually mean shallow depth of field?) or the widest possible field of view - fish-eye? I can see why you might feel cocked if you keep changing what you're talking about. :P
Angostura 7y ago
Thinking about this, why can’t the SE’s software work out depth-perception by using Live Photo-type tech - we all move a little bit while taking photos, so comparing frames would give you depth info. Tripod shots excepted.
- Traster 7y ago
  Probably because the first thing that would happen is a vlog from MKBHD saying that it doesn't work whilst mounted on his $17000 tripod and gimbal setup. In all seriousness though, you can do a to imitate two cameras with one, but this is designed to be a differentiating feature, the iPhone SE is designed to have a worse camera. Why would you spend time focusing on features exclusive to the camera that you've already decided shouldn't be that good.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    Because it sounds as if they already focussing on those kind of features.
- sandofsky 7y ago
  It's (comparatively) easier to calculate depth data if you have the precise distances between the two cameras. Apple knows these values, down to the millimeter. Calculating the camera extrinsics based on two arbitrary photos has to be way harder. Maybe they got that far, and decided the results weren't as good as a neural network.
f311a 7y ago
Which iPhone is better if I want a good camera, but I don't want to go with the PRO model? I stopped following iPhone models a while ago and have no idea about the differences between 11, XR, and XS. I need a simple phone with a good camera and swapping SE1 for SE2 does not sound like a good option.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  iPhone 11 has the same cameras as iPhone 11 Pro, except for the telephoto lens.
- Razengan 7y ago
  I've been sticking with the XS and it has pretty good cameras. This is the first time I've skipped an iPhone since the 5, because I regretted upgrading to the XS from the X. You could just wait a few months and get the next one that's supposedly coming out with LIDAR or whatever.
- klodolph 7y ago
  There’s no simple answer for everyone but my current take on phone cameras is simple: Every current production iPhone has a good camera. The rear-facing cameras (which you use for taking pictures) are within spitting distance of perfect, barring any revolutions in camera physics. The front-facing cameras are inferior but they get the job done and are very respectable. If you want a noticeably better camera, it’s simply not available in this form factor. You can play with gimmicks like the 108MP Xiaomi Mi Note, but once you zoom in, you can see the dirty secret that there is heavy, heavy processing that makes the resolution possible at all, and from an image quality standpoint, you’re not any better off.
  - jahlove 7y ago
    > The rear-facing cameras (which you use for taking pictures) are within spitting distance of perfect, barring any revolutions in camera physics. The front-facing cameras are inferior but they get the job done and are very respectable. I disagree. The pics looks good on a phone, but when you compare a large print vs a full frame camera, the difference is obvious. Also, if you try to photograph the milky way with your iPhone, it's limitations are obvious (even on a phone screen).
Accacin 7y ago
For all those bemoaning the lack of a headphone jack, if you like music do yourself a favour and get yourself an older iPod and do all your podcast and music listening on your iPod. The sound is much better and it's nice to have a device where I can listen to music and not be distracted or tempted to do other things.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  How is the sound better?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Parent means compared to Bluetooth compression codecs...
    - skrebbel 7y ago
      Ah! Thanks, that makes sense.
thdrdt 7y ago
Side note: depth of field blur is not a gaussian blur but a bokeh blur. Most software uses gaussian blur to fake depth of field but this always looks unnatural. Bokeh blur looks more like a lot of circles. If you compare the iPhone 11 blur with the SE blur it looks like the SE is using bokeh blur which looks much more natural.
- kqr 7y ago
  It's more subtle than this: bokeh blur can look very different depending on lens design and configuration. It can look like toruses (tori?), various sided polygons, stars, double overlayed low-pass circles with resonance at the edges, ovals shaped and rotated into a full-picture swirly effect, and so on and so forth. Depth of field blur is a very organic effect and in many cases part of the signature look of lens designs. It is not just one, parameterless filter one can apply to an image.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  >depth of field blur is not a gaussian blur but a bokeh blur This is one of my main problem with those big-time YouTubers. Since the portrait mode on the iPhone come out, all other manufacturers followed and all these reviewers made this into "Who would extract the head of a person and blur the background" contests and they kept praising the phone that would do the sharpest extraction. As if those people never saw an actual DoF blur? Then some manufacturers start adding random bokeh flares... It's one of those things that keep my faith in Apple, they actually have people who know a thing or two and don't jump on the next race of megapixels/bezel to body ratio/ISO or whatever next fad race is. This "who would do the sharpest edges around the object on portrait mode" contest annoyed me so much that I quit watching gadget reviewers. Next time I watched reviewer videos they all were talking about "Which company does the best color science" and quit again.
- ska 7y ago
  bokeh is one of those terms that is often misused, as it does not describe a type of "blur" but the aesthetic characteristics of how out of focus elements look from a particular camera & lens. You can apply the same thing to algorithms. Like many lenses though, so far they all have really bad bokeh. You are quite right that the optical effects are far more complex than a single gaussian blur applied on a background mask. They are also much more complex than the modeling currently being done with limited depth information, or even worse, faked depth information.
mrweasel 7y ago
I don’t get it, it’s a phone, with a camera. The camera just needs to be good enough, and for most people it’s been good enough for years. Most phone reviews these days focuses waaay to much on the camera, because the reviewers are often people who are also into photography or shooting videos. For myself, I care solely on privacy and price, so I only have one option, if I need a new smartphone. I still think the iPhone SE need to come down in price, but it the only choice, there are no competitors
- gregoriol 7y ago
  I very much second this: the camera is like the snakes game on old Nokias, it's very cool it's there but it's not what I need the most.
  - gregoriol 7y ago
    Also, on the iPhones it has actually made the device more annoying because of a very simple thing: the back is not flat! This creates a very bad experience when the phone is on a table or any surface. So the ideal phone would not be an iPhone SE as many suggest this week, it would be an iPhone SE with a flat back, whatever the camera is.
    - mhb 7y ago
      So an SEv1? (Hat tip to Apple for the brain-dead reuse of a model name which requires disambiguation.)
    - nonamenoslogan 7y ago
      I think most people use a case. Not using a case on a glass body $400-1200 device you're going to carry around in your pocket is pretty risky.
      - gregoriol 7y ago
        This is not acceptable: having to use a case to fix a "defect", are you Steeve Jobs from the antenna gate?...
rchaud 7y ago
Really interesting read, and I love that there was a small GIF shoutout to Top Secret. Funny, campy action film in the spirit of stuff like Hot Shots Part Deux. I'm pretty ignorant about how cameras work in general. Bit embarrassed to admit that I didn't realize stuff like ML was used to guess depth and know how to add background blur.
gfiorav 7y ago
The whole portrait thing is going to plague this decade's pictures. We'll cringe when we look back at them the same way we cringe at 80's shoulder pads.
