The magic of phone cameras disappears in a moment when you get hold of a mirrorless for 5 minutes. Even a bottom end one is orders of magnitude better than the best phone camera even if it’s got a lot less megapixels.
I love my mirrorless, but it certainly wasn't 5 minutes. The first two lenses I tried (cheap ones obviously) were pretty underwhelming. Once I got a large aperture lens, I started to really get it. Even then, so many of my photos came out dark or blurry because I hadn't learned how to pick settings or focus for different lighting conditions and subject movement speeds. Autofocus on consumer cameras is pretty trash compared to iPhone/Pixel. EyeAF my ass.
These camera companies need to invest more in their software. Superzoom, night sight, subject tracking and smart autofocus should be table stakes. Auto mode on my mirrorless should at least be on par out of the box with my phone. It's sad that the pixel phones with very old Sony sensors can take better 10x pictures than mirrorless out of the box. They need to worry less about better lenses and sensors, and worry more about better onboard compute capabilities.
Lenses make SUCH a difference. A family member asked me to shoot their wedding (no pressure, right?) and since without me it wouldn’t have happened, I agreed. I also rented some L glass for my SLRs, and holy shit was that eye-opening. Turns out that a $2000 lens is objectively better than a $300 lens, who knew?
The clarity, the sharpness, the pop - everything was improved. Good glass is a bigger difference than the body.
This is also introducing the difference between zoom lenses and prime lenses. You can get a good 28mm lens for much less cost than a good 24-70mm zoom lens. Most novices in photography don't start nowadays with good prime lenses, but with cheap zoom lenses.
Great! Inexpensive zoom lenses are getting better all the time. And manufacturing processes are likely also improving. The gap is narrowing.
But, at least today, you still get enhanced features on the more expensive zoom lens, such as wider aperture, and a constant maximum aperture across the entire zoom range. Neither of those things necessarily yields a superior photograph -- you don't need f2.8 across the whole zoom range if you're taking pictures at f6 -- but they can be very helpful. If they're worth paying for depends on one's personal needs, desires, and budget.
>A $300 lens is objectively better than a $5 smartphone lens.
Not sure where you are getting the $5 figure from. In any case, smartphone lenses are manufactured in vastly higher quantities than lenses for interchangeable lens cameras, so it doesn't make sense to compare the per unit cost. Modern smartphone lenses are miracles of optical engineering. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557578 The cost of the R&D that's gone into enabling their design and manufacture probably couldn't have been recuperated if they were being used only in cameras.
Fair enough; perhaps it’s fair to say that given a specific application or lens type, a more expensive one will generally be better than a cheaper one. For example, you can get any prime or zoom you want from Canon as a normal or L variety. The latter will cost about 10x as much, and will be better. 10x better is subjective.
On the flip side, my favorite macro was a Sigma 105mm prime. Tack-sharp, and cost well under $1000. Of course, I’ve never shot with the equivalent Canon L (which isn’t quite the same at 100mm, but close).
* wider f-stop
* less chromatic aberration
* less distortion generally
* smaller circle of confusion
The chromatic aberration is an important but subtle effect. Remember that lenses are multiple pieces of glass, and every interface diffracts the wavelengths of light like a prism. One of the considerations in lens design is converging all those different wavelengths of light in the same place. Not just at one point, but at every point across the image plane.
Poor lenses might do the well in an area. Good lenses do it everywhere.
Sorry, should have clarified. The lens in particular that made me rethink everything else I had was a 70-200mm f/2.8L. Zooms in particular often suffer from sharpness and chromatic aberration issues compared to a prime due to the larger number of optics. This lens did not. I’m sure a comparable prime stuck next to it would still show it up, but coming from kit zoom lenses, it was quite a shocking difference.
The static aperture also helps tremendously of course, yes - nice bokeh with a tight zoom means you can easily get candid portraits that look great from anywhere in the room.
70-200 f2.8 L IS III is the Bentley of lenses, the Aston Martin, the Maybach, etc. you got the best hardware possible for the job. for the price it better be amazing! even the older ones without IS are excellent.
L glass is also a very interesting used market - those things basically don't lose value IME.
It was the IS II at the time, but yes - an absolutely spectacular piece of kit. I think it was about $100 to rent for the weekend? Very reasonable IMO, and made me realize that one could quite easily bootstrap a wedding photography business without actually owning gear.
Other than the actual business side of things, pesky details like getting clients. And the massive stress of shooting a wedding. I was happy to do it gratis for family, but I don’t think I’d want to deal with paying clients.
When I was still shooting Canon, I used a 70-200mm f/4L which I picked up for a song (C$~600 sixteen years ago?). Not the beauty of a 2.8, but having a consistent 4 made for some beautiful shots on Cape Breton.
Lenses affect color contrast too. I don't fully grasp it but internal reflections adding neutral white bias or correction tradeoffs between geometry and color or something. Aperture can be widened as much as lens barrel allows so that isn't it.
