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iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras
- sturza 1y agoComputerized phone photography is not for desktop viewing, printing, etc. It appears to look "amazing" on phone displays - probably optimized for that.
- rjh29 1y agoAnd nowadays unless you professionally shooting photos for a billboard, bedroom poster or newspaper advert - that is clearly enough. 99%+ of photo viewing is done on a phone or tablet screen.
- shmeeed 1y agoI have no idea why you're being downvoted. It's the simple truth.
- criddell 1y agoEven looking at the photos on the web page, I do see some differences, but both look fine to me. I'd love an A/B version where I can overlay the two photos and click back-and-forth quickly. But then if I need to do that to spot the differences, maybe it doesn't matter? If my phone photos did bother me, I would turn on RAW mode and do the processing myself. My "real" camera is a 15 year old Canon Rebel XSi. It's big and can't do a lot of the things my iPhone can and the photos are about the same quality (which is impressive because the Rebel is only 12 megapixels).
- PaulHoule 1y agoShouldn't this be "bad"? BTW, as an independent photog I have been looking for something like this, even thinking about making it myself.
- joelccr 1y agoTFA has the title in quotes, as though it is a reply to someone saying it. Must have got lost on submission
- chimeracoder 1y agoYeah, removing the quotes from the title in the submission (which may have been done automatically or by a mod) completely changes the meaning of the title as read.
- kittikitti 1y agoIt's a genre of clickbait titles that I support since the content actually supports the opposite, for journalistic effect. It's very funny when people who never read the content and share an article are exposed.
- markhalonen 1y agowoah I am the author. I don't even have analytics set up on this site, but hope everyone enjoys it!
- datadrivenangel 1y agoWhat kind of camera was used for the non-iphone shots?
- markhalonen 1y agosony a6400 with sigma 30mm f/1.4, but then the child one is a 2004 Digicam I think a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W5
- sturza 1y agoOne observation i'd expected to see is sensor size versus apparent focal length - this might be at least one of the reasons for distorsion. iPhone camera is ±7mm, which is ±4x crop factor in 35mm terms - but it's marketed as ±26mm.
- dataflow 1y agoFeedback: I absolutely love the idea of doing analysis like this, but it's incredibly frustrating to be shown photos that were clearly taken at different times when the subjects naturally don't look exactly the same. Like for example who's to say that player isn't actually leaning? The second photo sure doesn't prove anything. And comparing them side by side feels like an exercise in frustration. I would probably (if possible) repeat this idea but with photos taken at the same time, with cameras as close to each other as possible. If at all possible I would also try to use as similar of a lens as possible, if only as a 3rd comparison point to compare the other two to.
- multiplegeorges 1y agoThe building shot perfectly illustrates all his points, very little difference between them. The child in the surf is almost identical. Maybe a few ms of difference, look at the foot position. The facial structure differences in the players were striking despite not being identical shots.
- throwaway314155 1y agoI honestly can't see much of a difference that couldn't be explained by the photos not being taken simultaneously. I definitely can't tell enough of a difference that I wouldn't put the photo in a frame on the wall (which people almost certainly do, despite the author's assertion that "you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed") Edit: Is this just a good bit of sarcasm/shitpost? If so, it's just a tad too subtle.
- TuringNYC 1y agoFor what it is worth, all my printed and framed photos were on the iPhone, despite having a great SLR camera. The best camera is the one you actually have on-hand at the moment you need to take the photo and that often ends up the phone camera.
- matwood 1y agoBingo. You also need to know your camera. I have a d7100, a Z5, and the latest iPhone pro. For quick snapshots it's really hard to beat the iPhone. If I can get very close to something, the iPhone can also do some cool things. My d7100 might be one of my favorite cameras of all time. I've taken very nice picks of birds mid-flight that would be very hard to do on a phone (impossible?). But, it's not a camera you pull out your pocket and start shooting snapshots. It takes time to learn and post-process. They are all just tools, pick the right one for what you're doing. And sometimes the right one is the one you have with you :)
- wat10000 1y agoI have smartphone photos on my walls. They look damned good. Is this person going around asking all of their friends what kind of camera they used to take the photos they have on display? Or are they just sure they can tell from looking?
- aikinai 1y agoYou absolutely can tell from looking, and you don't even need to be trying. Whenever I show people photos from trips or of my kids or whatnot, they immediately notice the quality ask "You took this on your phone!?" (since I'm showing the photo from my phone library and that would be the default assumption). Sure, people are used to phone photos and they're fine, but even laymen who aren't thinking about judging photo quality immediately notice and appreciate the quality of a real camera photo.
- Thaxll 1y agoAll recent smartphone camera are good.
- bombcar 1y agoI see what he’s saying, but I also see all the iPhone photos printed and hung on the wall.
- nixass 1y agoI'm always sad when I pull up holidays photos on my monitor. Even though Pixels make great photos, they're great only on small OLED screens. Gonna clean the dust out of Nikon D3200 with proper lens and use that instead. Casual photos will be made byy wife anyway
- Sayrus 1y agoOn my Pixel, I'm always torn with using GCam or another camera app. GCam photos are definitely better on small screens, but every time you zoom in, you get AI artifacts, letters that shouldn't be here. It basically reconstructs the image from the original and blurrier photo. The other apps without these transformation lead to better quality on zoomed photos but the overall preview looks less good. This is especially true when digital zoom is involved.
- sturza 1y agoLike this or worse? https://yager.io/comp/comp.html https://yager.io/comp/comp.html
- Sayrus 1y agoWay worse. At least here the text looks like the original. Here is an example of what that looks like: https://imgur.com/Q4J5BHi https://imgur.com/Q4J5BHi In case it isn't obvious due to the zoom and lack of context: - The texture on the top and windshield don't exist, it's plain gray. - The letters on the card actually read something, here it's gibberish. Sometimes half a letter, sometimes a texture that doesn't exist.
- sturza 1y agoAll the patterns in the photo look pixel by pixel generated(looking at the distorsion) versus a normal camera distorsion when you get at the edge of capability/zoom(smearing etc)
- makeitdouble 1y ago
- earth2mars 1y agoSomeone didn't try the power of Google pixels phones. Recently, many of my iPhone friends and family envy the pictures taken from Google Pixel 9 pro vs their latest iPhones. It's hands down the best camera and image processing.
- sturza 1y agoHave you seen them on desktop or compared to a 20yo sensor without computerized photography? The post is not about iPhone cameras per se, but about small phone sensors + computerized photography. The author probably has that iPhone.
- aikinai 1y agoIt's still not going to come anywhere close to a real camera. Phone cameras with their tiny sensors have physical limitations that cannot be overcome, I guess until the day they are regenerating the entire image with AI based on what it expects the scene should look like with a real camera.
- jodrellblank 1y agoImagining a Facebook Phone where you point the camera at your family to take a photo, and it recognises who is in the picture and replaces their faces with the best available photo of each them from their Facebook account. Or their "My chosen social media photo".
- Ancapistani 1y agoI would be willing to bet I have photos in my archive that cannot be reproduced on any modern smartphone, that I took in ~2004 with a Nikon D70.
- quest88 1y agoThe differences are subtle to me. I see them but it doesn’t prevent me or my family from printing and hanging iPhone photos. I want to hang fun photos from family vacation for the memories.
- markhalonen 1y agoI was born in 95, so my childhood is well documented by my mothers digicam. When I look back at the photos, it is very obvious they are way better than iPhone photos that many parents are taking today.
- sturza 1y agoWhile i don't disagree, it's good to take into consideration the way people took photos back then vs now. I'd argue that today they are more of a commodity than they were back then, so people thought more before they took the shot(at least for some photos).
- dangus 1y agoThe opening statement of the article is almost insulting in how badly it abuses correlation, causation, and the concept of cause and effect. It effectively states that people don’t print photos anymore because phones produce bad photos. But back in the film camera days you literally had to develop and print the photos to see them. There was no universal device for viewing photos that you always had on you.
- olivermuty 1y agoThe best camera is the one you have with you!
- j00pY 1y agoAbsolutely. My DLSR almost never comes out which is a shame, but even on special trips I don't want to lug an extra camera around and have to worry about damaging that, so my phone has been my primary camera for 10+ years.
- breadwinner 1y agoMost of the issues noted are because of the wide angle lens of the iPhone. The more expensive iPhones (the Pro models) have 3 lenses one of which can produce photos similar to a traditional camera.
