To me, the "hotdog skin complexion" aspect is a dead giveaway for when a photo was taken on an iPhone. It's so over the top and unrefined that I wonder how not only Apple let it happen, but seemingly entertain it/make it worse over generations of devices? Certainly such photos won't "age well"? And it's not like it has to be this way because of technological limitations, take Pixel photos, for instance, they get their colors much more balanced and faithful.
Same with Pixel, which actually did it years before I'd presume.
I'm white as ghost. Pixels are determined to make me looked tan for absolutely no reason. I mean, maybe I look 'better', arguably, but it's not me. Is that what people want?
I bought the kid some newfangled Polaroid type thing, and she uses that way more than phones anymore for photos. Maybe the kids will be ok.
1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or whatever the focal length is.
2. Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone and the other camera. It’s again, no different between the two.
It’s a poor article because it doesn’t focus on the actual material differences.
The phone will have a smaller sensor. It will have more noise and need to do more to combat it. It won’t have as shallow a depth of field.
The phone will also of course have different ergonomics.
But the things the post focuses on are kind of poor understandings of the differences in what they’re shooting and how their cameras work.
I disagree, I thought the article highlighted the differences beautifully. I'm on a professionally color calibrated 27" monitor that came with one of those color calibration "certificates" at the time of purchase. The second I loaded the article, the differences were just stark. The skin tones alone were a dead giveaway.
It is no secret that Apple does a lot of post processing on their mediocre photos to make them look good - more so than most other Androids - because, it's all software. But, from the article, it is understood that the author is trying to point out that Apple could've done a better job to represent skin tones more accurately atleast. The fish-eye defense for Apple is totally understandeable, but, why are we defending the weak skin tones? Every year, they keep launching and claiming grandoise statements "This is the best smartphone camera out there is".
And no, this is not a limitation of smartphone sensors. In fact, if you look at the latest Xperia series from Sony, they have the same software from their DSLRs translated into the smartphones that addresses the skintones perfectly well.
I hope we can skip past the biases and personal preferences we have towards Apple and treat them neutrally like any other manufacturer. This "Apple can do no wrong" narrative and attacking anyone who points out their flaws is just tired and boring at this point.
It the old days Apple used to somewhat pride themselves with taking more "realistic" photos. While Android had it the other way around and basically post processes a lot of things as well as colouring. Mostly used for Social Media like Instagram.
And then came iPhone X. They started changing the colour of Sky and sharpening a lot of things. To the point of a lot of Photos taken by my camera looks great but also looked fake.
> And then came iPhone X. They started changing the colour of Sky and sharpening a lot of things. To the point of a lot of Photos taken by my camera looks great but also looked fake.
The phone processing is lagely shaped by social media culture. Camera makers also started to incorporate in-camera editing features on vlogger targeted models.
You’re somehow both reading far too in to my comment (none of my comment is specific to Apple) and not reading my comment enough (because you m missed the point about color profiles)
I’m not defending the default color choices, I’m saying that they’re comparing apples to oranges because they’re comparing an output designed to be opinionated with one that’s designed to be processed after the fact. The iPhone is perfectly capable of outputting neutral images and raw files.
Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable, they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.
I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.
You're completely off base on the focal length argument.
A traditional camera has the choice and can choose the most appropriate length; an Iphone is locked in to a fish-eye clearly put in there to overcome its inherent limitations.
So it doesn't really matter "if it's fair" or not, because it's not about a fair comparison, it's a demonstration that a traditional camera is just better. Why should the traditional camera use an inappropriate focal length just because the Iphone is forced to?
Every hardware have it's limitations, my DSLR don't fit in my pocket for instance. But that wouldn't be a fair point when comparing photo quality against a smartphone.
Comparing quality with non equivalent focal lengths is as pertinent as to mount a fisheye on the DSLR (because you can!) and then claim that the smartphone have less distortion.
The biggest real differences between iPhone and whatever ye-olde-good-standalone-digital-camera are sharpening/edge enhancements and flattening of lighting.
If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly.
The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing.
Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones.
The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image.
But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment.
(Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.)
Agreed, in particular the distortion of the players on the ends, the smaller shoulders and chest, as well as the lean can all be attributed to the wider lens used on the iPhone (and as such that the photo was taken closer to players). I'd guess the author was using the "1x" lens on the iPhone, a lot of these issues go away if they use the "3x" or "5x" lens. I'd even consider that most of the jawline change of the player is simply the angle of their chin/face as well as expression.
The 2x mode of the wide lens is basically the standard “nifty fifty” of a big camera and what the author should have compared to. The 1x is 24mm equivalent which is a focal length I don’t particularly care for, but I get why they picked it (easy to frame a group of people indoors).
For portraits the ideal length is 85mm equivalent which would be 3.5x, rumored to be on the next iphone pro. At this length there is minimal facial feature distortion without getting the flattening effect you get at longer focal lengths.
I'll kindly disagree with you. Like the other commenter, I'm on a 27" HP business monitor comes with color calibration certificate, and the differences are very visible. Moreover, I'm taking photos as a hobby for some time.
The angle, different focal lengths doesn't matter in rendering of the images. The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people. Moreover, we want to be liked as human beings, it's in our nature.
So, phone companies driven by both smaller sensors (that thing is way noisier when compared to a full frame sensor) and market pressure to reduce processing needed to be done by end users (because it inconveniences them), started to add more and more complicated post-processing in their cameras.
The result is this very article. People with their natural complications reduced, skin tones boosted on red parts, sharpened but flatter photos, without much perspective correction and sometimes looking very artificial.
Make no mistake, "professional" cameras also post process, but you can both see this processing and turn it off if you want, and the professional cameras corrects what lens fails at, but smartphones, incl. iPhone makes "happy, social media ready" photos by default.
