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Controversial take: DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have largely made themselves irrelevant by ignoring computational photography advancements (computational photo

Controversial take: DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have largely made themselves irrelevant by ignoring computational photography advancements (computational photography is seen as "cheating"). I own several "real" cameras: FF, M43, and over a dozen lenses. Multiple camera companies. On paper many have very impressive specs. The problem is that camera companies focus primarily on raw specs with software being a secondary concern. To give one concrete example, I can press one button on a cellphone (almost any) and it will capture more dynamic range than my $2K DSLR. How can a tiny sense in a cellphone capture more dynamic range can a massive sensor? Software. It is stacking multiple rapid exposures using an eShutter and computationally merging them. You can do that with a DSLR, but it is time-consuming, outside of camera, and produces worse results (e.g. motion in the frame will ruin your stack). It is super aggravating, but it isn't actually surprising if you look at the amounts of money spent on photographic software alone compared to almost the entire camera industry. I've given up for most things, a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches.

aspyct 5y ago
As a sports photographer, I disagree. There's no stacking multiple frames in my world. Also, as a portrait photographer, I disagree too. Until we can use flashes properly, I'm not getting rid of my camera. Plus, dynamic range isn't everything.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  > As a sports photographer, I disagree. You don't disagree with the post you replied to. Niches will always require specialized equipment as it said. It was a comment about general purpose photography (and its ever shrinking market share).
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Moving objects aren't a niche, they are the real life outside of of selfies and posing.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Surely the background is somewhat stationary during, so there is ample space to refine that with less fast-moving data. Sure, you have to get better hardware to properly capture the fast moving target of the photo, but it is not an either or question.
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        I think a lot depends on whether you stand to loose and the other bloke stands to gain from those lies - if these are old war stories that bear no relationship to my current life, well, that's just entertainment, whatever. But if the other person is telling me "deposit money in this ATM, it's totally secure' then I'd be a bit assertive with holding him to account.
  - aspyct 5y ago
    It's not about the niche, it's about doing a job with the right tools. Did you ever build a desktop gui app with php? You actually can, it's just not the most productive tool. Conversely, you can take good pictures with a smartphone (for some specific cases), it's just not a great tool for the job.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  I have to side with OP here. Yours pluses are really worth it only if you need quality 98% of the people here won't ever need (OK, 1-3 pictures printed as bigger canvas in next 10 years, but still). Most people today see pics on phones only. Even those done by pros in studios. The rest is mostly tablet/notebook screen. 1% (like me) something bigger. On that level, I can do almost/completely same pics as you with my Samsung S22 Ultra for those portraits (not sports part, but if its for family, videos usually trump photos for target audience). Minuses are staggering - the amount of money, time invested, annoyance to shooter and subjects, the speed with which you can capture most moments in life. If I understood you correctly, you're pro/semi-pro. That's not the topic here, its everybody else snapping pics. As long term full frame shooter, for last 2 weeks, its almost dead platform for me. I'll consider to take it for longer vacations, but I expect it to come out of bag very rarely.
  - aspyct 5y ago
    We're just not photographing the same subjects in the same way. 90% of the pictures I take, be it professionally or personally, I couldn't take with a smartphone.
- HALtheWise 5y ago
  For sports photography, why wouldn't you want stacked exposures for the non-moving background parts of the frame? If it allows getting a comparable noise floor with faster shutter speeds, that seems like a strictly good trade.
  - aspyct 5y ago
    I see where this is coming from, but I don't care about the background being noisy and blurry. If anything, that's a plus in my book. However I want the subject to be tack-sharp, and he's moving and changing shape all the time.
Jiejeing 5y ago
> a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches Until you zoom in, and then it's all a big smudge. Unless you are talking about $1k+ cellphones only, which is outside of the price range of most.
- astrange 5y ago
  Prime lenses on cameras are much better quality for the same price, so the best kind of zoom is already the one with your feet.
  - Jiejeing 5y ago
    I meant, when you open the image at its true resolution on a computer. But I agree that prime lenses are close to always better in quality than variable length ones, even if for some situations you need a telephoto anyway (and having a fixed 300mm in my pocket does not seem practical).
    - astrange 5y ago
      There is that, but I feel like pixel resolution turns out to not matter pretty often. Obviously it does matter if you’re cropping or blowing it up for a background etc, but even printing can look good with a low res image if you’re viewing it from far enough away. They do make clip-on zoom lenses for phones but I haven’t actually used any, not sure how much they help.
      - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
        Surprising decent even with cheap plastic lenses. I was surprised anyway, after not expecting much.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    My experience with the iPhone camera (X) is that smudge artifacts (AI, compression) are quite noticeable even on the device's screen. As soon as you put that on your 30" desktop monitor, the photo is nearly unviewable. This hasn't been my experience with mirrorless cameras, whose output looks pretty good at 1:1 on a 100dpi screen. There are two photographs that come to mind where the iPhone utterly disappointed me. One was a morning park scene, rays of light filtering through leaves. The leaves just looks liked blobs. Another was on a boat at night; with my eyes I could clearly see texture in the buildings on the illuminated skyline, reflections on the water, and texture in the water. The iPhone shot was just a black screen with some blurred specks of light. I know I could have gotten both of those photographs with my A7ii. I have handheld nighttime pictures with stars in the sky. A big sensor gathers a lot of light, and even more important than getting close is collecting as much light as you can.
KMnO4 5y ago
I agree. 90% of DSLR shots don’t need to push the limits of physics. 100 vs 1600 ISO doesn’t matter if you have indistinguishable noise reduction. F/1.8 gives a nice bokeh, but if you only have two depth planes (a foreground subject and a distant background), no one will notice if you fake the blur. That said, I still have to carry my mirrorless into the backcountry because tiny sensors can physically only let in so much light, which makes them unsuitable for astrophotography. I’ve seen the “Astro-modes” on new flagship phones and the result is always “wow, this is good...for a phone”, but nowhere close to what I can get unedited from my camera. And the worst thing is that it’s unlikely to change. Companies that have the ability to make really good phone cameras have no interest in ILCs, and the ones who make really good ILCs don’t care about software. And good luck trying to compete in the middle without the hundreds of millions that Apple/Google put into ML research and the decades of research that Canon has done on colour science.
unfocused 5y ago
I kind of agree. I'm not an absolute kind of person. For day to day photos, where there is no set up, sure, the camera phones are great because you can quickly take that photo. As they say, the best camera is the one you have with you. As a complete amateur, trying to take a photo of my kid at soccer, I have a Sony A6000 and I bought a used Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS. The camera phone is simply useless. Also, good luck trying to take a photo of that bird and showing it to your kids!
mkaic 5y ago
I agree with this. I own both a mid-range DSLR and an iPhone 12 Mini. In the past six months since I got the iPhone, I've transitioned all my short films to being shot with its tiny sensor over the DSLR's -- it just looks much, much better and saves me a ton of work. I really wish there was someone making the equivalent of an iPhone's computational photography, but used on a full-size sensor. Imagine the capabilities!
- switchbak 5y ago
