There's plenty of innovation on the hardware side - the move to mirrorless cameras has been the largest jump since digital became a thing (although most pros a sticking with DSLRs for now). Sensors are continually improved, and lenses are better every year.

The software side...not so much. The amount of customization in cameras isn't up to par. For instance, Nikon DSLRs have an image quality button. That's a button that I never want to hit, as it can change the quality from RAW to 'Basic JPEG.' The only way you'll notice that happened is if you see the amount of images you can fit on your card jump up. There's no way to disable it, and on the D750/D610 it's right next to the damned primary ISO button, and they even swapped places between those two cameras.

Fuji has some good film emulation postprocessing for their jpegs. I will say though that a lot of the postprocessing that's done on cell phones is to make up for their limited capabilities. I actually have everything turned off on my DSLRs, as the postprocessing effects the jpeg that's built in to the RAW file. That means what you see on the back on the camera isn't necessarily what you took.

The workflow is just different. With a DSLR the common path is to shoot RAW and do all the processing with software on your computer (Photoshop, DxO, etc).

There isn't much of a point in having the camera itself try to do the processing as it'll never be able to outcompete the capabilities (both hardware and software-wise) possible in the desktop software.

Do those photo editing packages have buttons for things like portrait-mode to automatically black out the background?

There are equivalents - mostly plugins, but you can do it natively in later versions of Photoshop - but they're not used much. Why not? Because you can do that properly when you shoot the image instead of faking it later.

> Because you can do that properly when you shoot the image instead of faking it later.

Are you saying you can carry a black sheet with you everywhere or that the DSLR can replace the background dynamically when you shoot?

It's not at all difficult to drop a background out to black if that's what you want to do. But that's not what "portrait mode" means to most people - that would be more about shallow depth of field and lighting emphasis - and you mentioned nothing about background swaps in your original comment. (By the way, background swaps were something I could do with film and proper shooting. Masks are easy to make if you're shooting with them in mind, whether they're layer masks in software or litho masks in the darkroom. We weren't exactly snapping with our Brownies and sending things to the drugstore back in the old days either, you know.)

I was specifically talking about computational effects like the one Apple calls portrait mode that can black out the background. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about that.

My whole point in this thread was that nobody in the big body camera world seems to be doing much with computation or multiple sensors. I think it's astonishing what Apple, Google, and Sony have done with small lenses and sensors and would be interested to see what they could do with big lenses and sensors.

I agree with this. If I buy a modern DSLR, utilizing the same tech as phones with automatic image optimization, I can only imagine how incredible the quality of the Image be by default. It's possible, but they really need to devote the engineering resources to this.