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Camera manufacturers are institutionally incapable of writing good software. I have experience with Sony, and their firmware barely changed in the last decade.

by pornel 4y ago

Camera manufacturers are institutionally incapable of writing good software. I have experience with Sony, and their firmware barely changed in the last decade. Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work. Touch screens are from a bygone era: laggy, imprecise, and without multi-touch. They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos came out sharp. Their phone apps are a clunky afterthought. Smartphones are running circles around them with computational photography. "HDR" mode on Sony cameras is slow and primitive. I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time.

FpUser 4y ago
>"I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time." As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking. And you do not even have to dick with raw files to see the difference. Plain JPEG coming out of my relatively ancient D800 puts best smartphone cam to shame. Size matters and full frame sensor vs one in smartphone are incomparable. That is not to say that smartphone can not take decent photos and in many cases what is being photographed matters way more than the picture quality as long as it is not atrocious.
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  Well, I have some photos of Amsterdam I took on iPhone 5S and they look just fine on my display. And we've had a ton of progress since then. In general case, you're right, but modern smartphones have come a long way.
- pornel 4y ago
  I'd be nice to have normal-sized lens, but it's hard to justify lugging them when the rest of the camera is so primitive. Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus. May screw up exposure. It's harder to check the photos. Extra steps are needed to get the photos out of the camera. And it annoys me to no end that my dumb camera can't automatically adjust its clock and the timezone.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    You don't have to cart around a big-ass DSLR with multi-pound lenses. My pen-f (2016) runs circles around an iphone pro, and it's pretty small and light for a "real" camera (it can fit in my coat pocket). > Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus. This is not true, especially if we're talking about DSLRs (as opposed to mirrorless). I used to have a Canon 40D. I never turned it off. It would stay "on" in the bag for however long I didn't use it. It consumed next to nothing when in "sleep" mode, but came out of it ready to shoot at the touch of a button. Autofocus was plenty fast, too. Ditto for a friend's Sony A700 (same vintage APS-C DSLR). I understand current mirrorless cameras have much better autofocus, even the mid-range ones. Even my pen-f (mirrorless) wakes up or turns on much quicker than you can slide around your finger on an iphone. Autofocus isn't great in low-light, though.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    You never touched a real camera, did you? AF speed depends on the lense, older ones with a screw drive AF are slower than newer ones where the AF motor is in the lens. Camera AF speed is incredible so, starting with mid-level cameras, let alone to speak of the more pro-grade stuff. And those cameras are ready to shoot faster from fully of than it takes to get them from holding them to your side to your eye. Definitely faster than getting a smartphone camera ready.
  - radlad 4y ago
    > Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus. This is definitely not true. Cameras may take slightly longer to start than a phone takes to turn its screen on, but the same amount of time (or quicker) to get to "shooting a photo." (Yes, even with shortcuts like double-tap the power button on a phone.) The Ricoh GR III is ready to shoot in 0.7 seconds, and that includes extending a retracted lens barrel. And this is a pocketable camera. Fast AF on a phone is mostly due to the fact that they usually use very wide-angle lenses. There's a wider range of acceptable focus. Newer lenses and cameras (i.e. the last 5-7 years) on a DSLR are still way faster.
  - 4y ago
- ZetaZero 4y ago
  ...my relatively ancient D800... Launched five years ago at $3000.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hef19898 4y ago
    And being sold used for 700-ish. Heck, an ancient D700 beats any smartphone whatsoever at larger prints and screens. You do have to do some post-processing yourself, true. And you need proper optics, there is only so much you can crop out of 12 MP. Smartphones take great pictures, and I love the fact that it gets a lot more people into photography than back during the film days. making art more accessible can only be good. But let's not kid ourselves, the reason why smartphone photos do look so great is a ton of heavy automated post-processing in device. I'd prefer to have that same functionalities available as stand-alone post-processing software. Or not, I'm fine with darktable.
    - radlad 4y ago
      I think the problem is less about the number of megapixels and more about the size of the pixels (i.e. sensor) personally. Smartphones simply cannot resolve the same level of detail that a proper camera can, regardless of how many MP of resolution they provide. Computational AI helps a bit, but...
  - gsu2 4y ago
    Launched ten years ago: https://www.dpreview.com/products/nikon/slrs/nikon_d800 https://www.dpreview.com/products/nikon/slrs/nikon_d800 Currently available for ~$600: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=nikon+d800&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=nikon+d800&LH_Sold=1&L...
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    I’ve had mine since 2012.
- jve 4y ago
  > As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking I hope I'll view photos on 4K someday...
- MSFT_Edging 4y ago
  I've noticed recently that a lot of smartphone cameras are doing a lot of heavy software upscaling and smoothing that erases details worse than simply low resolution. Everything is starting to look airbrushed. Having a real lens to do a lot of the optical heavy lifting and letting the sensor sense makes a huge difference if you really care about detail.
  - twoWhlsGud 4y ago
    Yes, and this means that everything you shoot with (say) an iPhone tends to look the same. The camera has a very well curated set of opinions on color science etc that works really well for most people, but it enforces a look and once you try and wander out of that it stops being an effective instrument for looking at the world. (Yes, ProRAW helps a bit, but nothing beats real lenses on a big sensor for having your own control over image creation.) That said, if you're just taking snaps to share with friends I don't see why you'd care about any of that : )
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. That's an enthusiast niche at best. That alone a market sustaining a large multinational co does not make. Sensibly, workflows optimize for the smartphone consumption use case. And yes, that hurts as photographers who obsessed over sharpness and pixel-level fidelity since the invention of digital cameras, but that just doesn't seem to be where the zeitgeist is at anymore. People never really cared in the first place. It's similar to how music producers obsess over whether a particular synth sound was made with analog gear or was a "cheap digital knockoff". The listener never cared in the first place. They just want to be moved wherever it is that they are, which happens to be on the phone 99% of the time in photography.
  - FpUser 4y ago
    >The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. That's an enthusiast niche at best." Maybe. I do not care. I only use phone as to call, GPS, controlling some gadgets, take a pic and that is it. I do the rest on PC on big screens.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    > The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. If you want to further process the image you want the best quality input you can get. Think digitally zooming/reframing, or choosing from a bigger dynamic range to use the colors you prefer. In a lower quality input you might be stuck with whatever photo you took, while the high-quality input gives you more information to correct the picture, even if the end resolution ends up being the same. P.S. Good printed photos also have more definition that most monitors (idk if 4k, but I believe comparable), for products like printed wedding photos.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    When you edit or crop you lose information. It's good to start with extra.
- jjav 4y ago
  > As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking. Exactly. Or when you print them out. On the wall here I have a printed photo about 4ft wide, taken from a cropped section of a photo (not even the full frame) and it looks stunning. And this isn't even from a newer pro camera, it was taken with a ~15 year old Nikon D40.
  - ymolodtsov 4y ago
    A 4ft printed photo isn't exactly a popular use case. A 10x15 would look great.
Scene_Cast2 4y ago
The funny thing is that this translates over to Sony Xperia smartphone cameras too. On one hand, their custom camera app's UI feels like a Sony A7 variant. On the other, basic expected computational features such as night mode are missing.
- nolok 4y ago
  > On the other, basic expected computational features such as night mode are missing. Oh, how fast is progress in the world of technology. I remember 6 years ago when google showed some prototypes of night photo from a smartphone using long expose. Meanwhile my Galaxy Note 4 made blurry unusable mess during the 14th of july nightly event I tried it at, while my gf DLSR were clear and great. Ah ah, smartphones will never be able to do that. How 4 years ago Night Sight blew me away with their demonstration and almost made me go pixel. How 3 years ago Samsung added a Night mode to my S9+ through a regular update and while the photo took a whole second to take the result was usually clean and crisp compared to the noisy mess on my previous Note 4, making it actually usable for static scene or portrait shot. How the night mode on my Note 10 was genuinely great to the point it was just another mode as long as you avoid the usual night tricks like light sources. How my new S22 Ultra for the first time passed my "smartphone will never really be good for night event shots" by taking picture during the 14th of july fireworks the quality of which I would scientifically classify as "pretty fucking great". And now it's just a basic expected computational feature. Sometime we forget how much progress is being made due to how incremental they all are, but damn, and that's just one feature on a piece of glass and plastic that's insanely powerful and filled with features in my pocket. PS: the lack of Apple mention is merely because I'm not an Apple guy, I'm sure they had the same insane path