  Same boat. My Sony mirrorless is great (mostly), but the firmware/software just doesn't evolve, and it adds enough friction that I barely use the thing. Even though the resulting images can be better, they're only better with 5x the work (in front of a real computer). A high quality phone/ipad has a lot of benefits for HCI over a laptop, certainly for casual use. I'd be happy with a mirrorless shell that I snap a phone into to control the rest of the workflow. Give me that iPhone auto-AI picture magic (and some tunables to turn it down when needed) and I'd be happy. Well not in bright sun, but whatever. I was just looking for an EyeFi the other day, which are apparently no longer a thing. The Wifi workflow on my A6000 is just so bad as to be unusable, so I end up batching photos into a big editing session every 1-2 weeks, uggh :(
walljm 5y ago
Most of what the cell phone camera is doing in software is also available in the post processing software for DSLRs. Its not as convenient, but the quality is better. But, HDR isn't necessary in most cases, specially given that RAW files give you an extra stop in both directions when post processing. OTH, the properties of different lenses (FOV, DOF, magnification, macro) can't be reproduced in a cell phone camera (only approximated in software, and not usually well). A big DSLR isn't necessary for snapshots, but for serious applications (landscape, portraiture, nature, sports, events, etc...) they don't hold up.
- lm28469 5y ago
  > specially given that RAW files give you an extra stop in both directions With modern gear you can even recover 4 or 5 stops of shadow details relatively easily: https://theartofphotography.tv/nikon-z6-dynamic-range/ https://theartofphotography.tv/nikon-z6-dynamic-range/
- joshyeager 5y ago
  As someone who learned photography with film in an old Nikon but hasn't kept up, how is it possible to get two extra stops from a RAW file? And why does it need to be done in post processing instead of the camera just recording the image with the sensor's full dynamic range in the first place?
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    It manifests as extra detail hidden in the shadow or highlights, which is only exposed when you start messing with color curves or drag shadow or exposure controls way up. I asked a very similar question in another comment thread recently and the answer I got was that camera's awareness of the scene isn't nearly good enough when it comes to adjusting its own sensitivity curves, and that our eyes and brain are much better at postprocessing the raw data then the camera is.
    - astrange 5y ago
      One example is that cameras don't know what time of day it is (or rather, they could know but often choose not to care) and so auto-exposure/auto-white balance try to turn everything into noon daytime. So if you wanted your picture to look like the actual color cast and brightness you're seeing, it's up to you to remember what it looked like. Of course, phones aren't necessarily good at this either.
orbital-decay 5y ago
>by ignoring computational photography advancements I don't believe it's true. Dedicated cameras never "ignored" the means to get better dynamic range and signal/noise ratio with stacking. It's just not needed most of the time, being a very specific trade-off for certain scenes. And RAW processing software is pretty much embracing computational photography (calibrated optics correction, noise reduction, highlight reconstruction etc, including things like auto retouching and tonemapping if you don't want to do it manually). It hugely improved over the years, being able to pull out much better results from the same RAW shot. What they're lacking is miniaturization and speed. Big sensors and many megapixels mean slow reading and writing speeds; my smartphone can record RAW video at 4K@60fps which is out of reach for my camera. Modern super-sharp lenses became huge. Electronic viewfinder and variable aperture mechanism can't be made reasonably small. Thankfully, the need for mechanical shutter seems to slowly go away as recent Nikons show. I hope there will be more super-compact cameras like Sigma fp in the future; combine it with a pancake lens and proper calibration ("computational photography") to compensate for the lack of corrective elements in pancakes, and you got yourself a pocket camera with vastly better capabilities. Smartphones can sometimes get nice results and are pretty good at motion compensation in deep stacks, but they are slow, un-ergonomic and very restricted in what you can shoot well with them. And the people who use dedicated cameras tend to shoot RAW with smartphones for best results as well. (stacking is available in bayer domain so it's not a problem)
- Someone1234 5y ago
  > Dedicated cameras never "ignored" the means to get better dynamic range and signal/noise ratio with stacking. I respectfully disagree. No dedicated format for stacks (instead just filenames), no first party software to combine the stacks, and absolutely no on-board combination. Heck on a fairly recent camera I own, you cannot even configure the camera to always take a stack cellphone style. You have to bind to button to open a menu, to select stack size, every single shot. > And RAW processing software is pretty much embracing computational photography (calibrated optics correction, noise reduction, highlight reconstruction etc, including things like auto retouching and tonemapping if you don't want to do it manually). True. However, the market has shown time and time again that onboard is more popular than post-progressing. People want to snap and post, they don't want to snap and then post the next day/week after they've post processed it in PhotoLab or Lightroom.
lm28469 5y ago
> a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches. In what aspect ? Artistically a 2010 dslr would shit on any single phone on the market If your goal is to take pictures to document your life then yes use your phone, 100% the better choice here, but if your job or passion is to make pictures a proper camera will always be better, even my 1965 leica produce better pictures than the current top end iphone. The problem with DSLRs/mirrorless is that they're proper tools and just like with a brush and a canvas you have to put time and effort to master them. No amount of computational photography will make you a good photographer and if a modern 2k$ camera is the bottleneck it certainly is more of your fault than the camera. I also think the cross section between casual users who want an iphone like experience X people who drop 2k$ on a camera is extremely small. Different tools for different jobs
- gdfgjhs 5y ago
  > The problem with DSLRs/mirrorless is that they're proper tools and just like with a brush and a canvas you have to put time and effort to master them. No amount of computational photography will make you a good photographer and if a modern 2k$ camera is the bottleneck it certainly is more of your fault than the camera. This is a good analogy, I will have to borrow it. I got friends who ended up buying expensive DSLRs after they saw my photos taken with f/1.8 lens. But they had kit lens and were complaining that their cameras. I told them to get f/1.8 lens. Then they were complaining about zoom. Also they could not use maximum aperture outside. I helped them get ND filters. Now they are complaining about that. And forget to take ND filters indoors, get way too many photos incorrectly focused etc. Most people expect pro cameras to just act just like cell phone cameras.
  - bla3 5y ago
    What's a good resource to learn how to use cameras correctly?
    - numpad0 5y ago
      I think by far the most distracting feature is zoom. It gives false sense of being able to virtually move around like a drone would. Prime lenses used in aperture priority mode and all automatics off helped me a lot.
perardi 5y ago
As a photographer on the side: nahhhh. I have a “real” camera because I want control. Give me the RAW data, and I can move mountains. What have made interchangeable lens cameras increasingly irrelevant: the workflow. On a phone, somewhat obviously, I take a photo, and post it to Instagram, instantly. On a stand-alone camera? I… …uh, well if I’m shooting RAW I need to either have RAW/JPEG turned on, or convert to JPEG in camera, and then save that image, and then use the awful built-in wifi to connect to a shoddily made app that will randomly not connect for reasons, and then hope the transfer finishes, or use a SD-to-Lightning adapter and dongle up my phone. The DSLR/mirrorless workflow is still, conceptually, film, except replace a darkroom with Lightroom. It’s terrible for run-and-go casual shooting, which was a huge part of the lower-end market.
- ghaff 5y ago
  And Lightroom has a fair bit of computational photography built into it as well as does Photoshop. Though I use my iPhone mostly on raw a lot as well as my “real” cameras. They’re mostly easier for snapshots and sharing.
  - perardi 5y ago
    Distortion correction, chromatic aberration correction, perspective correction…yeah, all nice stuff. Especially the perspective feature, which is relatively recent. It’s nice to be able to straighten up an image quickly, in the Lightroom workflow, without having to round-trip to Photoshop.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    I don't know about the latest versions of lightroom (I still use my perpetual license) but the one I have remains untouched by the icy tendrils of "A.I.", and my output is still worlds better than it
    - ghaff 5y ago
      AI is admittedly an overused term. But Lightroom absolutely has algorithms of various types that it uses when you make any number of changes. Do you know exactly what vibrancy does to use one of the more trivial examples?
agumonkey 5y ago