I feel the same comparing my iphone and mirrorless. It's obvious software is years behind in almost every aspect; even relatively easy fixes like the horrible designed and unintuitive UI choices where the same mistakes are made year after year despite complaints...ugh! The last thing I need when taking pictures is fumbling around in 5 layers of menus to change important settings while my subject moves on and the moment has past. It almost feels on purpose as if the though is that added complexity is some proxy for it being "professional"
If processing power is one of the bottleneck to get some of the features phones can do it would be great if there was a universal hotshoe-like way to mount phones to camera bodies to use the screen, touch capabilities, and offload processing power, maybe with all phones now having USB-C its more of a possibility. If the camera makers don't do it I wouldn't be surprised if Apple/Google eventually do and eat their lunch.
> relatively easy fixes like the horrible designed and unintuitive UI choices where the same mistakes are made year after year despite complaints...ugh!
This is exactly the complaint I have about car manufacturers not having enough / the “right” digital UX experience.
The micro 4/3 M.Zuiko 45mm 1.8 is the bees knees - but the process of getting a useful shot into my family icloud album is so much work I rarely pull it out. Mirrorless really should be bodies with sensors and a thunderbolt connection to a smartphone.
Affinity Photo will let you export an image into the Photo library directly from the editor. I use it to do minimal edits (a bit of crop, exposure, maybe highlights/shadows) and then go File > Share > Add to Photos. It's a great workflow for a hobby photographer like me and I like that it is a perpetual license. Adobe products will let a pro fly through hundreds of images a day, but this is more than enough for quick edits and dumping the files into iCloud.
They offer a free trial, try it out! (I am not affiliated, just a happy user)
I bought a $1200 mirrorless which was supposedly the best in class a couple of years ago. All my photos look like they were shot on a potato compared to my iphone.
Not to mention that I don't walk around with that mirrorless camera in my pocket at almost all times.
I once asked someone with a nice piece of kit that wasn't too far from mine in cost. They said they sorted top to bottom on DxOMark list and bought one on the top and they didn't even know what a prime is. But that approach seemed to work.
How much did you spend on the lens that went on it?
Camera bodies will keep being updated. Glass is updated, but a lot more stable.
If I have a friend who wants to invest, say, $3,000 in a camera setup, I'd tell them to get a $1,000 body and $2,000 of lenses. A couple have thought they'd buy a $2,500 body and $500 lens, and I explained why they might be disappointed with that investment.
I agree but for the average user who takes sunset pics, kid pics or pet pics and then view those pictures on the same device they shot it on, apple’s incentive isn’t so much about competing with full-frame mirrorless cameras, but instead to make the pictures shot on the iPhone look as good as possible on the iPhone. That way, the shooter gets the dopamine hit when they shoot something that triggers our visual sense in a positive way.
My Sony a7iv gives me the same dopamine hit, maybe more so as there’s no better feeling than getting home, loading your footage into DaVinci and see that your exposure, focus and colours are nailed (on the other side of the coin, it’s a huge punch in the gut to get home and see your focus a little off, giving the opposite effect of a dopamine hit). But it’s more of a process to get there and the average user needs a faster feedback loop from shot to hit.
My typical test is to take a photo of the full moon. It works acceptably well on an iPhone (or Android). My recent Pixel phone even adjusts the brightness automatically. Sure, the lens is pretty wide-angle, so the pictures don't have many details.
I had to fiddle around for 20 minutes with settings on my Sony Alpha camera, eventually using manual focus and manual exposure. The pictures are, of course, better because of the lens and the full-frame sensor.
But the user experience is just sad. So I often just don't bother to take my camera with me on my trips anymore.
Also, a note to camera makers: USE ANDROID INSTEAD OF YOUR CRAPPY HOME-GROWN SHITWARE. Add 5G, normal WiFi, GPS, Play Store, a good touchscreen. You'll have an instant hit.
I do not want android on a phone. I don't want to update or reboot it. I want to turn it on, use it and turn it off again. And I don't want someone substituting pictures of the moon for stuff online (hey Samsung!)
Wow, that Pixel 6 shot is awesome in all the wrong ways. I have no idea how it could have happened.
Of course, cameras with large sensors and lenses are going to be better than small phone sensors. Physics is physics. It's just that it doesn't matter that much for most people (me included).
> I do not want android on a phone. I don't want to update or reboot it.
I have used Galaxy Camera back in 2014. It was awesome. I could take pictures, and automatically upload them to Picassa (RIP) or share them with people. The UI was also pretty good, but it was clearly a V1 without too much polish.
> I want to turn it on, use it and turn it off again.
I have an Onyx book reader that runs Android. It works just like this. I pick it up, press a button, and it shows the book I've been reading within a second. So it's clearly possible.
Great example of the primary difference here. I've said that the photos out of my mirrorless (also Z50, great camera) are true photographs in the sense that they capture light and show it to me.
My smartphone however does not create photos, it creates digital art based on the scene. Your Pixel image is a perfect example of how algorithms (now called "AI") re-paint a scene in a way that resembles reality when zoomed out.
Comparing smartphone and camera is really apples to oranges at this point, as smartphones aren't even capturing photos, they're entirely repainting scenes.
