I traveled to Japan recently with an middle-end smartphone (Samsung A72 with 12+35+60mm) & a middle-end DSLR (APS-C with 18-55mm), that I bought the same price.
Surprisingly, picture quality was on par. Low-light, stabilization, everything. I sold my DSLR since.
APS-C sensors aren't relevant anymore, only full-frames can beat smartphones nowadays.
Not sure what you were using, I don't see that at all with my Fuji kits.
I have both a X-Pro 3 and a X-T30 for street photography and both shoot much, much superior pictures than any smartphone is capable of...
APS-C is still pretty relevant, your old DSLR might not be up to par to latest smartphone cameras though. And the image processing done by smartphones using AI tend to create weird and ugly artefacts depending on conditions, that doesn't happen with my mirrorless cameras, for example.
Have you tried printing smartphone pictures and compare them to your DSLR shots?
Disclaimer, I'm a retired pro photographer that sold his full-frame to focus on software engineering.
- The X-Pro 3 is $2k, not what I call middle-end.
- I agree on the aggressive AI processing. Fortunately I could disable it.
- It was a Nikon D5500. I used the 18-55 kit lens, but f/1.8 prime lenses can do better indeed, at the cost of switching lenses all day.
- I compared on my 27" screen, no difference, even in low-light scenarios and at different ISOs
Huh. When I compare RAW output from my D5300 (using the default 18-55 mm lens) and a Pixel 6, the difference is staggering. Granted, the JPG output from the Pixel is usually on par with the JPG from the DSLR, high dynamic range is something where the Pixel is even a bit better most of the time.
But once you take RAW photos and hit the Auto button in Lightroom, the Pixel doesn't hold a chance against the D5300.
It doesn't even have to be a prosumer, average kids in my city know raw and post process. Kids are very familiar with editing, in fact, gen z is also blowing gen y out of water when it comes to editing video.
The X-T30 is US$ 800-900 and uses the same sensor and processor of the X-Pro3 so they're pretty equivalent on picture quality. Don't stick to the X-Pro3 mention as that's missing the point.
The D5300 is pretty old, I had one in 2013-2014, coming from a D3200.
> - I compared on my 27" screen, no difference, even in low-light scenarios and at different ISOs
This might be the main difference between us, I usually do prints in A3+ sizes and the differences in picture quality between a smartphone and my cameras are very noticeable.
On the price point I agree with you but then the comparison becomes not so level by comparing semi-conductors technology from 2014 to the ones from 2021, that's 7 years of evolution on sensor technology packed into the phone's sensor, plus all the image processing advances since then.
Again, I understand the price point but it's an oddball comparison. Perhaps a comparison between the A72 and a Fujifilm X-E2 could tell us more but I don't have either devices to directly compare myself :/
I sold my DSLR gear in 2015 including my absolute favorite 35/f2 lens, and I have an X100V on backorder in 2022 for its 35mm equivalent f/2 prime lens: seven years of AI missteps and absent bokeh in my preferred framing has finally gotten to me. I know that my phone will take better telephotos, and I know my phone has RAW mode and three lenses and takes amazingly great pictures. So I'm specializing my camera to exactly where I love it most, and will let my phone handle everything else, and I’m content that each has their strengths.
Even if you have been a professional photographer for a significant length of time, you shouldn't use it to try to appeal to authority. However, a cursory glance at your profile tells me you aren't even 30, come on mate. Unless you were a professional photographer before your 10th birthday I really don't think your experience is better than any other enthusiast.
Did you do a real image diff on the same setup? I doubt it. Phone cameras have come a long, long way but a lot of the advances are through "smoothing" things out through software.
I've done 6 years of professional photography to pay for college. Portrait shoots, weddings, even produced videos, ads, festivals, wildlife documentaries. I worked on Nikon D4S fullframes. How is my age relevant ?
My point is, professionals squeeze extra juice of the hardware, but the average consumer does not.
The image your phone generates isn’t real. It’s a medium quality photo enhanced by “AI.” See all the cases of iPhone pictures adding faces where people aren’t there.
D5300 is APS-C. I know because I have its descendent, the D5600. I wish it were full frame, especially this time of year. I should probably sell it since I never use it now that I have a good phone camera, but I would eventually miss my 70-300.
I just felt it's such an outrageous claim that I really hadn't to show that cameras with much larger sensors and better optics would shoot better pictures than a smartphone.
For me it's the opposite, show how smartphones are better than the current crop of mirrorless APS-C as this is the extraordinary claim requiring evidence.
