8 ms·

Phones now consistently/always outperform high-end cameras in brightly lit conditions involving the sky, water, snow etc. It's nearly impossible to get the same

by jeswin 4y ago

Phones now consistently/always outperform high-end cameras in brightly lit conditions involving the sky, water, snow etc. It's nearly impossible to get the same results with camera gear on account of them still having not figured out how to merge multiple exposures milliseconds apart. If camera makers don't radically alter image processing on their bodies, they'll soon find themselves in a place even smaller than what's already a niche.

FredPret 4y ago
I have an entry-level mirrorless and a top-level camera phone. The results are not in the same league, nevermind the phone being better. A bigger sensor and lens will always win.
solardev 4y ago
I wish someone just made an SLR with Android and Google Photos and the Google Camera, ie good lenses paired with good computational photography and easy sharing. Sony tried a few years back, but then Sony got it the way...
- spockz 4y ago
  Yes. I still don’t get why none of the camera makers outfits their camera with something on the level of the iPhone. Maybe there is less to be gained in dSLR because of the mirror. But mirrorless with the constant exposure should be a ready match.
  - Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
    I think mostly because they don't need to have that much processing power compare to a smartphone, due to their bigger lens/sensor - so they don't need to use higher end processing unit. You can delay the postprocessing to a dedicated (external) software so to say. One big advantage you have with dedicated hardware also is the reduced need to have a virtual interface (though UX is quite often in dire need to be improved on them, especially for advance configuration). A bit like knob are better in a car in a general way. But to be honest, at the end, it's clearly a difference of philosophy. I'd wager that the smartphone maker have better understood the market than the camera maker for a while.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    I have a pixel 6 with the same kind of 50 mega pixel sensor that the new iphone has (might even be the same sensor?). It's good. I also have a Fuji x-t30, which is a 26 megapixel camera from a few years ago. The Fuji is what I grab if I want to take a nice photo. The 12.5 megapixel photos that Apple and Google take by combining pixels in a 4:1 ratio from the 50 mega pixel sensor are alright and the resulting raw files that I can get from my phone are quite OK. But the Fuji raw files are way nicer. Just way more detail and dynamic range. People confuse the post processing that Apple and Google do in the phone with the quality of the camera. It's impressive what they do and the quality of the raw images is actually not as bad as it used to be on most phones. But it's still a noisy mess compared to any decent pro-sumer camera of the last ten years or so. You don't need the same trickery to make those photos look good. It's amazing what Apple and Google can do with the relatively limited form factor, sensor, lenses, etc. that phones have but when it comes to sensors, bigger is simply better and bigger requires more distance between the lens and the sensor. It's not the number of pixels that counts but their size and noise level. My Fuji is fine as an entry level camera but the real deal here is full frame sensors and expensive lenses. It makes all the difference. Some of the lenses on the market today are so good that it's pointless owning them unless you can pair them with a very high end camera and sensor. Phone lenses are comparatively not really worth talking about. Owning such a lens almost automatically means you probably want to have full creative control. So, typical owners of such cameras and lenses are not looking for point and click cameras but are deeply into controlling all aspects of their photography. Most manufacturers have put dslr development on halt or at least on the back-burner. The high end stuff is almost exclusively mirror less at this point.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      This is all true, but having a camera that’s even vaguely comparable which is in your pocket most the time, with functional software and near seamless upload/offload/sharing makes it vastly more desirable.
      - randomdata 4y ago
        In the same way a tractor is vastly more desirable than a sports car. Which is to say that, while they may share a passing resemblance, they are different tools that don't compare well.
  - Derbasti 4y ago