- sturza 1y agoSimilar to what? IQ? Amount of light capture? The first is a function of the second.
- kaonwarb 1y agoLonger effective focal length, reducing wide-angle distortion.
- _fw 1y agoThis is exactly it. A lot of the author's comments about skin tone and 'flat' colour are spot on though. To your point, take six steps back and use the 5x zoom on an iPhone Pro and you'll get a much better effect. As they say, the best camera is the one you have in your pocket. Physics means it can never replace a large sensor with a large lens... ... But Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, The Beach, Trainspotting, 127 Hours) was quite happy to film 28 Years Later entirely on the iPhone 15 Pro Max [1]. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/28-years-later-danny-boyles-new-zombie-flick-was-shot-on-an-iphone-15/ https://www.wired.com/story/28-years-later-danny-boyles-new-...
- tylermw 1y agoFor 28 Years Later, note that while the iPhone sensor did in fact ultimately collect the photons for the movie, they attached substantial professional-grade glass to the front to augment the phone camera.
- tehnub 1y agoMy understanding is that all that extra gear is mainly to enable more ergonomic manual control for things like focus. The matte box and ND filter are probably the biggest boosts to image and motion quality, and there are affordable ways to get those on your phone.
- astura 1y agoI must be a blind, I literally just can't see what this guy is talking about.
- atonse 1y agoI just started looking at photos and videos we took on vacation. I have an iPhone 16 Pro. And when I use the Photos app on my Apple TV to review a couple videos I took, I'm surprised at the weird, wavy quality I'm seeing in them. It's really strange. I will compare this to the videos I took with my Sony a6700. But until then, I'm surprised at how odd the videos looked on a large OLED TV. Might be compression from iCloud or something. Can't quite explain it otherwise. I have no shortage of friends who asked me why I bothered to buy a real camera, but if you're a hobbyist photographer, it's nice to use a real camera and have full control. There are apps that do let you do this on a smartphone, and it's definitely more convenient. But there's something about the real photos (with real Bokeh) that still look much better to me.
- datadrivenangel 1y agoI upgraded to the 16p instead of buying a new wide angle lens. The real bokeh is definitely nicer though.
- neogodless 1y agoWhen I owned an S21 Ultra, I found the photos were horribly paintbrushed due to excessive machine-learning. They look nice on a little screen, but pixel peeping is terrible. Using a OnePlus 12 now, and find the photos much less overprocessed (and wavy).
- Toutouxc 1y agoiCloud videos look terrible on Apple TV, the first time it caught me by surprise too. The originals are significantly nicer.
- ayoisaiah 1y agoI've been enjoying the Kino app for capturing in Apple Log with instant colour grading. Its my new default now.
- aosaigh 1y agoThese are some good examples. I'd love more on this. I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone. I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc. But I've come to the conclusion that once you start look closely there's absolutely no comparison. One thing I've started doing is creating custom photo books from all my photos. It's really helped me focus my photography. When doing this though I've noticed how edited phone photos are, as well as how poor the quality actually is (particularly in low light). The quality issue is understandable (it's physics). The editing issue is a bit more insidious I think. All in all, if you just want to view phone photos on your phone, they look great. But if you're actually interested in photography and printing, you should get a dedicated camera.
- markhalonen 1y agodigicams are making a huge comeback among young adults. Even a pocket digicam is a big step up from iPhone imo.
- aosaigh 1y agoI have a Ricoh GIII which is astonishing for its size. That said, it’s expensive so probably not an entry level pocket camera.
- rangestransform 1y agoThe GR III? I’m curious how the autofocus is on it, I tried one out at B&H but I think the autofocus was busted
- rangestransform 1y agoThe CCD digicams that are trending aren’t known for the technical quality of their sensors of lenses or whatnot, but the CCD low dynamic range aesthetic
- 1y ago
- FredPret 1y agoMy entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water. Add a nice lens and there's no comparison. However: - The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone) - The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us - The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
- aosaigh 1y agoI think these are good points. It boils down to: are you interested in photography or do you just want to have photographs? If it's the former, get a camera. If it's the latter, stick with the phone.
- datadrivenangel 1y agoI differentiate between photos for memory and records, and Photos for Photography as an art form.
- Auracle 1y agoI get what you’re saying, but I was a wedding photographer for ten years and that’s a job where ideally you’re doing both. That carried over to my personal life. Not that I don’t ever take snapshots - I do - but instead of just taking a picture of your kid from eye level, you can get down on their level and wait until their head is turned so they’re shortlit from light from the window. Of course, in that job you also quickly learn that the moment trumps everything. A technically awful photo of a great genuine smile or someone falling in the lake or whatever is usually better than an incredibly composed and lit photo of a person just sitting there…usually.
- rainsford 1y agoI sort of agree, but I also think there is lot that goes into taking interesting photos as an art beyond the technical capabilities of the camera you are using. Certainly a good camera can produce a better end product and can enable dimensions of creative freedom that's more difficult with a smartphone. But the process of picking an interesting subject, figuring out the angle and composition of the frame, finding the right light and time of day, etc, are all independent of the camera you're using and something you can explore with just the smartphone you already have in your pocket.
- dagmx 1y agoThe points really boil down to: 1. Difference in focal length/ position. 2. Difference in color processing But…the article is fairly weak on both points? 1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or whatever the focal length is. 2. Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone and the other camera. It’s again, no different between the two. It’s a poor article because it doesn’t focus on the actual material differences. The phone will have a smaller sensor. It will have more noise and need to do more to combat it. It won’t have as shallow a depth of field. The phone will also of course have different ergonomics. But the things the post focuses on are kind of poor understandings of the differences in what they’re shooting and how their cameras work.
- sazylusan 1y agoAgreed, in particular the distortion of the players on the ends, the smaller shoulders and chest, as well as the lean can all be attributed to the wider lens used on the iPhone (and as such that the photo was taken closer to players). I'd guess the author was using the "1x" lens on the iPhone, a lot of these issues go away if they use the "3x" or "5x" lens. I'd even consider that most of the jawline change of the player is simply the angle of their chin/face as well as expression.
- Joeri 1y agoThe 2x mode of the wide lens is basically the standard “nifty fifty” of a big camera and what the author should have compared to. The 1x is 24mm equivalent which is a focal length I don’t particularly care for, but I get why they picked it (easy to frame a group of people indoors). For portraits the ideal length is 85mm equivalent which would be 3.5x, rumored to be on the next iphone pro. At this length there is minimal facial feature distortion without getting the flattening effect you get at longer focal lengths.
- lambdasquirrel 1y agoThis does not address the detrimental parts of computational photography.
- crinkly 1y agoThey are good until they aren't. In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible. It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.
- ivell 1y ago"in the iPhone photo, the player is "leaning". His (long) feet are on the left and his head is on the right of the image. In the right image, the image accurately portays his balanced and confident stance. " The subject seems to have moved. His expression is different, how he holds the stick is different. Hard to believe that the stance remained the same meanwhile.
- markhalonen 1y agothe player in green has a substantial lean as well. Download the photo and crop and you can see it.
- drcongo 1y agoThere's so much wrong with this article it's difficult to know where to start, but the fact that they didn't bother to take the photos at the same time with an equivalent focal length makes the entire thing pointless.
- markhalonen 1y agoHow do you take a 45mm focal length photo with iPhone?
- drcongo 1y agoI said "equivalent" - the 2x lens is a 48mm equivalent so that difference would be almost invisible to most people.
- bloomingeek 1y agoI've been a Nikon user for decades, once I purchased a digital Nikon SLR, I was in heaven. Now, with my cell phone camera taking really nice pics, I don't carry the SLR as much. If I want to print and hang a photo, if it's a close up shot, I use my phone. If it's a larger view pic, I use my SLR.
- deneb150 1y agoiPhones have wide angle lenses but they are NOT fish eye lenses as stated a couple times in the article. They definitely distort things but a fish eye lens distorts things in a very different curved way rather than keeping lines straight like a regular wide angle lens.
- dale_glass 1y agoThat's not a particularly great test, because every camera will be great outside in the sunlight, and those photos are some of the least technically challenging ones you can take. Even a phone from 15 years ago won't be that bad at it. Modern computational photography does a great job of dealing with tricky conditions though.
