There's a limit to what you can do with these tiny optics to get depth via separation with a shallow depth of field.
These compressed images feel closer to me to the way I actually perceive the world. The colors do sometimes get a little funky though.
Depending on what you mean by “eye handles”, yes, you have far more dynamic range than most cameras. The reason I caveat is that just like how modern smartphones with their “computation images” are really combining multiple shots together, so is your brain. I forget the exact numbers, but I think the retina itself is around 5-8 stops of dynamic range and what your brain “sees” when you are looking around is something like 15-20 stops.
Human Eye - 21 stops
Best Camera - <= 15 stops
That's what you get when not a single artistic soul is present during the development, they maximise everything for pure raw """performance""". "see in the dark", "maximum amount of dynamic range HDR", "improve faces", "improve colors" &c.
So yes, the camera can see in the dark, see 20 stops of dynamic range, add fake depth of field, but it looks like shit because they fundamentally don't know what makes a good image.
You have the same thing with photographers:
- the "technicians" who have the most expensive and advanced gear and often produce lacking results
- the "artists" with limited funds taking breathtaking pictures on prehistoric hardware
Or it looks that way to faux-artistic purist sensibility, but actual users have managed to create awesome pictures with it just fine for over a decade...
These crazy HDR, face smoothing and fake background blur are objectively ugly, but sure you can take good pictures with them, the pictures would be better with proper tools though
Not if subjects disagree...
E.g. fake blur most would find bad only when it's badly done - when it exposes edges and so on. If it's done right in a image, they'd have no issue with it, nor find it "objectively ugly".
You can go to product pages for the iPhone 14 Pro or Galaxy S22 and see photos with a bit more soul... though still with a forced feeling that comes from marketing.
You can look at professional photos taken with phone cameras circa 2015 and they still look good.
It's like those voice compression algos where at a certain threshold "the character" of the person talking has just completely disappeared then magically reappears at a high enough bitrate.
These photos seem compressed in a way that takes away the "soul" of what's photographed.
Mirrors the way heavy loudness compression and autotune has become standard in pop music, and audiences now prefers "metallic" voices and very little dynamic range - so people will probably prefer this ghostly aesthetic to actual reality going forward.