    Because of sensor readout speed. Phones do what they do by shooting dozens or hundreds of very fast frames, then combining them into the finished picture. Cameras can't do that, because their bigger sensors take longer to read out. There'd be too few frames, and too much gap between frames. Big sensors are slowly getting faster, too, with stacked sensors and the like. But they're not quite fast enough yet for phone-style computational shenanigans.
- awiesenhofer 4y ago
  I just want Sony to release updated versions of their QX10/QX100 external cameras for smartphones- it was such a good concept, just slightly ahead of its time. I'm sure they would sell lots of them nowadays. https://petapixel.com/2013/09/04/sony-officially-debuts-two-revolutionary-lens-style-cameras-smartphone/ https://petapixel.com/2013/09/04/sony-officially-debuts-two-... https://m.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-cybershot-dsc-qx100 https://m.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-cybershot-dsc-qx100
- petepete 4y ago
  Sounds like you're after a Zeiss ZX1. https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/int/photography/zx1.html https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/int/photography/zx1....
- remlov 4y ago
  If only the Samsung Galaxy NX that looked like a DSLR and had interchangeable lenses running Android took hold almost 10 years ago and evolved we would be here. For now I guess we can only dream.
- llampx 4y ago
  Its not Android, its the algorithms and the ISP. Pixel phones have their own ISP chip and their own algorithms. The fact that they take good photos has nothing to do with them running Android.
aspyct 4y ago
Phones will never have interchangeable lenses, or enough buttons to be usable fast. I dare you to do sports photography in dimly lit situations on a phone.
- gchokov 4y ago
  That's 1/10000 of what photography is.
  - flyinglizard 4y ago
    Anyone who has little kids often needs to shoot erratically moving subjects in a dimly lit environment. Low light is where most progress in imaging is made, I’d say perhaps over the last 7 years, ever since outright resolution stopped mattering (the others are dynamic range and focus performance). Everything that happened since like OIS, new generations of image sensors, computational photography etc came to serve longer shutter exposures to get more light into the sensor.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      Anyone with kids also takes vastly more photos with the camera that’s readily accessible and has good sharing capabilities. Would the nice camera with big lenses take even 1/100th as many images as the phone?
      - FredPret 4y ago
        If you own one and you like using it, definitely yes
      - randomdata 4y ago
        I'd say 90% of the photos I've taken of my kids has been with a dedicated camera and big lenses. It is definitely nice also having a camera that is readily accessible for certain situations, but I don't find its use generally compelling as unless photography is what I want to do with that time I'd rather spend that time enjoying life with the kids, not watching them live their lives behind a screen. When photography is what I want to do, I can have the dedicated camera at the ready.
spoonjim 4y ago
I’d love the brains of an iPhone or Pixel in the body of a full frame SLR.
- izacus 4y ago
  I seriously wonder why Sony hasn't put their Xperia Android firmware into a camera body. They already do something similar for MP3 players, so why the heck not in cameras.
hnov 4y ago
Phones outperform cameras in suboptimally lit shots. They also distort reality, hard. Good enough for IG but pretty different results otherwise.
- positus 4y ago
  Depends on what camera you're referring to. Many modern CMOS cameras can basically see in the dark.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    There’s an empty parking lot near my house that is pitch black at night. One morning early, I took a photo of it, on a lark - with a new Canon at high ISO and slow shutter. It was unreal, like someone had switched on the sun for a second. It’s grainy from the high ISO, but you can see full details in full colour and with the naked eye it’s as dark as a pool of black ink.
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      I used to do a similar thing many years ago. Since my then DSLR was atrocious above ISO 1600, and barely usable at 800, I had to learn to be patient. But the results of minutes-long exposures in the dark were absolutely crazy. Colors were very deep, and there was an incredible nuance in the tones of even the darkest corners. Highly recommended to anyone not used with taking pictures in such conditions. This could even be tried in one's home at night. All the random LEDs shining around in the dark actually create an eerie atmosphere if you look long enough.