- markhalonen 1y agoiPhones always take "decent" photos even under tricky conditions, but they never take great photos. I would take 10 great photos over 100 decent photos myself.
- Ancapistani 1y agoThey really don't. I regularly take photos outside, at night, in ambient light with my Fujifilm X-Pro3 and 56mm f/1.2. I'm stretching the limits of it a bit, using high ISO and as low a shutter speed as I can get away with. In the same lighting conditions, an iPhone will basically take 3-5 shots and composite them together in software. The result, predictably, is unusable for most moving subjects.
- Almondsetat 1y agoFraming is different because of bad lens choice on the photo part (why always shoot wide angle??) and this skews the results immensely and unfairly (composition is the most important thing in a photo). Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.
- markhalonen 1y ago"you will have the average complexion and you will like it" rofl
- Almondsetat 1y agowho are you quoting?
- markhalonen 1y agoit seems you accept having your skin color changed by the iPhone algorithm... I do not accept that so was making light of it
- Almondsetat 1y agoAll cameras imprint their own color signature to photos, so I really don't understand what you're talking about. Some people buy exclusively Canon cameras because their JPEG profiles give "good" skin tones straight out of the camera. Does that mean they are "accepting" Canon's opinion of what skin should look like? Yes. Everyone does, with every manufacturer, and Apple evidently has determined their visual style. At least they also provide you with an optional semi-raw output you can freely edit if you so desire.
- aosaigh 1y agoNot really. Look at the sky, it's very different between the two. This is something I've noticed constantly with iPhones in particular. To the point where I don't bother trying to take photos that focus on the sky or sunset as it heavily processes the results (extreme oranges and deep blues).
- vFunct 1y agoThey're still over saturated. Skin tones always have a cosmetic/tanned look compared to real life. Mirrorless camera photos have a lot better output. You can see that even in the first sample comparison. If you look at the photo on the iPhone right when you took it, it doesn't look like the subject you just took a photo of. It's always over saturated compared to real life. But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject. But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects). Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground. BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)
- aikinai 1y agoI never use flash and real cameras are still in a completely different league. There are tons of advantages, but I think the biggest different is dynamic range. Faces, hair, etc. look so dark on phone photos. And even if I try to manually push up the exposure and let it blow out the background, it will still never give me bright faces indoors. Of course then there's the lack of detail and watercolor effect to try to fake detail, distortion, etc.
- relaxing 1y ago> connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject fucking hell “fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card. Wedding photographers use bounce flash because indirect light is flattering and not everyone is supermodel-beautiful. I don’t know where you’re partying that the ceilings aren’t painted white (they usually are because the problem of color cast on reflected light applies to normal room lights as well) but I’ll take color balance I can fix in post over harsh shadows from direct fill flash.
- StrLght 1y agoPhotos taken on an iPhone are good, unless you: * zoom in * print them * watch them on a bigger screen Sometimes I compare photos I've taken over 10 years ago with Sony NEX-5 with photos I take today with an iPhone. There's no competition, APS-C from 15 years ago is still solid. Anyway, the best camera is the one you have with you, so in that sense iPhone is great.
- sgt 1y agoI was waiting for someone to say that ("The best camera is the one in your pocket"). Well.. I've always agreed with that. But maybe it's time to dig out that old DSLR again. It can always be in a camera bag in the car, ready for action.
- lifestyleguru 1y agoI have an opposite experience. Most old photos are made with cheap compact auto focus cameras and always somehow blurry and pale, at that time that was the camera "you have in your pocket". Photos with modern smartphone are always superior.
- jonathantf2 1y agoThey LOOK worse but they have a sort of nostalgic, "real" feel about them without all the extra post processing. Maybe it's because my eyesight isn't the best but my friend recently took a little digital camera to a festival and the pictures off of that are the ones we all posted.
- aosaigh 1y agoI also think there’s something special about looking through a viewfinder. Even in new cameras (where the viewfinder itself is a tiny screen) something happens when you frame a photo this way, that doesn’t happen when you use the back display (or a phone). I don’t know if it’s down to physically using one eye, or the psychology of bringing your eye to the camera’s eye, but it feels different (and I like it)
- adkaplan 1y agoI've struggled with this too. I want to only use my phone but the quiet focus that a view finder gives me allows better attention to detail, the edges of the photo, and subtle alignments of parallax objects. I find it much harder on a phone or with live view on a proper camera. It's like -- for a moment, I am the camera and I'm about to make a record of a moment. I don't get nearly that feeling with a phone despite years of trying to convince myself its the same
- BadJo0Jo0 1y agoWasn't there a phone with a lens mount system using that maker's existing lens eco system? I cant remember the maker. Sony? Nikon?
- Zak 1y agoNo. Sony and Olympus both made interchangeable-lens cameras with no screen or viewfinder meant to pair with phones. Realme made a prototype phone that can take an attachment to mount Leica M-mount lenses: https://petapixel.com/2025/03/04/realmes-ultra-phone-concept-uses-leica-m-mount-lenses/ https://petapixel.com/2025/03/04/realmes-ultra-phone-concept...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kolololos 1y agoThe best camera is the one which you have with you
- kolololos 1y ago[dead]
- cunidev 1y agoI recently switched to an imported phone with a bulky 1" sensor (Vivo X100 Ultra) and although far from my Sony mirrorless, the quality of shots and color science went up dramatically compared to my older Pixel 9 Pro (way overprocessed) and iPhone 13 (way oversaturated and pretty low-res). This is not to say there's no AI or strong computational component to it, but larger and more expensive sensors, which still have not found their way in mainstream phones, do bring massive advantage if they are not killed by excessive AI processing (as, sadly, I saw multiple times when test-driving Samsung Ultra phones) Ironically enough, the Vivo ("Zeiss") color science also looks more accurate than most phones I've owned, and is pretty flexible at editing time.
- tverbeure 1y agoMy biggest gripe is with iPhone photos today is the way small details get mangled beyond recognition. Small text looks like it was sent through a hallucinating LLM (which it probably was!)
- rconti 1y agoIt feels like things are going backwards. I was never much of a pixel peeper, but in my last few iphones, 14/15/16 pro, I'm regularly noticing the airbrushing of all of the things.
- MPSFounder 1y agoIs it just me or is color saturation a huge deal with iphones? I take a pic of myself, and it literally makes it portrait like and changes my skin (makes it smoother and more transluscent). I take a pic of the outdoors, and if there is text somewhere far away, it mangles it. I get iphones are mostly sold for social media influencers these days and beauty standards matter, but damn it I just want it to scan stuff and take photos of my family. There is a big problem with image fidelity.
- bdamm 1y agoI see iPhone pictures posted on walls all the time, because most people aren't pretentious. The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine. Don't underestimate the power of the subject's comfort and state of mind. Gramma is happy to get the picture, she doesn't care how it got taken.
- jonny_eh 1y agoHow else to justify spending thousands on a device that can only shoot pictures?
- throwanem 1y agoCompetence. But you're right something is off here.
- throwawaybob420 1y agoDo you know how childish you sound? That specialized equipment that does one thing really really fucking well is expensive? Is this supposed to be a gotcha
- Mashimo 1y ago> a 2004 Sony Digicam with a paltry 5.1 MP thousands rubbles?
- hnuser123456 1y agoAll these photos also seem to be taken at a further distance at a higher zoom with the digicam. Use 2x mode on iphone and step back a bit and the perspective/distortion should be similar. 12mp is still plenty. Also, they didn't mention if they turned off face smoothing on the iphone. Google a couple years ago, however, made a big stink that they were forcing an always-on filter to "enhance" the appearance of dark skin on Pixels, so yeah you might need a real camera to get accurate photos of subjects with darker skin if you have a pixel.
- epicureanideal 1y agoWhy can’t the fisheye distortion be removed with software?
- ruuda 1y agoIt can, but the result of doing that is not a rectangular picture. You can crop it again, but then you lose a big part of the edges.
- epicureanideal 1y agoAnyone out there feel like making an app that fixes the distortion and then fills in the missing edges of the rectangle with generative ai? I’d sure enjoy using such an app.
- hatthew 1y agoMy only significant gripe with phone cameras is that they oversharpen everything. Sharpening can subjectively make things look better as long as you don't zoom in too much, but has one significant problem: desaturation. In high-detail high-contras areas, e.g. the foreground grass, the sharpening pushes many of the pixels towards black or white, which are, notably, not green. This has the overall effect of desaturating these textures, and is the impetus for Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.
