Re:iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King?
by jillesvangurp on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @08:03AM
(#23006170)
A couple of points. On this. Phone cameras are mainly used by people who don't intend to do any (or only very minor editing). Overall, both IOS and Android can produce great results even with mediocre lenses/sensors. Computational photography basically enables them to compensate for that and machine learned configuration of editing steps a pro would do manually actually produce nice results. Of course these results are not intended for further post processing and lot of the applied edits are lossy in the sense of compressing dynamic range, clipping blacks for contrasty look and feel, blurring out noise & detail not visible on a tiny screen, etc. But considering iphones have very high resolution screens these days that should still be fine for that and simple prints. But lets be real, most of this stuff gets produced for and consumed on phone screens by people who are not even close to being decent amateur photographers.
But for anyone who is used to dealing with proper gear (cameras & lenses) and having the freedom to make very subjective artistic choices for things like white balance, local contrast, tone mapping, noise reduction, etc. what a phone does is always a compromise. And also it's a 1 size fits all solution optimized for mass appeal, which usually means "oooooh blue sky, pretty saturated colors, super sharp/contrasty photos", which as any postprocessing enthusiast knows are all variations of compressing dynamic range (i.e. super lossy steps).
I fall in the last category but I do appreciate the best effort my cheap Nokia 7 Plus camera app makes. I occasionally use open camera to get raw dngs for editing in Darktable but they actually do a decent job with the jpgs given the noisy original. My shiny new Fuji X-T30 produces much nicer raw files with tons of dynamic range and detail that simply is not there on a mobile phone. All of the AI stuff that happens in a phone you can also do with a decent camera but it requires lots of specialized tools and tweaking (e.g. hugin for hdr stuff).
But the best camera is the one you have with you and for most of us that's usually a smart phone.
But for anyone who is used to dealing with proper gear (cameras & lenses) and having the freedom to make very subjective artistic choices for things like white balance, local contrast, tone mapping, noise reduction, etc. what a phone does is always a compromise. And also it's a 1 size fits all solution optimized for mass appeal, which usually means "oooooh blue sky, pretty saturated colors, super sharp/contrasty photos", which as any postprocessing enthusiast knows are all variations of compressing dynamic range (i.e. super lossy steps).
I fall in the last category but I do appreciate the best effort my cheap Nokia 7 Plus camera app makes. I occasionally use open camera to get raw dngs for editing in Darktable but they actually do a decent job with the jpgs given the noisy original. My shiny new Fuji X-T30 produces much nicer raw files with tons of dynamic range and detail that simply is not there on a mobile phone. All of the AI stuff that happens in a phone you can also do with a decent camera but it requires lots of specialized tools and tweaking (e.g. hugin for hdr stuff).
But the best camera is the one you have with you and for most of us that's usually a smart phone.