  - eganist 4y ago
    Among my devices I have a phone that unfolds into a tablet and has 3x optical, 0.6x optical, and 10x AI-assisted zoom that can take pictures like this (https://imgur.com/a/ITwdZSO https://imgur.com/a/ITwdZSO) with a total 30x zoom from literally 20 miles away. (Edit: for those curious, it's Samsung's "AI Super-resolution" tech, which I expect works similarly to AI upscaling tech e.g in Adobe's products. The phone I'm using in this example is the Fold 4) And I don't even have the best smartphone camera on the market right now. That prize goes to the S22 ultra which has two separate telephoto lenses (cameras?), 3x and 10x. https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-out-the-new-camera-functions-of-the-galaxy-s22-series/ https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-out-... Yeah when you sit down and think about it, it's nuts where we are today relative to last year, five years ago, and a decade ago. Especially considering 2019 still feels like yesterday because of COVID.
deleted 4y ago
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nradov 4y ago
It's so bizarre that camera manufacturers never figured out that the camera should be treated primarily as a smartphone peripheral. When I take a picture on the compact camera it should automatically sync to the smart phone camera roll with geotagging. All of the camera's settings and shutter should be controllable through a smartphone app. This lack of integration was a real failure of vision by camera manufacturers.
- netsharc 4y ago
  Sounds like you're complaining about a lack of vision because they couldn't mix technologies from different years, or have the budget to make a phone as well as a camera... But it does seem to be a clever idea, I'm imagining a phone that has surface contacts on its back, and a Go-Pro-sized camera module that you can attach to the phone (with precise magnets, so the surface contacts on both devices would connect both devices electronically as well) and be recognized as a peripheral for the phone. But I guess if already have a pro camera, you don't want to need to slap your phone on it to get it to work.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    That exists, the Sony QX100. Nobody bought it because it’s not quite as good as a real camera and it’s something you have to remember to bring with you.
    - netsharc 4y ago
      The whole lag and connection issue shown in the video is probably why grandparent comment's idea hasn't taken off. Since no phones have surface contacts, maybe if the lens had a USB-C connection it'd be a lot better (but no closed-garden iPhone support, obviously).
- adwww 4y ago
  Fuji have all of that functionality over WiFi on their X series. ...Only, as the parent comment says, it barely works, and the UI to get to it is awful, and the WiFi transfer speed is ridiculously slow.
lettergram 4y ago
I think they’re actually trying to solve different issues. Cameras are designed to capture & store the light in a way we can interpret later. They intentionally weren’t designed to edit or interpret the light and make corrections. Smart phones automatically do interpret and “correct” images. This can lead to artificially created artifacts in the image files. Professional photographers will often prefer the raw because they can apply their own edits without said artifacts. Now sure, camera photos are good for 99% of people, 99% of the time. BUT because the software on cameras were never designed to do those corrections, they just don’t. This makes night images worse, unless you decrease shutter speed. On a side note, it’s this very fact that I find it difficult to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if you’re looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify / generate the fine detail.
- gruez 4y ago
  >On a side note, it’s this very fact that I find it difficult to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if you’re looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify / generate the fine detail. Are there examples of this? The only example I can think of was an accusation a while ago that huawei phones were compositing a stock photo of the moon when taking moon pictures with their phones. They denied the accusation and it wasn't really clear whether it was actually happening or not.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    That Dallas plane crash recently had a new cell phone video surface where it is clear that the fighter started diving, but what is not clear is if there is a drone he was trying to avoid; and it's very possible that the apparent drone could also be a video artifact. And upscaling tools/etc introduce their own information, and may cause it to make something appear to be there that is actually just compression noise.
- brookst 4y ago
  You’re right that cameras never adapted to a world where users want cars, not faster horses. But I think you may be playing a bit loose with the ideas of evidence and details. Yes, smartphones “invent” details, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where those changes produce false evidence. You might find details of leaves rendered as watercolor brushstrokes; you won’t find a suspect inserted into a scene. And remember that film annd magnetic tape cameras also invent details. All of that film grain that we find artistic is not really there. Should we also question what we see on those videos because they aren’t pixel-perfect?
hef19898 4y ago
Camera manufacturers are very capabale of making hardware, incl. optics, that run sophisticated embedded software to take pictures. For editing, go to Adobe or one of the alternatives. Different use cases, different products, different markets. And not everything in the world can be solved by some consumer grade app.
- heather45879 4y ago
  I prefer manual buttons when taking photos the traditional way. Too many digital screens these days deviate from a good solid device that does a few things really well.
  - bigyikes 4y ago
    This is why I got a Fuji XT-30. It’s got a physical control for everything. I don’t have to use the menu unless I’m doing something unusual. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like there are many cameras designed this way anymore.
- awestroke 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with editing. Modern smartphones combine multiple pictures for each picture you take, and have very sophisticated demosaicing, noise reduction and color grading. No app needed.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I could not disagree more. Professional photographers require good reliable connectivity. Nikon cameras are extremely clunky in this regard. Similarly, their menu system is atrocious. I am not saying this as somebody who looked at a camera once and said "this is too hard". I ran a photo business from 2008 to 2018, read all the manuals intimately and worked with Nikon cameras daily, and came to it from techie nerd perspective and knew what every button option and mode does in intricate detail. "Great hardware, horrible software" is well understood state of camera business last 2 decades. I now have two young kids. I have 4 dslr and two mirrorless cameras at home... And take kids photos with my cell - because it's convenient accessible and fast to transmit. Why can't I have an efficient sharing work flow with my $3000 camera? Because they make sucky closed systems and refuse to change open or learn.
hwbehrens 4y ago
I can't speak for cameras specifically, but my partner is Taiwanese and apparently this hardware/software dichotomy is extremely prevalent there as well. Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke. Thus, the best and most talented engineers go into hardware, and the jokers work in software, leading to this "good hardware, bad software" observed outcome and reinforcing the stereotype further. Rinse, repeat, and you eventually end up with decent hardware running absolutely garbage firmware. Given the social cross-pollination between Japan and Taiwan, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar pattern held true there as well.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  That's a bit odd. Are they unaware of the last 30 years of computer history? Even as someone with a background in mechanical engineering the degree of complexity behind some software products, such as Windows, is really impressive.
  - Tempest1981 4y ago
    (Probably a rhetorical question, but...) It's hard to overcome preconceived notions. As we know from politics, emotions are much stronger than logic. You can't simply say, "be logical!" or "change your view".
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    I suspect "hardware is real engineering" is really just "hardware engineering is where you can find prestigious employment in this country". It used to be quite similar in South Korea until the more recent rise of domestic software giants like Naver and Kakao Corp. In a lot of the East Asian countries, there is a large gap in desirability between the large, established employers and smaller companies due to outrageous differences in pay grade, benefits and job stability. So new business has a tougher time making it to escape velocity and offering significant numbers of jobs.
    - smahs 4y ago
      +1. I have vague memories of my time at a Japanese automation vendor out of the uni. I had quit out of frustration that the software was super buggy, there was no one to help except just a couple of people in Japan who knew the software but would not reply to emails. I also remember feeling neglected as folks working on the hardware or on customer projects were paid higher than me. A recent experience at a neobanking startup from SE Asia reaffirms the point. Despite the product built around an API-only model, the firm was operations heavy when it came to decision making and investing in people, as it was believed to be the core company strength (for a variety of reasons including the institutional bureaucracy, corruption in these markets, etc.) TL;DR people work where the money flows. Companies get what they pay for. And the investors pay for what they think is the strength or is likely to sell at inflated valuations.
esel2k 4y ago
I agree on all points with my sony a7. Especially the Bluetooth connectivity was a great start but no updates and constantly dropping connections make it look laughable in 2022. I guess there is a perception that it is like hardware « once its out its sold and we don’t care about it ». At this stage I am seriously wondering if I will ever replace my camera with a new one or just be happy with a new smartphone. Maybe the camera will just stay a a sidehobby.
Tempest1981 4y ago