- arsenico 7y ago
  Shoulder pads are back in
- seppin 7y ago
  It's the same as shooting a wide aperture, the blurred background look has always been a thing.
  - gfiorav 7y ago
    It’s the crappiness of the effect... it’s too much! And the borders... ugh
    - seppin 7y ago
      I guess 99.9% of people don't notice.
rwmj 7y ago
Can someone answer this point I'm confused about: Why can't a phone generate bokeh blur using the same technique that an ordinary camera does, ie. a large aperture / small f-stop? IOW why is ML or depth sensing needed at all?
- foldr 7y ago
  Two reasons. First, phone cameras all have a fixed aperture. If you set the aperture wide enough to get bokeh in a typical portrait shot, then the depth of field would be too narrow to be practical for general photography. Second, the depth of field depends not only on the f-stop but also on the focal length (or, to put it another way, it depends on the absolute diameter of the aperture). Given the focal length of a typical phone camera, you'd need a lens with a very wide aperture to get significant background blur for subjects at portrait distance. Wider apertures complicate the complexity and expense of lens manufacture. It is interesting to speculate on the use of very wide aperture lenses on future phone cameras, though. If such lenses could be made cheaply, one can imagine that the shallow DOF could be overcome via some form of automated focus stacking.
- dingaling 7y ago
  Because phone camera sensors are so tiny, and the physical focal length so short, the perceived depth of field is enormous; basically infinity all the time. The aperture that would be required to achieve physical bokeh at normal portrait ranges would be impractically huge.
- DSingularity 7y ago
  Because you are limited by the mobile form factor. The camera lenses which produce these kinds of pictures can weigh 2lb alone. The sensors are also huge — over 800 sq mm. Without the hardware you can only match the DSLR optics by using software techniques.
- jacobroyquebec 7y ago
  Because of a few things : 1) in a camera, you’ll have a big (>1inch) sensor. 2) in a camera, you’ll have a much bigger lens diameter, thus a bigger aperture diameter (not f number). Both effects will decrease the width of the focus point, wich will increase the bokeh effect.
nromiun 7y ago
I never expected Apple to make something this cheap. But still in some countries the price is the same as OnePlus 8. Which has much better hardware and features. Still, it is the cheapest iPhone right now so maybe some people will buy anyway (despite the ridiculous price difference in different countries).
- eugeniub 7y ago
  It's debatable whether it has better hardware. The iPhone SE has a faster processor than any Android phone in the world. Also, where in the world is an iPhone SE ($399 USD) cheaper than a OnePlus 8 ($699 USD)?
  - nromiun 7y ago
    I doubt a few percent increase in CPU power can make up for the only camera, those huge bezels, the abysmal battery life (mrwhoistheboss got only 3 hours of SOT). It starts at exactly the same price in India (about 41k rupees - 590 dollars). Shocking isn't it?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      iPhone SE is at least 50-70% faster than top-of-the-line Android phones, and there's no way that its actual battery life would be 3 hours. Also, the phone comes with iOS.
      - nromiun 7y ago
        The Geekbench5(multicore) scores for SD865 and A13 are 3463 and 3517 respectively. How did you get a 70%(!!!) percent difference? Can you give a source? Of course the actual battery life would be much better then just the SOT. But still it gives an indication of how quickly you are going to drain it with your usage. For me it's unlikely to last more then 6 hours. Which is way worse then any phone I have used in the last 5 years. And regarding iOS, that's exactly the point I was making in my first comment. Despite the ridiculous price in some countries people will still buy it because it is the cheapest iPhone.
bborud 7y ago
Some of the depth blur fakery occasionally fails so badly I get dizzy when looking at it because my brain is wired for shooting and editing DSLR images that have been shot in RAW mode. Since I've short DSLRs for almost 20 years now, my workflow is wired to work with the technology and its limitations. And DSLRs have some significant limitations. Let's forget about the limitations of small sensors and tiny optics for a bit. It's a phone and not a DSLR or a medium format camera with glass that costs more than your car. It can only do so much.. When I shoot I aim for data capture and not how the image looks as shot. How it looks comes later. Which, in overly simplified terms, means: don't blow out the highlights ever and try to keep the noise level in the shadows as low as possible. Or in other words: try to get as much as possible within the dynamic range of the sensor at the lowest possible sensitivity (amplification?) setting of the sensor. (I'm not fond of large grain - artificial or otherwise). The post processing is essentially about taking more data that your output medium can reasonably render and then offset, squeeze and stretch parts of the dynamic range until you get the tonality you want from the data you have. Even the iPhone 6 did an amazing job at automating this. But I can't help but feel that with each generation, iPhones get a little bit worse. It tries to do more, which means that when it gets things wrong, the results can get really horrible. And I'm not fond of images that have had heavy alterations of pixels. Sure, most people aren't going to see this when the image is rendered on a surface that isn't that much bigger than a baseball card. And sure, for most pictures it probably isn't going to be as noticable for the 2 seconds they spend looking at it. And as someone else pointed out, if you are going to fake focus blur, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot more complex stuff than just smearing pixels with gaussian blur or any other blurring method that doesn't model how lenses actually work. If you want a really stark example, take a 85mm Petzval lens, or some other "bokeh monster", shoot it wide open with a foreground subject that is 2m away against a background that is 4-5 meters away that contains lots of small highlights. Then repeat the same with various iPhones. No the iPhone doesn't have a Petzval lens or any other (relatively) large lens. So why try to fake that you do? If you want the visual effects of large glass then shoot with large glass. As a hobbyist photographer I find it easier when a camera doesn't try to be clever. When it just does what it does. To me a mobile phone camera is more of a "documentation camera" - it should try to capture what you are interested in. It doesn't always have to be pretty. It just needs to be reasonably accurate. Subtly applied HDR tricks are okay since it helps you capture what you are looking at, but when you start to alter pixels, it becomes less useful as a tool.
jayd16 7y ago
If its pure software will Apple add it to iPhoto (or whatever their photo software is called now)?
- dangus 7y ago
  It’s called Photos.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Regarding depth estimation through motion: > This is similar to how augmented reality apps sense your location in the world. This isn’t a great solution for photographers, because it’s a hassle to ask someone to wave their phone in the air for several seconds before snapping a photo. This is interesting because with my shakey-ass hands, that's essentially what I'm doing unintentionally every time I try to take a nice picture.
ebg13 7y ago
I think I would much rather they secretly capture multiple frames and compute structure from motion or use flash-based segmentation to avoid the presented real world failures. The given "wave their phone in the air for several seconds" dismissal is a pretty strong exaggeration. For one thing, my hands are moving anyway, because I, like everyone else, open the app before holding up the phone to take the shot. And seconds? What is this, 1995?
- sandofsky 7y ago
  Author here. ARKit takes several seconds, and that's with comparatively sparse feature extraction. Can you speak from a different experience?
type0 7y ago
That just looks strange, I would not subject my dog to such terrible portraits.

