This feels like groundhog day. New iPhone [insert model] has the best camera ever! Fast forward two months: new Google [insert model] has the best camera ever!
I think we're getting to the point where the incremental gains we're seeing with each new phone cycle are almost unnoticeable to the average user who just wants to take photos of their kids to send to Grandma.
> the incremental gains we're seeing with each new phone cycle are almost unnoticeable
I don't think so. As someone with a whole lot of expensive "real" camera gear, I was astonished - and I don't really say that lightly - with what I saw a friend getting out of her iphone 7+. If three years ago you had shown me some of these images I would have sworn they were taken by at least five grand worth of gear, expertly used. And by all reports the 8 is another giant step up.
I find this all incredibly exciting. It reminds me of the great democratisation of electronic music, where all of a sudden you didn't need $30k worth of hardware synths to make music - a single computer would do. A cambrian explosion of creativity ensued.
High quality and highly capable cameras - and video cameras - in the hands of the masses? Bring it on I say! How many thousands, if not millions, of incredible, moving, moment-defining images will be captured now we don't need a pro photographer on hand to do justice to a scene?
If we're gonna have cameras in smartphones - and we're gonna - they may as well be good, and Apple is setting the pace - and forcing down the price. Good on them.
I think your post actually proves the point of the person you were disagreeing with.
If you, someone experienced with "real" camera gear, were "astonished" by the iphone 7+ pictures and thought they were taken by "five grand worth of gear", then for the average person further gains are going to be unremarkable.
Yes, I understand that a camera gearhead finds everything new and each small improvement incredibly exciting. But for the average picture taker none of it is a big deal; what they have is already quite good, certainly good enough. Of course, it won't be hard for marketing to convince people that they should go out and once again fork over more of their hard earned money for "the best", even if it's in reality a minor improvement.
Also, for the real photographers the equipment is secondary. Better gear helps very little with creating better pictures. I assure you, people were making awesome pictures with digital cameras ten and twenty years ago, with specs that anybody would laugh at now. Good photographers can produce good pictures no matter what camera they take them with. (And, conversely, bad photographers produce crap no matter how good their cameras.)
> for the average picture taker none of it is a big deal
I think this is a pretty cynical view. OK, maybe the majority don't give a damn, but quite a few people obviously do. Someone's buying iPhones, and S8s, etc. It's pretty dark to assume that all of them are just brainwashed by marketing. Certainly I would say 50%+ of the smartphone owners I personally know were at least influenced by the camera quality.
> what they have is already quite good, certainly good enough
Well, the reason what they have might be "good enough" is because of this relentless "drag to quality" that Apple et al are orchestrating.
> for the real photographers the equipment is secondary
And yet all the "real photographers" have tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear. Funny, that. Look, there's a truth to it - no gear on earth will help you if you don't have an eye for framing, light, etc. But gear does matter and it's ridiculous to pretend otherwise. Direct me to your nearest pro/awarded/exhibited tog who wields a $100 point and shoot and I'll eat my words.
Here's one photographer using cheap point-and-shoot that comes quickly to mind: is Magnum photographer Alex Majoli good enough for you? He preferred to work with an Olympus C5050 point-and-shoot, which was cheap back then and you can pick up for $50 or less on ebay right now:
Seriously, photography is probably best example of a subculture full of amateurs who obsess over gear and think throwing more money at gear is going to give them a better end product (although there are many similar subcultures). Crap is crap, however good the gear is that's used to make it.
Here you can read another article about a professional photographer's use of cheaper cameras:
Buyers do want significantly better quality, but phones are delivering only marginally better quality and marketing the hell out of it.
I say this as someone who used and tested the 5s, 6, 6s Plus, 7 Plus, Nexus 5x and Google Pixel. Every year brings a marginal improvement. Unless you have a many year old phone, upgrading won’t produce noticeably better photos.
The difference between 10 and 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch.
I won't argue with you on the first number. 10 years ago good photographers took beautiful images with the Canon 1Ds Mk III or the Nikon D300.
However, 20 years ago you were stuck with modified film bodies like the Kodak DCS520, shooting 2 megapixel images of questionable quality[0] for the bargain price of $15,000[1]
It is only fairly recently that any digital camera off the shelf is capable of producing "good" images with a good photographer, and we're now getting to the point where computational photography and incredible smartphone sensors will produce good images with a total novice at the helm. That's what makes this all so exciting.