When I get some time I might shoot some comparison pictures, but if I don't: remember that I'm not here to serve your demands, I'm sorry.
I have used an iPhone SE and a mirrorless M4/3 camera to photograph a sheet of paper containing barcodes of varying sizes (including some with bars less than 1 pixel wide). I then checked which barcodes were readable in the resulting image.
The light levels were the same, both cameras were positioned and zoomed so the target took up the entire image, and both cameras were supported on a tripod.
I expected the M4/3 camera would blow the iPhone out of the water with its much larger lens, bigger sensor, and higher price. But no, the iPhone's image had marginally more readable barcodes.
Modern smartphone camera performance is just crazy, for the sensor size.
Dynamic range is better on the phone, but otherwise the DSLR has sharper edges, less noise, nicer colors, and is less mushy (but that is possibly due to the "AI processing", so ditto about the "real" image). That said, noise reduction is usually more advanced on phones, and handheld with a kit lens at night with high-contrast zones is kind of the worst scenario for DSLRs (hopefully it was a stabilized kit lens at least).
You can read the words "Hotel Platinum" on the phone photo. And it's blurred and "mushy" on D5500. And the phone had additional glare from an oncoming train, and it still pulled out things out of the dark.
Depends on what you need, of course, but for most people the photo from the phone is superior.
A fair point but unfair in that you are not also asking this of the OP. The status quo is that that a dedicated camera will be better than a smartphone (see other comments)
>Surprisingly, picture quality was on par. Low-light, stabilization, everything.
Almost certainly this is not true. It seems far more likely to me that perceived image quality after in device post processing was similar.
A lot of the quality of smartphone cameras comes from their software, which does a really good job at using the sensor data to create good images.
Cameras sold to photographers do not do that, or not as much. This is by design, if you are a photographer (someone who is interested in the process of photography) these corrections are something you really do not want, as they remove your ability to manually control these corrections later.
You are actually comparing two different types of images and it is quite unsurprising that the DSLR did not "win".
That's actually problem with DSLRs. Phone use the tiny sensor they have to its fullest, DSLRs mostly treat it as it was a film, and not try to reap all the benefits of digital processing and ability to shoot a bunch of images in quick succession.
Instead of shooting at 1/8 or 1/15 in low light it could "just" shoot images at 1/125 or even 1/1000 then compensate for minute movements of the camera to get perfect sharpness, and then merge them to denoise it, and boom, near-noise-free, near blur free (just the blur from target movement, not the photographer) image in low-light.
This is absolutely not a problem with DSLRs or large format cameras.
>Instead of shooting at 1/8 or 1/15 in low light it could "just" shoot images at 1/125 or even 1/1000 then compensate for minute movements of the camera to get perfect sharpness, and then merge them to denoise it, and boom, near-noise-free, near blur free (just the blur from target movement, not the photographer) image in low-light.
There is absolutely nothing stopping a DSLR or large format camera user from doing exactly that. This is also a very common procedure in astro photography where dozens of such photos are stacked to capture objects in the sky.
This doesn't happen on the camera of course, but a photographer wouldn't want it to happen anyways.
I think you entirely missed the point of a digital large format camera. The user does not want the camera doing post processing. The user wants the camera to capture technically excellent images and process them manually.
The difference between a phone and a large format camera in this case is that the photographer can choose to take such a photo and he can process it on a high performance machine with manual intervention. This is absolutely not a problem with the camera.
The intersection of people who want to spend a significant of money on something they already have (a camera) to get a version which allows them fine grained control and technically excellent results, but then don't care how the results are processed after they pressed the shutter is almost zero.
A modern large format camera is for people interested in photography. If you do not care about photography, but care about getting decent enough pictures with each press on the capture button, those cameras are not for you.
I care about photography, I care about good results, I care about using my camera to get those results, I do not care about spending hours in front of a computer screen.
So you invest time, money and effort into an expensive machine, which needs fine tuning, knowledge, experience and time to get the best results. But then you want to feed those results into a machine to do whatever it finds best, instead of manually controlling how your output looks?
I won't tell you what to do or don't but that market segment is probably not very large...
By design and necessity - I suspect people would not be happy if they saw what actually came off the sensor (or had to carry around a better sized sensor).
For some cameras "beauty filters" are even a selling point. For a professional photoprapher that would be a nightmare. But most people aren't photographers and only care about getting a good looking image after pointing and shooting. And there is nothing wrong with that, but it makes for bad comparisons.