- CarVac 1y agoUnfortunately, if the phone camera images are processed without oversharpening, the results are extremely soft. Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing.
- hatthew 1y agoYeah, and even with sharpening it's noticeably softer when you zoom in on the photo. For fisheye, I guess it would have been more accurate to say: the perspective distortion is present in both photos and is stronger for the iphone photo due to a shorter effective focal length, and there is no noticeable fisheye/barrel distortion in the iphone photo.
- vladvasiliu 1y ago> Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing. Not just phones. Most wide-angles for "serious cameras" have distortion and rely on digital correction. See [0] for an extreme example in the form of a 16mm Canon, which is much less wide than the iPhone lens. [0] https://photographylife.com/reviews/canon-rf-16mm-f-2-8/2 https://photographylife.com/reviews/canon-rf-16mm-f-2-8/2
- can16358p 1y agoiPhone camera is perfect for getting an instant/algoritmically-processed HDR-enabled photo that looks nice on the phone screen and social media. Oh it's also great for macro due to physically being small. For everything else, actual camera hands down! Though for its size and availability iPhone camera is great!
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- kazinator 1y agoBeginner Photographer's pictures would compare better if they used a wider depth of field so the background objects are sharp, like the iPhone pics. But, conversely, how do you do the narrow(er) depth-of-field in the iPhone when you want it?
- jrockway 1y agoThe iPhone blurred background is completely synthetic. It uses multiple cameras to build a depth map of the scene, and then blurs whatever isn't at the depth of the subject of the photo. If you're asking "how do you do", you can select "portrait" when taking the photo, or go to the photo in your gallery after the fact, pick "edit", pick "portrait", and choose a fake aperture ("f/1.4") and focus point to use. The results are ... mid.
- can16358p 1y agoIt also fails miserable with long hairs unless it's all tightly tied up. Though still good to see how it turns out otherwise for a small phone in your pocket.
- retinaros 1y agoresults arent mid they would be equivalent to the beginner photographer in article.
- jrockway 1y agoI mean, you can try it. I took a random photo in my library, my self and a friend taking a selfie at a museum. I added the blur and there is no way to make both of us sharp while having the background blurred. Our depths are that different (inches), I suppose. At least with a DSLR you could correct this before taking the picture (by adjusting the composition of the shot). Doing it after the fact with a questionable depth map... not as good. One could take the depth map and use it to mask off two areas to keep sharp, which would potentially have better-than-real-camera results. The iPhone does not do this, however. You'd have to write your own program to do it.
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- hopelite 1y agoI wish the images had been taken at the same height. Especially when taking images of a person and evaluating their faces, taking one from a lower angle and another from a higher angle does not allow for good comparison. I am also not exactly convinced that this supposed iPhone picture of those kids is actually an image taken at 1x.
- makeitdouble 1y agoIt was a nice analysis of wide angle lenses, what processing is needed to adjust for the physical limitations, and on processing picture. From there: > Real cameras capture shadow more accurately. > professional cameras That's saying that real cameras don't use wide angle lenses nor have an image processing pipeline, and professionals of the field have adequately labeled cameras. This kinda makes the whole piece so shallow and weirdly ideological, when it doesn't need to be. People interested enough in the craft will spend time knowing their gear, the strength and limitations, and work with it. Phone cameras now give more and more access to the underlying mechanisms and RAW formats. There's of course tons of photos I'd want to put in my wall coming from my phone, they're just really great for subjects that properly match the lenses strengths. iPhones or Pixel phones aren't perfect or ideal in all conditions, but what camera is ?
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- kittikitti 1y agoThis is a great article, thank you for this. I will save it as a reference. I usually get unsolicited advice from people when I use my Fujifilm camera's about how a smartphone would shoot better. Even though I own one of the latest iPhone's, there's no comparison between the two. I don't mind the comments but there's always someone. There's also people with the latest phones who come and brag about their photo quality. I'm always nice about it and give my talking points about the sensor sizes and the lenses as quickly as possible. Sometimes they are more aggressive about it and start to question my competence. I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's as I'm usually in the middle of a few things during events. I liked how the article mentioned amateur photographer (which would describe me) so it addresses some of these concerns. It also uses examples of older cameras that are very affordable. Next time someone is coping from Big Tech marketing about the camera on their smartphone, I'll show them this. All the "Pro"s use iPhone camera, right?
- throwawaybob420 1y agoHonestly those people are fucking worst. Somehow having an actual camera makes people feel…inadequate? Like cmon dude, let me take my photos why do you have to start saying “oh my phone takes better photos, and i can use it to watch YouTube”
- 9rx 1y ago> I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's > "My phone takes better photos" < "Yeah. I wish I could afford one." Problem solved.
- dangus 1y agoThe actual answer is not to engage in the discussion. “I prefer the photos I take from this camera.”
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- jdelman 1y agoI see lots of framed iPhone pictures. I have a few in my house. They’re not big, but they’re pictures of happy moments that are worth printing. Using the 5x lens helps, but good composition, cropping, and fine tuning colors does as well.
- throwawaybob420 1y agoThe amount of people who get really defensive when people actually point out that, no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera is kinda crazy.
- cultofmetatron 1y agoI take a iphone and a nikon z5 with me. in their defense, if you dont' know what you're doing, the iphone will consistently take better photos. my z5 photo beat it any day but I had to learn how to be intentional with it in order to get that difference.
- Aurornis 1y ago> no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera 9 times out of 10 when I see someone making this claim it’s engagement bait. They know it triggers people and generates interactions. I think most people are well aware that they’re not the same. The point usually made is that it’s amazing that we can get such good photos out of something that fits in our pockets. In well-lit scenes you really can get some impressive image quality out of those tiny devices.
- Waterluvian 1y agoI’m not sure I’ve seen a single actual case of this. But I also haven’t seen a single actual case of anyone having any loud opinions about their phones for many many years now. I might just be finally old.
- actuallyalys 1y agoI basically agree with the author that the iPhone's camera is inferior to dedicated cameras, at least in the hands of a photographer who's learned to use them. To me it's striking that there's even a question. My first camera as a child was a cheap film camera[0], and the first digital cameras I saw firsthand, as cool as they were at the time, had even worse quality. Now smartphones have much better quality for people pointing and shooting and do it while crammed into a device that does many other things. Now, I'd hate for dedicated cameras to go away. I love shooting on SLRs, digital and film. I see smartphone cameras not as pretenders to the throne but as democratizing tools lowering the barrier for entry and a great way to get shots when you don't have your dedicated camera. [0]: for the record, the issue with the camera was that it was cheap and I didn't know what I was doing, not that it was film.
- deadbabe 1y agoSmartphone cameras have always been shit, the best thing about them is that you have them all the time. But then I bought a Ricoh GrIIIx, which is very pocketable and takes amazing photos. Even has a handy remote view function through WiFi. I don’t bother with my phone anymore.
- userbinator 1y agoAt least the "real" camera won't be hallucinating detail that isn't there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39926633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39926633 (sanity prevails)
- croemer 1y agoReminds me of the Xerox bug: https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0?si=b9ke9s1LHWm1WsdU https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0?si=b9ke9s1LHWm1WsdU
- gilgoomesh 1y agoIf you read through the thread on that top story, it wasn't a hallucination. There was really a leaf in the shot.
- pizlonator 1y agoThis article is evidence of iPhone cameras being really amazing intermingled with lots of words about things
- mullingitover 1y agoIf we’re going to berate mobile phone cameras I’d like to offer my take as someone who uses off camera lighting: it’s bullshit that we still don’t have any way of doing flash sync. I want to be able to control my Godox three point lighting system. I can trigger it with my Canon P that was made in the 1950s (which has no electronics whatsoever!), but not my iPhone that’s over 60 years newer.
- marcus_holmes 1y agoI got interested in photography during my travels, and my wife is very interested in it. I bought a decent camera. I really enjoyed playing with it, and spent some happy hours learning about it. I even took some decent photos (well, I liked them anyway). But in the end, carrying it became a chore and trying to take off-the-cuff photos during adventures took too long. I found that we needed to go for specific "photography adventures" with the camera, with the intent of taking photographs with the camera, in order to use it. If we were going for a trip without the specific aim of taking photographs it was just easier to use the phone cameras. Also the camera photos were stuck on the camera, while the phone photos were instantly usable in social media, and shareable from the Google/Apple Photos. I have a portable drive folder somewhere with all the camera photos, but I never see them. The phone photos are a search away. I think it's the difference between "being a photographer" and "taking photos". I am not a photographer, I just want to take some photos and share them with my friends. They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again. All the comments in the article are accurate but meaningless in this context. On the other had, if you're a photographer and want to take a photograph that someone will hang on their wall, all the comments in the article are accurate and relevant.
