iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review(austinmann.com) |
iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review(austinmann.com) |
It was literally just to see how the new LIDAR stuff can help with a nearly impossibly dark shot.
Of course a DSLR/mirrorless with proper lighting and a tripod would actually look good.
I don't think that was the point with that test shot, though.
Modern cameras can take video with nothing but moonlight, let alone photography.
Almost any flagship phone can produce similar pics to the ones in this article. The devil is really in the details now.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/50730c37e4b03a...
If that's the output I can expect, I don't know why I'd even bother taking the picture. The image is a mess. On the basis of this article, my conclusion is if you want to share or view the images on anything other than a mobile device, you might be disappointed with the output of this camera. Better to stick with your a7 III or what have you.
I agree with you completely, that when it comes down to the full image, the results are usually grainy and pixelated. That's why I'm sticking with my Sony camera.
TBH, I think some of these photos look a little muddy and noisy even at 4x6 dimensions. Even some of the ones taken in daylight. Maybe there was an issue with the post-processing, but I wouldn't characterize someone who wants to print a 4x6 as a pixel peeper..
The insane quality upgrade you get from a point-and-shoot is because they have a much bigger sensor and a real lens and focus light brilliantly well, and if you want bokeh you don't need any of that crap fake blur processing to achieve what physics will do for you.
I often feel like people have forgotten or never even knew how good images can be with an actual camera, and it doesn't have to be a DSLR at all.
If you want a camera, buy a camera, not a phone.
[0] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1210607-REG/canon_109...
Yes, I get the unit economics of it (at least I think I do, I've never worked in the phone industry so that could easily be hubris on my part), but if you can spend an extra few dollars or even tens of dollars on your BOM for something that is clearly, objectively a better camera to everything else out there I don't see how Samsung couldn't trivially add a minimum $200 markup just for that.
And you don't even need that. You could add a sensor that's just a few dollars more expensive at scale - it seems the margins are trivially there since that would easily justify a $50 markup. I realize the optics also matter, but at this point it's really the sensors limiting the phones, not the cheap glass.
In an industry where everyone is struggling for an edge, it just seems painfully obvious to do this to me. I look forward to someone more knowledgeable telling me why all my assumptions are wrong though (I mean that literally, no snark intended!).
There are also a bunch of software features on the iPhone that are actually more ergonomic than on a dedicated camera, and help me catch the shot I want. Live Photos, burst, pinch zoom, tap to focus (on a legit screen, not on those poor excuses for touch UIs on cameras). Instant switching between video/still and lens modes. Basically everything is auto and It's point and shoot in any situation.
If I am to boil the whole thing down I would say the iPhone's camera makes my MILC feel antiquated and 90% of the time I'll be catching better photos on the iPhone 12.
I hope the Lidar can help portrait mode and other AI depth of field techniques work at further distances to a subject
If this becomes true I chuck all of my DSLR-form factor cameras immediately, its over.
No mention of whether or not the photo was handheld or how long the exposure time was. If the photo they were referring to was handheld, I guess I agree. However, the subsequent photo which is the same landscape is captioned "on tripod" so it's not clear if the previous one (which isn't captioned) is handheld or not.
If both were shot on a tripod, then I disagree with the original statement. Any sensor will do better in low light with a longer exposure, and if phones simply let you expose for however long you wanted to then many "night" photos would look amazing - on a tripod, of course.
With slightly better lighting it can be "good enough" to be hard to distinguish from a bigger sensor camera for "web" where "web" really means ~6inch phone display - and that's great, but let's not fool ourselves ;-)
I'm also curious what the max will look like - though at the size and price it's difficult to say if buying a RX100 and a cheaper phone isn't a better option still, for many.
On any normal camera that photo would be a complete blur. Impossible. It's a hand-held three second exposure.
It seems the point of it in the first place was to see how well the night mode works in near pitch-darkness for portraits.
This is partly because the flash has blasted her face with light losing all the shape except for an ugly shadow under her nose. With my Nikon I could try at (very) high ISO for a natural-light shot or use an off-camera flash to shape her face in a more flattering way. But perhaps people used to the very flat / boring light common in mirror selfies won't care about this.
The blur on the edges of the fur look digitally smeared rather than optically blurred.
[edit - okay, I didn't spot that he used off screen light rather than flash. But the effect is similar and hasn't given any pleasing sculpting of the subject. Other processing may have made things worse]
Good portraits are usually made by excellent lightning conditions. As a portrait this picture is average, but when you take conditions in the account the result is quite amazing.