Maybe they're focusing on what's important. It's plausible they're blind and dumb, or it's possible they reviewed iphones features and shots and said nop. Most smartphone pics have a weird feel to it, I thought I was being picky but it seems the article author feels the same. Computing power alter the optics too much.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  Possible but unlikely. They have had a decade to see this coming and innovate. They just kept selling the same thing with more megapixels.
  - Ancapistani 5y ago
    This isn't my experience _at all_. Until about six months ago, I carried a Fujifilm X-E2. It's an older camera (~2014), and was 16.3 MP. I upgraded to an X-Pro3, which is 26.1MP. Given that the MP stat increases with the square of resolution, that's not a huge change. My iPhone X has a 12MP camera, the same as the iPhone 13 Pro. The technical resolution _doesn't matter_. It hasn't mattered since the 10MP barrier was breached. I would prefer the Nikon that I carried in ~2004 to the iPhone 13 Pro for "photography". Note that that is in quotes, because "photography" is very different from "taking pictures". I use my iPhone when I'm with my family most of the time and it's great for that. It's great for documenting activities and "capturing memories". That's not at all the same thing as "photography". My X-Pro3 can produce excellent images at 12,800 ISO and f/1.4. My iPhone doesn't even tell me what ISO its capable of as far as I know, has a static f/2.4 aperture, and the OS "Camera" app doesn't even let me set shutter speed. It does "does its best". They aren't comparable tools.
    - copperx 5y ago
      Yes, a photo is not a snapshot. But no one can deny that the iPhone 13 Pro is among the best snapshot tools in the world.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      This has nothing to do with the fact that the professional camera industry has failed to adapt to new and improved tools and methods that apple has largely pioneered in the field.
guelo 5y ago
> How can a tiny sense in a cellphone capture more dynamic range can a massive sensor? Software No it's also hardware. The cellphone has much more powerful CPUs and GPUs than your DSLR that enable this
- positus 5y ago
  The CPU and GPU aren't really relevant in a DSLR. What does matter, though, is the efficiency of the sensor and the quality of the lenses. If I'm shooting a DSLR I'm also going to be editing the RAW data on a much, much more powerful device than a cell phone.
  - guelo 5y ago
    The point is that if DSLRs were to do onboard computational photography like OP wants them to it would require them to have more powerful CPUs and GPUs
vladvasiliu 5y ago
There may be more dynamic range in an iPhone photo, but the tones are quite harsh if you don't control the light. Fine texture also seems lacking when viewing on a (desktop) computer screen. I very much prefer the rendering of a "big camera", even with less dynamic range, than what can be obtained from an iPhone. Of course, as others have said, the iPhone quality is still amazing for what it is, especially given that you can carry it in your jeans pockets. Even the tiny Olympus Pens are worlds away from that. And just as always, the best camera is the one you have with you. I also agree that it would probably be great to have a "big camera" with the smarts of an iPhone. But there's probably not that big of a market for that, so the manufacturers don't invest in it. Although I'm surprised Sony didn't do anything, since they're in the camera phone business, too. At least, much more than say Nikon, Canon or Olympus.
Ancapistani 5y ago
As a "serious amateur" photographer at this stage of my life, the last thing I want my camera to do is be "smart". I use a Fujifilm X-Pro3, and while I have a variety of lenses, I almost always have my 23mm f/1.4 mounted. With the crop factor that gives me a "traditional" 35mm focal length. I almost always shoot with fully manual exposure, and only use autofocus about half the time. I chose this kit specifically because I have full control over the image with physical controls to make changes - I can change shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and even dynamic range without taking my eye out of the viewfinder. The X-Pro3 is pretty much made for me and my use case. While it has a "screen", it's folded into the back of the camera and isn't visible unless I manually flip it down. It can't practically be exposed when I'm using the camera normally. It's handy if I want to shoot at waist level or if I want to show someone standing next to me an image... but that's it. I have nothing against "computational photography", and it definitely has its place - but for me, as for most photographers, that place is in post-processing. Adobe is responsible for that stuff, not my camera. I expect my camera to produce a RAW file as an artifact, not an "image".
- somebodythere 5y ago
  As a person who makes money shooting video. I wish I had more reason to invest in my camera body. Interchangeable lens should come with chromatic abberation/distortion profiles on a chip that communicates with the camera so we can buy cheaper and lighter lenses with fewer elements. You can always buy the fancy lens with perfect optics if you prefer that aesthetic. A professional camera software will always expose on/off switches for the correction so the photographer retains control over the shot. I really don't see the problem with giving pro cameras more optional smarts, it just makes them more versatile.
  - perardi 5y ago
    Are you sure cameras don’t do that? I honestly do not know. They definitely do for still photos—Nikon has had chromatic aberration correction and lens distortion correction for quite a while, and it’s keyed to individual lenses. If they aren’t doing that in video, I suspect it’s a pure horsepower limitation. Reading the data off the sensor, and applying the corrections in real-time while writing to card may be too computationally intensive or bandwidth-limited.
hughrr 5y ago
Problem with smartphones is the lack of glass up front. I have an iPhone 13 Pro which is about as good as it gets but there’s no linear optical zoom on it. That means you have to spend half of the time getting closer and further away from things or deal with huge quality drop from cropping. The sensor and processing aren’t anywhere near as important as that. With all that my 13 Pro is about as capable as my old Nikon D3100 which I bought over 12 years ago. I am actually considering buying a Nikon Z50 so I can actually go back to an era of more control.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  >Problem with smartphones is the lack of glass up front. They have "periscope lenses" in some phones
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Yes aware of that. The optics aren’t quite there yet. They seem to suffer from internal reflections and aberrations you don’t get on much larger better engineered lenses. The iPhone 13 pro has a couple of annoying things already in that space.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Fun fact: your eyes are apparently a very low-quality camera. The reason we can make out so much detail is because our brains are really good at processing and focusing.
tomc1985 5y ago
Ugh, god no. I don't want fancy software trying to think for me. I want raw sensor data captured with as much detail and fidelity as possible that I can feed into my virtual darkroom workflow. The dynamic range thing is frustrating, indeed. But even so the data is usually still there. Perhaps better scene programs is a solution for traditional DSLR cameras, but most definitely NOT "computational photography" Photography needs better sensors and better scene programs, not a bunch of algorithms with their poorly-thought-out predefined notions of what is "good"
- kaba0 5y ago
  I don’t think you know what computational photography is. Do you also think that the famous photograph of the black hole is not true to life? It is not AI upscaling or whatever “magic” that just guesses at noise, most of it is just clever “hacks” to get out more data than you would ordinarily get, e.g. by using up the small vibration of the photographer’s hand to distribute the adjacent color filter’s input to where it belongs, and the like. Many part of it is done in hardware as well.
  - astrange 5y ago
    A lot of people assume the worst about computational photography; there were stories about Samsung phones having an "unbelievably" good Moon photography mode, where everyone assumed it was just pasting in a photo of the Moon instead of just knowing not to overexpose it.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    That part is fine, though I have considered that to be just 'image processing'. There is a clear difference between what the iPhone 13 does computationally and what my DSLR body does computationally. The body doesn't claim to use AI, it doesn't refer to machine learning models, and aside from the physical characteristics of the hardware that affects the images that it takes, what I get out of it is pretty much raw sensor data. Which then gets fed into an image processing postproduction workflow. I would think that any photographer worth their salt would know that a lot of famous photographs of the stars are false color, as NASA very prominently annotates exactly how it achieved the image that it did on its site. But I would bet they are still hand-tuning the end result. Do these new iPhones come at you with, "hey, it looks like you underexposed the face so I fixed this for you" then ask me to keep or undo the changes?" From the description of it, they don't. It just happens, without your consent, because Apple thinks their phone is smarter than you are.