20 years ago, in 1997, I bought my first -consumer- digital camera, an Epson Photo PC500. It had a resolution of 640x480. If I'm not mistaken, I think I paid around 700 CAD at the time. And the photos weren't even as good as "questionable quality". So I would go even further and say 20 years ago is a huge stretch.
Yes, you're right, I felt the 20 years was a little bit of a stretch, but it sounded better.
I do think at least 17 years is legit, though, back to release of Canon EOS D30 in 2000. D30 was only 3.3MP, but was used by a lot of professional photographers and made some great images (I still have one, taken by a photographer friend, that is one of my favorite pictures ever). I think it was priced around $3k.
You can read review by Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape, who called the D30 an "inflection point" and said it "changes the playing field forever". He took plenty of pictures with D30 and had multiple exhibits with gallery-size prints:
I'm pretty sure good photographers made great images with lesser digital cameras before that, but D30 was the camera that started people thinking that digital could really be as good as or better than film.
Ha, I actually didn't touch this part of the comment but yeah - 20 years ago, no. As part of my job at the time I had access to the very first sony mavica floppy disk digital camera, and a contemporary kodak I don't recall the model number of. Oh my god they were bad. They, in no way, shape or form, competed with film in quality. They were crap.
I'm not saying you can't see what the picture is of. Sure, you can. But nothing about it is pretty. Think about the lowest budget, crappiest webcam you can imagine - that's it.
"equipment is secondary" - buddy with that hardware you're taking "glitch in the matrix" digital dystopia pictures and basically nothing else. And hey I like that. But don't pretend it just needed a skilled hand. There were fundamental flaws and every photographer I knew back then swore they'd never forsake film, and who could blame them?
I think your post actually proves the point of the person you were disagreeing with.
If you, someone experienced with "real" camera gear, were "astonished" by the iphone 7+ pictures and thought they were taken by "five grand worth of gear", then for the average person further gains are going to be unremarkable.
That's kind of a strange argument, no? You're saying that if experienced photographers think the improvement is large, then average people can't tell the difference?
That's very strange.
Have a look at e.g. this paper from Google. http://www.hdrplusdata.org/hdrplus_preprint.pdf These changes certainly count as "astonishing" to me (let's say, an "enthusiastic amateaur" photog), and I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that this tech is insignificant to the average user.
Yeah it means that for the layman "great" is just "great" and "that's normal anyway technology always do great things". whereas as an expert you actually realize why it's hard to get to that point.
go explain to someone in high school why andrew wiles proof of fermat theorem is harder than galois theory... i'm bringin my pop corns
The argument is not that the recent improvement aren't noticeable. The argument is that there is a point of diminishing returns, and with such dramatic changes in the past few years we are closing in on them fast. Future changes are going to be harder and harder to notice.
Not really. A layperson takes stuff for granted because they don't know better (or what to look for). An expert knows better and can appreciate the differences.
>> they can certainly tell that it still looks better
The thing is that this is highly subjective and widely varies from person to person. Sometimes it's related to the content (subject) of the photo, sometimes it's the colors, sometimes it's the sharpness, etc.
And sometimes the reason why the photo is "better" has more to do with the photographer's camera settings or technical choices than how good the camera is on paper.
I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable of cameras, but I will consistently say that a high DOF iPhone portrait is better than a portrait with razor thin DOF with silky bokeh shot on a Sony A9, when the A9 is clearly the superior camera. That's because my definition of "looks better" is highly subjective and unique to my own tastes and biases.
> a high DOF iPhone portrait is better than a portrait with razor thin DOF with silky bokeh shot on a Sony A9
I agree completely. I appreciate the gear like anyone else, but it's all about the end result. A recent iphone plus in portrait mode can genuinely capture an amazing looking, high apparent DOF photo. Yes it's all computer trickery but who cares. It looks great. An expert with an A9, with the right lens, primed for the shot, might be able to do better but - and here's the important part - 99.9% of the time they're not there.
> for the average picture taker none of it is a big deal; what they have is already quite good, certainly good enough
So many photos are all about edge cases. If one phone’s sunset or lightning or eclipse photos are more beautiful, people will notice—virally. We’re not at the marketable limit of miniature camera technology. Even if we hit perfect reality —> digital image compression, a smaller camera module, in line with the chassis, would still have a marketable advantage. We’re far from peak camera; gains shouldn’t be dismissed.
