My point was the in-camera software doesn't matter for my use case as long as it stays out of the way. The person I replied to didn't specify what kind of camera. The brands in the list implied non-phone cameras to me.

The point is, there is a LOT more the software can do for you than "stay out of the way". The software can do massive things for your image quality and assisting you in bad conditions. But big cameras do not even try.

I don't want them to try. I don't care if the features are there as long as I can turn them off, but I don't want it. The things I can do off-camera will always be far ahead of whatever's inside.

Capture One/Lightroom and Affinity Photo/Photoshop will have those features with higher quality long before they reach non-phone cameras. They work with the raw data right off the sensor. Nothing done with the limited power of an on-board processor will beat a good raw processor in pulling a good photo out of subpar conditions.

You absolutely can not do the kinds of things the iPhone does off-camera.

The iPhone can do three-second exposures free-handed, and have them come out pretty sharp without even trying to hold the phone still. That is not something you do in postprocessing.

I can absolutely do three-second exposures free-handed. It takes a lot of practice and isn't very consistent. But why in the world would I do that? I can get as much light in one as an iPhone can fake in three, and I can always get a pocket tripod or monopod if I really need three seconds. You're inventing problems with better cameras to make the things you have to do to overcome the limitations of a smaller sensor sound impressive.

That's really the point. If all I had was a phone camera, I would be glad for all this software support. For all the times I have my DSLR, the 10x bigger sensor obviates the need for all of that.

It takes zero practice or effort on an iPhone. You don't even have to hold the phone particularly still.

Like, you're literally describing all the extra effort and gear you have to have to do this on your camera. Wouldn't it be better if you just... didn't need any of that?

You seem to be under the impression the only thing people care about with "big cameras" is image quality. Yes, it would be great if I could do everything with an iPhone, but until it has the same ecosystem of add-ons and tools, it just isn't going to work. I've only mentioned image quality because that was the focus of the thread, but that isn't everything.

I've seen some of the absurd lengths people go attaching things to their iPhones just to reach parity with an entry-level DSLR and a few attachments that cost less than the iPhone rig with the cost of the camera included. I looked into the lenses on the 12. The longest is a 35mm equivalent of 85mm. I would need a grip add-on and a lens clip with no image stabilization just to approach the stability and reach of my 70-300mm lens on an APS-C sensor. That's just for wildlife photography, and not even the longest lens. Most serious wildlife photographers go for a full frame and 600+mm primes. And that's just one use case served by the photography platform that "big cameras" are.

You don't know what you don't know and it shows.

You seem to be thinking that I am arguing that you should use an iPhone instead of a DSLR. Not sure where you are getting this idea from.

The argument is that DSLR software is lagging far behind what an iPhone can do. The point is that DSLR software needs to improve, not that you should use an iPhone.

Again: it doesn't matter how much the on-board software improves. It will always lag behind desktop software that's not power constrained. I have the screen on maybe 30 seconds for every 200 photos for checking exposure and using the very well-designed settings screen. Why would I want to use battery draining software that will never match what I can do once I offload photos to a real computer?

Because, again, the kinds of feature I talk about can not be done in software on your desktop. They need to run in realtime on the camera, interacting with its image sensor and other sensors.

Worth 1k words: Electronic video stabilization on Foxconn/Sharp Aquos R6 smartphone[1]

1: https://twitter.com/sm_hn/status/1394210048318971908

Maybe on an oldies like Nikon F6 with 35mm but not like D6 with 85mm, worst case the twitch from clicky shutter button on low end mirrorless are enough to shake resulting picture, you just don't notice at low(in relative terms) resolution

Meh. It's just lipstick on the pig of a tiny lens.

It is far more than that. It is getting amazing results out of that tiny lens.

Why would you not want the same to be applied to a bigger lens?

What's so great about what the iphone camera does specifically?

Take a RAW image with your phone, take a JPEG of the same scene, and then compare.

If the scene is challenging at all, the JPEG may look fine, but the RAW will look like it came out of a 1990s webcam. No dynamic range. Fuzzy focus. Harsh/blown out highlights and muddy shadows.

There is astounding computational sorcery that smartphones use to make that tiny dot of a lens and sensor produce acceptable photos and videos.

The night mode especially is beyond anything seen in a full-size camera. It can take fairly sharp three-second exposures free-handed.

OK, but it's worth noting that a full-size camera wouldn't need to take a three-second exposure though.

I would like to see a full-size camera with some extra smarts though.

It would, in the middle of the night. The lens on an iPhone is not slow compared to your average lens.

The lens doesn't matter nearly as much as the sensor. A wider aperture on something that collects 1/10 the light isn't going to match a DSLR. Even the slow 3.5 maximum lenses that come with most DSLRs will beat the 1.8 on an iPhone just because the sensor is 10x bigger.

None of that matters to the basic argument that DSLR software is primitive, and could be lots better, as the iPhone shows, by producing impressive results with vastly inferior hardware.

I think you imagine a usage for DSLRs that's vastly different from reality. I could and often do fill an SD card without ever interacting with the software on the camera. This will continue to be the case unless something major changes to flip the balance between what's possible on a tiny battery and what's possible with 6 cores, a wide range of software that can do anything the iPhone does, and an essentially limitless supply of power.

Even the stuff on there already uses too much power. Nikon's SnapBridge uses BLE and still cuts how many photos I get on a charge by 90%. That's without spending any time doing anything in the camera's software. I turned it off so I didn't have to charge the battery after going out for a walk with the camera. And you think I want to do more on that battery?

You do not "interact" with the software on the iPhone either to use this feature.

Until said tiny lenses start demolishing the market is the bigger lenses. Thus the death of the low end and mid end cameras.

It's not really about the lens. Phones already have solid quality lenses. The sensor is what matters. Nothing you can do with the product of a small sensor will beat the worst you get from even an APS-C sensor. ML can make guesses about what the tiny sensor can't capture. A big sensor just captures it.