- MAGZine 4y ago
  dslrs can use a similar technique that phones use—exposure bracketing—with good or better results depending on a variety of factors. It does make you wonder if fullsized camera bodies will figure out better bracketing. Exposure time is really important, and you need good computation to align the images and correct for stability. it's better to get it right during shooting than in post.
AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
I would disagree with this so much. If this would be the case every wedding photographer would just use an iPhone. Yes, phone does HDR (not always perfectly) but there is so much more to photography than trying to make shadows not black and sky as blue as possible.
- jeswin 4y ago
  > If this would be the case every wedding photographer would just use an iPhone. As a POC, some have. Here's Peter McKinnon [1], and Tomorrow's filmmakers [2]. The wedding is also a very controlled lighting scenario, allowing the dedicated camera to maximize its advantage. Shutter-speed matters too, which Phones have closed in on but not yet eliminated. (In my post, I called out brightly lit conditions.) Large camera bodies are also about looking "professional". Like most people don't wanna go to banks where staff is dressed in t-shirts and shorts. [1]: https://youtu.be/yLZJS2k2V4k https://youtu.be/yLZJS2k2V4k [2]: https://youtu.be/6RAVCzd0MZw https://youtu.be/6RAVCzd0MZw
  - aspyct 4y ago
    In real life, weddings don't have a strong control of light. Quite the opposite. It's usually a big mess.
    - llampx 4y ago
      Some weddings I have gone to have the photographer with a big flash and an assistant, who has an even bigger light. With predictable results - everyone looks startled and you can tell that all the red eye has been photoshopped out. To take candid photos in a dimly lit environment (evening, church, outdoors at night etc) you need a big honking flash or a lens that captures more light than the Hubble.
      - aspyct 4y ago
        Yeah I use a flash during the dinner and party at a wedding, but during church is a big fat no :p Indeed, you're stuck with big telephoto lenses and high iso.
belugacat 4y ago
Look to the Fuji GFX 100S for the future of digital cameras. Large optics + a medium format surface area sensor at 100MP is not something phones can rival anytime soon (or perhaps even ever, given the physics at play and the form factor phones require). Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line.
- jeswin 4y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. Phones are already touching 1" (almost), about 1/12 the size of the sensor in the Fuji. Those sensors are going to advance faster than the Fuji in almost every way, and it's possible that software will make up for the remaining. > Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line. I think this is fairly unlikely. It's a niche market, and there'll be no money to be made in selling $1k medium format cameras. For those who are buying high-end cameras (professionals mostly), the sensor size is just one of the factors determining the purchase. They care about build, weather-sealing, buttons, ports, write-speeds, battery etc - a $1k camera would have to compromise on all of those.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    A top of the line mirrorless from 5-10 years ago will destroy an iphone in 90% of situations. You can get a sony a7II for 400 euros, add a cheap manual focus lens and you're set.
  - max51 4y ago
    > Phones are already touching 1" (almost) They are barely 1/2" in actual size. The iphone 14 pro sensor for example is 9.8x7.3mm. When they call them "1/2 inch" or "3/4 inch", they refer to the diameter of a glass tube (ultra old measurement from the CRT days), not the physical size of the sensor. They only continue to name it like that to make people think their sensor is somewhat close to the Full-frame or APS-C that you get in a professional camera.
llampx 4y ago
Yes, it is another example of software eating the world. Sony, for example, makes most of the sensors that find their way into smartphones the world over, but their own phones with the same sensors are not at the top-level at all. Google really kicked off the computational photography space, Huawei made some leaps and bounds improvements to it, and now Apple is following up. Unfortunately thanks to US policies we don't have real competition to Apple since Huawei was kneecapped. Other Chinese companies learned their place. I would love a versatile camera in a phone like what I have in my Chinese phone that cost under $500 - a 108mp camera with a large sensor, 3x and 5x telephoto zoom, and an ultrawide.
