6 ms·

The iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie Camera

kumarvvr 6y ago
As per the general context of the article, it should be that the "smartphone with a camera" should be today's Kodak Brownie camera. Nothing the iPhone does in particular is highlighted. Taking a picture, even before the iPhone, on earlier smartphones was exactly the same process. Navigate to an icon / menu item, select "camera", click photos.
- simonh 6y ago
  iPhones totally dominate the rankings for most used cameras on Flickr, and also dominate as the phone of choice for most top instagram accounts. So considering people for whom photography is a primary distinguishing feature, as against an incidental feature, it's probably correct.
  - bbarnett 6y ago
    The point of the brownie isn't "people who are into photography". It's for every-person. Those who aren't into photography, and just want to have pictures to remember things. There are two points here. Who initiated the trend, and what the trend is now. If initiate the trend is to be discussed, that is, who started the social change, Blackberry was a behemoth in the smart phone market, before the iphone ever even existed. And they had cameras, messaging apps, their own ecosystem, and people shared photos with one another lavishly and often. If one is to discuss now, then Android phones are far more numerous than Apple devices, and frankly, more used by people just needing a cheap phone. And the brownie was cheap, quick and easy to use, and even very cheap Android phones today have "good enough" cameras. Just like the Brownie. "Good enough". Not sure why the author ties this to iphones. I can only assume it is like Kleenex.
    - simonh 6y ago
      OK, I think that's fair.
      - bbarnett 6y ago
        What? No! You cannot agree, you have entirely and completely broken my brain. This is the Internet! The Internet. Right or wrong, correct or not, you are supposed to argue your point relentlessly. God help us all, if more of you appear, and we actually discuss things, back and forth, using logic and reason. What shall become of us all? Edit: Immediate downvote. The above was sarcasm, a comment on our times, and an attempt to applaud simonh's frank and honest "OK, that's a fair point" type of response. simonh's response is rare. It shouldn't be. I'm wrong, everyone's wrong from time to time. So it's refreshing to see honest discourse. Downvote away?!
        skyyler 6y ago
        Your tone is very off-putting. It comes off as out of touch, patronising, and smarmy.
        bbarnett 6y ago
        Does my edit at least clarify, that my intent was not so? I prefer that, over comment removal...
        smichel17 6y ago
        You can lose a maximum of 4 karma per comment, relax. It's fine to be downvoted here and there.
        bbarnett 6y ago
        Didn't know about the max down votes, but it wasn't that. I didn't want simonh to have the wrong impression, or others. But thanks for the info.
  - kumarvvr 6y ago
    As a vehicle of introduction to photography, the whole smartphone market,with its wide spectrum of devices is responsible. iPhone is just popular, and that too in the developed world. I most of developing world, the iPhone is still a luxury. And you ha e millions of other brands that are used for pics.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  The iPhone was the difference, though. I worked for one of the world’s leading photographic equipment manufacturers for decades. When the iPhone first came out, I showed it to one of the senior marketing managers, and said “this could be trouble.” They laughed, and talked about the low resolution, depth of field, bad lenses, insensitive sensor, etc. Well...here we are...
  - kumarvvr 6y ago
    All those are still true. Sure, latest iPhones may have put a dent in the beginner DSLR marlet,and have definitely sunk the point and shoot market, but nowhere are they replacing the professional stuff. Would you want your wedding to be photographed with an iPhone? For that matter, thos egoing on vacations might prefer taking a proper DSLR rather than just the iPhone.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
      Yeah, I agree, but the people who want to use DSLRs are fewer and farther between. Even news organizations are laying off their pro shooters, and telling their print/video newspeople to use smartphones. Also, computational photography is a big deal. This is something that smartphones are uniquely positioned to do.