(0) That is an assumption I am making which might be wrong. You could also definitely do this by hand by investing 100-1000x more time.
DSLR vs. iPhone is apples and oranges. Two devices with completely different use cases.
If your primary goal is to buy a no-compromise device for photography, obviously you should get a full size camera.
But 99% of the time, you're going to have an iPhone in your pocket and no camera on hand. That's why it's great to have an excellent camera in your phone. You can always augment with a DSLR for special occasions, but it's not like a DSLR and iPhone are interchangeable.
I don't have kids, but wouldn't Live Photos be a better feature for reliving moments with your kids? A DSLR will never be able to do that, because the mechanical shutter prevents it from doing so.
For the amount of time it takes - the iPhone 12 Pro and similar can really outperform a camera. One you get a snapshot you'd be okay with sharing with others immediately - with the other, you're like, "Yeah, the exposure is a little off but maybe that's just because of the dynamic range limitations? And I need to adjust the contrast, maybe sharpen a little bit, colors aren't really there, and it would've been great if I had done bracketed exposures because the sky is just too blown out to recover properly..." A lot of that stuff is gone with smartphones because they do it all for you.
It's what annoys me about modern cameras - they don't have any of that built in as an option. You have to do all the work by yourself and bracketing is just way too much of a PITA for me to deal with for most photos. Computational photography is a huge breakthrough that many cameras just don't utilize almost at all.
Looks like EyeFi (WiFi-equipped SD cards) isn't a thing anymore: http://www.eyefi.com/ "Welcome to nginx!"
The one feature to make me upgrade is a high refresh rate screen. I switched from 60hz to 120hz on my main monitor a few years ago and I can’t go back. I imagine the same would happen with my phone since it’s mainly used to reading articles like this one.
I’m considering getting rid of my Nikon Z6 since I rarely actually use it due to the size and weight. Its still image quality is still noticeably better than the phone, especially with my Nikon f1.8 50 mm lens, but the iPhone wins for video and Live Photo’s.
In my opinion the limiting factor in phone cameras is the size. Of course, for a given size a cheap, crappy sensor will give crappy results. But I wouldn't be surprised that sensors used in flagship phones are actually pretty close to the state of the art.
The issue with the size is that if you increase it for the sensor, you're going to have to increase it for the optics. In an era where manufacturers are convinced we want paper-thin devices, they're going to have to choose the one over the other.
Certain iPhones were manufactured by Samsung, cameras for a long time were almost exclusively supplied by Sony.
I guess someone ran the number on that and figured it would make more sense financially.
The Long answer. Adding a decent camera sensor also requires you market the crap out of it. And as shown by Huawei and Samsung, longer Zoom sells better than better sensor or image quality. For 90% of customers Flagship Smartphone Camera quality is good enough or fast approaching good enough. Zoom level makes lots of difference.
And that is assuming Sony's Smartphone overall are anywhere as good as its competitor such as Samsung and Huawei. I have no idea whether that is the case, but Sony's Smartphone sales are dismal in numbers. [1]
And finally, as far as I can tell, both Sony and Samsung are innovating like crazy to produce the best small sensor. There just isn't a super great small sensors sitting there waiting for others to pick up for additional $20 more. And if Sony decade to withhold those tech from Apple, Samsung will capture those market shares.
[1] If you look at overall annual shipment, Huawei, Samsung, Apple, Chinese Brands ( Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus, RealMe, Vivo etc.. ) They are 90+% of the market.
Unfortunately the iPhone (and Mac's built-in FaceTime) cameras have no option to manually set the white balance. You need to use third-party apps/webcams to handle it.
https://www.techradar.com/news/what-is-apple-proraw-the-new-...
Things like low-light photography has always been available on DSLR's, like SLR's long before it, since you've always been able to control shutter speed, aperture, and ISO.
And all the extra software magic can already be done on your laptop on RAW files, where you've got enough space on your screen for all the sliders -- and a large enough screen to see the difference it makes in the details.
These days, pretty much the only people shooting with DSLR's are the people who want/need that fine-grained manual control anyways.
When that becomes available, then yes the possible processing on a computer will match and exceed what can be done on a phone.
If any camera would be able to do it, I'd bet on the Sony A9iii or A7iv.
Or people who shoot journalism, sports, conferences or other live events.