281 points by gok 7y ago

downerending 7y ago

Yeah, well, I wish it had one eye, in the form of a headphone jack.

system2 7y ago
Still fighting for this? It is long gone and I am very happy without it too. I use the original iPhone earplugs, works perfectly fine for call and music. I have a Bluetooth headset and if I am dying for music I use that one for more bass.
- downerending 7y ago
  Jacks aside, you really need to get some quality headphones. The ones Apple delivers are beyond awful.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > beyond awful They're fine.
saagarjha 7y ago
If only it could be a one-handed king as well…
qubex 7y ago
I honestly find it hard to believe that people are still bemoaning the ‘loss’ of the headphone jack. I stopped using it well before it was removed, probably sometime while using an iPhone 6 Plus/6S Plus (so 2015-2016). It was an absolutely obsolete interface and clearly a weak point for water resistance and structural integrity. If you really want to use headphones you can use a pigtail on the Lightening connector or plug them into a bluetooth adapter. EDIT: Fine, there are people who still want headphone jacks. I’m not the one who decided to remove them and I’m glad they did, but I can’t give them back to you.
- Lio 7y ago
  > If you really want to use headphones you can use a pigtail on the Lightening connector or plug them into a bluetooth adapter. How fast will this wear out the Lightning socket? Since Apple put the springs in the socket and not the plug (like USB-C) when that socket wears out the phone is a right off.
  - qubex 7y ago
    Right off the bat, I think you mean write-off. ;)
    - Lio 7y ago
      Ah the beauty of being dyslexic. Occasionally I substitute the wrong spelling of words, especially when replying on a phone for some reason. Well at least you understood the point I was trying to convey.
  - kayoone 7y ago
    I've been using the adapter in my car for 2 years, twice a day, no problems so far. Lightning is far more resilient to this than USB-C ports in my Macbook for example, which have become pretty loose over the years of plugging in chargers and monitors.
    - Lio 7y ago
      It's the lead that becomes loose not the port with USB-C so you can change the cable you use to connect to your monitor and it will be like new again.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It really depends on how you treat my phone. My iphone 5 took a lot of abuse, and I had to use a rubber band to apply pressure on the port to get it to charge by the end of its life. So far my SE1 is holding up.
- nradov 7y ago
Ghjklov 7y ago
Who is flagging this? It's an amusing post and pretty much harmless.
kayoone 7y ago
By now i think these are just troll comments. This is a pretty good phone for the money, it is still possible to connect wired headphones if that is what you desire.
cl3m 7y ago
You right but nobody care. Here is the only petition I found that is still open and you'll see support is abysmal: https://www.change.org/p/apple-apple-bring-the-headphone-jack-back https://www.change.org/p/apple-apple-bring-the-headphone-jac...
- Daneel_ 7y ago
  You really think a change.org petition is going to do anything? I'm certainly not under that impression, hence why I'm not bothering to sign it. Those of us who cherish our headphone jacks still desperately want them back, there's just no great avenue to express our rage. I want my headphone jack. I have $1K+ headphones that are effectively collecting dust because I can't plug them into my phone.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    Maybe the answer is trivially "the sort of person who can afford to buy $1k+ headphones", but this comment makes me immediately think "what sort of person buys $1K headphones and then buys a phone they can't use the headphones with?". More seriously, why don't you get a better phone? (Or carry around an audio player?)
    - nonamenoslogan 7y ago
      Or use the 3.5mm to Lightning adapter. Maybe not 'perfect,' but your $1000 headphones would make sound with one.
      - asdff 7y ago
        Took a road trip last summer with an iphone X as the audio and GPS, boy what an annoyance. GPS drains battery like nothing else, so I had to keep cutting music to charge the damn phone. Why couldn't apple make a pass through charging dongle, this one is so dumb.