      - kumarvvr 6y ago
        I am surprised Canon, Nikon and the likes did not introduce this (Computational stuff) into their DSLR lines. With the battery space and lesser constraints than a mobile, they have more space to add such enhancements. Heck, they could release an iPhone companion app that does the same with low res pics from the camera. Add detailed lens info that they have and other data about their cameras, they could build a photo super machine. They could have added depth sensors, lidars, etc to accentuate their DSLR lines.
        ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
        Tell me about it... I did try, but these folks are very conservative. I have also participated in efforts to develop software-driven cameras. It is not easy. Apple makes it look easy, but there's a lot going on, under the hood, and their vast financial resources are a big help.
- izacus 6y ago
  But then it wouldn't be able to do double duty as an Apple ad right?
The_Colonel 6y ago
It sounds really ironic to compare Brownie (which was a success through its cheap price) with iPhone which is essentially the most expensive camera device in its class (which for the most of the world remains exclusive for the upper middle class). It's also silly to ascribe this trend to iPhone alone. Camera phones were in heavy use before iPhone showed up.
- ljf 6y ago
  I am no iPhone/apple fan boy (in fact the opposite) but it is easy to forget that despite camera phones existing before the original iphone, the photos languished on the vast majority of phones, never seen by others. To get them off you had to plug your phone into your pc, pull the media card, or pay through the nose to email them to yourself (unless you had WiFi at home which not everyone did at the time). MMS was the only common form of media sharing for loads of users and that really degraded the image quality - I forget the maximum MMS size but it was tiny. The iPhone and the apps actually encouraged people to share their images and explore others in the way that devices before didn't. And even if you didn't use the apps the ease of backup through iTunes was a massive boost to people accessing and using their images away from their phones. I had Dropbox on my android phones as soon as you could and would tell everyone to do the same, but for android it wasn't really until Google photos that photo backup and sharing got as simple and easy. And even recently it still wasn't installed on the majority of new phones, and manufacturers pushed their own backup/gallery apps that were rarely as good.
  - dingaling 6y ago
    Facebook did more to popularise mobile phone snapshot sharing than any app and it was a piece of cake to upload from the phone gallery via the built-in browser. Even basic feature phones could do so.
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    > To get them off you had to plug your phone into your pc, pull the media card, or pay through the nose to email them to yourself (unless you had WiFi at home which not everyone did at the time). How is that different from iPhone? > The iPhone and the apps actually encouraged people to share their images and explore others in the way that devices before didn't. Shouldn't you give credit for that to the apps/services? Pioneering service in this regard was e.g. Flickr which weren't exclusive to Apple - you could use them on the web, on iPhone, Android, even dumbphones. > but for android it wasn't really until Google photos that photo backup and sharing got as simple and easy. Sharing photos on Facebook was a thing since the beginning of Android. That used to be a big reason to sign up on FB.
NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
"Neither device was necessarily built for the sake of disrupting the art of image taking. " Did the writer have access to design briefs for the products? Or what the product leaders communicated to the teams? Ffrom what I read, camera was perceived as quite important for the iPhone. Jobs did set out to disrupt the market, check even most pop-culture bio books.
- simonh 6y ago
  iPhone photography pivoted with, maybe the iPhone 4s as the inflection point when they went to 8MP. The early iPhones had pretty mediocre cameras even for the time so when talking about the original vision for the device and it's reason for being, I think that's quite correct.
Ayesh 6y ago