I don't care how damn good smartphones are (or will become). DSLRs will forever rule the roost in fast paced environments, smartphones are just too fiddly and there's nothing the manufacturers can do, the hinderance is not software, its form-factor.
Not entirely true: DSLRs wouldn't be able to capture depth data like the dual/triple-camera phones can, for "computational photography" magic (or simple masking).
Now, there's some good use cases for it but I guess the tradeoff hasn't been worth it so far. E.g. having some processing options in camera can speed up your workflow (but then again all the "toys" like this are removed from pro cameras because most people didn't use them). Also, the same magic Apple or Google use doesn't really exist outside of their phones (yet at least, I assume Adobe is working on this).
There's also some obstacles that I know of:
- bigger sensor, slower readout, slower sensor processing
- much bigger raw, needs big expensive CPU, heating problems
- hiring engineers that can do this (it took a long time for Apple to catch up to Google f.e.)
One constraint around this is the sheer bandwidth required to do any sort of live processing (either for viewfinding purposes or autofocus) — the latency (and even bandwidth) of anything less than a direct raw feed into the processor isn't gonna be good enough.
The 12 Pro's "regular" wide also has a larger aperture to improve low light capture, so Night Mode can stack fewer / shorter exposures for the final image.
I'd also ask what kind of screen you're looking at the image on. This image looks fine on my phone, but its screen is barely as large as a 3x5, which is essentially the lowest common denominator for printing -- the McDonald's hamburger of photo rendition. The image looks bad on my monitor, and would look awful if printed on 8x10.
Plus, it has artifical light, a phone screen, so even less than that would be useful.
As for AF, the obvious solution is to simply have a light in the camera. Mine does, it works fine even in complete darkness. I've actually gone and took a photo of a subject lit only with a phone screen, in perfect darkness, at around 2 meters.
Result? F2.8, 1/10x3 (stacking), ISO6400 actual, ISO2066 effective.
Very, very far from a challenging situation. Actually, quite easy.
With my F/1.4 lens, a cellphone screen provides enough light to illuminate a wooden plank to a shutter speed of 1/25 at ISO4000. More than serviceable. Especially with stabilization, where I can in reality get away with 1/2.
You know, dedicated cameras also evolved. A lot.
At the issue of this expriment, I can be confident that my camera can take pictures of much higher quality in the same conditions, at a higher resultion with much less noise and more detail, and all that at half of the price. Indeed, an a6000+EF-speedbooster+Tamron28-75 2.8 EF will run you 600$ tax included, for a higher performance, and will last you a decade or more.
EDIT: for some reason, I can't answer since I'm rate limited, but I can actually do a 3 second exposure, hand held, with my camera, and get a sharper result that that. Especially if I'm tipsy. Here's how I do it - I put my camera in image stacking mode, set the shutter speed to 0.8 seconds, and fire the shutter.
My camera will then take 4 pictures with IS on for 0.8 seconds in each of them, recenter IS in the few milliseconds between them, then warp and shift the images together and stack them. Bam, 3(.2) second exposure. It's not always the sharpest on the first try, but it's a hell of a lot sharper than whatever is in the picture there. Also, the iPhone is rejecting quite a few images there, so it won't be 3 seconds and more like 1.2 seconds.
Especially at the wide focal lengths equivalent to an iPhone. It's not very hard. I was at 1/20 before to ensure maximum sharpness, but if I'm willing to either stack in post or take 2-3 shots, more than possible.
It's a reasonable separate point to make that a "proper" camera wouldn't need such a long exposure for the same amount of light.
I can share some pics, if you want. It does require a steady hand.
But then again, the iPhone doesn't really do a 3 second exposure, it rejects a lot of frame so it's more like 1.5-2 seconds, which I can do reliably.
But really, I recreated the shot, in a perfectly dark room with a phone light as the only light source, and it focused adequately and the image came out more than adequate at 1/20x ISO 2066 @ f/2.8, or 1/30 ISO2400 f/1.4, all with good AF.
Of course it's a reasonable point you make that a "proper" camera wouldn't need such a long exposure for the same amount of light.
> This Portrait mode w/ Night mode 3-second exposure was shot with the iPhone 12 Pro in my right hand. Simultaneously, in my left hand, I held my iPhone 11 Pro and used the light emitting from the screen (not the flash) as an off-camera fill light for Esther’s face.