fulafel 7y ago

Is this related to Halide the language that Google also uses to implement computation photography? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halide_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halide_(programming_language)

sandofsky 7y ago
No.
xuki 7y ago
No, it's a reference to silver halide in analog photography. Halide is a camera app on iPhone.

ghostpepper 7y ago

This seems like a cool feature. Is there something comparable on flagship Android phones?

thesandlord 7y ago
Are there any flagship android phones with a monocular camera setup? Seems like every new phone, even at the $400 "mid-tier" price point, has at least two cameras. Even phones like the Pixel 3A which have a single lens use the "dual-pixel" tech to get better depth info.
haditab 7y ago
Portrait mode in Pixel2 did the same thing and imo opinion worked better than portrait mode in the dual-camera iphone 7 plus (I know iphone 7 plus is older but that's the only dual camera iphone I had access to at the time).
- renewiltord 7y ago
  No, the Pixel 2 and iPhone XR do the same thing. They use DPAF. In the post, you'll see that the XR's depth map actually smoothly follows the ground into the background. The Pixel 2 will do that too and it will work for inanimate objects as well.
renewiltord 7y ago
The portrait mode feature is present. See this for example: https://imgur.com/a/xyMH4Io https://imgur.com/a/xyMH4Io but it uses the tech they describe from iPhone XR, i.e. the slight difference in the angle that it hits two parts of the sensor is used as an input to detect depth https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/learning-to-predict-depth-on-pixel-3.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/learning-to-predict-depth-...
danielbarla 7y ago
I have no references to back this up, but I did have some odd results with setting my Huawei P9's camera to "aperture mode" (this was a while back, the actual mode's name might have been different). Essentially what you'd expect is that the subject should be crisp, but anything further away or closer should blur significantly. I assumed that this was done as expected, via the lens. But certain scenes would have this "effect" applied wrong; things that should have been out of focus in the background were in focus, while simultaneously things at the same distance were blurred elsewhere, and so on. I quickly became convinced it was a software effect, and the algorithm was simply guessing the depth wrong. While it looked great most of the time, it only took a few of these oddball Escher-esque photos to put me off it for good (since you generally only notice it afterwards, when it's too late to retake). EDIT: Actually, having now gone through this article, it has some really good examples of how this can go wrong (e.g. dog with "crown" instead of background tree), and how odd it can feel.

renewiltord 7y ago

The portrait modes on these are getting really good. The blur is pretty convincing looking. The only open-source software I know that does similar stuff is body-pix which does matting, but I don't think it generates a smooth depth map like this thing. It would be cool because then you can do a clever background blur for your Zoom backgrounds with v4l2-loopback webcam. By the way, I decided to also quick summarize the usual HN threads that have the trigger word iPhone in it: - No headphone jack --- Actually this is good because ecosystem built for it ----- Don't think ecosystem is good. Audio drops out ------- Doesn't happen to me. Maybe bad device. ----- Don't want to be locked in. Want to use own device. ------- That's not Apple philosophy. Don't know why surprised. --------- I have right to my device ----------- cf. Right to Repair laws ------- Can use own device with dongle. --------- Don't want dongle. Have to get dongle for everything. Annoying. ----------- Only need one dongle. ------------- If only audio, but now can't charge. ----------- Use dongle purse. --- Apple quality have drop continuous. Last good Macbook was 2012. ----- Yes. Keyboard is useless now. Have fail. Recalled. ------- I have no problem with keyboard. --------- Lucky. ------- Also touchpad have fail. Think because Foxconn. ------- Yes. Butterfly? More like butterfly effect. Press key, hurricane form on screen. ----- Yes. Yes. All Tim Cook. Bean Counter. ----- Yes. Many root security violation these days. ------- All programmers who make security violate must be fired. --------- Need union so not fired if manager make security violation. ----------- Don't understand why no union. ------------- Because Apple and Google have collude to not poach. See case. ------- Yes. Security violation is evidence of lack of certification in industry. --------- Also UIKit no longer correctly propagate event. --- Phone too big anyway. No one make any small phone anymore. ----- See here, small phone. ------- Too old. Want new small phone. Had iPhone 8. Pinnacle of small beauty. ------- That's Android. No support more than 2 months. --------- Actually, support 4 months. ----------- Doesn't matter. iPhone support 24 centuries and still going. Queen have original. --------- Yes, and battery on Android small. --- Will buy this phone anyway. Support small phone. ----- No. This phone is also big. No one care about small hand. ------- Realistically, phone with no SSH shell dumb. I use N900 on Maemo. --- Who care? This press release. Just advertisement. ----- Can dang remove clickbait. What is one-eye anyway? Meaningless. Phone no have eye. --- Also, phone not available in Bielefeld. --- Phone only have 128 GB? Not enough. Need 129 GB. ----- 64 GB enough for everyone. ------- "640 KB enough for everyone" - Bill Fence, 1923