- acherion 1y agoWhy can't you be both? I am an amateur photographer, but it doesn't mean that I carry my camera with me everywhere that I go. I see photography as a hobby, so when I feel like I want to do "hobby things" I bring a camera with me. I prepare myself to do so. It doesn't mean that I don't use my phone camera at all (in fact I upgraded my phone purely for the "better camera"). If you are just taking snapshots to share with friends, then it makes sense to not bring the camera. But if it's your hobby, where you sit down and take time and care to take a photo, then it's a different game altogether. I don't often print my photos out and put them on a wall, but I do have my own photography blog where I post the photos I take (with a camera). I think the article is still relevant to that kind of scenario too. I think the purpose of this kind of page is to outline differences between taking a snapshot and taking a photo. This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time. It also attempts to combat the prevalent myth that more megapixels = better photos. Yes that myth still exists in 2025.
- kube-system 1y agoThe distortion of faces near the edges of iPhone photos is, in my opinion, the biggest issue with iPhone photos. So much so that I avoid being at the edges of group photos specifically for this reason. And it gets worse as you approach the edge of the frame. If you are barely in-frame, you will look like you've gained 30lbs and you've just had a stroke.
- lambdasquirrel 1y agoYeah, and it’s an interesting problem because for a lot of casual photos, most people won’t care. But once you do care, there’s suddenly no recourse. Folks will say it’s just the focal length. But can you crop when your sensor is already that small?
- thefluffytoucan 1y agoEasily solved. Next time have the photographer use the telephoto camera and make them step back a bit so everyone fits in the frame and the faces at the edges will be perfectly fine.
- kube-system 1y agoThat’s a technical solution but not always socially viable for most of the situations where someone else is volunteering to take a group photo that I just happen to be in. And taking a picture of a big group in telephoto is often space constrained.
- whatever1 1y agoTo my knowledge none of the photo oriented cameras of the market have the processing capabilities of a modern iPhone. These things can casually record 4k 60 for as long as your storage can survive with the best OIS. Night mode photo check. HDR mode check. I wish Apple was selling their processing hardware to camera vendors.
- landgenoot 1y agoIsn't that because the processing is not supposed to happen in-camera?
- brokenmachine 1y agoa6700 can do quality 4k120 for as long as you want and has IBIS, HDR and real lenses. I know what I'd rather take pictures with.
- badgersnake 1y ago> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall? I have a photo I took on my iPhone 6S on my wall. It’s a crop of a panorama taken from the top of a sand dune in Namibia.
- teiferer 1y agoMy expectation is that in a few years from now, the raw photo taken by the mobile camera will merely serve as an input to some AI image generator which will then produce a top-quality pro photographer grade image at whatever resolution you like with whatever changes you command ("without all those 1000s of tourisms in front of the Louvre except my wife"). The photo will be fake but will capture the scene that you have in mind better than any pro photographer could.
- 14123newsletter 1y agoHave yet to see AI doing anything remotely close to real life image even now.
- dwayne_dibley 1y agouncertain what to think about this comment. Are you living under a rock?
- CranberryDefuse 1y agoIn 2021, Samsung introduced a feature called Moon Mode that, without the user's knowledge, substituted an artificial intelligence image of the moon for a moon photo. Moon-gate: Samsung fans are mad about AI-processed photos of the moon : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds-fake-detail-to-moon-photos-via-reference-photos/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds...)
- LambdaComplex 1y agoSomeone actually did this already as an art project: https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/paragraphica https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/paragraphica
- jajko 1y agoSamsung recently pushed Oneui (their skin over android) I think version 8 to my 3.5 years phone (s22 ultra). Menus and light design changes are barely noticeable, but - they also revamped photo app. Now every single picture taken is much sharper and better looking, the darker it gets the bigger the difference. Also 10x physical zoom produces much better photos in all conditions. It feels like I just got a new phone with amazing new cameras, I'd say dxomark score should be revisited. Now maybe they tackled some hardware reserves via better algorithms, its all possible. Or, slightly more probably, some tiny little AI is ironing out pictures on a level not detectable by mere viewing by eye. I don't complain, camera is #1 priority for me on phone as an amateur photo enthusiast, and basically I don't need to upgrade phone for quite a few years. The results are really really good and I haven't seen anything noticeable in few hundred snaps, often done after sunset.
- viccis 1y agoA couple of things, some of which are difficult topics to broach: 1. Every dude here is pretty unattractive, so the question is which camera gives them enough camera makeup to hide it. If you shake your head at this, take a peek at this: https://i.imgur.com/vdD5r8M.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/vdD5r8M.jpeg Every dude is mewing for his life in the latter photo 2. They aren't making the same face for each shot, so all of this is a waste of time. That's so much more important. 3. The only real difference is just the background being blurred or not. Otherwise it's a totally different pose for each guy.
- jillesvangurp 1y agoI have a Pixel 6 Pro. I played a bit with it's raw format when I got it. It's fairly impressive; especially for night time photography. When that came out, both Apple and Google sourced their sensors from Sony. I think that's still the case. At the hardware level, there's not that much difference between cameras in different phones. Most of the differences are created in software. The dng files that come out of my Pixel phone down sample from 50 mega pixels to 12.5. You can't access the original 50 mega pixels. So each pixel has information from 4 "real" pixels. That's fairly effective for getting rid of noise. I took some night shots with it and it holds up pretty well. It actually makes Google's night vision AI mode a bit less impressive because the starting point isn't that bad. My other camera is a Fuji X-T30. The lenses and sensor are clearly better on that one if you look at the raw files. More detail, dynamic range, etc. But at night it's kind of weak (noise). And if you are into that, Fuji's film emulation produces pretty pleasing jpg files without a lot of work. I shoot raw so I tend to ignore that. But it's a somewhat fair comparison because in both cases there isn't much post processing. Except the Fuji isn't doing a lot of AI trickery and is just relying on a good results that come out of the camera and applying a prefab tone mapping that resembles what film used to do. The difference of course is that with the Fuji, you are making lots of creative choices with focal range, depth of field of the lens (aperture), shutter speeds, and ISO while you are shooting. You don't really have that with a smart phone (though you can have some control). The iphone and pixel phones fake some of this stuff and some people like the portrait mode with the fake bokeh. Lens quality is amazing given the size of phones these days. But it's not the same as shooting with a proper lens and they do have some real physical limitations. And if you shoot raw, you gain a lot of control over tone mapping etc. Not for everyone of course. But also not the end of the world with the right software. I use Darktable for this and if you dial that in properly, it's not actually a lot of work. That being said, my pixel takes decent photos without a lot of effort and there is value in that. I have it with me by default and that is invaluable. I only use the Fuji a few times per year. But there's less art to using a smart phone. Point and tap on the button and hope for the best.
- otikik 1y agoI prefer what the author calls “hot dog skin” in the examples
- KempyKolibri 1y agoThe new(ish) Adobe Project Indigo attempts to rectify some of these - it generally captures pictures in a more SLR-ish manner, even when it outputs HDR. It does RAW capture and has decent control options if you want that. However, it's a battery hog and can be a bit sluggish to get going, and there are some weird interactions with the built in photos app (if you crop the photo after the fact in the Photos app it pushes all the colour towards purple in the thumbnail, but not in the actual image). I'm already happy enough with the image quality that I can overlook these flaws, which will hopefully get fixed over time. People should try it to see what they think.
- karel-3d 1y agoMy phone is too old for this app :(
- Lord-Jobo 1y agoIm grateful I can still shoot raw on my pixel 8 and edit myself from there. But at that point I will just grab the dslr. A used canon eos 100d is like, startlingly cheap on eBay, I think I picked mine up for $150 a few years ago with a decent lens and it still demolishes any smartphone without much effort.