> What can lightroom not control manually what Google does automatically.
The camera itself. Smartphones shoot several frames with different settings at different times, they may have a time of flight sensor to estimate distance, plenoptic features, etc... These can be fed into algorithms specifically trained on that camera and that can take advantage of all these extra data.
DSLRs can do things like bracketing, but external software doesn't have nearly as much control.
Camera industry is dying. I don't see Nikon or Olympus being around in the consumer camera market much longer. Its just going to be Sony and Canon.
People just want pictures that look good. I don't want to shoot bracketed shots then combine them together in photoshop so I can get the same dynamic range as my phone. I don't want to take 20 pictures at a time of my kids hoping to get that one moment where they looked at the camera when my Iphone has live photo mode.
All r&d is being developed for the small sensor sizes. New stacked CMOS sensors will come to phones first because that is where the money is at. Phone cameras next year may surpass capabilities of mirrorless/dslr cameras in terms of dynamic range with a single picture.
I really don't understand why camera manufactures aren't investing in software. What they are doing now isn't working. I am planning to go on vacation for the winter holiday and this may be first year in a long time that i don't bring my dedicated camera(right now a Sony A7III) because my IPhone 14 just takes good pictures.
> I really don't understand why camera manufactures aren't investing in software.
Some of them are. Olympus (now OM System) in particular has been emphasizing in-camera stacking features that take advantage of the fast sensor readout and very effective image stabilization they can achieve with a smaller sensor than most.
Those features aren't like the smartphone magic "make my picture look good" though. They're more manual and creative than that, like "let me take long exposures in bright light without filters" or "I want to paint light onto this dark scene with a flashlight". They produce a sort of raw file (it's obviously not simple raw sensor data at this point) suitable for further manual processing if desired. People not taking photography seriously as a job or an art form won't get much out of that, and most everyone else prefers the convenience of a phone.
> It seems far more likely to me that perceived image quality after in device post processing was similar.
That’s just what they said. The purpose of cameras is to produce images we find pleasing, for a few different values of “pleasing” (recording memories, aesthetics, etc).
Nobody cares about the “how”. Whether it’s a photographer with an MFA doing pixel-by-pixel adjustments on a RAW image or an algorithm in an ISP, nobody cares.
Ok, not nobody, but no casual user, which is 99.99% of the market. For most of us, we take a picture and look at the picture. Insisting that one technology is better even though it produces no user benefit is missing the point.
>Ok, not nobody, but no casual user, which is 99.99% of the market.
That's kind of my point. If you just care about getting a good enough result you do not want a camera which is producing images which are good on a technical level. And comparing technically good images to post processed images is essentially pointless.
I am not sure about the 0.01% every person who ever used lightroom or similar software has wanted something from a picture their camera did not give them. And even if the number is correct, there still are people who see photography as a creative endeavour and who want images which are easy to edit and not heavily preprocessed. If you aren't one of them your phone is likely more than good enough already and there is nothing wrong with that.
When my mother uses both in auto mode, the pictures turn out the same quality.
This article is about the general public, not us, the HN crowd which love to push hardware to the limit. Which is the historical definition of hacking btw :)
Perfect for carrying it in a pocket sure, not at all great for carrying it around in a hand. A compact camera is wider but shorter in two other dimensions, so it's easier to carry.
In my main camera use case the "gopro" form factor has much better ergonomics than a phone, by a wide margin. Unfortunately, that market is wildly underserved because all existing cameras in that form factor barely consider stills even an afterthought, if they consider it at all. I'd pay real money for a camera that is on par with phones but does not come with an almost face-sized TV attached.
(I use an RX-0, which at first glance seems to fit that bill, but doesn't really: it's an extremely small movie camera that only pretends to be a very small compact for addressing a wider audience than it deserves)
Agree. A cellphone with its button-lens is never going to match an actual camera in the kind of flexibility that only real depth of field can offer.
To be sure though, out of convenience I pretty much only take my phone on vacations. (Well, and an old medium-format TLR film camera just for the odd novelty photo — but it only ever leaves the van when I think I have a subject best suited for it. Oh, ha ha, and I have a stereo digital camera in the glove box that gets similar treatment.)
True, "only full-frames can beat smartphones nowaday" is nonsense. iPhone 14 Pro Max's sensor size is 1/1.28". Naive physics, 1" is collecting more raw light. Now it depends on how good a person controls the collecting process (and post).