soylentgraham 7y ago

The article/advert misses this information out; is this depth estimation a model in the OS somewhere, or part of the vision api, coremedia api (where the stereo->depth frames are), or just inside the camera app and not exposed to developers?

RavlaAlvar 7y ago
In all probability, there will be no true depth sensing capability in SE, thus developer would not be able to access the api. The portrait mode is likely to be implemented with monocular depth estimation using deep learning.
- soylentgraham 7y ago
  Of course it's a depth-from-mono model, it says so in the article. Apple's "true depth" is an estimate from two cameras, that's not actually real depth either but it's exposed to developers. Also in the article "We’re happy that this depth data — both the human matte and the newfangled machine-learned depth map — was exposed to us developers, though."
sandofsky 7y ago
Author here. In the article, we mentioned it's a neural network, and the results are accessible to developers. We left out further details because this isn't an implementation guide.
- soylentgraham 7y ago
  Could you give me a hint here which of their API's it's using? There's a few "depth" frame interfaces in iOS for various devices and googling which apply to which devices rarely yields much. (I wish the apple docs would hint as to which devices apply to which APIs)

diogenescynic 7y ago

I really wish there was an iPhone SE Plus. This is just too small, but everything else is perfect.

kgwgk 7y ago
This is the iPhone SE Plus and it's too large. In the original SE format it would be perfect.
- gjs278 7y ago
  indeed. i’m using a new SE now I have to keep using my other hand to help adjust when I need to reach.
- diogenescynic 7y ago
  I meant I want an the SE Plus model that follows the “Plus” sizing format of other iPhones. The iPhone Plus models were 6.2” tall and 3” wide, whereas the iPhone SE is 5.4” tall and 2.6” wide.
  - kgwgk 7y ago
    I know, I know :-) I was just venting my frustration.
    - diogenescynic 7y ago
      I assumed I was wrong and that was why I was being downvoted so I had to re-check the specs. All good.

karolist 7y ago

My Pixel 2 XL I'm typing this on also has just one camera and does pretty amazing DoF for portraits, SE is definitely not the first phone to do this in software alone.

renewiltord 7y ago
No, that device does it using the thing called DPAF https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/10/portrait-mode-on-pixel-2-and-pixel-2-xl.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/10/portrait-mode-on-pixel-2-a... The iPhone XR technique described in the link does that too. And it'll usually be better (than the monocular thing).
- CarVac 7y ago
  The Pixel 2 uses true monocular depth estimation for the front camera.
  - renewiltord 7y ago
    Completely forgot about the front camera. Thank you.
jes5199 7y ago
bet it still lags when you try to open the app menu
- karolist 7y ago
  no... latest Android, one of the snappiest Android phones I had. But I understand where you're coming from, it's typical experience with most Android manufacturers sadly, especially with Samsung where it turns into lagging abandonware 2 years in. I'll stick with it unless Pixel 5 is a compelling upgrade and returns the fingerprint scanner back.

Luc 7y ago

The visual artefacts (white spikes) on the woman's shoulder are pretty bad. Unacceptably bad, I would say.

playeren 7y ago
> Shot on an iPhone XS in 2018
- Luc 7y ago
  So they included it _because_ it looks bad? If so, I didn't catch that!
  - playeren 7y ago
    > If so, I didn't catch that! The reasoning for including the picture is in the actual _text_ of the article. I do not wish to antagonize people who have trouble reading, but I also think they shouldn't be surprised when they miss out on material information.
    - Luc 7y ago
      All that and a roasting too! Thanks so much.

safgasCVS 7y ago

When I got my first iPhone (an XR) I remember the first 3 weeks I kept playing around with portrait mode. Now a year in, looking at the photos in my iCloud stream I haven’t used the feature in more than 9 months. I had to read this article to remind myself the feature still existed. Similar story with Touch ID.

syntheticcorp 7y ago
Do you mean 3D Touch instead of Touch ID? I agree that 3D Touch isn’t that useful or an everyday feature, I believe it’s now discontinued