- ezst 1y agoTo me, the "hotdog skin complexion" aspect is a dead giveaway for when a photo was taken on an iPhone. It's so over the top and unrefined that I wonder how not only Apple let it happen, but seemingly entertain it/make it worse over generations of devices? Certainly such photos won't "age well"? And it's not like it has to be this way because of technological limitations, take Pixel photos, for instance, they get their colors much more balanced and faithful.
- silisili 1y agoSame with Pixel, which actually did it years before I'd presume. I'm white as ghost. Pixels are determined to make me looked tan for absolutely no reason. I mean, maybe I look 'better', arguably, but it's not me. Is that what people want? I bought the kid some newfangled Polaroid type thing, and she uses that way more than phones anymore for photos. Maybe the kids will be ok.
- dialup_sounds 1y agoGoogle made an publicized effort to better represent darker skin tones, which may explain the tan. It probably thinks you're overexposed and desaturated instead of pale. https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/real-tone/ https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/real-tone/
- nmeofthestate 1y ago"What we need is a great big melting pot Big enough to take the world and all it's got Keep it stirring for a hundred years or more And turn out hot-dog-coloured people by the score"
- trallnag 1y agoThat's basically what the USA are. Although Brazil is probably a better example.
- globular-toast 1y ago
- dejongh 1y agoAfter reading the article I might dust off my DSLR, however the fact that I have my iPhone with me most of the time will never change - so more than 99% of my photos/videos will be captured by that thing.
- wordofx 1y ago> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall? I stopped reading here. Every photo on the walls in my house came from some smart phone.
- spamjavalin 1y agoI always see smart phone pictures printed on walls. Also all these photos look the same pretty much. News flash no one really cares about perfect - only good enough.
- pmontra 1y agoThe average person does not know anything about all of this. I start with TV sets. The usual way to chose one was walking into a shop, looking at dozen of TVs tuned on the same channel, picking the ones that subjectively looked best then check the price and size. Did we (average people) cared about the inner workings of the TV? Nearly zero. Enter cheap compact digital cameras (200-300 Euro or Dollars.) We didn't have a chance to take pictures to compare cameras and even if we did it would take too much time. We read reviews, trust them, shop from home. Most people would buy the model with the highest number of Megapixel. Enter smartphones. On average there are people that will buy an iPhone no matter what and people that will not buy an iPhone no matter what. Then they would use the camera inside the phone and would possibly notice that its pictures looked better or worse than their previous phone, especially in dark places. And about camera vs phone: the phone is always in the pocket, the camera is always at home unless somebody goes on vacation in some scenic place and plans to take a lot of pictures. Half of them will be taken with the phone anyway. I do have a compact camera. It's some Sony model with 30x optical zoom. It's great to take shots of animals without having to get close and scare them away (so no picture.) It's definitely better than my phone but my phone is not so bad too and it's more convenient to use. Furthermore those compact cameras lost many manual settings that would make them more useful. Sometimes it's easier to pin the autofocus of my phone on a subject than to make my camera understand that it must focus to something instead of doing its best to focus on the surroundings. And I won't digress on how long it takes to take a picture with cameras and send it to somebody on WhatsApp. So, those 5 golf players look better on the camera but their picture will be taken and shared with a phone 99.9999% of the times.
- patrakov 1y ago> So, those 5 golf players look better on the camera but their picture will be taken and shared with a phone 99.9999% of the times. The point not in the article is that a phone camera, when used correctly (i.e., not defaulting to 1x zoom, maintaining a proper distance from the subject, and choosing wisely what's in the background), can produce photos of the same kind as a real camera in terms of composition. And that's what should be shared 99.9999% of the time. The extra resolution does not matter online, as most people will not zoom beyond what the platform, such as DeviantArt, offers as the default viewing experience - which is approximately 50% of the screen width, i.e., 1920 pixels on 4K displays.
- mrob 1y agoI prefer all the iPhone examples. The wider angle lens gives more of a 3D appearance, and the greater depth of field means I have greater choice in where to look instead of the photographer trying to force me to look where they want me to.
- shmeeed 1y agoThat's an interesting take that reflects how subjective viewing habits are. I definitely know what you mean, and there's a kind of (mostly casual or documentary) photograph where it makes sense to say that. But in a more classical sense, directing the viewer's look is what composition in photography is all about.
- muppetman 1y agoI've seen plenty of smart phone photos on walls. Heaps. I get the author knows what he's talking about/looking at, but most of us don't. I couldn't tell you which of those was iPhone vs Expensive Camera if you didn't tell me. Maybe I could guess but I'd have to examine. This is the same as me being incredulous that the author has (made up example) a $20 cheap router his ISP gave him vs my lovingly handcrafted config on my home VyOS router. At the end of the day both work...
- jajko 1y agoBoth work for you since you have no idea about actual photography. The second the article loaded on my small screen and I knew it was iphone vs real camera, without seeing description I knew photo on the left was from iphone. Apple is 'famous' for at least a decade to (by default and basically nobody turns it off) overdo saturation towards red spectrum so that every single photo looks like its taken in golden hour (last hour before sunset). Every single one. Skin tones are affected correspondingly, looking artificial. You may not see it, its glaringly obvious to anybody who even scratched surface of photography (I never got deeper and still). I get it, people like that 'instagram' look, but when its coming from all directions it loses all beauty and its just plasticky looking people. Apple has some properly good hardware (and corresponding sw processing), they didn't have to resort to overdoing it so much (also very aggressively removing any skin blemishes and moles which all goes back to above). At the end, apple photos and people on them look too artificial. If you like it as such that's fine, but it doesn't represent reality, at least far less than other phones and proper camera photography.
- patrakov 1y agoRegarding the focal length difference, which is very well illustrated by the first two photographs, I would frame this point differently from what the article does. Disclaimer: I don't have an iPhone 16, but my Poco X4 Pro 5G suffers from the same "fisheye" issue with its 25mm-equivalent lens. And I am not a professional photographer. It is not a "bad camera" issue, but a composition issue forced by the short focal length second and the users' aversion to cropping the image first. You can easily avoid this issue by shooting at 2x digital zoom (or cropping) and going 2x further from the scene. And 2x zoom (with the corresponding decrease in the resolution of the resulting files) is how I shoot the majority of my photos. So yes, I effectively have a 3MP camera, not 12MP (and not the hyper-marketed 108MP AI camera), and, for many purposes, it's still good enough. P.S. Composition matters a lot. The right photo has the right proportions between the players and the trees in the background. The inclusion of the yellow golf flag in the "beginner photographer's" photo is also what makes the scene more complete artistically and worth hanging on the wall.
- Lanrei 1y agoFocal length wouldn't even be an issue if the photographer was taking the photos from the same position. The fish-eye effect is literally because the photographer is closer. Cropping a photo with a different focal length will give the same composition and difference will be the distortion introduced by the camera and the image processing.
- Terretta 1y ago100% -- "zoom with your feet" To your point, back up to where you'd shoot the long lens, then crop back. Thanks to the 48mp, there's room to crop, it'll be fine. FWIW, this crop is what every* camera with a sensor smaller than full frame is already doing to get "reach" from smaller glass, whether we realize it or not. * By and large.
- amelius 1y agoThe trees look better in the iPhone photo. In fact, the leftmost player's hair looks like it blends with the trees and becomes a different hairdo.
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoOk, chillax iPhone fanbois: https://www.cined.com/iphone-15-pro-lab-test-rolling-shutter-dynamic-range-and-exposure-latitude/ https://www.cined.com/iphone-15-pro-lab-test-rolling-shutter...
- nmstoker 1y agoThe colour corrections are also annoying when you're trying to take photos of things like cuts and bruises as you want an accurate record (eg to show a doctor) but instead it effectively says "let me clean that up for you" and you're left with the blemishes you wanted diminished!
- todotask2 1y agoI would framed it up with the photos taken with Halide P0 app.
- ksynwa 1y agoAs a permanently amateur photographer my favourite aspect of this comparison is portrait photographs. Beginner cropped frame DSLRs with a high aperture prime lens take so much better portrait pictures than any phone camera. Now I understand that it is not really fair to compare a specialised equipment with a phone camera. But it is a testament to how timeless and beautiful a prime len's bokeh is. Phones try to simulate it with depth estimation but it never looks good to me.