saiya-jin 4y ago
The day I bought my Samsung S22 ultra is the day I stopped lugging around my full frame Nikon. And I took it everywhere, all hikes and skitours, many climbs, got with it to 6000m altitude on Aconcagua too. Last time I took it to vacation to Egypt and literally didn't take it out of pouch for 2 weeks. Good pictures as it does, the pain of carrying 2.5kg camera around all the time, looking weird in small public spaces and all the freakin time wasted post-processing ain't worth it for me. I have phone camera with 16x zoom range altogether, small kids and I strongly prefer making (sometimes) sub-ideal pics of almost all situations rather than a bit better pics of few of those. Often it does properly great photos. And much much much better videos. While weighting 200g and fitting (so-so) in my pocket. I literally couldn't care less about mirrorless cameras, for me cameras are over.
- TedShiller 4y ago
  This is not a bad approach as long as you only look at your photos on a phone. If you ever print them, or look at them on a monitor, they won't measure up. But for convenience, you can't beat a phone.
  - jjav 4y ago
    > This is not a bad approach as long as you only look at your photos on a phone. If you ever print them, or look at them on a monitor, they won't measure up. And you never really know which photo will turn out so nice you later want to print it. Someone taking photos only on their phone won't have that option. In the wall behind me I have a 4-foot wide print of a photo I took on vacation. It's a crop of a section of the photo that later (a few years later) I realized would make for a great print on the wall. Glad I took it with the DSLR, so a cropped section printed out to 4 feet looks stunning.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Fuji x100v is the way to go for travel, 450gr, fits in a jacket pocket, miles ahead of any phones for portraits, printings, &c. you can shoot jpegs and never edit the files thanks to their inbody presets That being said I also just bring my pixel 3 for hikes and sport in general even though I own a few leicas, nikon, &c. weight is king sometimes
ricardobeat 4y ago
The highly processed images are instantly identified by the artificial lighting / HDR look, ringing around subjects. Adding that to a DSLR is not going to do wonders (mine already has native HDR and it looks exactly as you’d expect). What you should be looking at as a benchmark is cinema sensors with wide dynamic range like RED. You can get slightly better range from the iPhone by shooting RAW, but still far behind.
mijamo 4y ago
That is just plain wrong. No later than a month ago I was in vacation and took several picture with a regular mirrorless (Fuji x-e3) and a new pixel phone, while others in the group had iphones. The mirrorless picture quality was just miles ahead. In bright conditions the pixel were pretty good for the light parts but not for any shadow, and it lacks nuance. iPhone photos are just not that great, with colors all over the place, and bad shadows. Sure it may look fine on the iphone screen for instagram but put that on a bigger screen or print and it's just not good.
vladvasiliu 4y ago
This summer, I was in the US desert with a friend (AZ/UT). He had an iPhone 11 pro (maybe you consider this old?), while I had a 6 yo m4/3 Olympus (never was particularly high-end). His pictures would systematically look "flatter", almost cartoonish. They were lacking a certain nuance in the colors, especially on larger swaths of similar colors (think the buttes in Monument Valley). Its saving grace was that, out of camera, my sky was a tad lighter than you'd expect. The camera does have an HDR mode, but I basically never bother with it.
lm28469 4y ago
They only look better if you're not a photographer and/or don't know what you're doing. As soon as you dig in the files they absolutely fall apart, plus you don't have any control whatsoever on the camera unless you use some extremely clunky third party apps
- Infinitesimus 4y ago
  "They only look better if you're not a photographer and/or don't know what you're doing" That would mean they look better to the majority of people who consume photos...
lm28469 4y ago
A fiat 500 outperform a ferrari to go to the supermarket yet ferrari still sells cars It's not the same market at all

