When you take sunlit panoramas for instance, the iPhone will auto bracket and perform hdr treatment, it’s fantastic : you can see both the ground and the blue sky and the clouds. You can’t do that easily with a dslr, certainly not like a phone is doing right now, which is integrating the last x frames and modulating the digital shutter to capture multiple exposures.
Same when you take night shots, where the iPhone is integrating 1-2 s of sensor frames and compensating for movement with the accelerometer. You can take handheld shots of the sky, which is completely out of question with a standard dslr. Maybe Sony can do that with a very fast lens, in body stabilization and a very high iso, but this is 10k worth of equipment right there.
I’m still liking my dslr « real » bokeh and photos, but some of the innovation in digital photos should spill into dslr/mirrorless.
Standalone cameras have been doing this for at least a decade. The same is true for nighttime exposures. That's not to say that the iPhone doesn't do it better, maybe it does, it certainly can throw more processing power at it.
https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/sony-a3000/sony-a3000...
I've been using AB for 20ish years, but it has never been as automatic as on a phone. It could certainly be that I haven't bought the right stand alone camera though.
Cameras have HDR video capability, but not HDR stills except for the very latest models.
> As far as I know, iPhone and Android aren't doing anything that isn't already done by digital cameras. They ramp up the settings on things like noise reduction and sharpness to balance out their tiny sensors, but it's more or less the same algorithms that the cameras are using.
That is not true AFAIK, phone cameras use things like "AI" enhancement amongst other things. The fake bokeh is one example of this, but there are others, like "AI sharpening" etc. . Also the amount of NR is typically much higher in a phone camera.
You are correct they typically also employ a lot more range compression and contrast enhancement to make pictures "pop" more, but you can often achieve similar things by adjusting camera settings especially in lower grade DSLRs.
That makes mostly better thumbnails. Perfect for instagram but shitty for everything else.
It's the opposite, most digital cameras aren't doing enough compared to smartphones, which have minimum control and look very good at 2M pixels. A proper camera with default settings looks bland in the hands of an amateur (too little saturation) and handles dynamic range poorly (without bracketing or post-processing). Plus it's never going to beat smartphones at connectivity (SNS), or portability.
Most people aren't going to spend time processing RAW files, or try to get in-camera picture control/film simulation etc. to look pleasing like photographers do.
Which cameras have worse "Auto" settings than a phone? I have two Fujifilms, a Panasonic, and a Nikon, and they all take better photos on "Auto" than my iPhone or any of my friends' Androids.
And who buys a camera in this day and age but doesn't want to play with the settings? Point and shoot users stick with their phones now.
Sharpening is a destructive process and the appropriate amount depends on how and what size you are using the image. It can also be easily applied anytime later. So enthusiast camera apply minimal sharpening and look under sharpened at small sizes, and phone cameras apply heavy sharpening but have artefacts if you zoom into them.
Same with saturation and 'ai' tricks like skin smoothing: users of enthusiast cameras often have different preferences.
Note, phone cameras don't do skin smoothing, people just think they do. (Unless you get a beauty camera app.)
The issue is that almost any processing has the effect of removing noise, which is the same as skin smoothing. If you're taking 2-3 images and merging them, it'll remove the noise even if you do something smarter than averaging the pixels - so you actually have to add steps to measure the noise level and add it back.
The same issue comes up in video compression, where there's dedicated film grain metadata since almost any compression kills the real thing.
https://www.thephoblographer.com/2018/01/04/film-emulsion-re...
Although their digital cameras' emulation modes of their old film stock are kinda lame. They also make those weird non-Bayer-format cameras which I'm not sure are worth the price.
Better or worse is of course entirely subjective. Maybe your real cameras take more neutral pictures, but people these days might expect less neutral pictures: more saturated, more HDR, more contrast.
The goal of photography is often not to look "real" or "neutral". For example, Ansel Adams took beautiful photos...but very stylized.
> And who buys a camera in this day and age but doesn't want to play with the settings? Point and shoot users stick with their phones now.
This point I tend to agree with. Imagine a device that combines the camera/photos interface of a smartphone (full screen viewfinder, touch controls, camera apps, on-device editing etc.) with the hardware of a camera (larger body allowing for bigger sensors, more lenses etc.). Basically the specs of a DSLR with an interface for the masses. Who would carry this with them? It sounds a bit like the novelty "dumb phones" that exist nowadays: very interesting, but a way too small market.
Let me figure out when a scene is static enough to combine multiple shifted pictures for better snr. Ideally, let me enable that feature on my camera. Combine that feature with image stabilization, and let me tweak the conversion from multiple images after the fact.
Bought a Nikon z50 because this was annoying me. Shooting JPEGs and it does a vastly better job and it will still go in my pocket with the 28mm f/2.8 or the 16-50 kit lens. The iPhone is embarrassingly bad in comparison.
As far as I know, iPhone and Android aren't doing anything that isn't already done by digital cameras. They ramp up the settings on things like noise reduction and sharpness to balance out their tiny sensors, but it's more or less the same algorithms that the cameras are using.
Good cameras even allow you to tweak the settings and control RAW conversion right on the camera. The author could have botched the noise reduction on his Fujifilm to match the iPhone if he wanted to. [0]
[0] https://www.jmpeltier.com/fujifilm-in-camera-raw-converter/