Sony still makes many smartphone sensors. And optics? Not sure. They just don't get to put their name on the resulting "camera" in this new world.
manv1 4y ago
It's not a problem with camera manufacturers, it's a problem with hardware companies. Even chip vendors, who you would would think understand the importance of software, will de-prioritize their software side. I wonder if it's a sort of macho thing; anyone can learn to write software, but not everyone can get an EE degree. It also could be that the idea of incremental releases doesn't really exist on the hardware side. Hardware, because it's physical, requires a coordinated release. Then you do the next revision once the inventory gets low. The idea that you can ship on a flexible schedule is alien to the hardware side.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  > anyone can learn to write software, but not everyone can get an EE degree. I took a EE microcontrollers class. A lot of EEs struggled writing assembly, and they all had at least an introductory C programming course.
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago
  > sort of macho thing please contain this to twitter. What does "macho" have to do with comparing the relative difficulty of two things and attaching status to the most difficult? That's how society brought us where we are.
weberer 4y ago
Get a Canon and install CHDK. https://bw.vern.cc/chdk/wiki/CHDK https://bw.vern.cc/chdk/wiki/CHDK
- Wistar 4y ago
  Wow. Thank you. I had no idea this existed. I have a Canon S95 long languishing on the shelf and will have to give CHDK a try.
binkHN 4y ago
I couldn't agree with this more. My small child received a compact camera as a gift. While it was a decent camera for a kid, she was very frustrated with how small the screen was and how non-intuitive it was to her compared to a smartphone. I too was very frustrated with it as it was slow, configuring the software on it was a massive pain and the process of quickly getting photos from the camera to a computer was laughable. So, what did I do? I put the camera on a shelf and bought my daughter an older smartphone. I proceeded to lock it down and remove everything I could with the exception of the camera and gallery app. My daughter is now happier than ever and taking non-stop pictures. She can also almost instantly see those pictures on a computer now too!
- browningstreet 4y ago
  I've long thought that should be a product. Especially if the shutter is a button. For kids, and for other kinds of camera products (ahem, GoPro).
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Before there were smartphones it was universal that anything other than a PC had a cheaper CPU but it was maybe 1/3 the price for 1/30 the performance. That is, off-brand CPUs of all kinds were a terrible bargain. Then smartphones came along and there was another commodity platform that gave good price-performance. Around that time Intel also got interested in making low-performance parts with low sticker prices but that were highly uneconomical if performance or user experience mattered.
- esel2k 4y ago
  Thanks for the hint. I was just about to buy an old compact camera for my daughter as she sees me taking pictures with my sony a7. Maybe you are right compact cameras are awful usability. What software did you use to lock it down? I have some older iPhones laying around.
  - derefr 4y ago
    The iOS built-in Parental Controls settings can be used to enable/disable access on an app-by-app basis; that's probably all that's needed here, since Camera + Photos by themselves don't give you any built-in web browsers. (Camera.app can scan QR codes, but it just pops a new tab in Safari when you click them, and Parental Controls would block that.)
psychomugs 4y ago
It's a shame how well-designed and fun-to-use Fujifilm cameras are (I've owned several and they are the only digital cameras I use, apart from my phone) but how garbage their mobile app is. From what I've seen, Leica is the only company with a usable first-party app.
- nop_slide 4y ago
  Can concure, just got an x100v and it's great but sometimes it takes me 10 mins of restarting the damn app for it to connect correctly. I end up just doing SD card -> iphotos which will sync up to my phone later.
  - psychomugs 4y ago
    I’ve never been able to get it to work. Setting it to act as a USB-C card reader and tethering to my iPad isn’t too bad, though.
pkolaczk 4y ago
Wifi and Bluetooth... Yeah. It's not good on DSLRs either. My Pentax K1 has WiFi option, and, otherwise being an excellent camera in terms of imaging quality, build, ergonomics, good UI, it has somehow unreliable and cumbersome wifi - hard to set up and the mobile app is average at best. As if different people designed the wifi subsystem. And interestingly my Tascam 44dw (not a camera, but sound recorder) has also abysmal wifi. Low range, unreliable and seems to be using single TCP connection for sending realtime data which suffers from head-of-line blocking. As if noone there heard about UDP. Why is wifi such a problem? Weird.
mschuster91 4y ago
Sony shooter here (A7S2, A6300)... > Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work. YES YES YES. And they don't support such basic use cases as "open an access point and let the connected device do the work of selecting pictures" - no, you have to select the photos on the camera and then call them down from the mobile app. Super "great" when you're in the field that I am and document rallies etc. so you need to get a photo up to social media as fast as possible. > They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos came out sharp. Yeah, same for lighting, another annoyance from hell. Personally, for shots in complicated conditions I've grabbed an used Blackmagic VideoAssist 4K... works way better. > I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time. Problem with smartphones, even modern ones, is the quality goes down dramatically in low-light scenarios. That's simple physics, the pixels are like 100x smaller. AI can cover for a lot of that, but it's noticeable enough to not make it worth my while - and for what it's worth, there are no Android tablets on the market with a halfway decent camera. Sony's hardware is the best in class, there is no match at all for the A7S series from anyone in low-light, but the sorry state of their software is laughable. And the best of it is: it's all Linux under the hood. The older A7/A6000 series actually exposed parts of it via an Android subsystem layer where one could write apps for it after jailbreaking - too bad that the Android layer was/is fossilized (IIRC, Android 4-ish?!) and so they ripped it out after the A7S3 :/
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  Smartphones definitely beat cameras at night though. iPhones and Google Pixels in particular can make photos simply impossible with any kind of DSLR thanks to their computational magic.
- twoWhlsGud 4y ago
  Yep - that was an annoying own goal move on Sony's part. Having some sort of scripting layer in the OS would have made a big difference - they should have expanded the layer rather than abandoning it : (
- xxpor 4y ago
  If you don't want to pull with their app, your other option is UPLOADING TO AN UNSECURE FTP SERVER. I have a linux server hanging around (that's also the NAS where I store the raws) so this wasn't a huge deal, but like WTF. I bought the camera (A7 IV) because it has ethernet support, which I thought, great. I'll just be able to scp or samba them off or something. Absolutely not.
softfalcon 4y ago
Yeah, some camera menus suck. I’m a photographer and your comment made me laugh. Everyone in photo circles hates the Sony menus on their cameras because they’re the worst. Canon, Panasonic, and Fuji have substantially better menu systems that we all far prefer. I find it funny your opinion has been informed by using the worst the camera sphere has to offer! That being said, these menus and UIs are aimed at pros who do nothing else but take photos. It’s a coding IDE, not a simple text editor. It’s going to be foreign to the casual user. That is by design. Also, the computational photography is a nuisance for our work. We want the LEAST edited photo file possible every time. I understand your lack of interest in editing, it’s a chore that even we have to do, but it’s also one of our power tools. We choose this, it is not a step backwards for us! It sounds like “professional” photography just isn’t for you! However, before I start a bunch of arguments, I will say one thing. There is always room for improvement and they could likely do UX/UI analysis to further improve things. Though, from my use, I do find it to be very hardware focused which feels intuitive to me and those in my photo circles. I think it’s the prerequisite of knowing shutter, ISO, and aperture as well as focus pulling concepts. That makes me “know what to look for”.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  The latest Sony OS version is a tad better, but with enough practice you can get used to even the Sony menus. But yes.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    It's taken a few years but the menus on my Sony mirrorless have grown on me.
- spiderice 4y ago
  (Canon user here) This response is very misleading. They're all bad. Other camera manufacturers are not substantially better than Sony in this regard. If Sony is a 1 and smart phones are a 10, the other camera manufacturers fall somewhere between 1 and 3. GPs comment is still spot. edit: Please indicate when you make edits to your comments. Your comment is now very different to the one I responded to.
mkaic 4y ago
Based on this thread and my own corroborating experiences, this feels like a field ripe for harvest—if anyone sold a camera with DSLR-grade optics and smartphone-grade usability and computational abilities, they'd be rich! For those in the know, what makes this more difficult than it seems? Why has nobody done this yet and what challenges are standing in the way?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hef19898 4y ago
  People needing and wanting DSLR grade optics, or mirroless as optics are more less the same thing, don't want or need shiny clicky smartphone apps. They need and want a professional tool that produces the least edited picture possible for post-processing later on. I wouldn't touch a camera that runs on Android with feet pole.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    This. I'm going to do any editing on my PC, not the picture-taker. Far bigger screen, far better control. The brains I want on the camera are for things that actually involve taking the shot. Give me intelligent capture of images for stacking. That entails two things: 1) HDR exposure. Point the camera at something, select HDR. It takes the exposure and examines the frame for any pixels near the extremes of the sensor. If there are any pixels near the top it reshoots exactly the same shot but with a shorter exposure time. Repeat until there are no really bright pixels. On the other end, if there are any really dim pixels reshoot with a slower exposure, repeat as needed. 2) Focus stacking. Manual focus, pick a point. Pick another point. The camera shoots a sequence of exposures moving the focus between the two points.
