I'm a bit fed up with "computational photography". The image reconstruction on the iPhone 13 is super fascinating from a technical perspective - crazy what can be achieved with the given constraints - but I do prefer less of it like it was still the case with my old "more honest" iPhone X. I should probably finally test the Pro Raw mode, I guess it will give me what I'm missing?
Still, I'm wondering if anyone has a rec for a slightly less handy yet purpose built and somewhat comparable modern "snap & shoot" camera? Even after reading this well done review / comparison the iPhone 14 Pro upgrade is just not worth it to me at this point.
When I had my Pixel 2 XL I was constantly amazed at how clear, sharp, and non-muddy the computational photos came out. It was astonishing. I now have a 13 Pro Max and wish that I could just shut off the “water color effect”. I don’t know if it’s just me being picky, but I swear to god the Pixel 2 XL had a better camera in every way. More zoom, higher quality color, sharper pictures, WAY BETTER IMAGE STABILIZATION, and the computation stuff like Google’s night mode is leagues ahead of iPhone.
I created an account just to recommend shooting ProRaw with the Pro Camera app on an iPhone. There's even a setting to turn down some of the computational photography features (under 'Capture Quality'). Makes a world of difference!
I bought the RX100m3 from Sony for this reason with the birth of our first child. It worked amazingly and was exactly what I was looking for in what I was buying. Shooting RAW was nice, and all the Sony tech from the larger bodies makes it way down into the RX100 line. They are not cheap though.
I currently have a small digital point and shoot that’s about 5 years old and notice it still manages to take better photos than my iPhone 12 mini due to the crazy processing the iPhone does.
I also am a relatively recent new dad and this comment resonated with me.
What’s your quick review on it? I’m a pretty amateur photographer, but is this camera worth an upgrade over my current setup and amateur experience?
I pulled the trigger on a GR IIIx about a year ago. It's mind bogglingly amazing and several orders of magnitude better than anything my iPhone 13 Pro nor my Pixel 6 XL can muster. It goes everywhere my smartphone does as it is very pocketable.
I'd recommend shooting in ProRaw and then using Affinity/Darkroom/Pixelmator-Photo to edit it.
Photos shot in ProRaw still display the opinionated high-clarity [1] version in the photos app. Only editing in a third-party app will override that.
Unlike Raw, ProRaw will still do much of the good (IMO) processing, while allowing you to avoid Apples color-grading.
[1] I believe clarity, not sharpness, is the reason why iPhone 13 photos look so bad. It clears up parts of the image that are supposed to be foggy, thus removing an important depth queue and making the image look flat.
In the following examples, notice how minor details are blown out, making the image almost look like a mosaic.
I want to know the answer to this also! Total photography noob contemplating getting a new iphone here, is it possible to use a different camera app to disable a bunch of the computational magic?
I've been learning to take "real" photos with a Sony A6400 over the past few months, with a couple of Sigma prime lenses. I've been super super happy with the photos I've managed to get out of it and definitely recommend a similar setup!
a6400 is mighty powerful indeed. I upgraded to it from a5100 (which I still have for its compactness) and was amazed by its customizability. Also with mirrorless you can adapt pretty much any old cheap manual-focus lens and get creative bokeh or fast telephoto for under $200.
It feels limited for video though — a lot of options but no way to get beyond 8 bits per channel, so iphone hdr videos win in most cases.
Seems a strange omission not to evaluate the ProRAW capture. I can understand having the rankings being in the typical/regular mode (as competitors may not have comparable modes), but surely there's value into evaluating what the enhancement offered by the top-quality mode offers?
It's a bit like evaluating the drive characteristics of a sports car but not once taking it out of comfort mode.
Knowing little about photography all of these photos look like an obscure combination of fake and dull. Like over saturated HDR-era style photos with too little depth.
It's like those voice compression algos where at a certain threshold "the character" of the person talking has just completely disappeared then magically reappears at a high enough bitrate.