I had the original iPhone, and the photos were terrible. I don't think it focused on camera features at all! The photos were laughably awful, while my Nokia took reasonable photos to its age. There were no video support, and a video camera app off Cydia maxed at 320x240 px at a low frame rate (that I don't recall well). My Nokia at the time took VGA quality videos out of the box
- lmilcin 6y ago
  To be fair, at the time phones were not seriously used to make a lot of photos. If you wanted photos you would have a separate camera with you and phone was used only as a last resort and maybe when you needed to send an MMS with the photo.
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    Not true, there were phones with much better cameras - as other user pointed out Sony Ericsson made phones with decent cameras (e.g. K850i) and they were actually heavily marketed (and bought) based on its camera quality. See e.g. https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_k850-review-165p5.php#image17 https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_k850-review-165p5.php...
    - kalleboo 6y ago
      Sony Ericsson had much more success in Europe and Asia and as such most Americans don't realize they exist - their memory of the dumb phone era is centered around crappy Motorola flip phones like the RAZR. And Americans get to write most of the tech history online.
    - lmilcin 6y ago
      Just because there existed phones with much better cameras does not change the fact that almost everybody had a phone that had shit camera that was barely usable. Today it would be inconceivable to create a flagship phone without matching bleeding edge camera, but at that time, it was true (regardless of the fact that there were some phones with good cameras) that most people did not use phones for photography on a daily basis. This means there was no immediate expectation the phone will have best camera. I just went through the original unveiling of the iPhone and the focus is completely on UI and form factor and there is very, very, very little about the camera (basically, yes, it has a camera).
HenryBemis 6y ago
>..illuminating the confluence of the Indus and Zanskar rivers. I was wondering how that looks like so I DDG-ed and found the below photo titled "Sunset on Indus river": https://i.pinimg.com/originals/40/7a/21/407a21fbb8d124dff71370ebca50b25f.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/40/7a/21/407a21fbb8d124dff713...
saagarjha 6y ago
I've recently picked up a new iPhone 12 and what I would summarize it (and I am sure every new phone these days, probably–I'm just comparing it to my iPhone SE I had before it) is that it is really good at making random pictures look pretty decent, no matter what you are pointing it at. And I think that's pretty remarkable; it's akin to what point-and-shoots did to the average person's pictures but now it is in a device that you literally never leave behind and it also does a much better job. I like to think I have a basic eye for framing and some general knowledge of what ruins a picture (like, I can tell that those super-HDRed pictures with the saturation turned way up are fake and not good) but I'm no photographer, even an amateur one, and I have been amazed by what it does. I've actually been mildly frustrated at the lack of opportunity to really test the camera with the pandemic, but I snapped a couple of quick pictures to try out things like HDR, the wide angle lens, or low light performance (read: I pointed my phone at some random trees, or my family in the dimly-lit living room, or directly at the sun–usually things that don't photograph well) and they have all come out shockingly good for the effort I put into them. It's truly amazing how well it works for someone who just points the camera at something and taps the shutter button. It's so good that I've almost even forgiven them for making a phone that doesn't lay flat on a table :P
- fouc 6y ago
  Are you comparing to iPhone SE 2016 (1st generation)?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Yeah, so it's just before Apple started really ramping up their cameras and computational photography. Which isn't to say it couldn't take good pictures back then, it totally could, but it would either only do that in good conditions, or if you put effort into it. That no longer seems to be true anymore.
- amelius 6y ago
  How quickly does the camera app start (worst case)? Because that is my main frustration with smartphone cameras.