  - bambax 4y ago
    Yeah well, you're right, but some new features would be welcome, like, for instance, the ability to immediately send images out of the camera. Yet even with recent DSLRs and mirrorless top-end cameras it's still a hassle. I recently made a photobooth from an old Canon DSLR and a rPi running gphoto: a script takes the images out of the camera and posts them on a server, and people can see them in almost real time. It's really great, but it would be even better if it was all done in camera.
jcims 4y ago
I've sworn off Sony cameras after paying ~$1500 for a NEX-6 and having them abandon the firmware at version 1.03, 18 months after the camera was released. I don't even remotely understand how that's possible. Did they just contract all of the work out?
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  I never had a firmware upgrade for any of the compact digital cameras (Canon) I had between ~ 1998 and 2012. I did not even think that this should exist, they worked well from the beginning.
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    The NEX-6 mentioned by the parent isn't compact. Nikon DSLRs do get updates. Example [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32248732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32248732
derefr 4y ago
I don't understand why phone manufacturers don't just get into the camera business, then. They certainly all seem to love making phones that brag about having large sensors and fancy (tiny) lenses... so why not just go one step further and make a "phone" that only runs a camera app, with a lens mount rather than a fixed lens, hardware mode switches, and a tripod screw mount?
- hef19898 4y ago
  The camera market small, quite crowded (before Sony kind of created the mirrorless market the only serious contenders were Nikon and Canon, now you got Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji and Panasonic), smartphones already killed the entry level and compact camera markets and the tech is quite different from smartphone cameras.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Phone cameras don't have sensors or optics at a quality comparable to basic point and shoots. They have to fit into a tiny space and performance is necessarily compromised. They're making it all up on software processing.
gumby 4y ago
This is a cultural issue: programming is a low status blue collar job in Japan, especially in existing industry. This is especially weird to me given the number of great Japanese computer scientists, but so it goes. One exception is the gaming industry: Sony Computer Entertainment in particular treats its developers similarly to the US (Ken Kutaragi drove this) while the rest of Sony follows the standard Japanese model. Bandai and Nintendo are similar, though not quite as much as Sony, and Sega a bit more traditional.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  This must explain Sony's crappy phone software.
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    I just except that if I buy a Sony camera, the software is going to suck. I have zero expectations, I know that sending photos to my phone is probably out of the question.
_ea1k 4y ago
There's also an issue with camera UI that phones managed to largely bypass. I remember getting a Canon t4i with a touch screen. The touch interface was actually pretty decent and this was probably ~10 years ago! But a lot of "camera people" hated it. They'd complain that it would inevitably lead to smudges on the screen and they wanted physical controls instead. So who do you sell a dedicated camera to? A new UI will largely alienate the small market that still exists. The old UI guarantees an unappealing product for the smartphone user. Ultimately all interfaces have to be easily navigable with buttons and this has consequences.
yieldcrv 4y ago
and lets talk about how increasingly out of touch photographers are about all of that! A whole decade of people in enthusiast photography communities collectively playing devil’s advocate “why do you want that feature, whats a UI have to do with taking a photo, I never understood the point of a Live Photo, bluetooth? Thats what tethering and an external contraption is for….” meanwhile the rest of the world just turned around and walked away
LeoPanthera 4y ago
This is so true. I have an Olympus M4/3 camera, and to update the firmware on it, you must install a Mac application that requires a kernel extension. This is offensively stupid and I can’t believe this hasn’t changed in years.
- abruzzi 4y ago
  Sony has a stupid update app as well, but Nikon and Pentax? Download a firmware file, put it on the root of the SD card, and boot itin a particular way or goto some menu and runu the update. Its a very 90's process but easy and simple compared to Olympus and Sony.
dboreham 4y ago
Mostly agree, but I will say Canon seem to have eventually nailed the Bluetooth/WiFi experience, at least for me on Android.
prmoustache 4y ago
I am one of these luddites that still use a compact camera. The firmware may be bad, yet I take a picture faster on my Sony compact camera than I do with my smartphone thanks to the physical buttons. I can also do it while cycling while doing the same with my smartphone is annoying as fuck in winter with gloves, in summer with sweat and expose the risk of losing and destroying my precious pocket computer. Also for some my phone screen show as a black screen when using my polarized sunglasses while the lcd of my camera is still visible and allow me to point and shoot quickly. No idea what is the difference in tech on both that would explain that difference. Most flagship smartphones may be super responsive but the average sub 200usd smartphone won't necessarily fire up the camera app faster than my Sony compact camera. And there is no way I will buy a 600 to 1000usd smartphone. I'd rather repair/replace either a 200usd smartphone or a second hand compact camera in the event I drop it and break it than a single 1000usd one. Also from my experience with friends using flagships and apple ones, even the best smartphones are crappy under low light. Smartphones are great during the day, once it is dark they are pretty much useless.
- dnh44 4y ago
  >Also for some my phone screen show as a black screen when using my polarized sunglasses If you rotate your phone 90° you'll be able to see the screen.
- svachalek 4y ago
  I think that last bit has been true until recent flagships. Recent iPhones are sluggish in the dark, but take pictures that are better than my eyesight.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  There is still a small market, but not enough to support many players. I've got a compact around here somewhere, specifically because it can take getting dunked. With the pandemic my intended use case has gone away and I'm not sure where it is now.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
paulpan 4y ago
It boils down to 2 things: 1) Fact that whereas camera technology in smartphones has & is continuing to develop rapidly (computational photography as mentioned is latest major jump), it has largely stagnated within the mid-low tier camera market. Makes sense Panasonic is exiting the market, and other major players like Sony and Fujifilm focusing on the high end. 2) Vast majority users value convenience and ecosystem integration over pure photo quality. In most cases the latest smartphone take "good enough" photographs, so who wants to fiddle with having to transfer images from your standalone camera to your photo before sharing on social media? As the adage goes, "the best camera is the one you have on hand". Personally I'd love to see something like the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom or Nokia Lumia 808/1020 being revitalized - a camera-first smartphone. How long before Apple or Google enter the DLSR or mirrorless market? Seems inevitable given the large investments both companies already make in smartphone camera photography.
gryf 4y ago
Nikon do very well with the Z series. I have a Z50 and it's closer to smartphone than DLSR. BT and WiFi work, decent quality viewfinder and articulated multi-touch screen. Also with the 16-50 lens it still goes in your pocket but is a proper camera. I disagree with smartphone quality. I have what could be considered a close to best of breed in quality iPhone 13 Pro and it's crap. It's a 2009 DSLR with three crap prime lenses stuck to it. It's mostly usable if you shoot ProRAW with it but the processed images (HEIC/JPEG) are really quite fucked up.
xnx 4y ago
Precisely. Big lenses should be dump peripherals to phones.
acchow 4y ago
I got a full frame Nikon Z5. I use it with a f2.8 lens. In low light, the output from my iPhone 14 pro looks much better. Especially on video. Haha
ISL 4y ago
I'll go against the grain here and hard-disagree. My Canon has locked up hard only once in half a decade of hard use, generating ~8TB of images in adverse conditions. It is sometimes left turned on for months at a time. I sometimes accidentally do terrible things with the power switch and SD card. Lenses are attached/removed without a care in the world. I've never seen a flaw in the function of menus or the corruption of a single image. I cannot state the same for almost any other software product. I can use it like a tool, not like a computer. That's a sign of good software.
- daniel-s 4y ago
  Aren't all the things you described signs of good hardware?
  - bambax 4y ago
    It's both. If pro cameras (or even point and shoot) had really bad software, we would see corrupted files all the time, unreadable media, exposure completely off, weird bugs in battery monitoring or power consumption, etc. Smartphones have constant "updates" and yearly new OSes, and we think it's marvelous if a two year old phone still functions. Yet digital cameras from 15 years ago still work fine with exactly zero update. Robustness and dependability are important features. In-the-box HDR is cute but it matters less.
chemmail 4y ago
Digital cameras is ALL about post processing. I used to have Minolta, Panasonic, Sony, and Canon point and shoots. No matter what, Canon pictures always come out much better out of the camera even if it has inferior lens, sensor, or is much older. Basically all sensors of Sony now, so the magic is all about the processing. The rest is really up to the photographer, that is where the art is.
- ulfw 4y ago
  Canon doesn't use Sony sensors. They are the only Non-Sony camera brand left that manufactures it's own sensors.
everyone 4y ago
Sure, but I'd say the same about smartphone manufacturers.