These photos seem compressed in a way that takes away the "soul" of what's photographed.
Mirrors the way heavy loudness compression and autotune has become standard in pop music, and audiences now prefers "metallic" voices and very little dynamic range - so people will probably prefer this ghostly aesthetic to actual reality going forward.
The photos are intentionally dull. It's just a product of comparing cameras in a controlled environment.
You can go to product pages for the iPhone 14 Pro or Galaxy S22 and see photos with a bit more soul... though still with a forced feeling that comes from marketing.
You can look at professional photos taken with phone cameras circa 2015 and they still look good.
I’ve always felt that my eye handles high dynamic range scenes much better than cameras. In the past I would shoot a photo and the shadows in the photo would be much darker than they appeared to me in person, and the sky would be blown out with no color.
These compressed images feel closer to me to the way I actually perceive the world. The colors do sometimes get a little funky though.
> I’ve always felt that my eye handles high dynamic range scenes much better than cameras.
Depending on what you mean by “eye handles”, yes, you have far more dynamic range than most cameras. The reason I caveat is that just like how modern smartphones with their “computation images” are really combining multiple shots together, so is your brain. I forget the exact numbers, but I think the retina itself is around 5-8 stops of dynamic range and what your brain “sees” when you are looking around is something like 15-20 stops.
> Knowing little about photography all of these photos look like an obscure combination of fake and dull. Like over saturated HDR-era style photos with too little depth.
That's what you get when not a single artistic soul is present during the development, they maximise everything for pure raw """performance""". "see in the dark", "maximum amount of dynamic range HDR", "improve faces", "improve colors" &c.
So yes, the camera can see in the dark, see 20 stops of dynamic range, add fake depth of field, but it looks like shit because they fundamentally don't know what makes a good image.
You have the same thing with photographers:
- the "technicians" who have the most expensive and advanced gear and often produce lacking results
- the "artists" with limited funds taking breathtaking pictures on prehistoric hardware
>So yes, the camera can see in the dark, see 20 stops of dynamic range, add fake depth of field, but it looks like shit because they fundamentally don't know what makes a good image.
Or it looks that way to faux-artistic purist sensibility, but actual users have managed to create awesome pictures with it just fine for over a decade...
Phones now consistently/always outperform high-end cameras in brightly lit conditions involving the sky, water, snow etc. It's nearly impossible to get the same results with camera gear on account of them still having not figured out how to merge multiple exposures milliseconds apart.
If camera makers don't radically alter image processing on their bodies, they'll soon find themselves in a place even smaller than what's already a niche.
About "there is so much more to photography than...": a guy I met in a vacation years ago was taking pictures with a low cost phone with at best an average sensor. Nevertheless his pictures were always more memorable than the ones that other people in the party were taking with 1000+ Euro cameras. OK, he couldn't zoom into the eyes of birds on branches (my cheap 30x compact camera could) but he had enough talent to make me wish he had one of those cameras.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that some measurable percentage of "official person tasked with photographing a wedding" are just using phones. These are not professional wedding photographers, but they are acting as a wedding photographer while using a phone camera. (And they are friends or family doing the task for free.)
Surely many weddings are not high expenditure events. An average person with a modern phone who takes a LOT of photos at each moment or scene will produce some good images. They may not be of the quality where you could print large poster size, but most people probably don't print larger than 11x14.
There's no doubt that a skilled photographer with good gear that is suited for the environment can do better. Phones are not a replacement for this if final result is the only criteria. But not only are not all "professional" photographers great, but a lucky amateur with a good phone cam and lots of snaps may end up with output that a layperson, including the subjects of the wedding, might not be able to see the difference of.
> If this would be the case every wedding photographer would just use an iPhone.
As a POC, some have. Here's Peter McKinnon [1], and Tomorrow's filmmakers [2]. The wedding is also a very controlled lighting scenario, allowing the dedicated camera to maximize its advantage. Shutter-speed matters too, which Phones have closed in on but not yet eliminated. (In my post, I called out brightly lit conditions.)