As, again other commenter said, it's not a limitation of the sensor (sans the noise). Sony supplies most of the higher end sensors in the market, and their cameras or other cameras sporting sensors produced by them got the "best color" awards over and over again, and XPeria smartphones comes with professional camera pipelines after that small sensor, so they can take photos like what you see.
I personally prefer iPhone as my smartphone of my choice, but the moment I want to take a photo I want to spend time composing, I ditch default camera app and use Halide, because that thing can bypass Apple's post-processing, and even can apply none if you want.
Yes, I shoot in RAW by default most of the time. It can be quickly turned on and off from the stock camera app without even leaving the main screen.
You may have to enable it once in Settings -> Camera -> Formats; I've been using it so long I don't remember what the defaults are. But once you've done that, it's in the top right of the camera app - just tap where it says RAW.
Which I’m personally failing to witness consistently by the “evidence” in this article.
Most of the photo examples here were somewhere between “I can’t tell a significant difference” and “flip a coin and you might find people who prefer the iPhone result more.”
Even less of a difference when they’re printed out and put in a 5x7” frame.
Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0. You already own one. You were going to buy a smartphone anyway for other things. So if we are going to sit and argue about quality we still have to figure out what dollar value these differences are worth to people.
And the “evidence” is supposedly that people aren’t getting their phone photos printed out. But let’s not forget the fact that you literally couldn’t see your film photos without printing them when we were using film cameras.
The problem with computational photography is that it uses software to make photos "look good" for everyday users. That may be an advantage for those users but it is basically a non-starter for a photographer because it makes it a crapshoot to take photos which predictably and faithfully render the scene.
Lots of apps gives you other options for how to process the image data.
I've had a bunch of "high-end" digital SLRs and they (and the software processing the raw files) do plenty computational processing as well.
I completely agree that all else being equal it's possible to get photos with better technical quality from a big sensor, big lens, big raw file; but this article is more an example of "if you take sloppy photos with your phone camera you get sloppy photos".
I can see a noticeable loss of detail in the iPhone sample photos. Personally, I prefer cameras that prioritize capturing more detail over simply producing visually pleasing images.
Detailed photos offer much more flexibility for post-processing.
> Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0.
Many people buy a more expensive smartphone specifically for the better camera module. These are expensive devices! It's good marketing that you perceive that as "free", but in reality,
I spend way less money on my fancy camera (new models every five years), than my iPhone-loving friends on their annual upgrades.
Can you really have a 70mm focal length on a phone that is less than 10mm thick? I thought it was simulated by cropping the image from the actual very short focal length.
Usually it's "FOV equivalent", e.g. scaled to a full frame sensor size. Tiny sensor size means you maybe have a 10mm focal length, but the size of the sensor relative to 10mm makes it the FOV of a 70mm lens on a full frame camera.
You see similar when people are comparing APS-C, micro 4/3, or medium format lenses.
Physics really works out such that the smaller you make camera sensor, the smaller you can make the lens. Full-frame lenses tend to be markedly bigger for equivalent quality compared to, say, APS-C lenses.
However, due to physics there is also no working around the quality issues of a small sensor. Photosites get less light and produce more noise, and automated noise suppression costs detail and sharpness.
I wonder whether tiny lenses of equivalent sharpness and clarity as their larger equivalents would be much more expensive or impossible to produce (sure, less material, but much finer precision required), but it probably doesn’t matter because the tiny sensor already loses enough sharpness that better lenses won’t contribute much.
> Physics really works out such that the smaller you make camera sensor, the smaller you can make the lens.
At some point the wave-like nature of light starts to bite. Can't really go much smaller than a micron per pixel. So a millimeter sized chip gets you 1 megapixel. 50MP mean ~7mm. (back of the envelope caveats apply)
> Full-frame lenses tend to be markedly bigger for equivalent quality compared to, say, APS-C lenses.
Only if you define quality as field of view.
For light-gathering ability and background separation/bokeh, you need a lower f/number on APS-C than on full-frame to be equivalent: A 35mm f/1.2 lens on a 24MP APS-C sensor will take pictures that look nearly identical to a 52.5mm f/1.8 lens on a 24MP full-frame sensor. (Assuming crop factor of 1.5.) Both will have an aperture size of 29.17mm (= 35mm/1.2 = 52.5mm/1.8), will capture a 37.9° x 25.8° FoV.
Almost all important properties of lenses are determined by field of view and the aperture diameter: Amount of light gathered, background blur, diffraction, and weight.
The illumination-per-area on the full-frame sensor will be 2.25x lower, but the area of the sensor is 2.25x larger so it cancels out such that both sensors will receive the same number of photons.
Background blur is determined by aperture diameter, field of view, and the distances to the subject and background. Since the two lenses have the same aperture size and field of view, you'd get the same amount of background blur for a given scene.
For many lenses (particularly telephoto lenses), the size and weight are primarily determined by the size of the front element, which needs to be at least as big as the aperture. For wide-angle lenses, you start needing a front element that's significantly wider than your aperture for geometry reasons -- the subject has to be able to see the aperture through the front element, so that relationship breaks down.
(Also with lenses where focal length << flange distance, you start to need extra optics to project the image back far enough. This can mean that a wide-angle lens can be more complicated to build for APS-C than for full-frame on the same mount. Take for example the Rokinon 16mm f/2 at 710g / 87mm long versus the Nikon AF-D 24mm f/2.8 at 268g and 46mm long. This isn't relevant to phone cameras, since those don't need to fit a moving mirror between the sensor and the lens like SLRs do. Phone camera makers can put the lens exactly as far from the sensor as makes sense for their design.)