mateo1 5y ago
Computational photography can be done on your computer. What you should ask yourself is why isn't there any widespread software for this sort of thing widely available? Because the sort of people who want overprocessed photos are happy with their phones. People buy DSLRs for many reasons, none of which include unremovable sharpening filters, automatic replacement of faces with leafs or turning a bright orange sky blue. Or replacing the blurry 300px moon you just shot with a 3mp stock photo.
- weberer 5y ago
  Well there's CHDK for Canon cameras. I had it installed on a point-and-shoot a few years back and really liked the features it gave. https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK
  - mateo1 5y ago
    I did the same some 10 years ago only to discover I'm too lazy to do post-processing on my timelapse. You can definitely use it to record successions of stills and videos which I guess is part of what phones do. It would be better if there was native firmware support for some of that stuff though, and I imagine that some combination of firmware acquisition settings and accelerometer data would give you the same capabilities as smartphones. Perhaps maybe a secondary camera with a high framerate to get optical flow/camera pose data from? Dunno. You can still do it manually, but give it 3 years and you'll be able to compose that photo from scratch with an off-the-shelf generative NN photoshop plugin anyway. But still I'd say the market for DSLRs will remain the same because their main function (in my opinion) is to capture an accurate representation of reality with predictable errors in pixel space and not in some latent one.
- lupire 5y ago
  > automatic replacement of faces with leafs this was confirmed to be fake news.
  - mateo1 5y ago
    The leaf was in front of the face but the algorithm decided to blend it in that way.
coolso 5y ago
> I've given up for most things, a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches. Phone cameras absolutely unequivocally cannot beat the clarity, sharpness, detail, natural bokeh, shutter speed, and overall quality of even an affordable dedicated camera in the $1K range. The only time a phone camera can somewhat keep up is when you're looking at the photos on your tiny 4" phone screen and throwing some heavy duty filters on it to the point where anything will look "good". Throw that photo up on a computer monitor, or TV screen, or get it printed and you can immediately see the difference just in sharpness and detail alone. Yes, phone cameras are far more convenient, and they have more filter options, and so on. But there's no comparison whatsoever. It's just that most people don't care enough when they're putting it up as a tiny little square on Instagram or sending it as a Snap that someone will look at for 5 seconds and never see again.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Genuinely asking, is it also true when you are in bad conditions? Sure, cameras take in much more light, but there surely is a point where “working smarter not harder” actually turns it around. For example, I have seen the Pixel 6 take a better photo of a river before a town at night due to the very hard dynamic range requirements plus the movement of the waves in the dark.
  - coolso 5y ago
    Assuming a modern camera with a prime lens shot at the widest aperture, yes, absolutely, although to get the best results you'd have to do some post-processing in Lightroom/Capture One (which the phone is already doing automatically in the background).
- astrange 5y ago
  Instagram hasn't had "heavy duty" filters since pre-iPhone 4 days when it was a lomography app. Everyone goes for an overly well lit but realistic look these days. Although a lot of them do just shoot on larger cameras.
m463 5y ago
I think the mirrorless cameras do some of this. canon does skin smoothing, selfie, HDR, etc.
kumarvvr 5y ago
Is it really fair to say about software though? As it is, a DSLR or mirrorless cameras put a lot of money to make good lenses and frames. I think it is fair to say that the software was usually on desktops, with the likes of Adobe providing all features needed for making a good photo great. Is it really necessary for the camera companies to cram half baked, low powered software into compact camera cases and increase the cost by another 600 - 1000 USD? There was a time when everyone bought point and shoot ones to get their pictures. Mobiles have almost fully replaced those ones. Some people bought DSLRs and the like as a step up compared to PAS ones. Good mobile cameras might make the DSLR ones back to being professionals choice, rather than an enthusiasts choice. I would rather they build software to interface with phones to make use of their tremendous computational power rather than re-invent the wheel. How about having a DSLR that can sync its photos with an iPhone and an iPhone app that automates the processing of the photos?
echelon 5y ago
> Controversial take: DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have largely made themselves irrelevant by ignoring computational photography advancements Preach. Next up: $500,000 cinematic cameras and lenses, because we'll be capturing light volumes and skeletal postures. The biggest advantage won't be in equipment cost savings, either, but rather substantially increased workflow efficiency.
kenneth 5y ago
My Sony full frame mirrorless can take multiple frames for HDR with the flip of a setting. I'm sure whatever you're using can too. Swap the shutter setting to turn on bracketing and decide what attribute you want to change (exposure, aperture, shutter speed, or ISO are all options). That said, rarely are HDR shots actually desirable IMO.
esotericsean 5y ago
I agree with you, but... I don't think it's quite there yet. "Professional" cameras aren't yet irrelevant. But eventually they will be if they don't make some changes. This is film vs digital all over again.
_8j50 5y ago
Honestly don't know: can you post-process raw DSLR images on a computer to acheive the same quality as iPhone camera?
KolenCh 5y ago
It is not true, computational photography is not the thing that traditional cameras are missing. What they need is a seamless user experience. And while traditional camera excels at capturing (in terms of user experience), it lacks at anything after that. Processing, sharing, etc. Another important factor is “the best camera is the one you have with you.” This killed the compact camera segment. I don’t think it eats much into the interchangeable lens camera market, which is what you claims are becoming irrelevant. Just to prove that computation photography is not missing, it’s not new at all. Digital photographer has been using those techniques all the time, including HDR you mentioned. Some Sony camera can stitch panorama automatically so there are examples that in camera processing are also there (some Sony cameras can install apps that process HDR too, IIRC, but they killed that online store.) Again it is the user experience, if it is seamless and doesn’t take you much additional effort, then it becomes a more useful tool (in terms of how often you use it.) Your criticism of “producing worse result” again is not a matter of computation photography. It is just a matter of FPS, ie how fast the sensor reads out the data. Cell phone cameras especially iPhone (a few years ago Apple hired an indie app developer that optimized the app crazily using hand tuned intrinsics to capture highest FPS that have been seen on that model, IIRC 20fps.) But nowadays even FF sensor can be read out at insane FPS making your point irreverent. This is not a coincidence because a) who do you think develop those sensors used on smart phone and b) it has many other uses other than producing low artifact HDRs. Also if you want no-artifact HDR, not just low-artifact HDR, then get the biggest sensor you can get and take single shot HDR, not a cell phone. Lastly, computational photography is a necessity for smart phone, just because of physical limits. Indeed it’s a blessing that you can squeeze that much from such a tiny camera. But make no mistakes, it doesn’t win in the quality department, and people don’t hate it because it is “cheating”, but about the quality. Just to name one feature considered to be cheating and eventually becomes a standard in lens design: aberration correction. I think Olympus started it first in M43 that the electronic communications also send barrel distortion and CA correction information back to camera and write it in the EXIF data, and correct it both in the fly and in any preview or rendered output (ie this is a mandatory correction.) at first it is seen as an inferior lens design philosophy and eventually it is seen as a better optimization (as you only care the end results and whatever means towards a better end is a better optimization) where the biggest benefits is size (optimized/minimized size given same quality.) So no, it is not a controversial take, it is just a wrong take.
axg11 5y ago
The replies here are focused on “control” and how DSLRs are meant to be the _raw_ experience. I think they’re missing the mark. All DSLRs come with an “auto” mode. Why should it be the case that this mode is so rubbish? There is currently a gap in the market for a camera that combines superior hardware with superior computational photography. You can keep your RAW images but why not have a computationally processed output option to go alongside that?