Large camera bodies are also about looking "professional". Like most people don't wanna go to banks where staff is dressed in t-shirts and shorts.
Even if the iPhone was better, you couldn’t show up to the job and use an iPhone because people would feel ripped off and assume they could do the same with their phones.
I’ve seen wedding photographers where they have the assistant taking photos with the phone as a backup. And sometimes the customers prefer the phone shots.
That is just plain wrong. No later than a month ago I was in vacation and took several picture with a regular mirrorless (Fuji x-e3) and a new pixel phone, while others in the group had iphones. The mirrorless picture quality was just miles ahead. In bright conditions the pixel were pretty good for the light parts but not for any shadow, and it lacks nuance. iPhone photos are just not that great, with colors all over the place, and bad shadows. Sure it may look fine on the iphone screen for instagram but put that on a bigger screen or print and it's just not good.
I wish someone just made an SLR with Android and Google Photos and the Google Camera, ie good lenses paired with good computational photography and easy sharing.
Sony tried a few years back, but then Sony got it the way...
I just want Sony to release updated versions of their QX10/QX100 external cameras for smartphones- it was such a good concept, just slightly ahead of its time. I'm sure they would sell lots of them nowadays.
Yes. I still don’t get why none of the camera makers outfits their camera with something on the level of the iPhone. Maybe there is less to be gained in dSLR because of the mirror. But mirrorless with the constant exposure should be a ready match.
If only the Samsung Galaxy NX that looked like a DSLR and had interchangeable lenses running Android took hold almost 10 years ago and evolved we would be here. For now I guess we can only dream.
Its not Android, its the algorithms and the ISP. Pixel phones have their own ISP chip and their own algorithms. The fact that they take good photos has nothing to do with them running Android.
This summer, I was in the US desert with a friend (AZ/UT). He had an iPhone 11 pro (maybe you consider this old?), while I had a 6 yo m4/3 Olympus (never was particularly high-end).
His pictures would systematically look "flatter", almost cartoonish. They were lacking a certain nuance in the colors, especially on larger swaths of similar colors (think the buttes in Monument Valley).
Its saving grace was that, out of camera, my sky was a tad lighter than you'd expect. The camera does have an HDR mode, but I basically never bother with it.
The day I bought my Samsung S22 ultra is the day I stopped lugging around my full frame Nikon. And I took it everywhere, all hikes and skitours, many climbs, got with it to 6000m altitude on Aconcagua too. Last time I took it to vacation to Egypt and literally didn't take it out of pouch for 2 weeks. Good pictures as it does, the pain of carrying 2.5kg camera around all the time, looking weird in small public spaces and all the freakin time wasted post-processing ain't worth it for me.
I have phone camera with 16x zoom range altogether, small kids and I strongly prefer making (sometimes) sub-ideal pics of almost all situations rather than a bit better pics of few of those. Often it does properly great photos. And much much much better videos. While weighting 200g and fitting (so-so) in my pocket.
I literally couldn't care less about mirrorless cameras, for me cameras are over.
Fuji x100v is the way to go for travel, 450gr, fits in a jacket pocket, miles ahead of any phones for portraits, printings, &c. you can shoot jpegs and never edit the files thanks to their inbody presets
That being said I also just bring my pixel 3 for hikes and sport in general even though I own a few leicas, nikon, &c. weight is king sometimes
This is not a bad approach as long as you only look at your photos on a phone. If you ever print them, or look at them on a monitor, they won't measure up. But for convenience, you can't beat a phone.
They only look better if you're not a photographer and/or don't know what you're doing. As soon as you dig in the files they absolutely fall apart, plus you don't have any control whatsoever on the camera unless you use some extremely clunky third party apps
dslrs can use a similar technique that phones use—exposure bracketing—with good or better results depending on a variety of factors.
It does make you wonder if fullsized camera bodies will figure out better bracketing. Exposure time is really important, and you need good computation to align the images and correct for stability.
it's better to get it right during shooting than in post.