by jeswin 4y ago

FredPret 4y ago

I have an entry-level mirrorless and a top-level camera phone. The results are not in the same league, nevermind the phone being better. A bigger sensor and lens will always win.

solardev 4y ago

I wish someone just made an SLR with Android and Google Photos and the Google Camera, ie good lenses paired with good computational photography and easy sharing. Sony tried a few years back, but then Sony got it the way...

spockz 4y ago
Yes. I still don’t get why none of the camera makers outfits their camera with something on the level of the iPhone. Maybe there is less to be gained in dSLR because of the mirror. But mirrorless with the constant exposure should be a ready match.
- Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
  I think mostly because they don't need to have that much processing power compare to a smartphone, due to their bigger lens/sensor - so they don't need to use higher end processing unit. You can delay the postprocessing to a dedicated (external) software so to say. One big advantage you have with dedicated hardware also is the reduced need to have a virtual interface (though UX is quite often in dire need to be improved on them, especially for advance configuration). A bit like knob are better in a car in a general way. But to be honest, at the end, it's clearly a difference of philosophy. I'd wager that the smartphone maker have better understood the market than the camera maker for a while.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  I have a pixel 6 with the same kind of 50 mega pixel sensor that the new iphone has (might even be the same sensor?). It's good. I also have a Fuji x-t30, which is a 26 megapixel camera from a few years ago. The Fuji is what I grab if I want to take a nice photo. The 12.5 megapixel photos that Apple and Google take by combining pixels in a 4:1 ratio from the 50 mega pixel sensor are alright and the resulting raw files that I can get from my phone are quite OK. But the Fuji raw files are way nicer. Just way more detail and dynamic range. People confuse the post processing that Apple and Google do in the phone with the quality of the camera. It's impressive what they do and the quality of the raw images is actually not as bad as it used to be on most phones. But it's still a noisy mess compared to any decent pro-sumer camera of the last ten years or so. You don't need the same trickery to make those photos look good. It's amazing what Apple and Google can do with the relatively limited form factor, sensor, lenses, etc. that phones have but when it comes to sensors, bigger is simply better and bigger requires more distance between the lens and the sensor. It's not the number of pixels that counts but their size and noise level. My Fuji is fine as an entry level camera but the real deal here is full frame sensors and expensive lenses. It makes all the difference. Some of the lenses on the market today are so good that it's pointless owning them unless you can pair them with a very high end camera and sensor. Phone lenses are comparatively not really worth talking about. Owning such a lens almost automatically means you probably want to have full creative control. So, typical owners of such cameras and lenses are not looking for point and click cameras but are deeply into controlling all aspects of their photography. Most manufacturers have put dslr development on halt or at least on the back-burner. The high end stuff is almost exclusively mirror less at this point.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    This is all true, but having a camera that’s even vaguely comparable which is in your pocket most the time, with functional software and near seamless upload/offload/sharing makes it vastly more desirable.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      In the same way a tractor is vastly more desirable than a sports car. Which is to say that, while they may share a passing resemblance, they are different tools that don't compare well.
- Derbasti 4y ago
  Because of sensor readout speed. Phones do what they do by shooting dozens or hundreds of very fast frames, then combining them into the finished picture. Cameras can't do that, because their bigger sensors take longer to read out. There'd be too few frames, and too much gap between frames. Big sensors are slowly getting faster, too, with stacked sensors and the like. But they're not quite fast enough yet for phone-style computational shenanigans.
awiesenhofer 4y ago
I just want Sony to release updated versions of their QX10/QX100 external cameras for smartphones- it was such a good concept, just slightly ahead of its time. I'm sure they would sell lots of them nowadays. https://petapixel.com/2013/09/04/sony-officially-debuts-two-revolutionary-lens-style-cameras-smartphone/ https://petapixel.com/2013/09/04/sony-officially-debuts-two-... https://m.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-cybershot-dsc-qx100 https://m.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-cybershot-dsc-qx100
petepete 4y ago
Sounds like you're after a Zeiss ZX1. https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/int/photography/zx1.html https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/int/photography/zx1....
remlov 4y ago
If only the Samsung Galaxy NX that looked like a DSLR and had interchangeable lenses running Android took hold almost 10 years ago and evolved we would be here. For now I guess we can only dream.
llampx 4y ago
Its not Android, its the algorithms and the ISP. Pixel phones have their own ISP chip and their own algorithms. The fact that they take good photos has nothing to do with them running Android.

aspyct 4y ago

Phones will never have interchangeable lenses, or enough buttons to be usable fast. I dare you to do sports photography in dimly lit situations on a phone.

gchokov 4y ago
That's 1/10000 of what photography is.
- flyinglizard 4y ago
  Anyone who has little kids often needs to shoot erratically moving subjects in a dimly lit environment. Low light is where most progress in imaging is made, I’d say perhaps over the last 7 years, ever since outright resolution stopped mattering (the others are dynamic range and focus performance). Everything that happened since like OIS, new generations of image sensors, computational photography etc came to serve longer shutter exposures to get more light into the sensor.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    Anyone with kids also takes vastly more photos with the camera that’s readily accessible and has good sharing capabilities. Would the nice camera with big lenses take even 1/100th as many images as the phone?
    - FredPret 4y ago
      If you own one and you like using it, definitely yes
    - randomdata 4y ago
      I'd say 90% of the photos I've taken of my kids has been with a dedicated camera and big lenses. It is definitely nice also having a camera that is readily accessible for certain situations, but I don't find its use generally compelling as unless photography is what I want to do with that time I'd rather spend that time enjoying life with the kids, not watching them live their lives behind a screen. When photography is what I want to do, I can have the dedicated camera at the ready.

spoonjim 4y ago

I’d love the brains of an iPhone or Pixel in the body of a full frame SLR.

izacus 4y ago
I seriously wonder why Sony hasn't put their Xperia Android firmware into a camera body. They already do something similar for MP3 players, so why the heck not in cameras.

hnov 4y ago

Phones outperform cameras in suboptimally lit shots. They also distort reality, hard. Good enough for IG but pretty different results otherwise.

