That said, Olympus does a couple computational photography approaches (handheld multishot high res) and Fuji recently introduced in-camera HDR - but I tried neither.
I’m not authoritative on this topic, but I can’t think of a camera produced by one of the majors which isn’t mostly or entirely ASIC based for image processing.
> Fuji recently introduced in-camera HDR
Canon has had in-camera HDR for years, but I’m not sure I’d really put the output in the same category as a modern smartphone.
I have no idea why they haven't done this already.
They can process raw images in body and display them at any zoom level without lag, loading or any other issue. My R5 has a touch screen but it’s faster and more comfortable to use the physical controls, especially since you can change settings without actually having to even look. It’s almost identical to my 5Dmk3 except they moved a couple of buttons because of the articulating screen hinge.
This is exactly what most photographers want. Familiar hardware that doesn’t get in the way. That gives the best optical quality that accurately and faithfully captures a scene giving total creative freedom to the photographer not the processor.
The idea of ruining a perfectly good system by pushing Android onto it ‘because apps’ or whatever it is such HN/disruptive nonsense.
Look at any smartphone photo on a large screen and they’re basically mush when it comes to detail. This is fine for most people, these phone cameras are far better than the point and shoot market they have rightfully destroyed.
People edit professional camera photos on large screens and nobody wants to use their camera to edit. Nobody wants their professional camera to introduce computational artefacts onto their exposure. Nobody wants to wait for it to boot. Nobody wants battery life to fall through the floor.
Lytro made a light field camera that ran Android. It was a fun gimmick and is now gathering dust on my shelf. Now Zeiss is making one for $6k and no one who actually cares about photography will buy it.
> The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras, and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#h...
There is also absolutely no need for it to introduce artifacts into your images. RAW+JPEG is already good enough for this.
The actual advantage of an open camera are huge. For example, it would be trivial to adapt the camera to literally any mount, from EF to E to G and so on, which in and of itself is completely disruptive.
Phone processors have other aces up their sleeve. For example, unlike the Canon EOS R5, they can actually process 8K video indefinitely without breaking a sweat.
As for battery life, you're once again very wrong. The biggest draws in battery life in a camera are the processor and the sensor. Using a phone processor would allow for much lower energy usage as the lithography is incredibly more efficient, and all the high-battery-usage parts of a phone would disappear, such as always-on LTE modems, background processing, and so on.
For boot, Android with a camera sized battery and no modem can last weeks in standby, months in sleep mode. Your camera already doesn't turn off, but instead enters a low-power state. Try removing the battery of an A7 or EOS R, discharging the internal energy storage, and see how long it takes to start.
The actual advantage of this is that it allows you to become a camera manufacturer for much lower costs, meaning that you don't have to limit yourself to a single mount, and can outsource some R&D externally. For example, you won't need to be Fuji to have accurate film sims, you won't need to be Canon to have native level EF compatibility, and you'd even be able to do revolutionary things like autofocus manual lenses.
Beyond that, you'd be able to do things like temporal noise reduction, 3D depth mapping for haze removal, and so on, that can be either used for automatic processing and/or made available in RAW format for further editing.
Basically, you're describing "what if a phone company made a bad camera". What I'm talking about at least is "what if photographers made a camera untethered by the restrictions of existing cameras using commodity hardware". I think the second has the potential of seriously providing value.
That’s a bit hyperbolic, the collar isn’t the only difference between those lens connectors.
If you were to make a camera that is fully open, maybe even modifiable on the info it sends to the lens and what information it wants back, then you would get aftermarket adapters for Canon EF (you could also make one yourself with publicly available info). Sony E would be a tougher nut to crack, but there is a fair bit of info already out and there are already E mount adapters feasible.
So yes, maybe trivial is hyperbolic because of the Sony E mount, but very feasible.
(For background, a friend and I worked on designs for making an open camera platform a few years ago)
Mount optical characteristics are very simple. Just make sure your base mount has a larger diameter and a shorter flange distance, and you're golden. If you are designing your camera around that it is almost trivially done.
The code for implementing a basic E mount is on github, for the EF mount you just have to go looking around on some forums or buy it from the guy behind Metabones, same for Nikon G.
The fact is there's no reason you'd even have to know a camera is running Android. You can put whatever user-interface shell you want on to an OS, and it could run the same form factor, present the same (hopefully better) menus and interfaces & buttons, flip through menus just as fast, have the same optics, allow the same batteries. Get Micron or someone to use persistent memory so the boot time is even less than what you have now, which is not, as you say, instant, at least not on any camera I've ever seen.
New cameras like the Sony A7S iii have really good buttons-or-touchscreen interfaces. I think a lot of people have thought buttons are the way to go, have a die-hard perspective on what a proper camera is, but they, now that the future is here, are finding the flexibility offered amazing, finding that they would never want to go back.
> The idea of ruining a perfectly good system by pushing Android onto it ‘because apps’ or whatever it is such HN/disruptive nonsense.