aspyct 5y ago

As a sports photographer, I disagree. There's no stacking multiple frames in my world. Also, as a portrait photographer, I disagree too. Until we can use flashes properly, I'm not getting rid of my camera. Plus, dynamic range isn't everything.

Someone1234 5y ago
> As a sports photographer, I disagree. You don't disagree with the post you replied to. Niches will always require specialized equipment as it said. It was a comment about general purpose photography (and its ever shrinking market share).
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Moving objects aren't a niche, they are the real life outside of of selfies and posing.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Surely the background is somewhat stationary during, so there is ample space to refine that with less fast-moving data. Sure, you have to get better hardware to properly capture the fast moving target of the photo, but it is not an either or question.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      I think a lot depends on whether you stand to loose and the other bloke stands to gain from those lies - if these are old war stories that bear no relationship to my current life, well, that's just entertainment, whatever. But if the other person is telling me "deposit money in this ATM, it's totally secure' then I'd be a bit assertive with holding him to account.
- aspyct 5y ago
  It's not about the niche, it's about doing a job with the right tools. Did you ever build a desktop gui app with php? You actually can, it's just not the most productive tool. Conversely, you can take good pictures with a smartphone (for some specific cases), it's just not a great tool for the job.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
saiya-jin 5y ago
I have to side with OP here. Yours pluses are really worth it only if you need quality 98% of the people here won't ever need (OK, 1-3 pictures printed as bigger canvas in next 10 years, but still). Most people today see pics on phones only. Even those done by pros in studios. The rest is mostly tablet/notebook screen. 1% (like me) something bigger. On that level, I can do almost/completely same pics as you with my Samsung S22 Ultra for those portraits (not sports part, but if its for family, videos usually trump photos for target audience). Minuses are staggering - the amount of money, time invested, annoyance to shooter and subjects, the speed with which you can capture most moments in life. If I understood you correctly, you're pro/semi-pro. That's not the topic here, its everybody else snapping pics. As long term full frame shooter, for last 2 weeks, its almost dead platform for me. I'll consider to take it for longer vacations, but I expect it to come out of bag very rarely.
- aspyct 5y ago
  We're just not photographing the same subjects in the same way. 90% of the pictures I take, be it professionally or personally, I couldn't take with a smartphone.
HALtheWise 5y ago
For sports photography, why wouldn't you want stacked exposures for the non-moving background parts of the frame? If it allows getting a comparable noise floor with faster shutter speeds, that seems like a strictly good trade.
- aspyct 5y ago
  I see where this is coming from, but I don't care about the background being noisy and blurry. If anything, that's a plus in my book. However I want the subject to be tack-sharp, and he's moving and changing shape all the time.

Jiejeing 5y ago

> a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches Until you zoom in, and then it's all a big smudge. Unless you are talking about $1k+ cellphones only, which is outside of the price range of most.

astrange 5y ago
Prime lenses on cameras are much better quality for the same price, so the best kind of zoom is already the one with your feet.
- Jiejeing 5y ago
  I meant, when you open the image at its true resolution on a computer. But I agree that prime lenses are close to always better in quality than variable length ones, even if for some situations you need a telephoto anyway (and having a fixed 300mm in my pocket does not seem practical).
  - astrange 5y ago
    There is that, but I feel like pixel resolution turns out to not matter pretty often. Obviously it does matter if you’re cropping or blowing it up for a background etc, but even printing can look good with a low res image if you’re viewing it from far enough away. They do make clip-on zoom lenses for phones but I haven’t actually used any, not sure how much they help.
    - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      Surprising decent even with cheap plastic lenses. I was surprised anyway, after not expecting much.
- jrockway 5y ago
  My experience with the iPhone camera (X) is that smudge artifacts (AI, compression) are quite noticeable even on the device's screen. As soon as you put that on your 30" desktop monitor, the photo is nearly unviewable. This hasn't been my experience with mirrorless cameras, whose output looks pretty good at 1:1 on a 100dpi screen. There are two photographs that come to mind where the iPhone utterly disappointed me. One was a morning park scene, rays of light filtering through leaves. The leaves just looks liked blobs. Another was on a boat at night; with my eyes I could clearly see texture in the buildings on the illuminated skyline, reflections on the water, and texture in the water. The iPhone shot was just a black screen with some blurred specks of light. I know I could have gotten both of those photographs with my A7ii. I have handheld nighttime pictures with stars in the sky. A big sensor gathers a lot of light, and even more important than getting close is collecting as much light as you can.

KMnO4 5y ago

I agree. 90% of DSLR shots don’t need to push the limits of physics. 100 vs 1600 ISO doesn’t matter if you have indistinguishable noise reduction. F/1.8 gives a nice bokeh, but if you only have two depth planes (a foreground subject and a distant background), no one will notice if you fake the blur. That said, I still have to carry my mirrorless into the backcountry because tiny sensors can physically only let in so much light, which makes them unsuitable for astrophotography. I’ve seen the “Astro-modes” on new flagship phones and the result is always “wow, this is good...for a phone”, but nowhere close to what I can get unedited from my camera. And the worst thing is that it’s unlikely to change. Companies that have the ability to make really good phone cameras have no interest in ILCs, and the ones who make really good ILCs don’t care about software. And good luck trying to compete in the middle without the hundreds of millions that Apple/Google put into ML research and the decades of research that Canon has done on colour science.

unfocused 5y ago

I kind of agree. I'm not an absolute kind of person. For day to day photos, where there is no set up, sure, the camera phones are great because you can quickly take that photo. As they say, the best camera is the one you have with you. As a complete amateur, trying to take a photo of my kid at soccer, I have a Sony A6000 and I bought a used Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS. The camera phone is simply useless. Also, good luck trying to take a photo of that bird and showing it to your kids!

mkaic 5y ago

I agree with this. I own both a mid-range DSLR and an iPhone 12 Mini. In the past six months since I got the iPhone, I've transitioned all my short films to being shot with its tiny sensor over the DSLR's -- it just looks much, much better and saves me a ton of work. I really wish there was someone making the equivalent of an iPhone's computational photography, but used on a full-size sensor. Imagine the capabilities!

switchbak 5y ago
Same boat. My Sony mirrorless is great (mostly), but the firmware/software just doesn't evolve, and it adds enough friction that I barely use the thing. Even though the resulting images can be better, they're only better with 5x the work (in front of a real computer). A high quality phone/ipad has a lot of benefits for HCI over a laptop, certainly for casual use. I'd be happy with a mirrorless shell that I snap a phone into to control the rest of the workflow. Give me that iPhone auto-AI picture magic (and some tunables to turn it down when needed) and I'd be happy. Well not in bright sun, but whatever. I was just looking for an EyeFi the other day, which are apparently no longer a thing. The Wifi workflow on my A6000 is just so bad as to be unusable, so I end up batching photos into a big editing session every 1-2 weeks, uggh :(

walljm 5y ago

Most of what the cell phone camera is doing in software is also available in the post processing software for DSLRs. Its not as convenient, but the quality is better. But, HDR isn't necessary in most cases, specially given that RAW files give you an extra stop in both directions when post processing. OTH, the properties of different lenses (FOV, DOF, magnification, macro) can't be reproduced in a cell phone camera (only approximated in software, and not usually well). A big DSLR isn't necessary for snapshots, but for serious applications (landscape, portraiture, nature, sports, events, etc...) they don't hold up.