positus 4y ago
Depends on what camera you're referring to. Many modern CMOS cameras can basically see in the dark.
- FredPret 4y ago
  There’s an empty parking lot near my house that is pitch black at night. One morning early, I took a photo of it, on a lark - with a new Canon at high ISO and slow shutter. It was unreal, like someone had switched on the sun for a second. It’s grainy from the high ISO, but you can see full details in full colour and with the naked eye it’s as dark as a pool of black ink.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    I used to do a similar thing many years ago. Since my then DSLR was atrocious above ISO 1600, and barely usable at 800, I had to learn to be patient. But the results of minutes-long exposures in the dark were absolutely crazy. Colors were very deep, and there was an incredible nuance in the tones of even the darkest corners. Highly recommended to anyone not used with taking pictures in such conditions. This could even be tried in one's home at night. All the random LEDs shining around in the dark actually create an eerie atmosphere if you look long enough.
MAGZine 4y ago
dslrs can use a similar technique that phones use—exposure bracketing—with good or better results depending on a variety of factors. It does make you wonder if fullsized camera bodies will figure out better bracketing. Exposure time is really important, and you need good computation to align the images and correct for stability. it's better to get it right during shooting than in post.

AndrewThrowaway 4y ago

I would disagree with this so much. If this would be the case every wedding photographer would just use an iPhone. Yes, phone does HDR (not always perfectly) but there is so much more to photography than trying to make shadows not black and sky as blue as possible.

jeswin 4y ago
> If this would be the case every wedding photographer would just use an iPhone. As a POC, some have. Here's Peter McKinnon [1], and Tomorrow's filmmakers [2]. The wedding is also a very controlled lighting scenario, allowing the dedicated camera to maximize its advantage. Shutter-speed matters too, which Phones have closed in on but not yet eliminated. (In my post, I called out brightly lit conditions.) Large camera bodies are also about looking "professional". Like most people don't wanna go to banks where staff is dressed in t-shirts and shorts. [1]: https://youtu.be/yLZJS2k2V4k https://youtu.be/yLZJS2k2V4k [2]: https://youtu.be/6RAVCzd0MZw https://youtu.be/6RAVCzd0MZw
- aspyct 4y ago
  In real life, weddings don't have a strong control of light. Quite the opposite. It's usually a big mess.
  - llampx 4y ago
    Some weddings I have gone to have the photographer with a big flash and an assistant, who has an even bigger light. With predictable results - everyone looks startled and you can tell that all the red eye has been photoshopped out. To take candid photos in a dimly lit environment (evening, church, outdoors at night etc) you need a big honking flash or a lens that captures more light than the Hubble.
    - aspyct 4y ago
      Yeah I use a flash during the dinner and party at a wedding, but during church is a big fat no :p Indeed, you're stuck with big telephoto lenses and high iso.

belugacat 4y ago

Look to the Fuji GFX 100S for the future of digital cameras. Large optics + a medium format surface area sensor at 100MP is not something phones can rival anytime soon (or perhaps even ever, given the physics at play and the form factor phones require). Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line.

jeswin 4y ago
I'm not so sure about that. Phones are already touching 1" (almost), about 1/12 the size of the sensor in the Fuji. Those sensors are going to advance faster than the Fuji in almost every way, and it's possible that software will make up for the remaining. > Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line. I think this is fairly unlikely. It's a niche market, and there'll be no money to be made in selling $1k medium format cameras. For those who are buying high-end cameras (professionals mostly), the sensor size is just one of the factors determining the purchase. They care about build, weather-sealing, buttons, ports, write-speeds, battery etc - a $1k camera would have to compromise on all of those.
- lm28469 4y ago
  A top of the line mirrorless from 5-10 years ago will destroy an iphone in 90% of situations. You can get a sony a7II for 400 euros, add a cheap manual focus lens and you're set.
- max51 4y ago
  > Phones are already touching 1" (almost) They are barely 1/2" in actual size. The iphone 14 pro sensor for example is 9.8x7.3mm. When they call them "1/2 inch" or "3/4 inch", they refer to the diameter of a glass tube (ultra old measurement from the CRT days), not the physical size of the sensor. They only continue to name it like that to make people think their sensor is somewhat close to the Full-frame or APS-C that you get in a professional camera.