> If you, someone experienced with "real" camera gear, were "astonished" by the iphone 7+ pictures and thought they were taken by "five grand worth of gear", then for the average person further gains are going to be unremarkable.
I take issue with this, but even granting it as true for the sake of argument: most people aren't upgrading from a 7+ to an 8+... they're upgrading from a 5S, or a 6, and the difference is massive. Portrait Mode alone is giant leap forward for normal people taking pictures of kids or pets.
The original claim (GP of the comment you quoted) was:
> I think we're getting to the point where the incremental gains we're seeing with each new phone cycle are almost unnoticeable to the average user
That's why the comparison between phones of successive years was made. That being said, I'm not disagreeing with your claim that most people will upgrade from older devices.
> then for the average person further gains are going to be unremarkable
I'm the average person, I'm blown away by each iteration's improvement. I can already feel like the quality of the pictures I took with my previous phones were completely shitty whereas I did not noticed back then due to my lack of exposure with good quality pictures.
I have an iPhone 6S but I'm being tickled by the idea of upgrading just for the camera. Of course I won't, this is too expensive, but in a year or two I will.
Not really, there's always room for improvement. Look at all the times (starting with Mortal Kombat or so) people have said video game graphics can't get any noticeably better.
> High quality and highly capable cameras - and video cameras - in the hands of the masses? Bring it on I say! How many thousands, if not millions, of incredible, moving, moment-defining images will be captured now we don't need a pro photographer on hand to do justice to a scene?
I watch a fair amount of youtube, discoverability of "good" youtube content is very low in my experience, but if you're lucky you do stumble across some absolutely fantastic content that is completely on par with traditional, professionally staffed network television news or documentary shows, except produced by what is typically just a motivated consumer who's put in the work to learn the tools of the trade (and I expect that is probably quite a lot easier nowadays as well, as I imagine there are youtube channels that show you how do learn most all of the skills required to produce a solid youtube channel).
I kind of agree with both points. When I take pictures out around town with my 7+ and my Sony RX100mk3, I'm amazed at how much better the iPhone pictures look-- at least on the iPhone screen, compared with the janky beat-up sony screen.
... then i get them into lightroom on a 5k display and I can immediately tell from the watercolor effect which photos were taken on the iphone -- often without zooming in at all.
Though the dynamic range looks better from the iPhone, likely only because it outputs jpegs and I'm using RAW on the Sony. Sometimes I use the iPhone shot as the reference for how to tweak+process the Sony pictures, which look better after said processing.
The camera upgrade is really the one thing that has be one the edge of upgrading my 7+ to an 8+, I'll still probably wait until next year's model.
I'm still considering getting a full-format mirrorless system someday, because even with as great as smartphone cameras are getting there's only so much you can do with an image sensor the size of a pea - but damned if they don't take good looking pictures regardless.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with skipping the current year's iPhone. I don't know why people have this mentality. For any brand, really. Most new phones nowadays are incremental upgrades, not "evolutions" so to speak.
I'm on my iPhone 6 (not even the 6s) right now and I'll be upgrading after three years of having it, but only because the screen is shattered, battery life is bad, and sometimes it's a bit slow.
I so wish Apple would make a full sized camera. Include the A11 and a touch screen and even cellular if you want, I don't care how much it costs. Imagine all this hardware and software applied to a real image sensor.
It's been a secret little dream of mine for quite some time that Apple would just buy Sony.
Sony's imaging hardware is the best, full stop. Their software sucks, full stop. I wish Apple would just buy them and fix that and my god, the things that could be done. An Apple/Sony a7Riii.. what was the phrase?
I think we may start seeing Apple partner with more camera brands rather than buy them outright - see the current RED partnership they have for entry-level “cinema” cameras. It’s be nice if they did joint R&D instead of marketing/sales, though.
DSLRs plus skill plus lenses plus effort still produce the more interesting photos under the broadest range of circumstances. But smartphone cameras definitely should make anyone question purchasing a low-end DSLR with a kit lens that they only use to take pics on full auto.
That's not true. Some of the best photos I've seen were not taken with an DSLR. You'll definitely get higher quality photos, but that doesn't mean they're more interesting. But I do agree that buying an entry DSLR with kit lens isn't as tempting to some when smartphones are as good as they are today.