Phones don't need to be good at every situation, just in most of the situations an average consumer finds themselves in. As another poster alluded to, photographing kids is a big reason people buy cameras and before, camcorders. Families also have more money so it makes sense to target them.
Right now, phones kick the butt of compact cameras when it comes to versatility, dynamic range and using AI to make photos appealing and sharp. If the quality can only be rivalled by a dSLR with a 2 kilogram $1500 lens, then that is a big plus point for the phone.
The highly processed images are instantly identified by the artificial lighting / HDR look, ringing around subjects. Adding that to a DSLR is not going to do wonders (mine already has native HDR and it looks exactly as you’d expect).
What you should be looking at as a benchmark is cinema sensors with wide dynamic range like RED. You can get slightly better range from the iPhone by shooting RAW, but still far behind.
Look to the Fuji GFX 100S for the future of digital cameras. Large optics + a medium format surface area sensor at 100MP is not something phones can rival anytime soon (or perhaps even ever, given the physics at play and the form factor phones require).
Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line.
I'm not so sure about that. Phones are already touching 1" (almost), about 1/12 the size of the sensor in the Fuji. Those sensors are going to advance faster than the Fuji in almost every way, and it's possible that software will make up for the remaining.
> Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line.
I think this is fairly unlikely. It's a niche market, and there'll be no money to be made in selling $1k medium format cameras. For those who are buying high-end cameras (professionals mostly), the sensor size is just one of the factors determining the purchase. They care about build, weather-sealing, buttons, ports, write-speeds, battery etc - a $1k camera would have to compromise on all of those.
Yes, it is another example of software eating the world. Sony, for example, makes most of the sensors that find their way into smartphones the world over, but their own phones with the same sensors are not at the top-level at all.
Google really kicked off the computational photography space, Huawei made some leaps and bounds improvements to it, and now Apple is following up. Unfortunately thanks to US policies we don't have real competition to Apple since Huawei was kneecapped. Other Chinese companies learned their place.
I would love a versatile camera in a phone like what I have in my Chinese phone that cost under $500 - a 108mp camera with a large sensor, 3x and 5x telephoto zoom, and an ultrawide.
Never heard of the #1, Honor Magic4 Ultimate, but it looks like it aims for camera quality at the cost of everything else. iPhone looks like a much better set of tradeoffs at #2!
But when you look through the detail photos in the post the Honor phone is miles ahead in every category. I don't know how the overall rating ended up so close, maybe the video quality makes the difference.
Honor used to be Huawei's budget brand. They then split it off and now it's making flagships. I personally think it was the response to the sanction war waged against Huawei, but of course they deny it.
This iPhone review left me thoroughly impressed with the “Honor Magic4 Ultimate”. The dynamic range is wild and it has almost a film look. Why cant Apple have this!?
Mostly off-topic, but I love the scale used for score bars on this site. Each category has a scale from 0 to {highest score of all devices of this class}.
So every category where the current phone is the best has a 100% full bar. Where it’s not, you can immediately visualize if it’s 70% as good as the best device or 99% as good - even if the high score for that category is, say, 136.
A lot of stricter review sites will say something like (made up example) “no phone gets above a 4/10 score for zoom; only a DSLR/mirrorless exceeds that.”
Which is totally valid! But I want to know how the device I’m reading about scores within its category. Those smaller bars make it look like this gadget has one major weakness despite its other high scores, when the reality might be that it actually has the best - or close to the best - zoom ability out of all devices in this class.
Readit News
Still, I'm wondering if anyone has a rec for a slightly less handy yet purpose built and somewhat comparable modern "snap & shoot" camera? Even after reading this well done review / comparison the iPhone 14 Pro upgrade is just not worth it to me at this point.
https://www.procamera-app.com/en/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/procamera/id694647259
https://halide.cam/
https://www.sony.ca/en/electronics/cyber-shot-compact-camera...