leejo 7y ago

The article alludes to something I've noticed since upgrading from the 5c to an 11 pro last year - The computational aspect and/or current hardware limitations mean these phones can shoot images that look great on the phone. I mean, you scroll past images on Instagram, look at your own photos on the phone you took them with, look at your images on your Instagram feed on other people's phones or on the Instagram web app, and yeah they look pretty good. Get them on something bigger though? Look a little closer? Use decent resolution monitor? A reasonable sized print? They look bad. I'm not even talking about pixel peeping here, which is bullshit. I mean they look overprocessed. Like the machine took a course in photoshop on YouTube and didn't finish it. The examples in the article show this, they're full of little mistakes that don't happen when you have proper hardware - larger aperture lenses on larger sensors. Proper graduated neutral density filters to prevent halos. Sensors with large enough area/photosites to give better dynamic range or better high ISO performance. Real camera movements to tilt/shift/rise/fall/swing. I mean, most of this is boring technicality stuff that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of "is this an interesting photo" type considerations. It's more a case of computational photography is currently trying to climb out of its uncanny valley. It'll get there eventually. For now we're still at the point of "Eventually, anyone that values photos will carry a standalone camera." I say this as someone who shoots mostly with an iPhone, but still carries around a 4x5 camera when it matters. Edit: to expand on this a bit I've just uploaded some images I shot with the 11 pro a couple of weeks after I bought it back in October: https://leejo.github.io/2020/04/28/off_season_ibiza/ https://leejo.github.io/2020/04/28/off_season_ibiza/ # the caveat is that I was still figuring the phone/camera out but wanted to see "what it could do out of the box" - and yeah, the images look good on the screen with very minor lens corrections and levels in lightroom, but look overprocessed even with my attempts to pull that back: the sky in the photos looks added in, there are halos around parts of the images where HDR is trying and failing, the sharpening is too aggresive (real life doesn't have "sharp" edges), and so on. When you view these at larger sizes than seen in the blog post they look much worse.

foldr 7y ago
>larger aperture lenses on larger sensors Nitpick: smart phone cameras have very wide apertures (f̶2̶.̶2̶ f1.8 in the case of the iPhone SE).

Causality1 7y ago

Sometimes I think I'm cocked in the head because I still completely fail to see any point at all in bokeh images. It's rather like phone manufacturers dedicating hardware and bleeding edge software to the production of fish-eye images.

michaelt 7y ago
A keen photographer would point you to an image like [1] as bokeh removing 'clutter' and 'distraction'. Cues you would get from depth perception seeing the same thing in person. Like so many things in art, these are all subjective judgements and a matter of taste. If you want a more objective reason, crisp-subject-blurred background is associated with high quality because it's what professional portrait photographs often look like [2] It's not the be all and end all of photography, of course - few people would want their selfie with the Eiffel tower to blur out the Eiffel tower! [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aperture_and_bokeh.jpg#/media/File:Aperture_and_bokeh.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aperture_and_bokeh.j... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=the+queen&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=the+queen&tbm=isch
- bluedino 7y ago
  Paintings work the same way - https://paintingportraittips.com/homepage-old/portrait-painting-techniques/ https://paintingportraittips.com/homepage-old/portrait-paint...
jp555 7y ago
Bokeh (I assume you actually mean shallow depth of field?) or the widest possible field of view - fish-eye? I can see why you might feel cocked if you keep changing what you're talking about. :P

Angostura 7y ago

Thinking about this, why can’t the SE’s software work out depth-perception by using Live Photo-type tech - we all move a little bit while taking photos, so comparing frames would give you depth info. Tripod shots excepted.

Traster 7y ago
Probably because the first thing that would happen is a vlog from MKBHD saying that it doesn't work whilst mounted on his $17000 tripod and gimbal setup. In all seriousness though, you can do a to imitate two cameras with one, but this is designed to be a differentiating feature, the iPhone SE is designed to have a worse camera. Why would you spend time focusing on features exclusive to the camera that you've already decided shouldn't be that good.
- Angostura 7y ago
  Because it sounds as if they already focussing on those kind of features.
sandofsky 7y ago
It's (comparatively) easier to calculate depth data if you have the precise distances between the two cameras. Apple knows these values, down to the millimeter. Calculating the camera extrinsics based on two arbitrary photos has to be way harder. Maybe they got that far, and decided the results weren't as good as a neural network.

f311a 7y ago

Which iPhone is better if I want a good camera, but I don't want to go with the PRO model? I stopped following iPhone models a while ago and have no idea about the differences between 11, XR, and XS. I need a simple phone with a good camera and swapping SE1 for SE2 does not sound like a good option.

saagarjha 7y ago
iPhone 11 has the same cameras as iPhone 11 Pro, except for the telephoto lens.
Razengan 7y ago
I've been sticking with the XS and it has pretty good cameras. This is the first time I've skipped an iPhone since the 5, because I regretted upgrading to the XS from the X. You could just wait a few months and get the next one that's supposedly coming out with LIDAR or whatever.
klodolph 7y ago
There’s no simple answer for everyone but my current take on phone cameras is simple: Every current production iPhone has a good camera. The rear-facing cameras (which you use for taking pictures) are within spitting distance of perfect, barring any revolutions in camera physics. The front-facing cameras are inferior but they get the job done and are very respectable. If you want a noticeably better camera, it’s simply not available in this form factor. You can play with gimmicks like the 108MP Xiaomi Mi Note, but once you zoom in, you can see the dirty secret that there is heavy, heavy processing that makes the resolution possible at all, and from an image quality standpoint, you’re not any better off.
- jahlove 7y ago
  > The rear-facing cameras (which you use for taking pictures) are within spitting distance of perfect, barring any revolutions in camera physics. The front-facing cameras are inferior but they get the job done and are very respectable. I disagree. The pics looks good on a phone, but when you compare a large print vs a full frame camera, the difference is obvious. Also, if you try to photograph the milky way with your iPhone, it's limitations are obvious (even on a phone screen).