by pornel 4y ago

FpUser 4y ago

>"I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time." As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking. And you do not even have to dick with raw files to see the difference. Plain JPEG coming out of my relatively ancient D800 puts best smartphone cam to shame. Size matters and full frame sensor vs one in smartphone are incomparable. That is not to say that smartphone can not take decent photos and in many cases what is being photographed matters way more than the picture quality as long as it is not atrocious.

ymolodtsov 4y ago
Well, I have some photos of Amsterdam I took on iPhone 5S and they look just fine on my display. And we've had a ton of progress since then. In general case, you're right, but modern smartphones have come a long way.
pornel 4y ago
I'd be nice to have normal-sized lens, but it's hard to justify lugging them when the rest of the camera is so primitive. Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus. May screw up exposure. It's harder to check the photos. Extra steps are needed to get the photos out of the camera. And it annoys me to no end that my dumb camera can't automatically adjust its clock and the timezone.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  You don't have to cart around a big-ass DSLR with multi-pound lenses. My pen-f (2016) runs circles around an iphone pro, and it's pretty small and light for a "real" camera (it can fit in my coat pocket). > Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus. This is not true, especially if we're talking about DSLRs (as opposed to mirrorless). I used to have a Canon 40D. I never turned it off. It would stay "on" in the bag for however long I didn't use it. It consumed next to nothing when in "sleep" mode, but came out of it ready to shoot at the touch of a button. Autofocus was plenty fast, too. Ditto for a friend's Sony A700 (same vintage APS-C DSLR). I understand current mirrorless cameras have much better autofocus, even the mid-range ones. Even my pen-f (mirrorless) wakes up or turns on much quicker than you can slide around your finger on an iphone. Autofocus isn't great in low-light, though.
- hef19898 4y ago
  You never touched a real camera, did you? AF speed depends on the lense, older ones with a screw drive AF are slower than newer ones where the AF motor is in the lens. Camera AF speed is incredible so, starting with mid-level cameras, let alone to speak of the more pro-grade stuff. And those cameras are ready to shoot faster from fully of than it takes to get them from holding them to your side to your eye. Definitely faster than getting a smartphone camera ready.
- radlad 4y ago
  > Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus. This is definitely not true. Cameras may take slightly longer to start than a phone takes to turn its screen on, but the same amount of time (or quicker) to get to "shooting a photo." (Yes, even with shortcuts like double-tap the power button on a phone.) The Ricoh GR III is ready to shoot in 0.7 seconds, and that includes extending a retracted lens barrel. And this is a pocketable camera. Fast AF on a phone is mostly due to the fact that they usually use very wide-angle lenses. There's a wider range of acceptable focus. Newer lenses and cameras (i.e. the last 5-7 years) on a DSLR are still way faster.
- 4y ago
ZetaZero 4y ago
...my relatively ancient D800... Launched five years ago at $3000.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hef19898 4y ago
  And being sold used for 700-ish. Heck, an ancient D700 beats any smartphone whatsoever at larger prints and screens. You do have to do some post-processing yourself, true. And you need proper optics, there is only so much you can crop out of 12 MP. Smartphones take great pictures, and I love the fact that it gets a lot more people into photography than back during the film days. making art more accessible can only be good. But let's not kid ourselves, the reason why smartphone photos do look so great is a ton of heavy automated post-processing in device. I'd prefer to have that same functionalities available as stand-alone post-processing software. Or not, I'm fine with darktable.
  - radlad 4y ago
    I think the problem is less about the number of megapixels and more about the size of the pixels (i.e. sensor) personally. Smartphones simply cannot resolve the same level of detail that a proper camera can, regardless of how many MP of resolution they provide. Computational AI helps a bit, but...
- gsu2 4y ago
  Launched ten years ago: https://www.dpreview.com/products/nikon/slrs/nikon_d800 https://www.dpreview.com/products/nikon/slrs/nikon_d800 Currently available for ~$600: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=nikon+d800&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=nikon+d800&LH_Sold=1&L...
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  I’ve had mine since 2012.
jve 4y ago
> As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking I hope I'll view photos on 4K someday...
MSFT_Edging 4y ago
I've noticed recently that a lot of smartphone cameras are doing a lot of heavy software upscaling and smoothing that erases details worse than simply low resolution. Everything is starting to look airbrushed. Having a real lens to do a lot of the optical heavy lifting and letting the sensor sense makes a huge difference if you really care about detail.
- twoWhlsGud 4y ago
  Yes, and this means that everything you shoot with (say) an iPhone tends to look the same. The camera has a very well curated set of opinions on color science etc that works really well for most people, but it enforces a look and once you try and wander out of that it stops being an effective instrument for looking at the world. (Yes, ProRAW helps a bit, but nothing beats real lenses on a big sensor for having your own control over image creation.) That said, if you're just taking snaps to share with friends I don't see why you'd care about any of that : )
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. That's an enthusiast niche at best. That alone a market sustaining a large multinational co does not make. Sensibly, workflows optimize for the smartphone consumption use case. And yes, that hurts as photographers who obsessed over sharpness and pixel-level fidelity since the invention of digital cameras, but that just doesn't seem to be where the zeitgeist is at anymore. People never really cared in the first place. It's similar to how music producers obsess over whether a particular synth sound was made with analog gear or was a "cheap digital knockoff". The listener never cared in the first place. They just want to be moved wherever it is that they are, which happens to be on the phone 99% of the time in photography.
- FpUser 4y ago
  >The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. That's an enthusiast niche at best." Maybe. I do not care. I only use phone as to call, GPS, controlling some gadgets, take a pic and that is it. I do the rest on PC on big screens.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  > The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. If you want to further process the image you want the best quality input you can get. Think digitally zooming/reframing, or choosing from a bigger dynamic range to use the colors you prefer. In a lower quality input you might be stuck with whatever photo you took, while the high-quality input gives you more information to correct the picture, even if the end resolution ends up being the same. P.S. Good printed photos also have more definition that most monitors (idk if 4k, but I believe comparable), for products like printed wedding photos.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  When you edit or crop you lose information. It's good to start with extra.
jjav 4y ago
> As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking. Exactly. Or when you print them out. On the wall here I have a printed photo about 4ft wide, taken from a cropped section of a photo (not even the full frame) and it looks stunning. And this isn't even from a newer pro camera, it was taken with a ~15 year old Nikon D40.
- ymolodtsov 4y ago
  A 4ft printed photo isn't exactly a popular use case. A 10x15 would look great.

Scene_Cast2 4y ago

The funny thing is that this translates over to Sony Xperia smartphone cameras too. On one hand, their custom camera app's UI feels like a Sony A7 variant. On the other, basic expected computational features such as night mode are missing.

nolok 4y ago
> On the other, basic expected computational features such as night mode are missing. Oh, how fast is progress in the world of technology. I remember 6 years ago when google showed some prototypes of night photo from a smartphone using long expose. Meanwhile my Galaxy Note 4 made blurry unusable mess during the 14th of july nightly event I tried it at, while my gf DLSR were clear and great. Ah ah, smartphones will never be able to do that. How 4 years ago Night Sight blew me away with their demonstration and almost made me go pixel. How 3 years ago Samsung added a Night mode to my S9+ through a regular update and while the photo took a whole second to take the result was usually clean and crisp compared to the noisy mess on my previous Note 4, making it actually usable for static scene or portrait shot. How the night mode on my Note 10 was genuinely great to the point it was just another mode as long as you avoid the usual night tricks like light sources. How my new S22 Ultra for the first time passed my "smartphone will never really be good for night event shots" by taking picture during the 14th of july fireworks the quality of which I would scientifically classify as "pretty fucking great". And now it's just a basic expected computational feature. Sometime we forget how much progress is being made due to how incremental they all are, but damn, and that's just one feature on a piece of glass and plastic that's insanely powerful and filled with features in my pocket. PS: the lack of Apple mention is merely because I'm not an Apple guy, I'm sure they had the same insane path
- eganist 4y ago
  Among my devices I have a phone that unfolds into a tablet and has 3x optical, 0.6x optical, and 10x AI-assisted zoom that can take pictures like this (https://imgur.com/a/ITwdZSO https://imgur.com/a/ITwdZSO) with a total 30x zoom from literally 20 miles away. (Edit: for those curious, it's Samsung's "AI Super-resolution" tech, which I expect works similarly to AI upscaling tech e.g in Adobe's products. The phone I'm using in this example is the Fold 4) And I don't even have the best smartphone camera on the market right now. That prize goes to the S22 ultra which has two separate telephoto lenses (cameras?), 3x and 10x. https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-out-the-new-camera-functions-of-the-galaxy-s22-series/ https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-out-... Yeah when you sit down and think about it, it's nuts where we are today relative to last year, five years ago, and a decade ago. Especially considering 2019 still feels like yesterday because of COVID.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nradov 4y ago