Slow telephoto lenses for DSLRs are pretty much the only place where crop sensors have an advantage. DSLR autofocus sensors generally need f/5.6 or better. Thus, for a given field of view, you need a bigger aperture + front element for the full-frame lens than the "equivalent" crop-sensor lens -- e.g. a 300 f/5.6 with its 53.6mm front element is going to be heavier than a 200 f/5.6 with its 35.7mm front element. However, as mentioned above, the 300 f/5.6 on a full-frame camera will gather 2.25x as much light as the 200/5.6 on the APS-C sensor. Mirrorless cameras can typically autofocus with smaller relative apertures. This is why you see Sony selling an f/8 zoom and Canon selling f/11 primes for their mirrorless mounts -- this sort of lens just wasn't possible on DSLRs. On mirrorless, you could have a 300 f/8.4 full-frame lens that would be truly equivalent to the 200mm f/5.6 APS-C lens.
I specifically said “equivalent focal length”. Equivalent focal lengths are relative to a 35mm sensor unless otherwise specified, and the actual focal length reduces with sensor size providing the same fov.
By having a tiny sensor, the current iPhone pro has a range of 15-120mm.
My entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water.
Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.
However:
- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)
- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine
Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
I agree with your iPhone camera advantages, but to that list I'd add that I'm already going to buy an iPhone, which means any comparison of value for the price is effectively between the price of a camera (which for even an entry-level mirrorless isn't exactly cheap) and literally zero dollars. You could argue that the phone would be cheaper without the nice camera to make for a fairer comparison, but such a product doesn't really exist.
This applies only if you assume that you are not willing to spend more on a phone with a better camera and a lot of people do. I have friends who decided to buy an iPhone over way cheaper Android phones in the past, because "the iPhone camera was so much better". Funny enough, the differences were obviously negligible when compared with any actual camera.
I get sent a lot of photos of me cosplaying at conventions, and something I've noticed is that the phone photos are almost always nicer in general. The people who do photography as a hobby seem to always edit the photo too extreme and you get whack HDR type effects or they just aren't as skilled at manually setting settings as the iphone auto mode.
But, the dedicated camera photos are always massively higher resolution. You can zoom in on details and they look great, while phone photos seem to use AI upscailers and they look bad
Wack HDR is usually the sign of a novice photographer, assuming it's not the phone (my experience is that phones go absolutely insane with the HDR and saturation).
We all go through a period of abusing HDR and saturation, but we usually get over it.
Which only holds true if you don't care much about the result.
I've seen people trying to take photos at an airshow using their phone camera. A small black dot in the centre of frame, rendered as an Impressionist oil smudge by post-processing. Was that worth even trying?
The best camera+lens combo is the one suited to the scene. Anything else isn't.
Not really, because the scene you want to capture is there at that moment and probably wouldn’t be there anymore if you went back to the apartment/hotel/camera store and swapped out for a technically better kit. That’s what the “best camera” saying is about.
Not only is the iPhone always in your pocket, but it’s easier to carry and deal with.
I remember hearing a story from a well known photographer about a trip he took with a few others, including his wife. They woke up early to head out on a small boat in a lake or something. He was lugging all this gear and having to put a lot of focus into tuning the settings on his camera, he was pretty miserable. Meanwhile, his wife was enjoying morning with no baggage and snapping pics with her phone. She ended up having the best picture of the day, while actually enjoying herself, by not being bogged down by the gear.
Dedicated cameras have their value, but it’s been decreasing for years, and requiring higher and higher levels of skill to make it worth it. Most people could improve their photos dramatically by learning about framing and light, while just using a phone. These things have a much bigger impact on the resulting photo. A professional with an iPhone will always take a better and more interesting picture than an amateur with a DSLR for this reason.
There's always micro four thirds. I think it's a bit of an underappreciated format, really. It can have really compact cameras, and also they tend to have quite a lot of fancy tech in them.
If I transition from semi-pro to pro I am thinking of picking one of those up because the 300mm lens is the equivalent of a 600mm and good for taking pictures of birds but fits in a reasonable backpack. Built in focus-stacking is another advantage over my Sony.
I put a 90mm prime [1] on my Sony, set it to aperture priority, put the strap over someone's head and deputize them to get headshots ("frame it up with the viewfinder and push the button") and they do OK so long as the light is predictable. I wish I could tell the auto mode to let the ISO go higher than it will because I do noise reduction in developing such that there is no real quality loss at 6400.
[1] takes lovely portraits and no focus to deal with
Viltrox, Sirui, Sony themselves, and Samyang have all kicked out really nice 85mm fast primes. $600 down to $400, listed in decreasing weight order (down to 270g!). Yes, whatever you have: it's a massive amount of gear to carry compared to a phone. But what results!
The past 2-4 years have been amazing for lenses: Sony's willingness to let other people make lenses has been an amazing win for photography.
What has changed is the last four years is that Chinese and Korean lens makers have caught up in a big way, and are now producing excellent optics at a fraction of the price with AF and weather sealing (as of now, primes only). For example, the Viltrox Lab and Pro series, or the Samyang 135/1.8. The other Chinese manufacturers are a cut below.
Also, Sigma and Tamron (both Japanese) are putting out more higher quality lenses compared to a decade back. With optical quality rivaling Sony's own G Master series and the Zeissen.
I would love to do:
- set aperture priority (fully open for most cases)
- set shutter speed to AUTO with a limit (never open for longer than 1/100 s)
- set ISO to AUTO with a limit (never go above 6400)
If there is insufficient light, then by all means, the camera should adjust the shutter speed past the limit, but not until it has used all the available "reasonable" ISO range.
It's a shame I have to wrestle my Sony a6400 to get something even remotely close to this.
My entire photography career I was incredibly frustrated that there was no good way to change the minimum shutter speed in aperture priority.
Sure, I could go into a menu and change it from the range of 1/60 or a second to 1/200th (or 1/250th, depending on the camera), but that was it. This is on Nikon, btw.
But yeah, give me more options damnit. It’s something that comes up so frequently when shooting that it blows my mind it’s not an option.
But usually when I have passers-by take photos, the context is that we are posing in front of a church in Europe or something, and space can be limited.
I can't very well ask people to take a photo and but first to take 20 paces back and then do a crouch!
