There are many, many, many more reviews out there on the internet that show casual, unedited photos from this camera. I think this person's use case and exhibition are interesting due to his entire workflow.

Maybe I'm getting old but I find it difficult to shoot good photos even with the bulkiest of phone cases, while also being able to hit the shutter without shifting my camera drastically.

I personally use a Note so the S pen works great as a built in remote shutter (especially nice for tripod shots) but I can't for the life of me get good shots with the UI shutter or even volume/side button rockers. Sure you have voice controls or shutter timmers but timmers are not ideal in most shooting conditions from my experience, unless you have humans. You can also burst or drop frames from video but ick, shooting professional photos with a phone as is seems unnecessarily uncomfortable to me.

This is directed towards those taking pictures for social media. Advertising (that's what this is) in this way implies that you, yes you, could be as good as a professional photographer. Except, you also have to dedicate the time and vast expertise, like a professional photographer would, to get pictures like theirs. They cleverly leave that part out.

I can accept that he really likes the product, but even then, the point of the article is broken.I cannot imagine any scenario in which a professional photographer would use a mobile device for legitimate client work, unless he is paid by Apple. There is no way in hell it is on par with professional equipment. The battery alone is a huge detriment to field work.

To your points, these are nice new features. That in no way means that a professional photographer should say "you can be as good as me with these new features!"

* I don’t know about Apple’s ProRAW.

In digital, all “unedited” means is using camera firmware’s interpretation of raw values; especially with complex processing in modern phones this isn’t a very good measure as scene recognition can be hit or miss and the algorithm is a black box.

(What could be indicative is posting scene raws alongside exhaustive development presets, of course.)

With enough effort you can basically do whatever you wish, especially when it comes to increasing quality (see for example this one https://gizmodo.com/deep-learning-can-now-flawlessly-correct...).

I have a DSLR and I now don't bring it along anymore. I have three kids, so I already have to carry around a lot of stuff and children, so there is no more room or energy for my DSLR. My phone is always in my pocket though.

I recently invested in some phone lenses by Moment and I am very excited about them. They also fit in my pocket and I can pop one on my phone in about 10 seconds.

I also have kids, and no phone without seamless, automatic cloud backups and the ability to transparently take "Live Photos"[0] is at all interesting to me now. I don't care how good the stills are, if it doesn't have those two things.

[0] Live Photos are a feature of Apple phones where it captures a few seconds of video before and after you snapped a photo, including sound. Tap and hold on the photo to play the video. They're basically magic, especially if you have kids. Like the moving photos in Harry Potter. They also make photos with waterfalls in them really cool instead of reliably terrible.

this is the reason I loved the Ricoh GR series of cameras, an APS-C sensor that genuinely fits in almost any pocket is incredible, it's not for everyone but I wish there were more companies trying this, even the X100 cameras are too big for that

For the average consumer who doesn't know how to play music at all, maybe the ukulele would be a nice option. If you hand a professional guitarist a ukulele, and tell them it's a proper guitar, they will probably laugh at you.

That a ukulele is smaller is actually the opposite of what I'm looking for. I don't need a smaller guitar. I need a nice one, that plays and responds like I'd expect a guitar to.

I would never use a ukulele as a way to somehow replace a recording of a traditional guitar, even though it's more convenient.

There are thousands of photographers who feel this way about DSLR's.

If it doesn't fit your current/busy lifestyle, cool - the ukulele works for you. But don't pretend the ukulele is / can be a guitar. Popping lenses onto an iPhone camera is like putting an amplifier onto the ukulele. You're still trying to make something better that is, due to its size alone, never going to have the depth or quality a guitar or DSLR would have.

Also, I'm not dissing the ukulele, here. I'm trying to provide an example that just because a tool can work for a purpose, doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job.

From personal experience, if you hand a professional guitarist a ukulele, he will play the shit out of it and make it sound better than you've ever heard a ukulele sound.

OP, is making a weird comparison is all I'm sayin I guess.

It is a pocket camera, and it does very well.

But I agree - it's clearly not a substitute for even a mid-range prosumer SLR.

This is a professional photographer writing a review targeted at other professional photographers, so it feels appropriate to post photos shot and developed as a professional photographer would.

Regardless, the article is more about features like the new macro mode with short focus distance and the performance of the telephoto lens. Those don’t depend on manual post-processing.

> As I watched this piece, particularly the interview in Cinematic mode, it dawned on me that we’re moving beyond the world of just computational photography and into the realm of computational videography. The release of Cinematic mode marks another one of those fundamental shifts where software, unbounded by the limitations of hardware, has opened up entirely new possibilities in the creative process.

This is not a new experience, it's just one that Apple put inside your iPhone. Reading stuff like this really makes me wonder how critical they're being here, because it seems like "it shoots photos better than the last one" is enough to warrant a perfect review. And if that's the case, every camera system on every phone ever is perfect and there's no point to reviewing them at all, because you can rest assured knowing your next phone will have 25% better digital zoom, or whatever.

I do agree though that it would be useful to state how much time and effort was spent in lightroom and PS.

Asking for someone to post the unedited version of a raw photo is a big misunderstanding of what that format even means.