It's so bizarre that camera manufacturers never figured out that the camera should be treated primarily as a smartphone peripheral. When I take a picture on the compact camera it should automatically sync to the smart phone camera roll with geotagging. All of the camera's settings and shutter should be controllable through a smartphone app. This lack of integration was a real failure of vision by camera manufacturers.

netsharc 4y ago
Sounds like you're complaining about a lack of vision because they couldn't mix technologies from different years, or have the budget to make a phone as well as a camera... But it does seem to be a clever idea, I'm imagining a phone that has surface contacts on its back, and a Go-Pro-sized camera module that you can attach to the phone (with precise magnets, so the surface contacts on both devices would connect both devices electronically as well) and be recognized as a peripheral for the phone. But I guess if already have a pro camera, you don't want to need to slap your phone on it to get it to work.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  That exists, the Sony QX100. Nobody bought it because it’s not quite as good as a real camera and it’s something you have to remember to bring with you.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    The whole lag and connection issue shown in the video is probably why grandparent comment's idea hasn't taken off. Since no phones have surface contacts, maybe if the lens had a USB-C connection it'd be a lot better (but no closed-garden iPhone support, obviously).
adwww 4y ago
Fuji have all of that functionality over WiFi on their X series. ...Only, as the parent comment says, it barely works, and the UI to get to it is awful, and the WiFi transfer speed is ridiculously slow.

lettergram 4y ago

I think they’re actually trying to solve different issues. Cameras are designed to capture & store the light in a way we can interpret later. They intentionally weren’t designed to edit or interpret the light and make corrections. Smart phones automatically do interpret and “correct” images. This can lead to artificially created artifacts in the image files. Professional photographers will often prefer the raw because they can apply their own edits without said artifacts. Now sure, camera photos are good for 99% of people, 99% of the time. BUT because the software on cameras were never designed to do those corrections, they just don’t. This makes night images worse, unless you decrease shutter speed. On a side note, it’s this very fact that I find it difficult to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if you’re looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify / generate the fine detail.

gruez 4y ago
>On a side note, it’s this very fact that I find it difficult to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if you’re looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify / generate the fine detail. Are there examples of this? The only example I can think of was an accusation a while ago that huawei phones were compositing a stock photo of the moon when taking moon pictures with their phones. They denied the accusation and it wasn't really clear whether it was actually happening or not.
- bombcar 4y ago
  That Dallas plane crash recently had a new cell phone video surface where it is clear that the fighter started diving, but what is not clear is if there is a drone he was trying to avoid; and it's very possible that the apparent drone could also be a video artifact. And upscaling tools/etc introduce their own information, and may cause it to make something appear to be there that is actually just compression noise.
brookst 4y ago
You’re right that cameras never adapted to a world where users want cars, not faster horses. But I think you may be playing a bit loose with the ideas of evidence and details. Yes, smartphones “invent” details, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where those changes produce false evidence. You might find details of leaves rendered as watercolor brushstrokes; you won’t find a suspect inserted into a scene. And remember that film annd magnetic tape cameras also invent details. All of that film grain that we find artistic is not really there. Should we also question what we see on those videos because they aren’t pixel-perfect?

hef19898 4y ago

Camera manufacturers are very capabale of making hardware, incl. optics, that run sophisticated embedded software to take pictures. For editing, go to Adobe or one of the alternatives. Different use cases, different products, different markets. And not everything in the world can be solved by some consumer grade app.

heather45879 4y ago
I prefer manual buttons when taking photos the traditional way. Too many digital screens these days deviate from a good solid device that does a few things really well.
- bigyikes 4y ago
  This is why I got a Fuji XT-30. It’s got a physical control for everything. I don’t have to use the menu unless I’m doing something unusual. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like there are many cameras designed this way anymore.
awestroke 4y ago
This has nothing to do with editing. Modern smartphones combine multiple pictures for each picture you take, and have very sophisticated demosaicing, noise reduction and color grading. No app needed.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
I could not disagree more. Professional photographers require good reliable connectivity. Nikon cameras are extremely clunky in this regard. Similarly, their menu system is atrocious. I am not saying this as somebody who looked at a camera once and said "this is too hard". I ran a photo business from 2008 to 2018, read all the manuals intimately and worked with Nikon cameras daily, and came to it from techie nerd perspective and knew what every button option and mode does in intricate detail. "Great hardware, horrible software" is well understood state of camera business last 2 decades. I now have two young kids. I have 4 dslr and two mirrorless cameras at home... And take kids photos with my cell - because it's convenient accessible and fast to transmit. Why can't I have an efficient sharing work flow with my $3000 camera? Because they make sucky closed systems and refuse to change open or learn.

hwbehrens 4y ago

I can't speak for cameras specifically, but my partner is Taiwanese and apparently this hardware/software dichotomy is extremely prevalent there as well. Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke. Thus, the best and most talented engineers go into hardware, and the jokers work in software, leading to this "good hardware, bad software" observed outcome and reinforcing the stereotype further. Rinse, repeat, and you eventually end up with decent hardware running absolutely garbage firmware. Given the social cross-pollination between Japan and Taiwan, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar pattern held true there as well.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
That's a bit odd. Are they unaware of the last 30 years of computer history? Even as someone with a background in mechanical engineering the degree of complexity behind some software products, such as Windows, is really impressive.
- Tempest1981 4y ago
  (Probably a rhetorical question, but...) It's hard to overcome preconceived notions. As we know from politics, emotions are much stronger than logic. You can't simply say, "be logical!" or "change your view".
- sho_hn 4y ago
  I suspect "hardware is real engineering" is really just "hardware engineering is where you can find prestigious employment in this country". It used to be quite similar in South Korea until the more recent rise of domestic software giants like Naver and Kakao Corp. In a lot of the East Asian countries, there is a large gap in desirability between the large, established employers and smaller companies due to outrageous differences in pay grade, benefits and job stability. So new business has a tougher time making it to escape velocity and offering significant numbers of jobs.
  - smahs 4y ago
    +1. I have vague memories of my time at a Japanese automation vendor out of the uni. I had quit out of frustration that the software was super buggy, there was no one to help except just a couple of people in Japan who knew the software but would not reply to emails. I also remember feeling neglected as folks working on the hardware or on customer projects were paid higher than me. A recent experience at a neobanking startup from SE Asia reaffirms the point. Despite the product built around an API-only model, the firm was operations heavy when it came to decision making and investing in people, as it was believed to be the core company strength (for a variety of reasons including the institutional bureaucracy, corruption in these markets, etc.) TL;DR people work where the money flows. Companies get what they pay for. And the investors pay for what they think is the strength or is likely to sell at inflated valuations.

esel2k 4y ago

I agree on all points with my sony a7. Especially the Bluetooth connectivity was a great start but no updates and constantly dropping connections make it look laughable in 2022. I guess there is a perception that it is like hardware « once its out its sold and we don’t care about it ». At this stage I am seriously wondering if I will ever replace my camera with a new one or just be happy with a new smartphone. Maybe the camera will just stay a a sidehobby.