I think that it doesn't look flat just because of the flash, but really as a mix of incredibly severe noise reduction as well as a ton of dynamic compression necessary to keep the background in roughly the same exposure.
There are also Deep Learning models that change angle of light on a final photo, so you would be able to get your Rembrandt lighting that way soon.
I can only talk to Panasonic (GX8) and Fujifilm (X100F, XE3), but for both of those it's still pretty awful. Transfers are very slow, especially if you want full resolution, and it's always frustrating to just connect my phone to the camera--the apps are slow and clunky, setting up the adhoc network is flaky, and often times even after connecting it'll suddenly just disconnect for no reason. The XE3 supposedly supports a persistent, bluetooth connection that'll auto connect and auto transfer photos, but every time I've tried to set that up, it sends like the first two photos along and then doesn't work anymore.
I've moved to just using an SD card reader.
It's not the camera that makes the difference but the lens. And a smartphone just can't make up that difference with software tricks.
A smartphone will be fantastically practical and convenient as a camera in a specific set of use-cases. Outside those it's pretty useless.
That's why I think smartphones are great. They lower the barrier for taking pretty good pictures. You don't have to worry about balancing exposure or figuring out how to merge multiple photos into one - etc. The smartphone does it all for you. It's an automated photo editor with some intelligent tricks that are very hard (or impossible) to do on a traditional camera.
No one is saying a smartphone is going to replace a pro-camera. If you want to do birding with a 1200mm equivalent, you're going to have a hard time doing that with a smartphone. But if you know the limitations (in the same way that all cameras have limitations) then it can do really well in those parameters.. and I find those parameters are more than enough for 90%+ of consumers out there.
Most people are fine with zooming with their feet.
Sony and Samsung have already started using much beefier hardware, now that their custom Asic is falling behind.
Unfortunately I don't remember where this was, but I read that the way Sony is setup they couldn't really do it.
This was related to "actual cameras", not phone cameras, but the article's point was that "Sony sensors" was a separate division, and Sony Cameras would be their client, just as, say, Nikon.
Nikon was supposedly taking part in the design of the sensors Sony would manufacture for them and this design was only to be used for Nikon. So if some engineer came up with some revolutionary idea, at least in theory, Sony cameras wouldn't be able to use it.
Not sure if this is the case with the phones, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least Apple took a similar approach with this.
I think the new iPhones ship with native ProRAW support, which might mean that the built-in Photos app would be able to access the same amount of imaging data that a specialised RAW editor could in prior versions.
It does seem like it's high time for there to be some kind of RAW-over-time standard, e.g. a single file with 2 hours of exposure that Photoshop would have built-in tools to manage -- and even the ability to handle matrix transformation movement over time, e.g. to photograph stars over 5 minutes.
I wonder how useful it would be to embed gyroscope/accelerometer data with it though? Everything I imagine having to do with long/stacked exposures involves a tripod.
Motion data actually seems like it would be more useful to embed in regular-exposure RAWs, since it could help build a deconvolution kernel to undo motion blur.
Of course, this would need a camera with much faster sensor readouts, which should be possible with Sony's next generation of stacked sensors.
Of course, storing 100 or 10,000 stills would up storage requirements dramatically -- but then lossless compression should bring that back down to entirely reasonable levels.
Because all you really have to do is compute the "average" image across the entire exposure (or at various "keyframes" if there's significant motion) and then encode the differences from those, which is trivial to compress.
I really hope this is something we see in the next 5 years, as opposed to 20 years.
That was the original question, and I'm not seeing it.
Obviously they're using DSLR's for the manual controls and lenses. But my point stands: if they need advanced image processing for something they're going to publish... they need to adjust it on a large screen. Not on-camera.
As an iPhone 11 Pro + Halide user myself, I daresay a DSLR photo with a decent portrait lens would definitely look better — or at the very least — more natural, than any iPhone photo that relies on "computational photography" fake-bokeh.
Put them both on a hi-res display, or HD TV or (even better) print them out in large format. Then there's no comparison.
So it really comes down to how is the photo going to be used.
And for 99% of photos taken these days, viewing it on a small screen is the purpose, so the phone camera is perfectly good enough.
Yes, anyone could tell the difference between this taken on a dedicated camera and this taken on iPhone. Really, anyone. No matter the resolution.
It really does just look like a blurry mess. A cheap 150$ DSLR with a bottom-bargain Chinese or very old lens (at say, F1.4 or lower) would provide significantly better results.