lm28469 5y ago
> specially given that RAW files give you an extra stop in both directions With modern gear you can even recover 4 or 5 stops of shadow details relatively easily: https://theartofphotography.tv/nikon-z6-dynamic-range/ https://theartofphotography.tv/nikon-z6-dynamic-range/
joshyeager 5y ago
As someone who learned photography with film in an old Nikon but hasn't kept up, how is it possible to get two extra stops from a RAW file? And why does it need to be done in post processing instead of the camera just recording the image with the sensor's full dynamic range in the first place?
- tomc1985 5y ago
  It manifests as extra detail hidden in the shadow or highlights, which is only exposed when you start messing with color curves or drag shadow or exposure controls way up. I asked a very similar question in another comment thread recently and the answer I got was that camera's awareness of the scene isn't nearly good enough when it comes to adjusting its own sensitivity curves, and that our eyes and brain are much better at postprocessing the raw data then the camera is.
  - astrange 5y ago
    One example is that cameras don't know what time of day it is (or rather, they could know but often choose not to care) and so auto-exposure/auto-white balance try to turn everything into noon daytime. So if you wanted your picture to look like the actual color cast and brightness you're seeing, it's up to you to remember what it looked like. Of course, phones aren't necessarily good at this either.

orbital-decay 5y ago

>by ignoring computational photography advancements I don't believe it's true. Dedicated cameras never "ignored" the means to get better dynamic range and signal/noise ratio with stacking. It's just not needed most of the time, being a very specific trade-off for certain scenes. And RAW processing software is pretty much embracing computational photography (calibrated optics correction, noise reduction, highlight reconstruction etc, including things like auto retouching and tonemapping if you don't want to do it manually). It hugely improved over the years, being able to pull out much better results from the same RAW shot. What they're lacking is miniaturization and speed. Big sensors and many megapixels mean slow reading and writing speeds; my smartphone can record RAW video at 4K@60fps which is out of reach for my camera. Modern super-sharp lenses became huge. Electronic viewfinder and variable aperture mechanism can't be made reasonably small. Thankfully, the need for mechanical shutter seems to slowly go away as recent Nikons show. I hope there will be more super-compact cameras like Sigma fp in the future; combine it with a pancake lens and proper calibration ("computational photography") to compensate for the lack of corrective elements in pancakes, and you got yourself a pocket camera with vastly better capabilities. Smartphones can sometimes get nice results and are pretty good at motion compensation in deep stacks, but they are slow, un-ergonomic and very restricted in what you can shoot well with them. And the people who use dedicated cameras tend to shoot RAW with smartphones for best results as well. (stacking is available in bayer domain so it's not a problem)

Someone1234 5y ago
> Dedicated cameras never "ignored" the means to get better dynamic range and signal/noise ratio with stacking. I respectfully disagree. No dedicated format for stacks (instead just filenames), no first party software to combine the stacks, and absolutely no on-board combination. Heck on a fairly recent camera I own, you cannot even configure the camera to always take a stack cellphone style. You have to bind to button to open a menu, to select stack size, every single shot. > And RAW processing software is pretty much embracing computational photography (calibrated optics correction, noise reduction, highlight reconstruction etc, including things like auto retouching and tonemapping if you don't want to do it manually). True. However, the market has shown time and time again that onboard is more popular than post-progressing. People want to snap and post, they don't want to snap and then post the next day/week after they've post processed it in PhotoLab or Lightroom.

lm28469 5y ago

> a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches. In what aspect ? Artistically a 2010 dslr would shit on any single phone on the market If your goal is to take pictures to document your life then yes use your phone, 100% the better choice here, but if your job or passion is to make pictures a proper camera will always be better, even my 1965 leica produce better pictures than the current top end iphone. The problem with DSLRs/mirrorless is that they're proper tools and just like with a brush and a canvas you have to put time and effort to master them. No amount of computational photography will make you a good photographer and if a modern 2k$ camera is the bottleneck it certainly is more of your fault than the camera. I also think the cross section between casual users who want an iphone like experience X people who drop 2k$ on a camera is extremely small. Different tools for different jobs

gdfgjhs 5y ago
> The problem with DSLRs/mirrorless is that they're proper tools and just like with a brush and a canvas you have to put time and effort to master them. No amount of computational photography will make you a good photographer and if a modern 2k$ camera is the bottleneck it certainly is more of your fault than the camera. This is a good analogy, I will have to borrow it. I got friends who ended up buying expensive DSLRs after they saw my photos taken with f/1.8 lens. But they had kit lens and were complaining that their cameras. I told them to get f/1.8 lens. Then they were complaining about zoom. Also they could not use maximum aperture outside. I helped them get ND filters. Now they are complaining about that. And forget to take ND filters indoors, get way too many photos incorrectly focused etc. Most people expect pro cameras to just act just like cell phone cameras.
- bla3 5y ago
  What's a good resource to learn how to use cameras correctly?
  - numpad0 5y ago
    I think by far the most distracting feature is zoom. It gives false sense of being able to virtually move around like a drone would. Prime lenses used in aperture priority mode and all automatics off helped me a lot.

perardi 5y ago

As a photographer on the side: nahhhh. I have a “real” camera because I want control. Give me the RAW data, and I can move mountains. What have made interchangeable lens cameras increasingly irrelevant: the workflow. On a phone, somewhat obviously, I take a photo, and post it to Instagram, instantly. On a stand-alone camera? I… …uh, well if I’m shooting RAW I need to either have RAW/JPEG turned on, or convert to JPEG in camera, and then save that image, and then use the awful built-in wifi to connect to a shoddily made app that will randomly not connect for reasons, and then hope the transfer finishes, or use a SD-to-Lightning adapter and dongle up my phone. The DSLR/mirrorless workflow is still, conceptually, film, except replace a darkroom with Lightroom. It’s terrible for run-and-go casual shooting, which was a huge part of the lower-end market.

ghaff 5y ago
And Lightroom has a fair bit of computational photography built into it as well as does Photoshop. Though I use my iPhone mostly on raw a lot as well as my “real” cameras. They’re mostly easier for snapshots and sharing.
- perardi 5y ago
  Distortion correction, chromatic aberration correction, perspective correction…yeah, all nice stuff. Especially the perspective feature, which is relatively recent. It’s nice to be able to straighten up an image quickly, in the Lightroom workflow, without having to round-trip to Photoshop.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  I don't know about the latest versions of lightroom (I still use my perpetual license) but the one I have remains untouched by the icy tendrils of "A.I.", and my output is still worlds better than it
  - ghaff 5y ago
    AI is admittedly an overused term. But Lightroom absolutely has algorithms of various types that it uses when you make any number of changes. Do you know exactly what vibrancy does to use one of the more trivial examples?

agumonkey 5y ago

Maybe they're focusing on what's important. It's plausible they're blind and dumb, or it's possible they reviewed iphones features and shots and said nop. Most smartphone pics have a weird feel to it, I thought I was being picky but it seems the article author feels the same. Computing power alter the optics too much.