Tempest1981 4y ago

Sony still makes many smartphone sensors. And optics? Not sure. They just don't get to put their name on the resulting "camera" in this new world.

manv1 4y ago

It's not a problem with camera manufacturers, it's a problem with hardware companies. Even chip vendors, who you would would think understand the importance of software, will de-prioritize their software side. I wonder if it's a sort of macho thing; anyone can learn to write software, but not everyone can get an EE degree. It also could be that the idea of incremental releases doesn't really exist on the hardware side. Hardware, because it's physical, requires a coordinated release. Then you do the next revision once the inventory gets low. The idea that you can ship on a flexible schedule is alien to the hardware side.

dehrmann 4y ago
> anyone can learn to write software, but not everyone can get an EE degree. I took a EE microcontrollers class. A lot of EEs struggled writing assembly, and they all had at least an introductory C programming course.
4gotunameagain 4y ago
> sort of macho thing please contain this to twitter. What does "macho" have to do with comparing the relative difficulty of two things and attaching status to the most difficult? That's how society brought us where we are.

weberer 4y ago

Get a Canon and install CHDK. https://bw.vern.cc/chdk/wiki/CHDK https://bw.vern.cc/chdk/wiki/CHDK

Wistar 4y ago
Wow. Thank you. I had no idea this existed. I have a Canon S95 long languishing on the shelf and will have to give CHDK a try.

binkHN 4y ago

I couldn't agree with this more. My small child received a compact camera as a gift. While it was a decent camera for a kid, she was very frustrated with how small the screen was and how non-intuitive it was to her compared to a smartphone. I too was very frustrated with it as it was slow, configuring the software on it was a massive pain and the process of quickly getting photos from the camera to a computer was laughable. So, what did I do? I put the camera on a shelf and bought my daughter an older smartphone. I proceeded to lock it down and remove everything I could with the exception of the camera and gallery app. My daughter is now happier than ever and taking non-stop pictures. She can also almost instantly see those pictures on a computer now too!

browningstreet 4y ago
I've long thought that should be a product. Especially if the shutter is a button. For kids, and for other kinds of camera products (ahem, GoPro).
PaulHoule 4y ago
Before there were smartphones it was universal that anything other than a PC had a cheaper CPU but it was maybe 1/3 the price for 1/30 the performance. That is, off-brand CPUs of all kinds were a terrible bargain. Then smartphones came along and there was another commodity platform that gave good price-performance. Around that time Intel also got interested in making low-performance parts with low sticker prices but that were highly uneconomical if performance or user experience mattered.
esel2k 4y ago
Thanks for the hint. I was just about to buy an old compact camera for my daughter as she sees me taking pictures with my sony a7. Maybe you are right compact cameras are awful usability. What software did you use to lock it down? I have some older iPhones laying around.
- derefr 4y ago
  The iOS built-in Parental Controls settings can be used to enable/disable access on an app-by-app basis; that's probably all that's needed here, since Camera + Photos by themselves don't give you any built-in web browsers. (Camera.app can scan QR codes, but it just pops a new tab in Safari when you click them, and Parental Controls would block that.)

psychomugs 4y ago

It's a shame how well-designed and fun-to-use Fujifilm cameras are (I've owned several and they are the only digital cameras I use, apart from my phone) but how garbage their mobile app is. From what I've seen, Leica is the only company with a usable first-party app.

nop_slide 4y ago
Can concure, just got an x100v and it's great but sometimes it takes me 10 mins of restarting the damn app for it to connect correctly. I end up just doing SD card -> iphotos which will sync up to my phone later.
- psychomugs 4y ago
  I’ve never been able to get it to work. Setting it to act as a USB-C card reader and tethering to my iPad isn’t too bad, though.

pkolaczk 4y ago

Wifi and Bluetooth... Yeah. It's not good on DSLRs either. My Pentax K1 has WiFi option, and, otherwise being an excellent camera in terms of imaging quality, build, ergonomics, good UI, it has somehow unreliable and cumbersome wifi - hard to set up and the mobile app is average at best. As if different people designed the wifi subsystem. And interestingly my Tascam 44dw (not a camera, but sound recorder) has also abysmal wifi. Low range, unreliable and seems to be using single TCP connection for sending realtime data which suffers from head-of-line blocking. As if noone there heard about UDP. Why is wifi such a problem? Weird.

mschuster91 4y ago

Sony shooter here (A7S2, A6300)... > Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work. YES YES YES. And they don't support such basic use cases as "open an access point and let the connected device do the work of selecting pictures" - no, you have to select the photos on the camera and then call them down from the mobile app. Super "great" when you're in the field that I am and document rallies etc. so you need to get a photo up to social media as fast as possible. > They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos came out sharp. Yeah, same for lighting, another annoyance from hell. Personally, for shots in complicated conditions I've grabbed an used Blackmagic VideoAssist 4K... works way better. > I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time. Problem with smartphones, even modern ones, is the quality goes down dramatically in low-light scenarios. That's simple physics, the pixels are like 100x smaller. AI can cover for a lot of that, but it's noticeable enough to not make it worth my while - and for what it's worth, there are no Android tablets on the market with a halfway decent camera. Sony's hardware is the best in class, there is no match at all for the A7S series from anyone in low-light, but the sorry state of their software is laughable. And the best of it is: it's all Linux under the hood. The older A7/A6000 series actually exposed parts of it via an Android subsystem layer where one could write apps for it after jailbreaking - too bad that the Android layer was/is fossilized (IIRC, Android 4-ish?!) and so they ripped it out after the A7S3 :/

ymolodtsov 4y ago
Smartphones definitely beat cameras at night though. iPhones and Google Pixels in particular can make photos simply impossible with any kind of DSLR thanks to their computational magic.
twoWhlsGud 4y ago
Yep - that was an annoying own goal move on Sony's part. Having some sort of scripting layer in the OS would have made a big difference - they should have expanded the layer rather than abandoning it : (
xxpor 4y ago
If you don't want to pull with their app, your other option is UPLOADING TO AN UNSECURE FTP SERVER. I have a linux server hanging around (that's also the NAS where I store the raws) so this wasn't a huge deal, but like WTF. I bought the camera (A7 IV) because it has ethernet support, which I thought, great. I'll just be able to scp or samba them off or something. Absolutely not.

softfalcon 4y ago

Yeah, some camera menus suck. I’m a photographer and your comment made me laugh. Everyone in photo circles hates the Sony menus on their cameras because they’re the worst. Canon, Panasonic, and Fuji have substantially better menu systems that we all far prefer. I find it funny your opinion has been informed by using the worst the camera sphere has to offer! That being said, these menus and UIs are aimed at pros who do nothing else but take photos. It’s a coding IDE, not a simple text editor. It’s going to be foreign to the casual user. That is by design. Also, the computational photography is a nuisance for our work. We want the LEAST edited photo file possible every time. I understand your lack of interest in editing, it’s a chore that even we have to do, but it’s also one of our power tools. We choose this, it is not a step backwards for us! It sounds like “professional” photography just isn’t for you! However, before I start a bunch of arguments, I will say one thing. There is always room for improvement and they could likely do UX/UI analysis to further improve things. Though, from my use, I do find it to be very hardware focused which feels intuitive to me and those in my photo circles. I think it’s the prerequisite of knowing shutter, ISO, and aperture as well as focus pulling concepts. That makes me “know what to look for”.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
The latest Sony OS version is a tad better, but with enough practice you can get used to even the Sony menus. But yes.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It's taken a few years but the menus on my Sony mirrorless have grown on me.
spiderice 4y ago
(Canon user here) This response is very misleading. They're all bad. Other camera manufacturers are not substantially better than Sony in this regard. If Sony is a 1 and smart phones are a 10, the other camera manufacturers fall somewhere between 1 and 3. GPs comment is still spot. edit: Please indicate when you make edits to your comments. Your comment is now very different to the one I responded to.

mkaic 4y ago

Based on this thread and my own corroborating experiences, this feels like a field ripe for harvest—if anyone sold a camera with DSLR-grade optics and smartphone-grade usability and computational abilities, they'd be rich! For those in the know, what makes this more difficult than it seems? Why has nobody done this yet and what challenges are standing in the way?

deleted 4y ago
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hef19898 4y ago
People needing and wanting DSLR grade optics, or mirroless as optics are more less the same thing, don't want or need shiny clicky smartphone apps. They need and want a professional tool that produces the least edited picture possible for post-processing later on. I wouldn't touch a camera that runs on Android with feet pole.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  This. I'm going to do any editing on my PC, not the picture-taker. Far bigger screen, far better control. The brains I want on the camera are for things that actually involve taking the shot. Give me intelligent capture of images for stacking. That entails two things: 1) HDR exposure. Point the camera at something, select HDR. It takes the exposure and examines the frame for any pixels near the extremes of the sensor. If there are any pixels near the top it reshoots exactly the same shot but with a shorter exposure time. Repeat until there are no really bright pixels. On the other end, if there are any really dim pixels reshoot with a slower exposure, repeat as needed. 2) Focus stacking. Manual focus, pick a point. Pick another point. The camera shoots a sequence of exposures moving the focus between the two points.
- bambax 4y ago
  Yeah well, you're right, but some new features would be welcome, like, for instance, the ability to immediately send images out of the camera. Yet even with recent DSLRs and mirrorless top-end cameras it's still a hassle. I recently made a photobooth from an old Canon DSLR and a rPi running gphoto: a script takes the images out of the camera and posts them on a server, and people can see them in almost real time. It's really great, but it would be even better if it was all done in camera.

jcims 4y ago

I've sworn off Sony cameras after paying ~$1500 for a NEX-6 and having them abandon the firmware at version 1.03, 18 months after the camera was released. I don't even remotely understand how that's possible. Did they just contract all of the work out?