Interesting was probably the wrong word. Put cameras in the hands of 1 billion+ people who carry them 90% of the time and you'll get many images that photojournalists just wouldn't historically have been there to capture. [ADDED: And some of those will be inherently interesting.] But to me, quality/composition/control help lead to [most of] the most memorable photos, especially those that aren't just capturing an inherently interesting moment, but mileage on that may differ.
note: I'm not at all criticizing your comment, just adding one anecdote:
I tried an iPhone 7+ one for like 3 minutes, at 10pm in a low light bowling club surrounding. I wanted to taste the camera magic and left totally disappointed both by software and sensor. I don't know how I managed that but I succeeded into making a set of crappy shots. I tried fiddling with the focus and luminosity gizmo in vain.
I have a moto g3, pictures are just adequate (I don't pursue ultimate quality like I used to), but I'd still be curious to see some photo magic out of an iPhone.
Notice that none of these images are zooming in on pixels to get the comparison. The fight for quality among high end DSLR's is nearing the description of unnoticeable difference, but phone cameras are benefitting immensely from new tech.
In fact, it's probably the area where we see the most gain compared to any other improvements in iPhone versions.
Perhaps your feeling is from the fact that new phones are released in rapid succession. If that's the case, just compare quality in phones a year or two apart instead of a few months.
Biggest game in DSLR world right now is low light. The new D850 is pretty crazy in that respect, with a full stop of ISO reduction. No phone camera on this earth is going to help me take better photos in low light restaurants(which I need for a side business).
> Biggest game in DSLR world right now is low light
As an a7Sii owner I couldn't agree more (the D850 looks great too). Phone cameras are going to have a hard time catching up there. There's only so much light and at some point, sensor size matters.
In my GP comment I mentioned being amazed by my friend's iphone 7+ pics, and it's true, I was. But when the sun went down, the a7Sii ruled over everything and captured every good picture from then on. There's a long way to go for the mobiles to be able to compete at night. Nice to know our investments aren't totally useless :P
Is low light something that a lens attachment over the iPhone camera could help with? There's a few lenses out there that are supposed to be quite good (like the Moment ones) but I don't know if they help out with that. It would be interesting if they kept the FOV the same and just provided more light.
Well, you could collect a huge amount of light and send it through to the phone sensor; that would have the same effect. But you're talking a very big lens. The pro DSLRs have a 35mm sensor - that's ~865mm². The iphone's is what, 60mm²? Thereabouts?
No matter how you cut it, that's generously 1/10th the sensing area/capacity (same thing). And it's not like the sensor tech in the iPhone will be 10x more efficient than contemporary DSLRs - iPhone sensors are made by sony, who will use the same tech in their own cameras. To get comparable light cell for cell into that you'll need a lens with 10x more light ingress, and sophisticated optics to focus it precisely down to a tiny half-square-centimetre. This lens would be larger, heavier and more expensive than the phone itself. Think "large can of tomatoes" size.
Not saying it's impossible. Mobile phone companies have pulled off some amazing advances and I have no idea what tricks might be up their sleeves. But for now, no mobile even touches full frame DSLRs in low light, and it doesn't seem like an easy hill to climb.
Actually there is an example in the article, comparing pixel-level detail from the last 4 iPhones in a low-light scenario (“old man” picture). The improvement with the 8 is impressive to say the least.
Interestingly, the article points it out how far cellphone cameras have come by comparing shots from just various versions of iPhones and you can see how much better the quality has been getting even just from Apple.
That's a false dichotomy. The alternative to living in a world where very slight progress gets overblown in the media isn't living in a world with no progress at all.
I have an iPhone 6s and the camera it came with was noticeably better than the Nexus 5 phone that I had prior to that.
And my Nikon DSLR still takes much better pictures than any phone on the market. If smartphones will ever improve to equal the better optics of a DSLR, we shall see, but there's tremendous room for improvement.
And most importantly, light is everything and biggest difference between a good camera and a bad one is the ability to make photos in poor light conditions. Improvements matter because I've had many attempts failed due to poor light, which are essentially lost memories.
Well lucky for you that's exactly the segment the new portrait modes would be enticing for. Also, phone cameras still have room to improve for low-light situations and in my experience they all denoise so heavily to the point of removing detail. This is all noticeable without zooming in as well so would be important for the average user.