My wife wants to see our shoes as well as the church spires in the same photo. Maybe a 35mm or even 28mm would work well in our case.
Definitely thinking of getting another prime but a ‘normal’ one with autofocus doesn’t really do anything I can’t with my zooms, I like 7artisans primes and might get one that is crazy wide but those are manual focus and take more skill —- I was so happy to get home and see I nailed this one
I find that photos from a prime look better in some undefinable way. Maybe it's because there's more light coming through, or maybe it's just easier for them to make a prime with great optics than a zoom with great optics.
I shoot on manual with auto-ISO straight to JPG (I don't have time for RAW editing), so my prime photos tend to have lower ISO's and I end up with a faster shutter.
All your points are true, but primes tend to have more character as well. I’m no optical engineer so I can’t speak as to why, but it seems like they have more choices on prime design than they do on zooms.
I’m suspicious that a lot of the apparent inherent benefit of a prime lens is that it can’t zoom, which forces the person holding it to think a little bit more about composition.
It would be an amusing experiment to compare a prime lens to a zoom lens that it somehow fixed to the same focal length. Maybe level the playing field a little bit by applying distortion correction to both lenses.
There’s a lot more to it, but I attribute a lot of ‘better in some way’ to microcontrast followed by how the lens handles the transition to out of focus detail.
Yeah, back when I had a Canon my only lens was a wide angle prime. I really like that Sony 90mm prime, DxO says it is Sony's best lens and I think it is.
Ever since I started shooting sports indoors (often w/ that 90mm prime or a 135mm prime) and started to depend on noise reduction I process everything with DxO and tend to use a lot of sharpening and color grading. One day I went out with the kit lens by accident and set the aperture really small and developed the "Monkey Run Style" for hyperrealistic landscapes that look like they were shot with a weird Soviet camera.
The lens I walk around with the most and usually photograph runners with is the Tamron 28-200 which is super-versatile for events and just walking around, I used it for the last two albums here
but for the Forest Frolic I used my 16-35mm Zeiss but it was tough because it was raining heavily -- I was lucky to have another volunteer who held an umbrella for me, but I couldn't lean in. The last one (Thom B) was not color graded because I'd had some bad experiences color grading sports when I got the color of the jersey wrong but now I use color grades that are less strong -- at Trackapalooza the greens just came out too strident and I had to bring them down.
To give you some idea of how powerful noise reduction is, this shot
was done in ISO 80,000 with that Tamron -- I wouldn't say it looks perfectly natural for a picture of cat that was not standing still in a room in a basement that is amazing.
Incredible, in the 90's I could barely take a picture of my dog in broad daylight, and it cost money for the film, and I had to wait forever to get the photos back, and then the dog was blurry.
I have no nostalgia for film, I could not afford to take 1500 film photos at a sports event -- even a photo like this which doesn't seem that remarkable
On many Sony models, you can set the camera to aperture priority instead of auto, set ISO to Auto ISO, and then change the max ISO to whatever you want; this is what I do in your situation.
If I set aperture priority to "maximum possible light in", I often have an issue that when there is insufficient light, the camera decreases shutter speed instead of cranking up the ISO (to the set upper limit), which would be much more desireable. This results in blurry images due to the longer exposure. I would much more prefer a grainy image over a blurred one in this case.
Do you know if there is any option of setting a limit on shutter speed while in aperture mode?
(I understand I can go full manual, but that just doesn't allow for the same point-and-shoot experience in changing light conditions.)
> but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in
And so, the reasons why Fuji and point-and-shoots are popular. Lots of “serious” photography enthusiasts don’t really get this and call Fujis “hype” cameras but it’s like bashing Wordpress because most people don’t want to learn AWS to post cat pics.
> The iPhone is always in my pocket
Rationale for both point-and-shoots as well as Leica (also hated by lots of serious camera people ;)).
I went from a D300s kit with about $10k of lenses to Fuji. I had an X100s, then an X-E2, and now an X-Pro3.
The X-Pro3 especially is light, has excellent physical controls, and very much feels like a vintage Leica. It's what I'd consider an "art camera" -- not what I'd choose if I were shooting weddings regularly, but perfect for street photography, family stuff, and perfectly capable of higher-end commercial work if you're willing to put up with its quirks.
They were popular. Are they still? Just observationally there are two groups left, phone users, and people with very expensive complex setups. Everyone who would have bought those simple cameras moved on to using phones.
By the numbers, the casual cameras are having a quiet turnaround.
Fuji and Ricoh can hardly keep their X100 and GR cameras stocked. Fuji added extra production capacity in China because it exceeded their expectations. I brought them up specifically because the serious camera people rag on them for being hype cameras, but I see plenty of everyday people with them. Go to places like the High Line in NY and there’s folks with A6700s and various X-mount cameras in addition to the serious full-frame mounts. Leica is doing financially well because of their Q series.
I think five years ago you could say it was just two groups, but by the numbers and by what I see in the streets, the point and shoots have been prematurely declared dead. Fuji and Sony are meanwhile figuring out how to sell APS-C to a more casual crowd, after the other old players effectively left that market.
I think these are good points. It boils down to: are you interested in photography or do you just want to have photographs? If it's the former, get a camera. If it's the latter, stick with the phone.
> are you interested in photography or do you just want to have photographs?
If it's the former, take the time to understand not only your gear but also light and image processing (whether digital or film). If it's the latter, and you are a stickler for pixels get a digital camera, if not stick with the phone.
I'm interested in photography, but I won't buy a digital camera. My last film camera was a Minolta 700si (in the 90's) and a camera bag full of lens and flashes and other gadgets (filters shades etc), but was a far cry from the $10k professional camera with professional studio film processing. If you understand your gear, light, and how the images are going to be output (film or digital processing) you can get great images from whatever you are woking with.