AdrianB1 4y ago
I never had a firmware upgrade for any of the compact digital cameras (Canon) I had between ~ 1998 and 2012. I did not even think that this should exist, they worked well from the beginning.
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  The NEX-6 mentioned by the parent isn't compact. Nikon DSLRs do get updates. Example [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32248732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32248732

derefr 4y ago

I don't understand why phone manufacturers don't just get into the camera business, then. They certainly all seem to love making phones that brag about having large sensors and fancy (tiny) lenses... so why not just go one step further and make a "phone" that only runs a camera app, with a lens mount rather than a fixed lens, hardware mode switches, and a tripod screw mount?

hef19898 4y ago
The camera market small, quite crowded (before Sony kind of created the mirrorless market the only serious contenders were Nikon and Canon, now you got Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji and Panasonic), smartphones already killed the entry level and compact camera markets and the tech is quite different from smartphone cameras.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Phone cameras don't have sensors or optics at a quality comparable to basic point and shoots. They have to fit into a tiny space and performance is necessarily compromised. They're making it all up on software processing.

gumby 4y ago

This is a cultural issue: programming is a low status blue collar job in Japan, especially in existing industry. This is especially weird to me given the number of great Japanese computer scientists, but so it goes. One exception is the gaming industry: Sony Computer Entertainment in particular treats its developers similarly to the US (Ken Kutaragi drove this) while the rest of Sony follows the standard Japanese model. Bandai and Nintendo are similar, though not quite as much as Sony, and Sega a bit more traditional.

selimthegrim 4y ago
This must explain Sony's crappy phone software.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  I just except that if I buy a Sony camera, the software is going to suck. I have zero expectations, I know that sending photos to my phone is probably out of the question.

_ea1k 4y ago

There's also an issue with camera UI that phones managed to largely bypass. I remember getting a Canon t4i with a touch screen. The touch interface was actually pretty decent and this was probably ~10 years ago! But a lot of "camera people" hated it. They'd complain that it would inevitably lead to smudges on the screen and they wanted physical controls instead. So who do you sell a dedicated camera to? A new UI will largely alienate the small market that still exists. The old UI guarantees an unappealing product for the smartphone user. Ultimately all interfaces have to be easily navigable with buttons and this has consequences.

yieldcrv 4y ago

and lets talk about how increasingly out of touch photographers are about all of that! A whole decade of people in enthusiast photography communities collectively playing devil’s advocate “why do you want that feature, whats a UI have to do with taking a photo, I never understood the point of a Live Photo, bluetooth? Thats what tethering and an external contraption is for….” meanwhile the rest of the world just turned around and walked away

LeoPanthera 4y ago

This is so true. I have an Olympus M4/3 camera, and to update the firmware on it, you must install a Mac application that requires a kernel extension. This is offensively stupid and I can’t believe this hasn’t changed in years.

abruzzi 4y ago
Sony has a stupid update app as well, but Nikon and Pentax? Download a firmware file, put it on the root of the SD card, and boot itin a particular way or goto some menu and runu the update. Its a very 90's process but easy and simple compared to Olympus and Sony.

dboreham 4y ago

Mostly agree, but I will say Canon seem to have eventually nailed the Bluetooth/WiFi experience, at least for me on Android.

prmoustache 4y ago

I am one of these luddites that still use a compact camera. The firmware may be bad, yet I take a picture faster on my Sony compact camera than I do with my smartphone thanks to the physical buttons. I can also do it while cycling while doing the same with my smartphone is annoying as fuck in winter with gloves, in summer with sweat and expose the risk of losing and destroying my precious pocket computer. Also for some my phone screen show as a black screen when using my polarized sunglasses while the lcd of my camera is still visible and allow me to point and shoot quickly. No idea what is the difference in tech on both that would explain that difference. Most flagship smartphones may be super responsive but the average sub 200usd smartphone won't necessarily fire up the camera app faster than my Sony compact camera. And there is no way I will buy a 600 to 1000usd smartphone. I'd rather repair/replace either a 200usd smartphone or a second hand compact camera in the event I drop it and break it than a single 1000usd one. Also from my experience with friends using flagships and apple ones, even the best smartphones are crappy under low light. Smartphones are great during the day, once it is dark they are pretty much useless.

dnh44 4y ago
>Also for some my phone screen show as a black screen when using my polarized sunglasses If you rotate your phone 90° you'll be able to see the screen.
svachalek 4y ago
I think that last bit has been true until recent flagships. Recent iPhones are sluggish in the dark, but take pictures that are better than my eyesight.
LorenPechtel 4y ago
There is still a small market, but not enough to support many players. I've got a compact around here somewhere, specifically because it can take getting dunked. With the pandemic my intended use case has gone away and I'm not sure where it is now.
- prmoustache 4y ago

paulpan 4y ago

It boils down to 2 things: 1) Fact that whereas camera technology in smartphones has & is continuing to develop rapidly (computational photography as mentioned is latest major jump), it has largely stagnated within the mid-low tier camera market. Makes sense Panasonic is exiting the market, and other major players like Sony and Fujifilm focusing on the high end. 2) Vast majority users value convenience and ecosystem integration over pure photo quality. In most cases the latest smartphone take "good enough" photographs, so who wants to fiddle with having to transfer images from your standalone camera to your photo before sharing on social media? As the adage goes, "the best camera is the one you have on hand". Personally I'd love to see something like the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom or Nokia Lumia 808/1020 being revitalized - a camera-first smartphone. How long before Apple or Google enter the DLSR or mirrorless market? Seems inevitable given the large investments both companies already make in smartphone camera photography.

gryf 4y ago

Nikon do very well with the Z series. I have a Z50 and it's closer to smartphone than DLSR. BT and WiFi work, decent quality viewfinder and articulated multi-touch screen. Also with the 16-50 lens it still goes in your pocket but is a proper camera. I disagree with smartphone quality. I have what could be considered a close to best of breed in quality iPhone 13 Pro and it's crap. It's a 2009 DSLR with three crap prime lenses stuck to it. It's mostly usable if you shoot ProRAW with it but the processed images (HEIC/JPEG) are really quite fucked up.

xnx 4y ago

Precisely. Big lenses should be dump peripherals to phones.

acchow 4y ago

I got a full frame Nikon Z5. I use it with a f2.8 lens. In low light, the output from my iPhone 14 pro looks much better. Especially on video. Haha

ISL 4y ago

I'll go against the grain here and hard-disagree. My Canon has locked up hard only once in half a decade of hard use, generating ~8TB of images in adverse conditions. It is sometimes left turned on for months at a time. I sometimes accidentally do terrible things with the power switch and SD card. Lenses are attached/removed without a care in the world. I've never seen a flaw in the function of menus or the corruption of a single image. I cannot state the same for almost any other software product. I can use it like a tool, not like a computer. That's a sign of good software.

daniel-s 4y ago
Aren't all the things you described signs of good hardware?
- bambax 4y ago
  It's both. If pro cameras (or even point and shoot) had really bad software, we would see corrupted files all the time, unreadable media, exposure completely off, weird bugs in battery monitoring or power consumption, etc. Smartphones have constant "updates" and yearly new OSes, and we think it's marvelous if a two year old phone still functions. Yet digital cameras from 15 years ago still work fine with exactly zero update. Robustness and dependability are important features. In-the-box HDR is cute but it matters less.

chemmail 4y ago

Digital cameras is ALL about post processing. I used to have Minolta, Panasonic, Sony, and Canon point and shoots. No matter what, Canon pictures always come out much better out of the camera even if it has inferior lens, sensor, or is much older. Basically all sensors of Sony now, so the magic is all about the processing. The rest is really up to the photographer, that is where the art is.

ulfw 4y ago
Canon doesn't use Sony sensors. They are the only Non-Sony camera brand left that manufactures it's own sensors.

everyone 4y ago

Sure, but I'd say the same about smartphone manufacturers.