I also am a relatively recent new dad and this comment resonated with me.
What’s your quick review on it? I’m a pretty amateur photographer, but is this camera worth an upgrade over my current setup and amateur experience?
This is my current camera.
Canon PowerShot G9 X Digital... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0167Q140U
That would be sick!
Photos shot in ProRaw still display the opinionated high-clarity [1] version in the photos app. Only editing in a third-party app will override that.
Unlike Raw, ProRaw will still do much of the good (IMO) processing, while allowing you to avoid Apples color-grading.
[1] I believe clarity, not sharpness, is the reason why iPhone 13 photos look so bad. It clears up parts of the image that are supposed to be foggy, thus removing an important depth queue and making the image look flat.
In the following examples, notice how minor details are blown out, making the image almost look like a mosaic.
- https://ibb.co/Stjh2xr
- https://ibb.co/TghZqVx (Apples default processing)
- https://ibb.co/fHD7R13
- https://ibb.co/Hh53pWL (Apples default processing)
I'd prefer that to a separate device, which I won't have with me most of the time.
It feels limited for video though — a lot of options but no way to get beyond 8 bits per channel, so iphone hdr videos win in most cases.
It's a bit like evaluating the drive characteristics of a sports car but not once taking it out of comfort mode.
It's like those voice compression algos where at a certain threshold "the character" of the person talking has just completely disappeared then magically reappears at a high enough bitrate.
These photos seem compressed in a way that takes away the "soul" of what's photographed.
Mirrors the way heavy loudness compression and autotune has become standard in pop music, and audiences now prefers "metallic" voices and very little dynamic range - so people will probably prefer this ghostly aesthetic to actual reality going forward.
You can go to product pages for the iPhone 14 Pro or Galaxy S22 and see photos with a bit more soul... though still with a forced feeling that comes from marketing.
You can look at professional photos taken with phone cameras circa 2015 and they still look good.
These compressed images feel closer to me to the way I actually perceive the world. The colors do sometimes get a little funky though.
Human Eye - 21 stops
Best Camera - <= 15 stops
Depending on what you mean by “eye handles”, yes, you have far more dynamic range than most cameras. The reason I caveat is that just like how modern smartphones with their “computation images” are really combining multiple shots together, so is your brain. I forget the exact numbers, but I think the retina itself is around 5-8 stops of dynamic range and what your brain “sees” when you are looking around is something like 15-20 stops.
That's what you get when not a single artistic soul is present during the development, they maximise everything for pure raw """performance""". "see in the dark", "maximum amount of dynamic range HDR", "improve faces", "improve colors" &c.
So yes, the camera can see in the dark, see 20 stops of dynamic range, add fake depth of field, but it looks like shit because they fundamentally don't know what makes a good image.
You have the same thing with photographers:
- the "technicians" who have the most expensive and advanced gear and often produce lacking results
- the "artists" with limited funds taking breathtaking pictures on prehistoric hardware
Or it looks that way to faux-artistic purist sensibility, but actual users have managed to create awesome pictures with it just fine for over a decade...
There's a limit to what you can do with these tiny optics to get depth via separation with a shallow depth of field.
If camera makers don't radically alter image processing on their bodies, they'll soon find themselves in a place even smaller than what's already a niche.
If this would be the case every wedding photographer would just use an iPhone.
Yes, phone does HDR (not always perfectly) but there is so much more to photography than trying to make shadows not black and sky as blue as possible.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that some measurable percentage of "official person tasked with photographing a wedding" are just using phones. These are not professional wedding photographers, but they are acting as a wedding photographer while using a phone camera. (And they are friends or family doing the task for free.)
Surely many weddings are not high expenditure events. An average person with a modern phone who takes a LOT of photos at each moment or scene will produce some good images. They may not be of the quality where you could print large poster size, but most people probably don't print larger than 11x14.
