iPhone XS: Why It’s a Whole New Camera

iPhone XS: Why It’s a Whole New Camera(blog.halide.cam)

66 points by dalbin 7 years ago | 17 comments

lathiat 7 years ago |

This is a really good review of the new camera including why the facial smoothing happens.. needs more visibility!

fetus8 7 years ago |

The images processed with SmartRaw look absolutely incredible. It's kind of shocking that some of the images out of the stock camera look as smooth and noisy as they do.

Good job Halide!

deepnotderp 7 years ago |

Interesting. To be honest, I'm a little bit surprised it took so long for computational photography to come to market in smartphones, but it's nice to see it, I definitely agree that it's pretty much one of the only ways to improve imaging in such constrained conditions.

xenihn 7 years ago |

Is anyone using Halide right now? Is it worth the $6? I've never purchased any sort of camera app before.

dewey 7 years ago | |

I’m using it, it’s a beautiful app and the guys building it seem to know a lot about what they do. It’s also an app purely focused on taking pictures, there are no filters and instead they just provide an easy way to hand things over to Darkroom app.

I usually use it when I think I want to edit the photo later on and want to grab a RAW file.

Terretta 7 years ago | |

Depends on whether you think the differences in results shown in the closing sections of the article are worth that cost.

jczhang 7 years ago |

Author must not have been aware that the Pixel has been doing this for years already. This is just Apple copying Google. Reading "Apple is smart." makes me cringe.

alphabettsy 7 years ago | |

By that measure the original Pixel copied the iPhone 6 that arrived two years before since it had HDR. What's the point of this game?

FreakyT 7 years ago | | |

I think parent is taking issue with the weird "Apple is smart!" opening narrative, which seems to imply that Apple came up with computational photography, as opposed to it simply being a general industry trend.

izacus 7 years ago | | |

The point is that author is doing the same thing as lot of Apple fans do: tries to rewrite history to show that Apple invented something.

gammateam 7 years ago | |

I used to care, but I appreciate how Apple doesn't just cram everyone onto a PCB just because it is possible.

Android phones consistently have features that won't be seen on Apple devices for 2-5 years, or never. When Apple announces something as if it is new, what they are announcing is a new integration into an ecosystem.

Iphone XS' image format will be usable, editable and parseable in OSX's default photo viewer.

It will inherit the live photo technology.

It will be transferrable without internet in short range wireless tech that actually works reliably and without any additional apps.

Thats what Apple announces when they don't pay homage to prior implementations of an existing technology.

vinay427 7 years ago | | |

> It will be transferrable without internet in short range wireless tech that actually works reliably and without any additional apps.

I'm genuinely curious if you've tried Android Beam. It works very smoothly in my experience and much more fun to use with a tap between two phones, but if I recall correctly it transfers over Bluetooth so is not as fast as AirDrop. That being said, it can be used in many more situations to transfer URLs between browsers, map directions, etc.

bfred_it 7 years ago | | |

> short range wireless tech that actually works reliably

I suppose you’re talking about AirDrop, which for me happens to not be that reliable, especially when sending files from/to Macs. Bluetooth worked much more reliably back on Symbian and OS X Leopard, but we know Apple likes proprietary solutions.

izacus 7 years ago | | |

Current tests show that XS is just catching up and not surpassing the year old Pixel 2 camera quality though.

bunnycorn 7 years ago | |

According to Vic Gundotra the Apple team is ahead.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/ex-google-svp-vic-gundotra-pra...