- neomantra 1y agoHas anyone used this Candid9 service or QR code photo sharing workflow? Does it work well? I happen to be making a RPi Camera for Burning Man and was incorporating a QR code workflow into it. With a thermal printer for either a low-res pic or a QR code to print or snap. I devised something along the lines of this service, but dead simple URL generation to filename+hash in an S3 bucket.
- markhalonen 1y agoI am the creator of Candid9 and I have taken about 290 photos of strangers and distributed them via candid9 QR codes. Happy to chat about it!
- neomantra 1y agoThanks for replying and congrats on releasing your idea to the world. I just signed up to check it out and will use it in parallel with my project. I like your idea of session-based versus photo-based and also the approach of pre-printing QR codes. That is a simple workflow quite accessible to the less technical on both sides. I don't think I have specific questions now, but I'm excited for the kinds of interactions it can spark. I mostly imagine getting lost in a sea of QR codes if it is not managed well. I was going to try to composite an extra copy for photographer reference.
- markhalonen 1y agoAwesome! It's a very simple workflow, here's another video that I don't have on the website for reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OctwOpaNoJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OctwOpaNoJQ
- Saline9515 1y agoThis is why I enjoy analog camera - aside from the fact that any 100$ camera can take crisp photos, they don't try to be perfect and add creative and artistic aspects to photography. Each film has its own color balance and sensitivity, each lens will render light differently, you can choose between them to create the aesthetics you want. I enjoy it more, and take really good family pictures with it!
- os2warpman 1y ago> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall? No. I have numerous smartphone photos printed and framed. On both walls and horizontal surfaces. There does not exist a greater pixel-peeping gearslut than I, but that's just a hobby. Hobbies only dominate my wallet, not my life.
- jpatten 1y agoI’m sure that Apple did tons of A/B testing, focus groups etc. with different image processing parameters to arrive at the settings that their phones use for photos, and from these comments it’s clear that a lot of people prefer the iPhone photos. When I was in grad school (in the pre-iPhone era) I photographed lots of weddings on the weekends, and one thing I noticed during the process was that people often have a set idea of what good photos look like. This idea of a “good” photo is often not tied to what the scene in front of them looks like. For example a “good” photo that includes a sunset will show a highly saturated orange/red sky, even if that’s not what the sky looks like at the moment the photo is taken. Personally, I carry around a Ricoh GR3, and shoot random shots with the iPhone, but when it really matters I’ll use the Ricoh. The way the iPhone flattens the lighting is what bugs me the most. Recently I was at a kid’s birthday party and each kid had a cupcake with a candle in it. The room was a bit dark, and the Ricoh photo showed that each kids face was illuminated just a bit by the candle in their cupcake… The color temperature of the candle light is warmer than that of the room light. The photo makes you feel like you’re really there. My friend shot a photo on her iPhone at the same time and we compared afterwards. In her photo, every kid’s face is well lit and the candle effect is gone. She likes her shot better and I like mine. Some people want a shot that reflects what they saw, and some people want a shot that looks like what they think good photos look like.
- Neywiny 1y agoMKBHD does a phone camera tournament (yearly?) and I believe at least once he found that people prefer a brighter image, even if that didn't match reality. No source or proof, just something I vaguely remember
- ratmeadow 1y agoI have found that non-photographer people have generally have absolutely no sense of what makes a good photo. They don't care about composition, lighting, colours, detail, or ambience. Their mental/emotional impression of what the photo represents is more important than the photo itself
- aalert 1y agoPortraits that you'd get from a nice 85mm f1.2 or f1.4 on a full frame camera cannot be replaced with iphone images (yet!) imho. Any color grading can probably be reproduced in post.
- dusted 1y agoI'm generally annoyed with the amount of processing going on in modern phone cameras, they often take pictures that "look fine" on the screen, until you zoom in to native resolution and discovered most of it is some fever-dream of approximations, it's amazing that we (people) are accepting this.. Lots of fine memories degraded by cheating cameras.. It's annoying especially because at a glance, the pictures taken by my S24+ look just fine, and it sometimes makes me not pull out the aging DSLR.. but then when I get the pictures onto my PC and want to actually look at them.. I always regret my mistake.. Even a 10 year old DSLR on automatic no-flash mode kicks its butt so bad it's not even a comparison..
- mahmoudhossam 1y agoIt's because the consumption side has completely changed. Most people now don't even own a PC so they're not likely to even notice this problem.
- dusted 1y agoprobably.. I was at a range and took a quick snap of my target, because I wanted to review it in a bit calmer environment.. I remember standing there, seeing the bullet holes in the paper, and I distinctly recall two holes that had multiple hits. When I opened the picture on the phone to look, lo and behold, those were generic bullet holes, they except, not mine.. I zoomed in and nope, they're fake.. I have had so many experiences with this on different Samsung phones.. that stuff is just OFF, like, a picture of my kid in low light, and the phone just decided part of his face was probably the wallpaper, so it just put wallpaper pattern there instead of skin.. I've been over every setting I can dig up, can't find anything that should do this..
- OldfieldFund 1y agoI believe the biggest problem here is that the author of the blog was using the ultra-wide-angle lens. I can tell by how the players are "leaning" and how the software is "fixing" the curvature of the photo. 90% sure of it. I always use the "regular" lens, and the pictures are much better. You can also set styles in the camera settings to fix these problems: incorrect AI white balance and lighting.
- Lord-Jobo 1y agoA decade of "the best smartphone camera competitions" by mkbhd have clearly highlighted what is happening here. 1: In a/b testing, nearly everyone including pixel peepers prefer a more vibrant photo. 2: the traditional perspective of "a photo should look as close as possible to what my eyes see if I drop the viewfinder" is increasingly uncommon and not pursued in the digital age by nearly anyone. 3: phone companies know the above, and basically all of them engage in varrying degrees of "crank vibrance until people start to look like clowns, apply a skin correction so you can keep the rest mega vibrant" with an extra dash of "if culturally accepted to the primary audience, add additional face filtering to improve how people look, including air-brushing and thinning of the face" This is rightfully compared to the loudness wars and I think that's accurate. It really became a race to the bottom once we collectively decided that "accurate" photos were not interesting and we want "best" photos.
- stego-tech 1y agoI fully agree with your observations, and would add the irony of such a pursuit by phone makers is that serious hobbyist/amateur/professional photographers and videographers understand that cameras are inherently inaccurate, and that what we’re really capturing is an interpretation of what we’re seeing through imperfect glass, coatings, and sensor media to form an artistic creation. Sure, cameras can be used for accuracy, but those models and lenses are often expensive and aimed at specific industries. We enjoy the imperfections of cameras because they let us create art. Smartphone makers take advantage of that by, as you put it, cranking things to eleven to manipulate psychology rather than invest in more accurate platforms that require skill. The ease is the point, but ease rarely creates lasting art the creator is genuinely proud of or that others appreciate the merit behind.
- mcny 1y agoI don't spend too much time thinking about cameras or lenses but this kind of conversation makes me wonder... when I take photos of receipts or street signs or just text in general, is it possible that at some point the computational photography makes a mistake and changes text? or am I being paranoid?
- retinaros 1y agoI stopped reading at the first picture comparison. Iphone has a portrait mode that blurs the background. you wouldn't be able to tell the difference at the first photo or any photo of a beginner photographer that has blurred backgrounds. anyway the major differentiator in photography is not the device but light.
- ChuckMcM 1y agoInteresting discussion here, I particularly like that people have recognized that the people who use phones to take pictures and the people who use cameras to take pictures often have different goals. There are lots of areas where there is a ‘convenience’ / ‘art’ split. One I recognized early was houses that were ‘architected’ and those that were just ‘built’. Looking at cabins from the 1800’s vs houses you can really see a cabin is practical, it is focused on utility that is easily built with a wide variety of materials at hand and skill sets of the builders. Whereas homes that were architected and built used a lot of craftspeople, bespoke materials, etc. My dad was a professional photographer and he would take pictures and I would take pictures and his looked great and mine looked ‘ordinary’? I was just capturing the view in a given direction and he was composing a view to have various elements in relation to make a picture. Phone cameras are “free” in that you bought a phone and it happened to come with a camera, and you carry it with you everywhere because phone. So a lot of the image capturing that is done is what you see. People do compose shots, and I’ve seen great photographs from phone cameras. But it is pretty clear that a photographer using a phone works harder to get their shot than someone who just wants a snapshot, and it goes the other way too, a person who just wants a snapshot works a lot harder to figure out how an SLR works, “just to take a picture” while the photographer seems to effortlessly bring it up to take a wonderful shot. So if you take the whole set of people who are using a tool, you optimize for the largest portion of that population which is where the culture aspects kick in it seems. People grabbing snapshots with ‘one button activation’ vs people taking photographs composing with scenes and light.