imwillofficial 5y ago
Possible but unlikely. They have had a decade to see this coming and innovate. They just kept selling the same thing with more megapixels.
- Ancapistani 5y ago
  This isn't my experience _at all_. Until about six months ago, I carried a Fujifilm X-E2. It's an older camera (~2014), and was 16.3 MP. I upgraded to an X-Pro3, which is 26.1MP. Given that the MP stat increases with the square of resolution, that's not a huge change. My iPhone X has a 12MP camera, the same as the iPhone 13 Pro. The technical resolution _doesn't matter_. It hasn't mattered since the 10MP barrier was breached. I would prefer the Nikon that I carried in ~2004 to the iPhone 13 Pro for "photography". Note that that is in quotes, because "photography" is very different from "taking pictures". I use my iPhone when I'm with my family most of the time and it's great for that. It's great for documenting activities and "capturing memories". That's not at all the same thing as "photography". My X-Pro3 can produce excellent images at 12,800 ISO and f/1.4. My iPhone doesn't even tell me what ISO its capable of as far as I know, has a static f/2.4 aperture, and the OS "Camera" app doesn't even let me set shutter speed. It does "does its best". They aren't comparable tools.
  - copperx 5y ago
    Yes, a photo is not a snapshot. But no one can deny that the iPhone 13 Pro is among the best snapshot tools in the world.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    This has nothing to do with the fact that the professional camera industry has failed to adapt to new and improved tools and methods that apple has largely pioneered in the field.

guelo 5y ago

> How can a tiny sense in a cellphone capture more dynamic range can a massive sensor? Software No it's also hardware. The cellphone has much more powerful CPUs and GPUs than your DSLR that enable this

positus 5y ago
The CPU and GPU aren't really relevant in a DSLR. What does matter, though, is the efficiency of the sensor and the quality of the lenses. If I'm shooting a DSLR I'm also going to be editing the RAW data on a much, much more powerful device than a cell phone.
- guelo 5y ago
  The point is that if DSLRs were to do onboard computational photography like OP wants them to it would require them to have more powerful CPUs and GPUs

vladvasiliu 5y ago

There may be more dynamic range in an iPhone photo, but the tones are quite harsh if you don't control the light. Fine texture also seems lacking when viewing on a (desktop) computer screen. I very much prefer the rendering of a "big camera", even with less dynamic range, than what can be obtained from an iPhone. Of course, as others have said, the iPhone quality is still amazing for what it is, especially given that you can carry it in your jeans pockets. Even the tiny Olympus Pens are worlds away from that. And just as always, the best camera is the one you have with you. I also agree that it would probably be great to have a "big camera" with the smarts of an iPhone. But there's probably not that big of a market for that, so the manufacturers don't invest in it. Although I'm surprised Sony didn't do anything, since they're in the camera phone business, too. At least, much more than say Nikon, Canon or Olympus.

Ancapistani 5y ago

As a "serious amateur" photographer at this stage of my life, the last thing I want my camera to do is be "smart". I use a Fujifilm X-Pro3, and while I have a variety of lenses, I almost always have my 23mm f/1.4 mounted. With the crop factor that gives me a "traditional" 35mm focal length. I almost always shoot with fully manual exposure, and only use autofocus about half the time. I chose this kit specifically because I have full control over the image with physical controls to make changes - I can change shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and even dynamic range without taking my eye out of the viewfinder. The X-Pro3 is pretty much made for me and my use case. While it has a "screen", it's folded into the back of the camera and isn't visible unless I manually flip it down. It can't practically be exposed when I'm using the camera normally. It's handy if I want to shoot at waist level or if I want to show someone standing next to me an image... but that's it. I have nothing against "computational photography", and it definitely has its place - but for me, as for most photographers, that place is in post-processing. Adobe is responsible for that stuff, not my camera. I expect my camera to produce a RAW file as an artifact, not an "image".

somebodythere 5y ago
As a person who makes money shooting video. I wish I had more reason to invest in my camera body. Interchangeable lens should come with chromatic abberation/distortion profiles on a chip that communicates with the camera so we can buy cheaper and lighter lenses with fewer elements. You can always buy the fancy lens with perfect optics if you prefer that aesthetic. A professional camera software will always expose on/off switches for the correction so the photographer retains control over the shot. I really don't see the problem with giving pro cameras more optional smarts, it just makes them more versatile.
- perardi 5y ago
  Are you sure cameras don’t do that? I honestly do not know. They definitely do for still photos—Nikon has had chromatic aberration correction and lens distortion correction for quite a while, and it’s keyed to individual lenses. If they aren’t doing that in video, I suspect it’s a pure horsepower limitation. Reading the data off the sensor, and applying the corrections in real-time while writing to card may be too computationally intensive or bandwidth-limited.

hughrr 5y ago

Problem with smartphones is the lack of glass up front. I have an iPhone 13 Pro which is about as good as it gets but there’s no linear optical zoom on it. That means you have to spend half of the time getting closer and further away from things or deal with huge quality drop from cropping. The sensor and processing aren’t anywhere near as important as that. With all that my 13 Pro is about as capable as my old Nikon D3100 which I bought over 12 years ago. I am actually considering buying a Nikon Z50 so I can actually go back to an era of more control.

moonchrome 5y ago
>Problem with smartphones is the lack of glass up front. They have "periscope lenses" in some phones
- hughrr 5y ago
  Yes aware of that. The optics aren’t quite there yet. They seem to suffer from internal reflections and aberrations you don’t get on much larger better engineered lenses. The iPhone 13 pro has a couple of annoying things already in that space.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Fun fact: your eyes are apparently a very low-quality camera. The reason we can make out so much detail is because our brains are really good at processing and focusing.

tomc1985 5y ago

Ugh, god no. I don't want fancy software trying to think for me. I want raw sensor data captured with as much detail and fidelity as possible that I can feed into my virtual darkroom workflow. The dynamic range thing is frustrating, indeed. But even so the data is usually still there. Perhaps better scene programs is a solution for traditional DSLR cameras, but most definitely NOT "computational photography" Photography needs better sensors and better scene programs, not a bunch of algorithms with their poorly-thought-out predefined notions of what is "good"

kaba0 5y ago
I don’t think you know what computational photography is. Do you also think that the famous photograph of the black hole is not true to life? It is not AI upscaling or whatever “magic” that just guesses at noise, most of it is just clever “hacks” to get out more data than you would ordinarily get, e.g. by using up the small vibration of the photographer’s hand to distribute the adjacent color filter’s input to where it belongs, and the like. Many part of it is done in hardware as well.
- astrange 5y ago
  A lot of people assume the worst about computational photography; there were stories about Samsung phones having an "unbelievably" good Moon photography mode, where everyone assumed it was just pasting in a photo of the Moon instead of just knowing not to overexpose it.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  That part is fine, though I have considered that to be just 'image processing'. There is a clear difference between what the iPhone 13 does computationally and what my DSLR body does computationally. The body doesn't claim to use AI, it doesn't refer to machine learning models, and aside from the physical characteristics of the hardware that affects the images that it takes, what I get out of it is pretty much raw sensor data. Which then gets fed into an image processing postproduction workflow. I would think that any photographer worth their salt would know that a lot of famous photographs of the stars are false color, as NASA very prominently annotates exactly how it achieved the image that it did on its site. But I would bet they are still hand-tuning the end result. Do these new iPhones come at you with, "hey, it looks like you underexposed the face so I fixed this for you" then ask me to keep or undo the changes?" From the description of it, they don't. It just happens, without your consent, because Apple thinks their phone is smarter than you are.

