I was in the market for a new DSLR, but their software just hasn’t kept up.
The iPhone 11 pro blew me away with the night mode photography, and the simulated bokeh that can be modified in post because of the depth camera is downright genius. And the most important feature, it’s always with me, unlike the DSLR.
I’ve been using my wife’s hand-me-down phones for a decade now. This was the first phone I bought for myself, and really it was a camera that has a phone feature, not the other way around.
I've been thinking about the same thing since Google impressed everyone with their computational photography tech years ago. The software in DSLRs is really primitive in comparison.
Really makes you wonder what could be achieved by combining Google's computational photography algorithms with a bigger sensor and high quality optics. I'm probably not going to buy another high end camera, until I see something like that on the market.
Indeed, a traditional camera with the post-processing of a smartphone would be incredible.
But indeed, camera manufacturers are way way way behind. The best they can do at the moment is find faces on a picture (and still, not that well except on Sony cameras). This is disappointing to say the least.
The Zeiss ZX1 runs Android, but I don't know how much computational photography it provides, since all the reviews about it only emphasize the fact that it can run Lightroom (which sounds completely useless).
there is e.g. https://magiclantern.fm/about.html for Canon DSLRs that allows you to do some more interesting things, it's been around for a decade or more
Same. I actually bought a last gen Sony RX100 VII and the difference in quality is negligible, other than the Sony having 20MP and the iphone only 12. This means the tiny iphone 11 pro sensor can produce similar results to a 1in top-of-the-line compact camera. This is mind-boggling.
After comparing them, I'm convinced that it's only a matter of time until phones are going to catch up to full frame cameras. Software these days is more important than the raw hardware it seems...
>I actually bought a last gen Sony RX100 VII and the difference in quality is negligible, other than the Sony having 20MP and the iphone only 12
Having recently purchased both the latest RX100 and the 11 pro, I both agree and disagree. For auto mode in certain conditions, when viewed at significantly scaled down resolutions, yes. To if you're posting to instagram or facebook or whatever, this is probably true.
Manual mode on the RX100 vs the 11 pro, even when using custom apps that expose a lot more of the camera settings, the RX100 starts to pull away. If you're doing any work with larger image sizes (and by larger I mean using a computer or TV screen instead of a phone), even more so. They're honestly not even close at that point.
Meanwhile, on the full frame side of things, the A7 line of cameras has been advancing picture quality at a rate as fast as anything in the iPhone, and just absolutely clobbers it. There's physics in play here, and I'm skeptical that software or processing power is going to increase the picture quality that much, and I have no idea how you would match things like super telephoto lenses in a smartphone form factor.
The 11 Pro camera is definitely really good; nice enough for me to forgo my Fuji XE2-S on some trips. When editing RAWs from Halide vs the Fuji (as a total amateur), I do feel like I get way more usable shots from the Fuji, though. I usually just adjust levels a bit and crop, and the iPhone shots were grainy and sometimes blown out. Definitely requires a bit more time when editing.
I do really love the iPhone when I just need to take a quick shot, though. All the computational stuff means that I'm almost always guaranteed to get a usable photo out of it in any condition.
The one thing the DSLRs still have is high levels of quality zoom. I have a Sony RX10 IV with a 600mm lens. I use it for the kids' sports photos and it's truly awesome. I also use it for wildlife photography (the only handicap being my own skill). iPhones are not terribly useful for either of these things.
Doesn't the Sony have much better autofocus? There should be a pretty big difference in low light performance too, unless I'm wildly overestimating how much bigger a 1" sensor is.
Olympus and Sony have been the most aggressive about sticking clever software in their cameras, so they'd be the ones most likely to invest more in computational photography.
The problems for camera manufacturers around this, though are:
1. Their market is incredibly, loudly regressive about a lot of this stuff. A noisy chunk of the photography market is really hostile to workflows that don't mimic hundred year old darkroom processes. Doing in-camera is an abomination. Automation is an abomination, etc.
2. Building the compute in to the camera is non-trivial. You've already got a lot of compute power focusing on running the complexities of things like continuous AF tracking (e.g. on top-end Olympus that's 4 of the 8 cores available). A lot of compute budget is used for things phone cameras are rubbish at. At some point things like heat become a problem.
3. Data volumes are hard: Olympus are "only" dealing with a 20 MPix image. Sony are dealing with 24 - 60 MPix images. Olympus do that at up to 60 frames/s (20 with AF), and to read the data within the constraints of shutter speeds of 1/16000 s. That is... a lot of data compared to the relatively modest rates on an iPhone. Oh, and while iPhone users are generally OK with a bit of lag, DSLR users get really pissy if you're making them wait for that. Latency needs to be very low.
4. Physics is hard: A Sony sensor is a 24 x 35 mm hunk of silicon. Quite apart from the challenges of the data volume, reading a chunk of CMOS that large has been a challenge. Sony have done a lot of clever things to work around those limits, but still... (Olympus have been able to do high frame rates longer than anyone else in part because their sensors are smaller)
(I should add to that: the pre-post capture already exists on Olympus since they released the E-M 1 II a couple of years ago. But DSLR makers are generally more focused on capture-time optimisations like that, eye focus, Sony's facial recognition in some of their cameras - which allow you to register a specific person's face and priority autofocus on them.)
The shots I get out of my 11 pro are great. I'm amazed just how good they are. But, I would be lying if I said they are better than my aging d7100 with a nifty 50.
And, if I ever need zoom (like in nature photography), phones just can't compete with a 300mm lens.
The iPhone 11 pro blew me away with the night mode photography, and the simulated bokeh that can be modified in post because of the depth camera is downright genius. And the most important feature, it’s always with me, unlike the DSLR.
I’ve been using my wife’s hand-me-down phones for a decade now. This was the first phone I bought for myself, and really it was a camera that has a phone feature, not the other way around.