llampx 4y ago

Yes, it is another example of software eating the world. Sony, for example, makes most of the sensors that find their way into smartphones the world over, but their own phones with the same sensors are not at the top-level at all. Google really kicked off the computational photography space, Huawei made some leaps and bounds improvements to it, and now Apple is following up. Unfortunately thanks to US policies we don't have real competition to Apple since Huawei was kneecapped. Other Chinese companies learned their place. I would love a versatile camera in a phone like what I have in my Chinese phone that cost under $500 - a 108mp camera with a large sensor, 3x and 5x telephoto zoom, and an ultrawide.

saiya-jin 4y ago

The day I bought my Samsung S22 ultra is the day I stopped lugging around my full frame Nikon. And I took it everywhere, all hikes and skitours, many climbs, got with it to 6000m altitude on Aconcagua too. Last time I took it to vacation to Egypt and literally didn't take it out of pouch for 2 weeks. Good pictures as it does, the pain of carrying 2.5kg camera around all the time, looking weird in small public spaces and all the freakin time wasted post-processing ain't worth it for me. I have phone camera with 16x zoom range altogether, small kids and I strongly prefer making (sometimes) sub-ideal pics of almost all situations rather than a bit better pics of few of those. Often it does properly great photos. And much much much better videos. While weighting 200g and fitting (so-so) in my pocket. I literally couldn't care less about mirrorless cameras, for me cameras are over.

TedShiller 4y ago
This is not a bad approach as long as you only look at your photos on a phone. If you ever print them, or look at them on a monitor, they won't measure up. But for convenience, you can't beat a phone.
- jjav 4y ago
  > This is not a bad approach as long as you only look at your photos on a phone. If you ever print them, or look at them on a monitor, they won't measure up. And you never really know which photo will turn out so nice you later want to print it. Someone taking photos only on their phone won't have that option. In the wall behind me I have a 4-foot wide print of a photo I took on vacation. It's a crop of a section of the photo that later (a few years later) I realized would make for a great print on the wall. Glad I took it with the DSLR, so a cropped section printed out to 4 feet looks stunning.
lm28469 4y ago
Fuji x100v is the way to go for travel, 450gr, fits in a jacket pocket, miles ahead of any phones for portraits, printings, &c. you can shoot jpegs and never edit the files thanks to their inbody presets That being said I also just bring my pixel 3 for hikes and sport in general even though I own a few leicas, nikon, &c. weight is king sometimes

ricardobeat 4y ago

The highly processed images are instantly identified by the artificial lighting / HDR look, ringing around subjects. Adding that to a DSLR is not going to do wonders (mine already has native HDR and it looks exactly as you’d expect). What you should be looking at as a benchmark is cinema sensors with wide dynamic range like RED. You can get slightly better range from the iPhone by shooting RAW, but still far behind.

mijamo 4y ago

That is just plain wrong. No later than a month ago I was in vacation and took several picture with a regular mirrorless (Fuji x-e3) and a new pixel phone, while others in the group had iphones. The mirrorless picture quality was just miles ahead. In bright conditions the pixel were pretty good for the light parts but not for any shadow, and it lacks nuance. iPhone photos are just not that great, with colors all over the place, and bad shadows. Sure it may look fine on the iphone screen for instagram but put that on a bigger screen or print and it's just not good.

vladvasiliu 4y ago

This summer, I was in the US desert with a friend (AZ/UT). He had an iPhone 11 pro (maybe you consider this old?), while I had a 6 yo m4/3 Olympus (never was particularly high-end). His pictures would systematically look "flatter", almost cartoonish. They were lacking a certain nuance in the colors, especially on larger swaths of similar colors (think the buttes in Monument Valley). Its saving grace was that, out of camera, my sky was a tad lighter than you'd expect. The camera does have an HDR mode, but I basically never bother with it.

lm28469 4y ago

They only look better if you're not a photographer and/or don't know what you're doing. As soon as you dig in the files they absolutely fall apart, plus you don't have any control whatsoever on the camera unless you use some extremely clunky third party apps

Infinitesimus 4y ago
"They only look better if you're not a photographer and/or don't know what you're doing" That would mean they look better to the majority of people who consume photos...

lm28469 4y ago

A fiat 500 outperform a ferrari to go to the supermarket yet ferrari still sells cars It's not the same market at all