As per the general context of the article, it should be that the "smartphone with a camera" should be today's Kodak Brownie camera. Nothing the iPhone does in particular is highlighted. Taking a picture, even before the iPhone, on earlier smartphones was exactly the same process. Navigate to an icon / menu item, select "camera", click photos.

simonh 6y ago
iPhones totally dominate the rankings for most used cameras on Flickr, and also dominate as the phone of choice for most top instagram accounts. So considering people for whom photography is a primary distinguishing feature, as against an incidental feature, it's probably correct.
- bbarnett 6y ago
  The point of the brownie isn't "people who are into photography". It's for every-person. Those who aren't into photography, and just want to have pictures to remember things. There are two points here. Who initiated the trend, and what the trend is now. If initiate the trend is to be discussed, that is, who started the social change, Blackberry was a behemoth in the smart phone market, before the iphone ever even existed. And they had cameras, messaging apps, their own ecosystem, and people shared photos with one another lavishly and often. If one is to discuss now, then Android phones are far more numerous than Apple devices, and frankly, more used by people just needing a cheap phone. And the brownie was cheap, quick and easy to use, and even very cheap Android phones today have "good enough" cameras. Just like the Brownie. "Good enough". Not sure why the author ties this to iphones. I can only assume it is like Kleenex.
  - simonh 6y ago
    OK, I think that's fair.
    - bbarnett 6y ago
      What? No! You cannot agree, you have entirely and completely broken my brain. This is the Internet! The Internet. Right or wrong, correct or not, you are supposed to argue your point relentlessly. God help us all, if more of you appear, and we actually discuss things, back and forth, using logic and reason. What shall become of us all? Edit: Immediate downvote. The above was sarcasm, a comment on our times, and an attempt to applaud simonh's frank and honest "OK, that's a fair point" type of response. simonh's response is rare. It shouldn't be. I'm wrong, everyone's wrong from time to time. So it's refreshing to see honest discourse. Downvote away?!
      - skyyler 6y ago
        Your tone is very off-putting. It comes off as out of touch, patronising, and smarmy.
        bbarnett 6y ago
        Does my edit at least clarify, that my intent was not so? I prefer that, over comment removal...
        smichel17 6y ago
        You can lose a maximum of 4 karma per comment, relax. It's fine to be downvoted here and there.
        bbarnett 6y ago
        Didn't know about the max down votes, but it wasn't that. I didn't want simonh to have the wrong impression, or others. But thanks for the info.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  As a vehicle of introduction to photography, the whole smartphone market,with its wide spectrum of devices is responsible. iPhone is just popular, and that too in the developed world. I most of developing world, the iPhone is still a luxury. And you ha e millions of other brands that are used for pics.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
The iPhone was the difference, though. I worked for one of the world’s leading photographic equipment manufacturers for decades. When the iPhone first came out, I showed it to one of the senior marketing managers, and said “this could be trouble.” They laughed, and talked about the low resolution, depth of field, bad lenses, insensitive sensor, etc. Well...here we are...
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  All those are still true. Sure, latest iPhones may have put a dent in the beginner DSLR marlet,and have definitely sunk the point and shoot market, but nowhere are they replacing the professional stuff. Would you want your wedding to be photographed with an iPhone? For that matter, thos egoing on vacations might prefer taking a proper DSLR rather than just the iPhone.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Yeah, I agree, but the people who want to use DSLRs are fewer and farther between. Even news organizations are laying off their pro shooters, and telling their print/video newspeople to use smartphones. Also, computational photography is a big deal. This is something that smartphones are uniquely positioned to do.
    - kumarvvr 6y ago
      I am surprised Canon, Nikon and the likes did not introduce this (Computational stuff) into their DSLR lines. With the battery space and lesser constraints than a mobile, they have more space to add such enhancements. Heck, they could release an iPhone companion app that does the same with low res pics from the camera. Add detailed lens info that they have and other data about their cameras, they could build a photo super machine. They could have added depth sensors, lidars, etc to accentuate their DSLR lines.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
        Tell me about it... I did try, but these folks are very conservative. I have also participated in efforts to develop software-driven cameras. It is not easy. Apple makes it look easy, but there's a lot going on, under the hood, and their vast financial resources are a big help.
izacus 6y ago
But then it wouldn't be able to do double duty as an Apple ad right?

The_Colonel 6y ago

It sounds really ironic to compare Brownie (which was a success through its cheap price) with iPhone which is essentially the most expensive camera device in its class (which for the most of the world remains exclusive for the upper middle class). It's also silly to ascribe this trend to iPhone alone. Camera phones were in heavy use before iPhone showed up.

ljf 6y ago
I am no iPhone/apple fan boy (in fact the opposite) but it is easy to forget that despite camera phones existing before the original iphone, the photos languished on the vast majority of phones, never seen by others. To get them off you had to plug your phone into your pc, pull the media card, or pay through the nose to email them to yourself (unless you had WiFi at home which not everyone did at the time). MMS was the only common form of media sharing for loads of users and that really degraded the image quality - I forget the maximum MMS size but it was tiny. The iPhone and the apps actually encouraged people to share their images and explore others in the way that devices before didn't. And even if you didn't use the apps the ease of backup through iTunes was a massive boost to people accessing and using their images away from their phones. I had Dropbox on my android phones as soon as you could and would tell everyone to do the same, but for android it wasn't really until Google photos that photo backup and sharing got as simple and easy. And even recently it still wasn't installed on the majority of new phones, and manufacturers pushed their own backup/gallery apps that were rarely as good.
- dingaling 6y ago
  Facebook did more to popularise mobile phone snapshot sharing than any app and it was a piece of cake to upload from the phone gallery via the built-in browser. Even basic feature phones could do so.
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  > To get them off you had to plug your phone into your pc, pull the media card, or pay through the nose to email them to yourself (unless you had WiFi at home which not everyone did at the time). How is that different from iPhone? > The iPhone and the apps actually encouraged people to share their images and explore others in the way that devices before didn't. Shouldn't you give credit for that to the apps/services? Pioneering service in this regard was e.g. Flickr which weren't exclusive to Apple - you could use them on the web, on iPhone, Android, even dumbphones. > but for android it wasn't really until Google photos that photo backup and sharing got as simple and easy. Sharing photos on Facebook was a thing since the beginning of Android. That used to be a big reason to sign up on FB.