Accacin 7y ago

For all those bemoaning the lack of a headphone jack, if you like music do yourself a favour and get yourself an older iPod and do all your podcast and music listening on your iPod. The sound is much better and it's nice to have a device where I can listen to music and not be distracted or tempted to do other things.

skrebbel 7y ago
How is the sound better?
- coldtea 7y ago
  Parent means compared to Bluetooth compression codecs...
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    Ah! Thanks, that makes sense.

thdrdt 7y ago

Side note: depth of field blur is not a gaussian blur but a bokeh blur. Most software uses gaussian blur to fake depth of field but this always looks unnatural. Bokeh blur looks more like a lot of circles. If you compare the iPhone 11 blur with the SE blur it looks like the SE is using bokeh blur which looks much more natural.

kqr 7y ago
It's more subtle than this: bokeh blur can look very different depending on lens design and configuration. It can look like toruses (tori?), various sided polygons, stars, double overlayed low-pass circles with resonance at the edges, ovals shaped and rotated into a full-picture swirly effect, and so on and so forth. Depth of field blur is a very organic effect and in many cases part of the signature look of lens designs. It is not just one, parameterless filter one can apply to an image.
mrtksn 7y ago
>depth of field blur is not a gaussian blur but a bokeh blur This is one of my main problem with those big-time YouTubers. Since the portrait mode on the iPhone come out, all other manufacturers followed and all these reviewers made this into "Who would extract the head of a person and blur the background" contests and they kept praising the phone that would do the sharpest extraction. As if those people never saw an actual DoF blur? Then some manufacturers start adding random bokeh flares... It's one of those things that keep my faith in Apple, they actually have people who know a thing or two and don't jump on the next race of megapixels/bezel to body ratio/ISO or whatever next fad race is. This "who would do the sharpest edges around the object on portrait mode" contest annoyed me so much that I quit watching gadget reviewers. Next time I watched reviewer videos they all were talking about "Which company does the best color science" and quit again.
ska 7y ago
bokeh is one of those terms that is often misused, as it does not describe a type of "blur" but the aesthetic characteristics of how out of focus elements look from a particular camera & lens. You can apply the same thing to algorithms. Like many lenses though, so far they all have really bad bokeh. You are quite right that the optical effects are far more complex than a single gaussian blur applied on a background mask. They are also much more complex than the modeling currently being done with limited depth information, or even worse, faked depth information.

mrweasel 7y ago

I don’t get it, it’s a phone, with a camera. The camera just needs to be good enough, and for most people it’s been good enough for years. Most phone reviews these days focuses waaay to much on the camera, because the reviewers are often people who are also into photography or shooting videos. For myself, I care solely on privacy and price, so I only have one option, if I need a new smartphone. I still think the iPhone SE need to come down in price, but it the only choice, there are no competitors

gregoriol 7y ago
I very much second this: the camera is like the snakes game on old Nokias, it's very cool it's there but it's not what I need the most.
- gregoriol 7y ago
  Also, on the iPhones it has actually made the device more annoying because of a very simple thing: the back is not flat! This creates a very bad experience when the phone is on a table or any surface. So the ideal phone would not be an iPhone SE as many suggest this week, it would be an iPhone SE with a flat back, whatever the camera is.
  - mhb 7y ago
    So an SEv1? (Hat tip to Apple for the brain-dead reuse of a model name which requires disambiguation.)
  - nonamenoslogan 7y ago
    I think most people use a case. Not using a case on a glass body $400-1200 device you're going to carry around in your pocket is pretty risky.
    - gregoriol 7y ago
      This is not acceptable: having to use a case to fix a "defect", are you Steeve Jobs from the antenna gate?...

rchaud 7y ago

Really interesting read, and I love that there was a small GIF shoutout to Top Secret. Funny, campy action film in the spirit of stuff like Hot Shots Part Deux. I'm pretty ignorant about how cameras work in general. Bit embarrassed to admit that I didn't realize stuff like ML was used to guess depth and know how to add background blur.

gfiorav 7y ago

The whole portrait thing is going to plague this decade's pictures. We'll cringe when we look back at them the same way we cringe at 80's shoulder pads.

arsenico 7y ago
Shoulder pads are back in
seppin 7y ago
It's the same as shooting a wide aperture, the blurred background look has always been a thing.
- gfiorav 7y ago
  It’s the crappiness of the effect... it’s too much! And the borders... ugh
  - seppin 7y ago
    I guess 99.9% of people don't notice.

rwmj 7y ago

Can someone answer this point I'm confused about: Why can't a phone generate bokeh blur using the same technique that an ordinary camera does, ie. a large aperture / small f-stop? IOW why is ML or depth sensing needed at all?

foldr 7y ago
Two reasons. First, phone cameras all have a fixed aperture. If you set the aperture wide enough to get bokeh in a typical portrait shot, then the depth of field would be too narrow to be practical for general photography. Second, the depth of field depends not only on the f-stop but also on the focal length (or, to put it another way, it depends on the absolute diameter of the aperture). Given the focal length of a typical phone camera, you'd need a lens with a very wide aperture to get significant background blur for subjects at portrait distance. Wider apertures complicate the complexity and expense of lens manufacture. It is interesting to speculate on the use of very wide aperture lenses on future phone cameras, though. If such lenses could be made cheaply, one can imagine that the shallow DOF could be overcome via some form of automated focus stacking.
dingaling 7y ago
Because phone camera sensors are so tiny, and the physical focal length so short, the perceived depth of field is enormous; basically infinity all the time. The aperture that would be required to achieve physical bokeh at normal portrait ranges would be impractically huge.
DSingularity 7y ago
Because you are limited by the mobile form factor. The camera lenses which produce these kinds of pictures can weigh 2lb alone. The sensors are also huge — over 800 sq mm. Without the hardware you can only match the DSLR optics by using software techniques.
jacobroyquebec 7y ago
Because of a few things : 1) in a camera, you’ll have a big (>1inch) sensor. 2) in a camera, you’ll have a much bigger lens diameter, thus a bigger aperture diameter (not f number). Both effects will decrease the width of the focus point, wich will increase the bokeh effect.