mateo1 5y ago

Computational photography can be done on your computer. What you should ask yourself is why isn't there any widespread software for this sort of thing widely available? Because the sort of people who want overprocessed photos are happy with their phones. People buy DSLRs for many reasons, none of which include unremovable sharpening filters, automatic replacement of faces with leafs or turning a bright orange sky blue. Or replacing the blurry 300px moon you just shot with a 3mp stock photo.

weberer 5y ago
Well there's CHDK for Canon cameras. I had it installed on a point-and-shoot a few years back and really liked the features it gave. https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK
- mateo1 5y ago
  I did the same some 10 years ago only to discover I'm too lazy to do post-processing on my timelapse. You can definitely use it to record successions of stills and videos which I guess is part of what phones do. It would be better if there was native firmware support for some of that stuff though, and I imagine that some combination of firmware acquisition settings and accelerometer data would give you the same capabilities as smartphones. Perhaps maybe a secondary camera with a high framerate to get optical flow/camera pose data from? Dunno. You can still do it manually, but give it 3 years and you'll be able to compose that photo from scratch with an off-the-shelf generative NN photoshop plugin anyway. But still I'd say the market for DSLRs will remain the same because their main function (in my opinion) is to capture an accurate representation of reality with predictable errors in pixel space and not in some latent one.
lupire 5y ago
> automatic replacement of faces with leafs this was confirmed to be fake news.
- mateo1 5y ago
  The leaf was in front of the face but the algorithm decided to blend it in that way.

coolso 5y ago

> I've given up for most things, a cellphone can beat all but the absolute top end dedicated cameras and even then only for niches. Phone cameras absolutely unequivocally cannot beat the clarity, sharpness, detail, natural bokeh, shutter speed, and overall quality of even an affordable dedicated camera in the $1K range. The only time a phone camera can somewhat keep up is when you're looking at the photos on your tiny 4" phone screen and throwing some heavy duty filters on it to the point where anything will look "good". Throw that photo up on a computer monitor, or TV screen, or get it printed and you can immediately see the difference just in sharpness and detail alone. Yes, phone cameras are far more convenient, and they have more filter options, and so on. But there's no comparison whatsoever. It's just that most people don't care enough when they're putting it up as a tiny little square on Instagram or sending it as a Snap that someone will look at for 5 seconds and never see again.

kaba0 5y ago
Genuinely asking, is it also true when you are in bad conditions? Sure, cameras take in much more light, but there surely is a point where “working smarter not harder” actually turns it around. For example, I have seen the Pixel 6 take a better photo of a river before a town at night due to the very hard dynamic range requirements plus the movement of the waves in the dark.
- coolso 5y ago
  Assuming a modern camera with a prime lens shot at the widest aperture, yes, absolutely, although to get the best results you'd have to do some post-processing in Lightroom/Capture One (which the phone is already doing automatically in the background).
astrange 5y ago
Instagram hasn't had "heavy duty" filters since pre-iPhone 4 days when it was a lomography app. Everyone goes for an overly well lit but realistic look these days. Although a lot of them do just shoot on larger cameras.

m463 5y ago

I think the mirrorless cameras do some of this. canon does skin smoothing, selfie, HDR, etc.

kumarvvr 5y ago

Is it really fair to say about software though? As it is, a DSLR or mirrorless cameras put a lot of money to make good lenses and frames. I think it is fair to say that the software was usually on desktops, with the likes of Adobe providing all features needed for making a good photo great. Is it really necessary for the camera companies to cram half baked, low powered software into compact camera cases and increase the cost by another 600 - 1000 USD? There was a time when everyone bought point and shoot ones to get their pictures. Mobiles have almost fully replaced those ones. Some people bought DSLRs and the like as a step up compared to PAS ones. Good mobile cameras might make the DSLR ones back to being professionals choice, rather than an enthusiasts choice. I would rather they build software to interface with phones to make use of their tremendous computational power rather than re-invent the wheel. How about having a DSLR that can sync its photos with an iPhone and an iPhone app that automates the processing of the photos?

echelon 5y ago

> Controversial take: DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have largely made themselves irrelevant by ignoring computational photography advancements Preach. Next up: $500,000 cinematic cameras and lenses, because we'll be capturing light volumes and skeletal postures. The biggest advantage won't be in equipment cost savings, either, but rather substantially increased workflow efficiency.

kenneth 5y ago

My Sony full frame mirrorless can take multiple frames for HDR with the flip of a setting. I'm sure whatever you're using can too. Swap the shutter setting to turn on bracketing and decide what attribute you want to change (exposure, aperture, shutter speed, or ISO are all options). That said, rarely are HDR shots actually desirable IMO.

esotericsean 5y ago

I agree with you, but... I don't think it's quite there yet. "Professional" cameras aren't yet irrelevant. But eventually they will be if they don't make some changes. This is film vs digital all over again.

_8j50 5y ago

Honestly don't know: can you post-process raw DSLR images on a computer to acheive the same quality as iPhone camera?

KolenCh 5y ago

It is not true, computational photography is not the thing that traditional cameras are missing. What they need is a seamless user experience. And while traditional camera excels at capturing (in terms of user experience), it lacks at anything after that. Processing, sharing, etc. Another important factor is “the best camera is the one you have with you.” This killed the compact camera segment. I don’t think it eats much into the interchangeable lens camera market, which is what you claims are becoming irrelevant. Just to prove that computation photography is not missing, it’s not new at all. Digital photographer has been using those techniques all the time, including HDR you mentioned. Some Sony camera can stitch panorama automatically so there are examples that in camera processing are also there (some Sony cameras can install apps that process HDR too, IIRC, but they killed that online store.) Again it is the user experience, if it is seamless and doesn’t take you much additional effort, then it becomes a more useful tool (in terms of how often you use it.) Your criticism of “producing worse result” again is not a matter of computation photography. It is just a matter of FPS, ie how fast the sensor reads out the data. Cell phone cameras especially iPhone (a few years ago Apple hired an indie app developer that optimized the app crazily using hand tuned intrinsics to capture highest FPS that have been seen on that model, IIRC 20fps.) But nowadays even FF sensor can be read out at insane FPS making your point irreverent. This is not a coincidence because a) who do you think develop those sensors used on smart phone and b) it has many other uses other than producing low artifact HDRs. Also if you want no-artifact HDR, not just low-artifact HDR, then get the biggest sensor you can get and take single shot HDR, not a cell phone. Lastly, computational photography is a necessity for smart phone, just because of physical limits. Indeed it’s a blessing that you can squeeze that much from such a tiny camera. But make no mistakes, it doesn’t win in the quality department, and people don’t hate it because it is “cheating”, but about the quality. Just to name one feature considered to be cheating and eventually becomes a standard in lens design: aberration correction. I think Olympus started it first in M43 that the electronic communications also send barrel distortion and CA correction information back to camera and write it in the EXIF data, and correct it both in the fly and in any preview or rendered output (ie this is a mandatory correction.) at first it is seen as an inferior lens design philosophy and eventually it is seen as a better optimization (as you only care the end results and whatever means towards a better end is a better optimization) where the biggest benefits is size (optimized/minimized size given same quality.) So no, it is not a controversial take, it is just a wrong take.

axg11 5y ago

The replies here are focused on “control” and how DSLRs are meant to be the _raw_ experience. I think they’re missing the mark. All DSLRs come with an “auto” mode. Why should it be the case that this mode is so rubbish? There is currently a gap in the market for a camera that combines superior hardware with superior computational photography. You can keep your RAW images but why not have a computationally processed output option to go alongside that?