> Comparing smartphone and camera is really apples to oranges at this point, as smartphones aren't even capturing photos, they're entirely repainting scenes.
Calm down, it's not that bad. Take for example night sight or astrophotography; it's using ML to intelligently stitch together light across time because available light in one moment is not enough to capture anything intelligible. Your end result is an accurate representation of what your eyes see (e.g. my own face in a nighttime selfie) and what is sitting there in the sky (the stars). You can call that repainting, but I disagree, it's more information aggregation over the temporal dimension.
Super resolution is similar, using shakes in your hand to gather higher resolution than you can accomplish with a single frame of data from your low res sensor grid. 2-3x digital zoom with super res technology is actually getting more information and more like optical zoom. It's not just cropping+interpolating.
Now...portrait mode. That's clearly just post-processing. But also...does blurring the background using lens focus have any additional merit vs doing it in post (besides your "purity"-driven feelings about it)?
At the end of the day, I want my mirrorless to do more than be a dumb light capture machine. I spent $X thousand+ for a great lens and sensor, so I want to maximize. It should do more to compensate automatically for bad lighting, motion blur, etc. It should try harder to understand what I want to focus on. As a photographer, I should get to think more about what photo I want taken and think less about what steps I need to take to accomplish that. My iPhone typically does a better job of this than my $X000 mirrorless. So I use my iPhone more.
> Take for example night sight or astrophotography
Oh speaking of astrophotography. It occured to me that all those pretty images of remote planets and nebulas have been doctored to hell and back.
What I don't know is where I can find space images that show the visible spectrum - i.e. what I'd see if i managed to travel there and look out the window.
Well, you're of course using the best example on the one side and the worst on the other side, so that's not really a fair comparison.
Apart from that:
The phones generally try to substitute the tiny sensors through highly complex software algorithms, creating something that sometimes only has a broad similarity with the original scene.
The cameras, on the opposite, usually have crappy software and rely on their great sensors (and other hardware).
So in an ideal world, you'd have a proper camera with good software.
That software then doesn't have to do all the (good or bad) stuff which is only there to try to make the best out of less than ideal image input, but instead it can provide more user friendly features which allow making quick and easy photos without having to study tutorials for a week (yes, now I am exaggerating a little on purpose :)).
This software doesn't have to do all the crap that in any way reduces the image quality in the end.
Please don't just think in the extremes, but look for the healthy middle way that would provide the best out of both worlds.
It is not Android that does the image processing itself btw., but special software that the phone manufacturers add on top of Android.
So this part would be the responsibility of the camera's manufacturer again, but this time they could focus more on their central use case (help making good pictures) instead of writing everything (like the user interface) themselves. And they could even provide their users with more options to extend their software for even better photos.
Of course. It does an equivalent of suspend-to-RAM after a few minutes of inactivity. It then can stay in this state for at least several weeks. I'm not sure for how long, I have never left my book reader for more than two weeks.
Cold reboot after updates takes about 20 seconds, like my phone.
So turn your camera on once when you pack your things for the flight. It can stay in sleep mode for at least a couple of weeks without draining the battery.
At this point I would've imagined Apple would have a moon detection feature and just replace it with a stock image cutout when detected in the field of view.
I love my d7100 and z5. There are some pictures only they can take over a phone, but it would take a user much longer than 5 minutes to beat their iPhone. I’ve been carrying the current gen iPhone and my larger camera for years and I use the iPhone more and more. The shots are good and easy to set up. I mostly keep a zoom on my larger camera now to give me reach and often use the iPhone otherwise.
Only applies to the small portion of the population that enjoys the process. I could never appreciate digital cameras. Take a bunch of shots , then go home and filter those shots for the good ones, then adjust the color of those shots. No thanks, not my cup of tea.
Funny enough I enjoy shooting film over digital. A lot less work and decision to be made.
For myself at least there is less mental load shooting film compared to digital. I am not taking multiple shots of the same thing generally and I don't develop the film myself. Historically the two things I did not like about digital was too many photos to review and having to work on each photo at home. There is something about not having the choice of which shot to pick and how to adjust the colors that is nice.
I have been interested in some of the micro 4/3 cameras that have prebuilt filters in them but I think film for me is king if I have a camera.
You can run a digital camera like that too. I am more interested in composition than camera set up and spend most of my time shooting in aperture priority. At best I'll tweak the white balance but the camera mostly just deals with that for me. I take few photos. I spent 16 days on a trek recently and took about 50 photos in total.
Ok let me clarify for you. In this context I am talking about point-and-shoot cameras, bridge cameras, DSLRs and mirrorless. Everything but a phone camera.
I’ve gotten far more amazing photographs (including exhibit quality large format ones) since smart phones became a thing than I ever had with an SLR. Because I always have the phone handy.
If you’re always walking around with a camera bag? Sure. If you’re regularly in beautiful situations without one? Eh…
Basically every news event in the last 15 years is caught on phone cameras. That's the magic. A device with which you can start streaming to the world in 30 seconds.