- ingohelpinger 1y agostop using phone cameras and lets go back to analog.
- ubermonkey 1y agoI've been a pretty enthusiastic amateur photographer for a long time, though COVID broke a good part of that habit. Even so, though, 5 or 7 years ago it became clear that I could absolutely use some iPhone shots as part of my travel sets. Yeah, you could tell they weren't from the full-frame Sony, but the delta was small enough that it was okay. Now that delta is narrower. But the BULK of the photos I end up sharing are still from a real camera. Some of that is the lack of distortion, and some of that is likely the intentionality of Using A Camera vs. whipping out one's phone, and a good chunk of is the level of control a competent shutterbug has with a proper camera that is mostly absent, or at least harder to manipulate, on a phone (aperture, shutter, ISO, etc).
- thefluffytoucan 1y agoColors are always subjective, so it’s totally fair to not like them. But why does the article compare what I assume is the iPhone’s ultra wide angle lens (incorrectly referred to as a “fish eye” lens) with a different focal length on a different camera without specifying what exactly it is being compared to? That’s apples to oranges. Distortion from focal length can only be meaningfully judged in combination with sensor size and subject distance. Example: iPhone 16 Pro ultra wide focal length is 13mm (equivalent to full frame). So the comparison shots need to be taken from the same spot and with another 13mm equivalent focal length, for example a full frame camera with a 13mm lens or a micro four-thirds camera with a 6.5mm lens.
- roywiggins 1y ago> The fish eye iPhone lens creates distortion Fisheye lenses are a specific thing, iPhone lenses aren't fisheye lenses.
- givinguflac 1y agoI find this article to be lacking. Perhaps I missed it, but it seems to me the author was shooting in the default settings and not ProRAW which is head and shoulders better. Also, seriously with the “leaning”? You can’t crop/rotate to make them look identical for comparison?
- prmoustache 1y agoIronically I have a few framed photos, from mobile (because that is what I had in the pocket), digital and film cameras but most photos that I have framed are Polaroid and Instax ones. An instant camera is a major PITA to carry, the film are expensive, a lot of pictures end up bad because of limitations of the media, the colors are often not very neutral but you are 100% sure that you end up with physical photos after every take, and thus some good memories. While smartphone pictures are more likely to end up in a family whatsapp group, I have tons of mobile and digital pictures I don't even remember I have taken and they mostly just take up space in my NAS and backup storage. Nowadays I never travel without either my Polaroid, Instax Wide or Lomo Instant Square Glass. It is also a great way to make gifts. I tried portable printers. It is nice to make gifts but it was just a hassle to even connect and launch the print most of the time.
- geldedus 1y agothat's not what "bokeh" means ; that's only out of focus blur of the background
- mikewarot 1y agoI thought the article was parody/sarcasm at first. I've got an old Nikon D5100 DSLR which I sometimes pull out and take photos with, and a cheap $200 Motorola phone, which does amazingly well, if there's plenty of light and the subject happens to take up most of the frame (and can thus focus) Getting a good photo with the Nikon is easier for me, but I've had a lot of practice. The main issue is getting things to focus in macro land.
- wigster 1y agoi prefer the other. death by auto filter
- p0w3n3d 1y agoI'd love to see indoor photos comparison. These photos all are taken outside where there's no need to do additional lighting from the camera, and using "some Sony 2004" camera is not a feasible solution in this case, because the flash would ruin everything, making people on the photo looking like a south park style stickers. I'd say that the software behind phone cameras copes well inside buildings, but standard cameras need additional help.
- Aachen 1y agoThe author identified their own problem: "The fish eye iPhone lens creates distortion". If you don't want distortion from the ultrawide camera, don't use ultrawide. The traditional camera didn't have an ultrawide lens on it either (or if it does, it's less wide) Most other points also seem contrived to me. Not all: skin color really seems better on the traditional camera. Whether that's due to the phone not being able to use the main camera, though, I wouldn't know... These pictures simply need to be compared with reality if you want to know which camera is better. I can't tell what the shape of the leftmost person's head is. I noticed the difference, found the iPhone version more flattering, but then read the text and saw that the iPhone is apparently distorting it. A reader can't judge how close it is to reality. Continue reading, and matching reality is now bad: the traditional camera can't properly capture the background (or light in the foreground of the later child picture) and the author thinks that's good. Blurring and darkening is something you can always still add in, I'd say that a camera performed better if it delivered a picture close to reality and you can work with that data to highlight any aspect you want. The camera doesn't have to force that upon you
- snowwrestler 1y agoThis is post fails to disclose an important detail, which is that the photographer was not standing in the same spot for all photos. For iPhone golf player shot, they were standing closer to the players and using a wide-angle lens. For the “beginner photographer” shot they were standing farther away and using a longer focal length lens. You can tell by the size of the trees in the background. This difference in positioning, not “because iPhone,” is why the player’s faces are distorted on the left. These details might not matter to random folks grabbing snapshots. But I expect something posted to HN to actually contain useable detailed information, rather than vague “looks worse” comparisons with an obvious thumb on the scale.
- markhalonen 1y agoIt is true that I was standing closer and using a wide-angle lens with the iPhone. But it wasn't on purpose to tip the scales, I was just taking an iPhone photo as I've done many times. So it would be a fairer comparison to use a longer focal length, but it's also true that I am the Average Joe, and Average Joe took a better photo with the camera, because it guided me in that direction more than the iPhone did.
- bonoboTP 1y ago> But it wasn't on purpose to tip the scales, I was just taking an iPhone photo as I've done many times. It tipped the scales and the post became overwhelmingly misleading, attributing the "distortion" to the camera, instead of the distance and zoom.
- markhalonen 1y agoRight but at the same time, Average Joe will take better photos with a digicam because they'll behave exactly like I did and make the same mistakes, so arguably it's very naive but also an accurate depiction of the average idiot who clicks a shutter
- mattlutze 1y ago
- ben7799 1y agoThis article is mediocre because smartphone is perfectly happy to take pictures that look like the "beginner photographer" pictures. You just have to know what you're doing. - Don't use the super wide lens and stand too close to people - Use the super easy edit features to fix distortion - Pay attention to lighting & exposure - Don't just accept the iPhones default settings If you want toned down contrast and color smartphones are perfectly happy to do that. Otherwise.. I do configure my fancy digital camera to capture reduced contrast and color saturation compared to the defaults on a smartphone. So a lot of the time my samples would look like his. Average people want contrast + saturation turned up like crazy. This is why the defaults ship that way. This is why a lot of the beginner non-phone digital cameras often shipped with the defaults that way. This is why TVs ship with the brightness/contrast/saturation boosted. The average person might look at your more subtle photo and appreciate it as better than theirs but then they will go right back to being super happy with their high contrast/saturation images.
- jlarocco 1y agoIn some situations an iPhone can't even compete. For example in low light, or in the rain, or with wet hands, or for getting certain focus and bokeh effects. I love having a camera on my phone for the convenience, but when I want to take good pictures I take out my camera.
- purerandomness 1y agoOkCupid (the original one, before they sold out) had a great article showing how your perceived attractiveness changes significantly, based on the camera you're using to take your profile pictures [1] [1] "Don’t Be Ugly By Accident!": https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/dontbeuglybyaccident.html https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/dontbeuglybyacciden... (mirror)
- hettygreen 1y agoWhat is a good digital camera that can be carried around in a pocket easily?
- pnut 1y agoRicoh GR3
- m463 1y agothis is a little confusing because "beginner" shows worse composition in each case, for example the trees growing out of the heads of the subjects.
- Footprint0521 1y agoYeah maybe if you stay in the default camera app and point and shoot? But I’ve been on cloud 10 editing exported RAW ProMax photos and that’s 90% of his complaints. And the last 10% of the jaw complaint was just the kid moving his mouth Like yeah, there’s differences, but not to a novice photographer. And they’re not the end of the world to professionals? Idk
- DavideNL 1y agoTo all the camera nerds here on HN: anyone know a good equivalent article / camera comparison blog post? Would be interesting to read another perspective on the same subject…