All cameras (compact to SLR does post processing) other than for RAW format. And infact even for RAW format SLR cannot beat modern flagship phones [1] [2].
ProRAW has one more surprise up its sleeve. A few years ago, Apple began using neural networks to detect interesting parts of an image, such as eyes and hair. Apple uses this to, say, add sharpening to only clouds in the sky. Sharping faces would be quite unflattering.
>And infact even for RAW format SLR cannot beat modern flagship phones [1] [2].
What is described is those article is the same as a normal raw that DLSR have been doing for decades. Adding the word "expert" or "apple" in front of the name doesn't make your RAW files magically better.
The only advantage for the smartphone here is that it's more user-friendly to edit the RAW files directly on the phone in one click compared to importing your photos in a software like Photoshop Lightroom
Ergonomics is a mixed bag. DSLRs win at latency and burst, as well as manual mode.
But sharing the pictures is a pain, the UI is hard for beginners. And the most important ergonomic of all : it's easier to grab my phone than the 1-pound DSLR.
I can share pictures from my Fujifilm cameras via WiFi to my phone... I think you are using a pretty outdated kit and trying to judge the current crop of mirrorless cameras against that.
Even Canon and Nikon abandoned the DSLR format, the digital photography world has embraced mirrorless, it's much more compact and the only thing you lose is the analog viewfinder through the mirror. For me it wasn't a loss at all.
I've been a hobby photographer for almost 15 years, had DSLRs, full-frames and ended on mirrorless exactly because I needed something compact and light to carry around.
Even the iPhone 14 Pro with its very much upgraded camera can only *just* start to be within the same league as a standalone camera when it comes to dynamic range. Noise performance, detail resolution etc. are all still woefully inadequate. In any instance, a phone camera can take amazing shots (especially when in great light) but a very long way from being equal. Everybody has a different threshold for "good enough" however and they have met yours.
I really don't agree with calling the D5300 a mid-range camera, it's 2013-2014 tech. Like I mentioned somewhere else I do understand the price comparison but it's not a mid-range camera anymore, it's very outdated.
Even with less outdated cameras (e.g. the last high-end APS-C from Nikon, the D7500), HDR bracketing is much worse than most mid-range phones from the last 5 years. And assembling them after manual bracketing in post-processing is also not great. Nikon HDR creates halos, doubling, even on relatively fast shutter speeds.
That said, I don’t have the experience of phones being "good enough", and even my Sony RX100 (edit: was "RX1", my bad) first gen which is quite old is out-performing 99% of the smartphone market in picture quality on a good screen, if you exclude HDR.
Sorry, I meant to say "RX100", it is now corrected. Yes, even with the improvements in sensor technology, glass, and post-processing I don't see a phone reaching RX1 quality anytime soon.
They make up for the sensor deficiencies relative to a DSLR with image processing. You can simulate increase dynamic range and reduced noise by taking multiple exposures with multiple cameras and processing them with smart 'AI' algorithms.
I have a recent Samsung flagship phone, and the same DSLR and lens as you. The DSLR is far superior for sports photography. My daughter plays indoor volleyball and smartphone pictures are garbage, just completely blurry due to the fast action. If I manually reduce the shutter speed then pictures are under exposed due to the tiny sensor. On the DSLR I can run it in shutter priority mode and push the ISO, so the results are pretty good (although a full frame camera would obviously be better).
The smartphone does pretty well in most other situations that don't involve fast movement in poor lighting.
Picture quality most likely wasn't on par. Just look at this iphone 13 vs nikon d750 comparison: https://i.imgur.com/ght1Vyu.jpg.
Sometimes my Pixel 4a renders something which looks decent, sometimes it gives me oversharpened photos with unnatural colors, like the iphone photo. Let's not even mention the AI generated fake details, which look horrible to me 99.99% of the time.
I've recently bought canon mirrorless just to also buy 50mm lens with f/1.2 aperture. I got photos I've always wanted to do (with blurred background) and no phone could match the quality of picture. Of course with standard 15-45 lens (f/3.5 - f/6) it's much closer to phone quality, but that's why I didn't go with compact or camera without exchangeable lens.
An SLR is nothing without a great lens. It is the most important part of the camera, more important than APS-C or full frame by a long shot. The lens may cost more than the camera body though...
Surprisingly, picture quality was on par. Low-light, stabilization, everything. I sold my DSLR since.
APS-C sensors aren't relevant anymore, only full-frames can beat smartphones nowadays.