Photography vs Photographs isn't about how many pixels a camera has or other limitations of a camera. It's what you do with it. Back in the day I preferred black & white film because I could control the entire processing cycle (I wasn't very good at color processing when the local camera shop could do it faster and better). Now I like the challenge of Photography with the limitations of a phone. Does that make it not "real" Photography? or not a real interest in Photography?
To me that where the difference is for "photography", a phone and dedicated digital camera are still digital. They are still processed and captured with the same medium, so learn it and understand it.
One might have greater ability to capture more light and thus not need the same amount of processing or setup, but it's still processed and produced from digital pixels. Both allow for any amount of post processing, but you have to know how to shoot with the device especially if there are more light capture limitations like a phone. If you just want photographs, put either in auto mode and you get what you get. Paying more for a dedicated camera just makes it easier to do, that doesn't make it "photography" over a more physically limited but still digital, phone camera.
I sort of agree, but I also think there is lot that goes into taking interesting photos as an art beyond the technical capabilities of the camera you are using. Certainly a good camera can produce a better end product and can enable dimensions of creative freedom that's more difficult with a smartphone. But the process of picking an interesting subject, figuring out the angle and composition of the frame, finding the right light and time of day, etc, are all independent of the camera you're using and something you can explore with just the smartphone you already have in your pocket.
I get what you’re saying, but I was a wedding photographer for ten years and that’s a job where ideally you’re doing both. That carried over to my personal life.
Not that I don’t ever take snapshots - I do - but instead of just taking a picture of your kid from eye level, you can get down on their level and wait until their head is turned so they’re shortlit from light from the window.
Of course, in that job you also quickly learn that the moment trumps everything. A technically awful photo of a great genuine smile or someone falling in the lake or whatever is usually better than an incredibly composed and lit photo of a person just sitting there…usually.
Phone cameras don't come close to any of my "real" cameras with my decades of experience shooting and composing ... but phone cameras absolutely obliterate anything I was shooting with a film camera as a beginner back when film was a thing. I have also arguably learned far more about photography with my phone, because of its portability and zero cost experimentation, than I have with ANY "real" camera.
But, perhaps most importantly, along the lines of what others have noted: you know, my phone camera may not be as good, but I have zero complaints about the impromptu photos of my kid growing up that I could never have caught with anything else.
i mean, he didn't say that the iphone camera was bad, just that it doesn't stand up to dedicated gear (which it doesn't, but a lot of people will tell you, especially apple's "shot on iphone" marketing campaign, that it will).
2025 Lightroom and Photoshop have a vastly better HDR workflow for working with RAW and exporting to AVIF or JPEG with embedded HDR luminance map that shows up correctly on iOS or in Chrome on MacOS with the display set to HDR. I don’t know about Android or windows.
I have re-exported files that I took in 2007 with the Nikon D7 that I kept the raw files for. They are vastly improved with modern processing (and noise reduction) vs what I exported from the same negative back then. The bit depth was always high enough.
It depends on your budget and interests. In terms of sensor size, Micro Four Thirds (from Olympus and Panasonic) is generally the most affordable, but it comes with a smaller sensor. APS-C offers a middle ground, while Full Frame is the most popular and typically delivers the best image quality.
Personally, I use Sony APS-C the most because of its smaller size, lighter weight, and more affordable lenses. Among APS-C systems, Sony and Fuji offer the widest lens selection. Fuji gear tends to be overpriced now, but it does have a stylish look.
Micro Four Thirds lenses are usually cheaper and more lightweight.
If you're shooting fast-moving subjects like birds or Formula 1 racing, Canon and Nikon are the most popular choices. They offer a wide range high performance lenses designed for demanding situations.
I bought a Canon RP which came with a 24-105mm zoom. I think it was CAD 1000 a couple of years ago, but it looks like that has inflated to around double now.
It's automatic. (If I'm handing a stranger my camera.)
> zoom level
This is maybe the hardest one, I guess, … but I do think most people have seen enough TV cop dramas to instinctively know. Or, they can just take the photo at the zoom I've handed them, and it won't be a big deal. Walking forward a few steps is also like zooming.
100% agree. I went on holiday at the start of this year and took my iPhone 15 Pro with me. I bought a mirrorless camera and went back because I was that disappointed with it. No joke. I regret using a phone for most of my family photos for the last 10-15 years and should have just used my old D3100 instead.
I think the processing is getting worse. I look at photos I took with my Nexus 6P and they look much nicer than my Pixel 7/9Pro photos. At some point everybody decided that the most important thing about photos is preserving as much dynamic range and having no noise. This makes the photos look fake and unpleasant.
It’s really a night a day difference once you spend just a little amount of time learning your camera. I always show people the difference in quality with two photos of my wife and kids during Fourth of July.
One shot is with my iphone15, the other with my Fujifilm xt5. It’s such a stark difference
Do you show them on a monitor or large prints or on your phone?
I’ve long thought the main “issue” with people not realizing the difference is that they’re just looking at photos on their phones, where the images are so small it’s harder to appreciate the difference. I rarely try to take photos apart from snapshots with my phone because I’ll invariably be really disappointed when I view them on my monitor.
The new(ish) Adobe Project Indigo attempts to rectify some of these - it generally captures pictures in a more SLR-ish manner, even when it outputs HDR. It does RAW capture and has decent control options if you want that.
However, it's a battery hog and can be a bit sluggish to get going, and there are some weird interactions with the built in photos app (if you crop the photo after the fact in the Photos app it pushes all the colour towards purple in the thumbnail, but not in the actual image).
I'm already happy enough with the image quality that I can overlook these flaws, which will hopefully get fixed over time. People should try it to see what they think.
The distortion of faces near the edges of iPhone photos is, in my opinion, the biggest issue with iPhone photos. So much so that I avoid being at the edges of group photos specifically for this reason. And it gets worse as you approach the edge of the frame. If you are barely in-frame, you will look like you've gained 30lbs and you've just had a stroke.