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago

"Neither device was necessarily built for the sake of disrupting the art of image taking. " Did the writer have access to design briefs for the products? Or what the product leaders communicated to the teams? Ffrom what I read, camera was perceived as quite important for the iPhone. Jobs did set out to disrupt the market, check even most pop-culture bio books.

simonh 6y ago
iPhone photography pivoted with, maybe the iPhone 4s as the inflection point when they went to 8MP. The early iPhones had pretty mediocre cameras even for the time so when talking about the original vision for the device and it's reason for being, I think that's quite correct.

Ayesh 6y ago

I had the original iPhone, and the photos were terrible. I don't think it focused on camera features at all! The photos were laughably awful, while my Nokia took reasonable photos to its age. There were no video support, and a video camera app off Cydia maxed at 320x240 px at a low frame rate (that I don't recall well). My Nokia at the time took VGA quality videos out of the box

lmilcin 6y ago
To be fair, at the time phones were not seriously used to make a lot of photos. If you wanted photos you would have a separate camera with you and phone was used only as a last resort and maybe when you needed to send an MMS with the photo.
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  Not true, there were phones with much better cameras - as other user pointed out Sony Ericsson made phones with decent cameras (e.g. K850i) and they were actually heavily marketed (and bought) based on its camera quality. See e.g. https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_k850-review-165p5.php#image17 https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_k850-review-165p5.php...
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    Sony Ericsson had much more success in Europe and Asia and as such most Americans don't realize they exist - their memory of the dumb phone era is centered around crappy Motorola flip phones like the RAZR. And Americans get to write most of the tech history online.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    Just because there existed phones with much better cameras does not change the fact that almost everybody had a phone that had shit camera that was barely usable. Today it would be inconceivable to create a flagship phone without matching bleeding edge camera, but at that time, it was true (regardless of the fact that there were some phones with good cameras) that most people did not use phones for photography on a daily basis. This means there was no immediate expectation the phone will have best camera. I just went through the original unveiling of the iPhone and the focus is completely on UI and form factor and there is very, very, very little about the camera (basically, yes, it has a camera).

HenryBemis 6y ago

>..illuminating the confluence of the Indus and Zanskar rivers. I was wondering how that looks like so I DDG-ed and found the below photo titled "Sunset on Indus river": https://i.pinimg.com/originals/40/7a/21/407a21fbb8d124dff71370ebca50b25f.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/40/7a/21/407a21fbb8d124dff713...

saagarjha 6y ago

I've recently picked up a new iPhone 12 and what I would summarize it (and I am sure every new phone these days, probably–I'm just comparing it to my iPhone SE I had before it) is that it is really good at making random pictures look pretty decent, no matter what you are pointing it at. And I think that's pretty remarkable; it's akin to what point-and-shoots did to the average person's pictures but now it is in a device that you literally never leave behind and it also does a much better job. I like to think I have a basic eye for framing and some general knowledge of what ruins a picture (like, I can tell that those super-HDRed pictures with the saturation turned way up are fake and not good) but I'm no photographer, even an amateur one, and I have been amazed by what it does. I've actually been mildly frustrated at the lack of opportunity to really test the camera with the pandemic, but I snapped a couple of quick pictures to try out things like HDR, the wide angle lens, or low light performance (read: I pointed my phone at some random trees, or my family in the dimly-lit living room, or directly at the sun–usually things that don't photograph well) and they have all come out shockingly good for the effort I put into them. It's truly amazing how well it works for someone who just points the camera at something and taps the shutter button. It's so good that I've almost even forgiven them for making a phone that doesn't lay flat on a table :P

fouc 6y ago
Are you comparing to iPhone SE 2016 (1st generation)?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Yeah, so it's just before Apple started really ramping up their cameras and computational photography. Which isn't to say it couldn't take good pictures back then, it totally could, but it would either only do that in good conditions, or if you put effort into it. That no longer seems to be true anymore.
amelius 6y ago
How quickly does the camera app start (worst case)? Because that is my main frustration with smartphone cameras.