Also it's a bit presumptuous to relegate all smartphone photography to that of quick snapshots of kids for grandma. Why shouldn't someone be able to take an action shot of their kid playing soccer (requires fast shutter speeds meaning better light sensitivity or wider aperture), utilize depth especially when contrasting between foreground and background, capture the high ranges present in landscape photos, crop out distracting elements and to a pleasing ratio (thus making the pixels important), use flash without washing out their subject or coloring them, capturing rich colors without having to later turn the saturation slider to 100 later, focus right away to catch that moment, etc... If you draw your own artificial line at what people should use their phone cameras for, you can justify any shitty camera, but if you want people to take quality photographs with top of the line DSLRs as benchmarks, and allow them to be creative with them and get the max out of them, there's still so much room for improvement.
I don't really care about cameras - I never really look at the photos I do take - but I feel like you're kidding yourself if you think these changes are small.
Dunno, I have the Google Pixel XL, it's the first camera that has made me not take my serious camera (a Fuji X series mirrorless) on trips. The quality of photos it produces is amazing, and the default camera app has some seriously good processing. You can do more with a serious camera, but I'm not sure it'll do much better with quick snaps.
You're right though, the constant marketing of phone cameras is kind of funny. I have no doubt the iPhone makes incremental improvements every year, as do other phone cameras.
I don't know that the incremental gains are unnoticeable, but we've definitely hit a point where no one camera is so vastly better than any other that the "winner" isn't going to change hands before you get a new phone.
However, if you jump between generations it's interesting to see the difference. I sometimes see old pictures I've taken with old phones and the difference is much more visible
Ignorance of the masses; Very few people realize when they get an HD Voice call that it's because they're on the same network.
It's frankly surprising that people make regular calls anymore because of the inter-network lack of HD voice; you'd think everybody would make hangouts or FaceTime calls.
Of course, the other likelihood from ignorance is that few people have good hearing.
The problem with "everybody would make hangouts or FaceTime calls" is that not everybody has unlimited data. Of course it depends how much you use your phone for calling while off wifi and how much data you pay for, but it's definitely not a factor worth ignoring.
I know a lot of people who make < 1 phone call per day and yet spend hours taking photos. Agree it's a shame.
Casting wide aspersions, I feel like it's because you can't get likes/upvotes for phone calls. But, Snapchat shows that ephemeralness is valued, so maybe it's something else behind the war on direct personal real communication.
Not much of a Groundhog Day because the only google phone that was able to compete with iPhone in camera department was the latest pixel. All previous google phones had worse camera than an iPhone
Nexus 6p was release more than a year after iphone 6 and 6 plus. Iphone 6s was release around the same time as Nexus 6p and should be the one to be compared to.
OK, fine, Nexus 6P ranked higher than iPhone 6s as well. Here's the link you didn't bother to include: https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Apple-iPhone-6s-review-Solid... "Despite our hopes for the new sensor, the Apple iPhone 6s posts an identical overall score as its predecessor."
I always expect from new products in a line up to perform better than its brothers and sisters, because there is no reason in buying one if it would be worse than my old one.
The reviewers don't actually care about which camera is better. According to the author's earlier review of the Pixel, it rates better on every metric.. color, contrast, etc. They just rate the iPhone higher because it's newer.
Wow, your camera can take great pictures of a landscape during the day? I'm impressed. /s
So far they all suck at low-light photography or moving subjects (or both at the same time like taking pictures of kids indoors at a birthday party). That would be a real breakthrough.
Isn't this just software? Slow sync flash is just synchronizing flash with a slower shutter and deciding what data to pull from the camera. Is there unique hardware required to do this?
So do our eyes, but our brain makes up for it. Out of context, the brain doesn't have enough info (or maybe incentive) to do that job.
The optical image stabilisation & object tracking of our eyes is mind blowing. Optical illusions demonstrate the amount of interpolation that our brains to do aid vision / fill in the gaps of image detail coming from the eyes.
Not really intending to be an apologist for digital cameras nor disagree that they have a lot of room for improvement, but moreso just put it all in a different light.
Most people who only photograph with phones, even high end ones, don't seem to realize that similar gains happen in the camera sensors as well. And them being always much larger, they will always be ahead in low light and in signal/noise ratio.
I think we're getting to the point where the incremental gains we're seeing with each new phone cycle are almost unnoticeable to the average user who just wants to take photos of their kids to send to Grandma.