These are some good examples. I'd love more on this.
I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone.
I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc.
But I've come to the conclusion that once you start look closely there's absolutely no comparison.
One thing I've started doing is creating custom photo books from all my photos. It's really helped me focus my photography. When doing this though I've noticed how edited phone photos are, as well as how poor the quality actually is (particularly in low light).
The quality issue is understandable (it's physics). The editing issue is a bit more insidious I think.
All in all, if you just want to view phone photos on your phone, they look great. But if you're actually interested in photography and printing, you should get a dedicated camera.
I took my Fuji XT-2 and 27mm pancake lens on a recent trip, after leaving it at home the previous few. Every time, I find the Fuji takes more work and skill than I have to develop good photos after the fact. I too often blow out the sky, for example.
Unfortunately, the less I use it, the worse I get. So snagging my "nice" camera for a vacation, then spending a lot of time making sure I lug it around and use it, and then having the results be, frankly, bad, is really frustrating. In particular, I have quite a few photos that are.. either blurry, or out of focus, and it's hard to tell which. I am pretty careful to ensure I hold the camera still, and have a sufficient shutter speed, but I'm definitely messing something up.
I need to take more time to practice at home rather than capturing a thousand frames over 3 weeks and hoping they're good (like the bad old days of film!)
The CCD digicams that are trending aren’t known for the technical quality of their sensors of lenses or whatnot, but the CCD low dynamic range aesthetic
Sometimes I compare photos I've taken over 10 years ago with Sony NEX-5 with photos I take today with an iPhone. There's no competition, APS-C from 15 years ago is still solid.
Anyway, the best camera is the one you have with you, so in that sense iPhone is great.
After reading the article I might dust off my DSLR, however the fact that I have my iPhone with me most of the time will never change - so more than 99% of my photos/videos will be captured by that thing.
It was a nice analysis of wide angle lenses, what processing is needed to adjust for the physical limitations, and on processing picture.
From there:
> Real cameras capture shadow more accurately.
> professional cameras
That's saying that real cameras don't use wide angle lenses nor have an image processing pipeline, and professionals of the field have adequately labeled cameras.
This kinda makes the whole piece so shallow and weirdly ideological, when it doesn't need to be. People interested enough in the craft will spend time knowing their gear, the strength and limitations, and work with it.
Phone cameras now give more and more access to the underlying mechanisms and RAW formats. There's of course tons of photos I'd want to put in my wall coming from my phone, they're just really great for subjects that properly match the lenses strengths. iPhones or Pixel phones aren't perfect or ideal in all conditions, but what camera is ?
My only significant gripe with phone cameras is that they oversharpen everything. Sharpening can subjectively make things look better as long as you don't zoom in too much, but has one significant problem: desaturation. In high-detail high-contras areas, e.g. the foreground grass, the sharpening pushes many of the pixels towards black or white, which are, notably, not green. This has the overall effect of desaturating these textures, and is the impetus for
Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.
Yeah, and even with sharpening it's noticeably softer when you zoom in on the photo.
For fisheye, I guess it would have been more accurate to say: the perspective distortion is present in both photos and is stronger for the iphone photo due to a shorter effective focal length, and there is no noticeable fisheye/barrel distortion in the iphone photo.
My expectation is that in a few years from now, the raw photo taken by the mobile camera will merely serve as an input to some AI image generator which will then produce a top-quality pro photographer grade image at whatever resolution you like with whatever changes you command ("without all those 1000s of tourisms in front of the Louvre except my wife"). The photo will be fake but will capture the scene that you have in mind better than any pro photographer could.
In 2021, Samsung introduced a feature called Moon Mode that, without the user's knowledge, substituted an artificial intelligence image of the moon for a moon photo.
The amount of people who get really defensive when people actually point out that, no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera is kinda crazy.
> no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera
9 times out of 10 when I see someone making this claim it’s engagement bait. They know it triggers people and generates interactions.
I think most people are well aware that they’re not the same. The point usually made is that it’s amazing that we can get such good photos out of something that fits in our pockets. In well-lit scenes you really can get some impressive image quality out of those tiny devices.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a single actual case of this. But I also haven’t seen a single actual case of anyone having any loud opinions about their phones for many many years now. I might just be finally old.
I take a iphone and a nikon z5 with me. in their defense, if you dont' know what you're doing, the iphone will consistently take better photos. my z5 photo beat it any day but I had to learn how to be intentional with it in order to get that difference.
I just started looking at photos and videos we took on vacation. I have an iPhone 16 Pro.
And when I use the Photos app on my Apple TV to review a couple videos I took, I'm surprised at the weird, wavy quality I'm seeing in them. It's really strange.
I will compare this to the videos I took with my Sony a6700. But until then, I'm surprised at how odd the videos looked on a large OLED TV. Might be compression from iCloud or something. Can't quite explain it otherwise.
I have no shortage of friends who asked me why I bothered to buy a real camera, but if you're a hobbyist photographer, it's nice to use a real camera and have full control. There are apps that do let you do this on a smartphone, and it's definitely more convenient.
But there's something about the real photos (with real Bokeh) that still look much better to me.
When I owned an S21 Ultra, I found the photos were horribly paintbrushed due to excessive machine-learning. They look nice on a little screen, but pixel peeping is terrible.
Using a OnePlus 12 now, and find the photos much less overprocessed (and wavy).
I'm always sad when I pull up holidays photos on my monitor. Even though Pixels make great photos, they're great only on small OLED screens.
Gonna clean the dust out of Nikon D3200 with proper lens and use that instead. Casual photos will be made byy wife anyway
It might not be for everyone, but digging in the camera controls helped tremendously for me.
In particular, manual focus with the actual focus scale (no tap around on some surrogate object) and in-focus indicator, control to set a lower ISO in scenes where the phone wants to pull a faster image, or set a higher shutter speed even on darker situations.