There's no doubt that a skilled photographer with good gear that is suited for the environment can do better. Phones are not a replacement for this if final result is the only criteria. But not only are not all "professional" photographers great, but a lucky amateur with a good phone cam and lots of snaps may end up with output that a layperson, including the subjects of the wedding, might not be able to see the difference of.
As a POC, some have. Here's Peter McKinnon [1], and Tomorrow's filmmakers [2]. The wedding is also a very controlled lighting scenario, allowing the dedicated camera to maximize its advantage. Shutter-speed matters too, which Phones have closed in on but not yet eliminated. (In my post, I called out brightly lit conditions.)
Large camera bodies are also about looking "professional". Like most people don't wanna go to banks where staff is dressed in t-shirts and shorts.
[1]: https://youtu.be/yLZJS2k2V4k [2]: https://youtu.be/6RAVCzd0MZw
Sony tried a few years back, but then Sony got it the way...
https://petapixel.com/2013/09/04/sony-officially-debuts-two-...https://m.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-cybershot-dsc-qx100
https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/int/photography/zx1....
His pictures would systematically look "flatter", almost cartoonish. They were lacking a certain nuance in the colors, especially on larger swaths of similar colors (think the buttes in Monument Valley).
Its saving grace was that, out of camera, my sky was a tad lighter than you'd expect. The camera does have an HDR mode, but I basically never bother with it.
I have phone camera with 16x zoom range altogether, small kids and I strongly prefer making (sometimes) sub-ideal pics of almost all situations rather than a bit better pics of few of those. Often it does properly great photos. And much much much better videos. While weighting 200g and fitting (so-so) in my pocket.
I literally couldn't care less about mirrorless cameras, for me cameras are over.
That being said I also just bring my pixel 3 for hikes and sport in general even though I own a few leicas, nikon, &c. weight is king sometimes
That would mean they look better to the majority of people who consume photos...
It does make you wonder if fullsized camera bodies will figure out better bracketing. Exposure time is really important, and you need good computation to align the images and correct for stability.
it's better to get it right during shooting than in post.
I dare you to do sports photography in dimly lit situations on a phone.
Right now, phones kick the butt of compact cameras when it comes to versatility, dynamic range and using AI to make photos appealing and sharp. If the quality can only be rivalled by a dSLR with a 2 kilogram $1500 lens, then that is a big plus point for the phone.
A bigger sensor and lens will always win.
What you should be looking at as a benchmark is cinema sensors with wide dynamic range like RED. You can get slightly better range from the iPhone by shooting RAW, but still far behind.
Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line.
> Right now you need to drop ~$6k to get started with digital medium format, but hopefully that’ll be sub $1k a few years down the line.
I think this is fairly unlikely. It's a niche market, and there'll be no money to be made in selling $1k medium format cameras. For those who are buying high-end cameras (professionals mostly), the sensor size is just one of the factors determining the purchase. They care about build, weather-sealing, buttons, ports, write-speeds, battery etc - a $1k camera would have to compromise on all of those.
It's not the same market at all
Google really kicked off the computational photography space, Huawei made some leaps and bounds improvements to it, and now Apple is following up. Unfortunately thanks to US policies we don't have real competition to Apple since Huawei was kneecapped. Other Chinese companies learned their place.
I would love a versatile camera in a phone like what I have in my Chinese phone that cost under $500 - a 108mp camera with a large sensor, 3x and 5x telephoto zoom, and an ultrawide.
They already do something similar for MP3 players, so why the heck not in cameras.
So every category where the current phone is the best has a 100% full bar. Where it’s not, you can immediately visualize if it’s 70% as good as the best device or 99% as good - even if the high score for that category is, say, 136.
A lot of stricter review sites will say something like (made up example) “no phone gets above a 4/10 score for zoom; only a DSLR/mirrorless exceeds that.”
Which is totally valid! But I want to know how the device I’m reading about scores within its category. Those smaller bars make it look like this gadget has one major weakness despite its other high scores, when the reality might be that it actually has the best - or close to the best - zoom ability out of all devices in this class.