The software defined world is one of open possibilities. "Because apps" is such a droll unimaginative slander of that notion. It's great that you feel so well served by your fixed-function cast-in-stone device, but it A) doesn't have to be that way forever, for every-one, and B) if cameras do get more flexible & capable of user-defined behaviors, it doesn't mean you have to lose this thing you evidently love.
Allowing people the flexibility to explore additional ways of doing photography seems to me like it should be obvious & is a frontier I look forward to opening.
I come from a different place. My friends are all pro-sumer, not professionals, but we're all insulted beyond belief how inflexible, how bad the computational photography is on our fancy mirrorless cameras, especially as compared to modern Pixel cameras. More-so, failure to start allowing more creative uses of cameras is an existential risk to cameras. Yes, some photogs will keep readily buying forever, but a lot of consumers find way more value from their phones, and cameras ought to want to be able to compete, to be devices for creativity. Right now, they are, but primarily inside the same lines they have been for decades on end now.
> This is exactly what most photographers want.
Not that big a market, compared to the rest of the world, who also enjoy taking photos, it turns out. But I think the photogs would be better served too, in the long run; much better served.
And I don't think they'd lose anything either.
Why this isn't advertised, promoted, & made available? Why digital cameras seem to want to get their lunch taken by phones? Not sure!
I think it was way too soon, but Samsung had a good go with a series of Samsung Galaxy Cameras[2] that were proud Android brandishing devices. Android has gotten better, mobile chips have gotten way better. But even something more like the unofficial OMF that I linked, a Sony camera, that doesn't look like an Android system, it looks like a camera, but is really Android and can run Android? That makes hella-sense to me.
If anyone wants to consider doing this, shoot me a message.
https://daxpix.medium.com/can-the-magsafe-hold-a-camera-lens...
If I were spending that money on a fixed-lens camera, it'd be a Leica Q (thanks, craigmod :/ ) but the concept is interesting.
Good photos stand the test of time because they are interesting, not because they have pumped colors and HDR.
Introducing ProRAW in a software update is already going to solidify that.
If digital cameras want to compete here is what they need to do:
- add live photos as a default
If photography enthusiasts wants to gatekeep:
- buy an older camera and stick with that... collectible.
If Apple wants to continue making their devices more appealing than dedicated cameras:
- Add live photos to portrait mode
For portraits, iPhone 12 Pro in okay lighting is the first one where I say, yeah good enough and often times better.
I don't care about DXOMark, I care about what humans think, and across mediums a photo from an iPhone 12 Pro absolutely is good and great enough.
But, my Nikon with my 50mm just takes noticeably better pictures in so many situations, particularly portraits. And if I expand my lens usage to my wide angle or my 300mm now we’re into types of pictures phones are completely incapable of taking.
Good enough? Maybe. Better than a much larger sensor and better lens? No way.
I’m only going to sound realistic
Even if I wasn’t, I love large prints and we always have some up in our house. Cell phone pictures are fine if you’re looking at them on your phone - not so much at 20x30”.
goalshifted into "it is ok enough for this single type of photo + light".
That's where we are today, and that's what "better" colloquially means.
In any case, good enough and better are two very different words. I really enjoy taking pictures on an ILC much more and the results I get are noticeably better even in portraits, including by people that don't know what I took it with. For example, good luck emulating the look of a 135mm f/2.8 (at night) with an iPhone if we're talking about portraits, or good luck doing better than a 50mm 1.4 for street, good luck doing better than a 70-200 2.8, and so on.
But yes, it has a much lower skill ceiling and often more consistent results, and it really does get close.
I think I’ll get a gimbal and some contraption to trigger flash and maybe some adapter lenses as they trickle out for this form factor
Yes, the consistency in such a wide range of lighting situations is what’s attractive. Along with the built in non-destructive editing. Soon, ProRAW for even more of that. Live Photos by default which “captures the moment” more than the composition itself, and a software and syncing pipeline that supports that seamlessly. With the nearest replacement being an entire tool-belt and bags of gear.
I think at this point we will see the market choose, and often times I ahead of the accepted trend on that. A daguerreotype was probably superior processing technology than film and paper but it wasn’t convenient enough to remain an option. Same went for film and dedicated digital cameras. I think this is where we are now with the iphone 12 pro and ProRAW, even for photo enthusiasts.
To start, you can actually crop. You can use lenses with a higher focal length than 70mm, which for many people makes all the difference in portraits. If you're using something like ProRAW, you're limited to 1/3 of an FPS vs 20FPS.
If you want to capture the moment on an ILC, you can also just hold the shutter. This would be the very first time we go from a platform that has higher image quality and more editing lattitude to a technology that has less of it. The replacement isn't an entire tool belt and bags of gear, for me it's an A7ii and a 28-75 2.8 (for a total cost lower than the iPhone 12 Pro + my current phone and will outlive it by four or five times).
As for sales, the iPhone has already gobbled up everything except the high end camera market, which is actually seeing increasing sales, so we'll see about that. I don't find it all that probable.
As for ProRAW, it's technically completely inferior to, say, an ARW file.