Or on the pro line you get the option to stop automatic lens switching, which gives a lot more control (stay on the best lens/sensor and adjust for it yourself, instead of the phone trying to be clever)
All in all it stops being a point and shoot, and there will be a more missed pictures because of wrong settings, but the highs are also a lot higher in my experience. And it can go back to the "all auto" mode anytime.
On my Pixel, I'm always torn with using GCam or another camera app. GCam photos are definitely better on small screens, but every time you zoom in, you get AI artifacts, letters that shouldn't be here. It basically reconstructs the image from the original and blurrier photo. The other apps without these transformation lead to better quality on zoomed photos but the overall preview looks less good. This is especially true when digital zoom is involved.
I have a Pixel 6 Pro. I played a bit with it's raw format when I got it. It's fairly impressive; especially for night time photography. When that came out, both Apple and Google sourced their sensors from Sony. I think that's still the case. At the hardware level, there's not that much difference between cameras in different phones. Most of the differences are created in software.
The dng files that come out of my Pixel phone down sample from 50 mega pixels to 12.5. You can't access the original 50 mega pixels. So each pixel has information from 4 "real" pixels. That's fairly effective for getting rid of noise. I took some night shots with it and it holds up pretty well. It actually makes Google's night vision AI mode a bit less impressive because the starting point isn't that bad.
My other camera is a Fuji X-T30. The lenses and sensor are clearly better on that one if you look at the raw files. More detail, dynamic range, etc. But at night it's kind of weak (noise). And if you are into that, Fuji's film emulation produces pretty pleasing jpg files without a lot of work. I shoot raw so I tend to ignore that. But it's a somewhat fair comparison because in both cases there isn't much post processing. Except the Fuji isn't doing a lot of AI trickery and is just relying on a good results that come out of the camera and applying a prefab tone mapping that resembles what film used to do.
The difference of course is that with the Fuji, you are making lots of creative choices with focal range, depth of field of the lens (aperture), shutter speeds, and ISO while you are shooting. You don't really have that with a smart phone (though you can have some control). The iphone and pixel phones fake some of this stuff and some people like the portrait mode with the fake bokeh. Lens quality is amazing given the size of phones these days. But it's not the same as shooting with a proper lens and they do have some real physical limitations.
And if you shoot raw, you gain a lot of control over tone mapping etc. Not for everyone of course. But also not the end of the world with the right software. I use Darktable for this and if you dial that in properly, it's not actually a lot of work.
That being said, my pixel takes decent photos without a lot of effort and there is value in that. I have it with me by default and that is invaluable. I only use the Fuji a few times per year. But there's less art to using a smart phone. Point and tap on the button and hope for the best.
Computerized phone photography is not for desktop viewing, printing, etc.
It appears to look "amazing" on phone displays - probably optimized for that.
And nowadays unless you professionally shooting photos for a billboard, bedroom poster or newspaper advert - that is clearly enough. 99%+ of photo viewing is done on a phone or tablet screen.
I got interested in photography during my travels, and my wife is very interested in it.
I bought a decent camera. I really enjoyed playing with it, and spent some happy hours learning about it. I even took some decent photos (well, I liked them anyway).
But in the end, carrying it became a chore and trying to take off-the-cuff photos during adventures took too long. I found that we needed to go for specific "photography adventures" with the camera, with the intent of taking photographs with the camera, in order to use it. If we were going for a trip without the specific aim of taking photographs it was just easier to use the phone cameras.
Also the camera photos were stuck on the camera, while the phone photos were instantly usable in social media, and shareable from the Google/Apple Photos. I have a portable drive folder somewhere with all the camera photos, but I never see them. The phone photos are a search away.
I think it's the difference between "being a photographer" and "taking photos". I am not a photographer, I just want to take some photos and share them with my friends. They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again. All the comments in the article are accurate but meaningless in this context.
On the other had, if you're a photographer and want to take a photograph that someone will hang on their wall, all the comments in the article are accurate and relevant.
Why can't you be both? I am an amateur photographer, but it doesn't mean that I carry my camera with me everywhere that I go. I see photography as a hobby, so when I feel like I want to do "hobby things" I bring a camera with me. I prepare myself to do so. It doesn't mean that I don't use my phone camera at all (in fact I upgraded my phone purely for the "better camera").
If you are just taking snapshots to share with friends, then it makes sense to not bring the camera. But if it's your hobby, where you sit down and take time and care to take a photo, then it's a different game altogether.
I don't often print my photos out and put them on a wall, but I do have my own photography blog where I post the photos I take (with a camera). I think the article is still relevant to that kind of scenario too.
I think the purpose of this kind of page is to outline differences between taking a snapshot and taking a photo. This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time. It also attempts to combat the prevalent myth that more megapixels = better photos. Yes that myth still exists in 2025.
yeah agree. I decided I wasn't a photographer, though I'm still interested in it.
> This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time.
"Never argue with idiots. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Seriously, are there people who think that iPhones are just as good as dedicated cameras, and can still tie their own shoelaces?
My biggest gripe is with iPhone photos today is the way small details get mangled beyond recognition. Small text looks like it was sent through a hallucinating LLM (which it probably was!)
It feels like things are going backwards. I was never much of a pixel peeper, but in my last few iphones, 14/15/16 pro, I'm regularly noticing the airbrushing of all of the things.
I recently switched to an imported phone with a bulky 1" sensor (Vivo X100 Ultra) and although far from my Sony mirrorless, the quality of shots and color science went up dramatically compared to my older Pixel 9 Pro (way overprocessed) and iPhone 13 (way oversaturated and pretty low-res). This is not to say there's no AI or strong computational component to it, but larger and more expensive sensors, which still have not found their way in mainstream phones, do bring massive advantage if they are not killed by excessive AI processing (as, sadly, I saw multiple times when test-driving Samsung Ultra phones)
Ironically enough, the Vivo ("Zeiss") color science also looks more accurate than most phones I've owned, and is pretty flexible at editing time.