nromiun 7y ago

I never expected Apple to make something this cheap. But still in some countries the price is the same as OnePlus 8. Which has much better hardware and features. Still, it is the cheapest iPhone right now so maybe some people will buy anyway (despite the ridiculous price difference in different countries).

eugeniub 7y ago
It's debatable whether it has better hardware. The iPhone SE has a faster processor than any Android phone in the world. Also, where in the world is an iPhone SE ($399 USD) cheaper than a OnePlus 8 ($699 USD)?
- nromiun 7y ago
  I doubt a few percent increase in CPU power can make up for the only camera, those huge bezels, the abysmal battery life (mrwhoistheboss got only 3 hours of SOT). It starts at exactly the same price in India (about 41k rupees - 590 dollars). Shocking isn't it?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    iPhone SE is at least 50-70% faster than top-of-the-line Android phones, and there's no way that its actual battery life would be 3 hours. Also, the phone comes with iOS.
    - nromiun 7y ago
      The Geekbench5(multicore) scores for SD865 and A13 are 3463 and 3517 respectively. How did you get a 70%(!!!) percent difference? Can you give a source? Of course the actual battery life would be much better then just the SOT. But still it gives an indication of how quickly you are going to drain it with your usage. For me it's unlikely to last more then 6 hours. Which is way worse then any phone I have used in the last 5 years. And regarding iOS, that's exactly the point I was making in my first comment. Despite the ridiculous price in some countries people will still buy it because it is the cheapest iPhone.

bborud 7y ago

Some of the depth blur fakery occasionally fails so badly I get dizzy when looking at it because my brain is wired for shooting and editing DSLR images that have been shot in RAW mode. Since I've short DSLRs for almost 20 years now, my workflow is wired to work with the technology and its limitations. And DSLRs have some significant limitations. Let's forget about the limitations of small sensors and tiny optics for a bit. It's a phone and not a DSLR or a medium format camera with glass that costs more than your car. It can only do so much.. When I shoot I aim for data capture and not how the image looks as shot. How it looks comes later. Which, in overly simplified terms, means: don't blow out the highlights ever and try to keep the noise level in the shadows as low as possible. Or in other words: try to get as much as possible within the dynamic range of the sensor at the lowest possible sensitivity (amplification?) setting of the sensor. (I'm not fond of large grain - artificial or otherwise). The post processing is essentially about taking more data that your output medium can reasonably render and then offset, squeeze and stretch parts of the dynamic range until you get the tonality you want from the data you have. Even the iPhone 6 did an amazing job at automating this. But I can't help but feel that with each generation, iPhones get a little bit worse. It tries to do more, which means that when it gets things wrong, the results can get really horrible. And I'm not fond of images that have had heavy alterations of pixels. Sure, most people aren't going to see this when the image is rendered on a surface that isn't that much bigger than a baseball card. And sure, for most pictures it probably isn't going to be as noticable for the 2 seconds they spend looking at it. And as someone else pointed out, if you are going to fake focus blur, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot more complex stuff than just smearing pixels with gaussian blur or any other blurring method that doesn't model how lenses actually work. If you want a really stark example, take a 85mm Petzval lens, or some other "bokeh monster", shoot it wide open with a foreground subject that is 2m away against a background that is 4-5 meters away that contains lots of small highlights. Then repeat the same with various iPhones. No the iPhone doesn't have a Petzval lens or any other (relatively) large lens. So why try to fake that you do? If you want the visual effects of large glass then shoot with large glass. As a hobbyist photographer I find it easier when a camera doesn't try to be clever. When it just does what it does. To me a mobile phone camera is more of a "documentation camera" - it should try to capture what you are interested in. It doesn't always have to be pretty. It just needs to be reasonably accurate. Subtly applied HDR tricks are okay since it helps you capture what you are looking at, but when you start to alter pixels, it becomes less useful as a tool.

jayd16 7y ago

If its pure software will Apple add it to iPhoto (or whatever their photo software is called now)?

dangus 7y ago
It’s called Photos.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

Regarding depth estimation through motion: > This is similar to how augmented reality apps sense your location in the world. This isn’t a great solution for photographers, because it’s a hassle to ask someone to wave their phone in the air for several seconds before snapping a photo. This is interesting because with my shakey-ass hands, that's essentially what I'm doing unintentionally every time I try to take a nice picture.

ebg13 7y ago

I think I would much rather they secretly capture multiple frames and compute structure from motion or use flash-based segmentation to avoid the presented real world failures. The given "wave their phone in the air for several seconds" dismissal is a pretty strong exaggeration. For one thing, my hands are moving anyway, because I, like everyone else, open the app before holding up the phone to take the shot. And seconds? What is this, 1995?

sandofsky 7y ago
Author here. ARKit takes several seconds, and that's with comparatively sparse feature extraction. Can you speak from a different experience?

type0 7y ago

That just looks strange, I would not subject my dog to such terrible portraits.