Feedback: I absolutely love the idea of doing analysis like this, but it's incredibly frustrating to be shown photos that were clearly taken at different times when the subjects naturally don't look exactly the same. Like for example who's to say that player isn't actually leaning? The second photo sure doesn't prove anything. And comparing them side by side feels like an exercise in frustration.
I would probably (if possible) repeat this idea but with photos taken at the same time, with cameras as close to each other as possible. If at all possible I would also try to use as similar of a lens as possible, if only as a 3rd comparison point to compare the other two to.
> you'll have to believe me when I say they are not leaning. They were just standing there posing for the photo.
I mean, if believing your words were enough to convey the message, then there'd be no point in taking the second photo and comparing them.
The point here isn't whether you're telling the truth (of course you are), it's about being able to see what's going on and get an intuitive feel for what changes and what stays the same. When I said "who's to say they're not leaning" my point wasn't to call you a liar; it was to say that that question is what immediately arises in your audience's brain, and it's completely distracting. Trust can't correct for the visual discrepancy, even if I had taken for the photo myself.
I was pretty irked by that as well. The change from smiling to not smiling affects face shape. But at least the building and car photos were stationary enough to illustrate the fisheye quality.
One observation i'd expected to see is sensor size versus apparent focal length - this might be at least one of the reasons for distorsion. iPhone camera is ±7mm, which is ±4x crop factor in 35mm terms - but it's marketed as ±26mm.
There is apps like Halide or Photon that have a Process Zero or TrueRaw mode that is more natural. Of course a phone is just an other tool with different constraints. I gave up paying 2 or 3 times the price of my phone for a dedicated camera. I like the lightness and integrated software to edit photos and share them on the spot. I made that sacrifice knowing I’ll never have the same quality but I don’t have to carry a big camera now.
But for passionate people who want the best you can’t replace a dedicated camera with a phone
I like the comparisons! I think it's 100% fair to compare the "out of the box" images from the iPhone to other cameras. With that said, some notes:
I think a lot of the differences you're seeing are the result of FOV differences; the iPhone camera is a ~24mm equivalent, which is much wider than most people would shoot on a dedicated camera. That wide-angle distortion is just a natural part of the 24mm focal length, but not really the iPhone's fault.
The other effects you're seeing are related to Apple's default image processing, which, at this point, most people would agree is too aggressive. This difference goes away if you shoot in ProRAW and process your photos in an app that allows you to dial down (or ideally turn off) local tone mapping.
If you have an iPhone that shoots 48MP ProRAW, don't be afraid to crop the image significantly, which increases the effective focal length and makes the image look more like a dedicated camera. It also increases the apparent bokeh, which is actually quite noticeable on close-ups. With the RAW you can then quickly edit the image to end up colors which are much more faithful and natural.
If anyone out there doesn't have a Pro model, they can shoot RAW photos in 3rd party camera apps, including Lightroom, which is free.
I basically agree with the author that the iPhone's camera is inferior to dedicated cameras, at least in the hands of a photographer who's learned to use them. To me it's striking that there's even a question. My first camera as a child was a cheap film camera[0], and the first digital cameras I saw firsthand, as cool as they were at the time, had even worse quality. Now smartphones have much better quality for people pointing and shooting and do it while crammed into a device that does many other things.
Now, I'd hate for dedicated cameras to go away. I love shooting on SLRs, digital and film. I see smartphone cameras not as pretenders to the throne but as democratizing tools lowering the barrier for entry and a great way to get shots when you don't have your dedicated camera.
[0]: for the record, the issue with the camera was that it was cheap and I didn't know what I was doing, not that it was film.
I see lots of framed iPhone pictures. I have a few in my house. They’re not big, but they’re pictures of happy moments that are worth printing. Using the 5x lens helps, but good composition, cropping, and fine tuning colors does as well.
Most of the issues noted are because of the wide angle lens of the iPhone. The more expensive iPhones (the Pro models) have 3 lenses one of which can produce photos similar to a traditional camera.
There are three different lenses on the iPhone 16 Pro. Which one gets used is determined by the "zoom" level you pick. The "0.5x" picks the widest angle lens, the "1x" and "2x" use the same lens, and the "5x" uses the third lens.
If you wish to reduce optical distortion and can get farther away from the subject, you'll want to pick the "5x" zoom. Think somebody else here said it was a 105mm equivalent, which sounds about right.
Intermediate values are obviously crops... although given that the 0.5x and the 1x lens are both 48mp sensors (IIRC), and the resulting image is typically 12mp, it doesn't make as big of a quality difference as one might ordinarily think.
It appears the long lens on that phone is 120mm-equivalent ("5x") and any intermediate zoom is just cropping. A 2x "zoom" (crop) would get pretty close to the field of view of the author's dedicated camera lens, but with further reduced image quality.
Actually using the iPhone telephoto for a group photo like the one shown in the article would require the photographer to stand a considerable distance from the subjects, and then we might start noticing a little perspective distortion from the 45mm-equivalent lens on the Sony.
For mid to long ranges, a dedicated camera with A Big Lens is still the way to go, but for wide angle and landscapes the better iphone cameras are very competitive.
For 28 Years Later, note that while the iPhone sensor did in fact ultimately collect the photons for the movie, they attached substantial professional-grade glass to the front to augment the phone camera.
My understanding is that all that extra gear is mainly to enable more ergonomic manual control for things like focus. The matte box and ND filter are probably the biggest boosts to image and motion quality, and there are affordable ways to get those on your phone.
I see iPhone pictures posted on walls all the time, because most people aren't pretentious.
The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
Don't underestimate the power of the subject's comfort and state of mind. Gramma is happy to get the picture, she doesn't care how it got taken.
> The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
What an odd thing to infer. Just a really large leap.
> Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
Considering there are 2 photos of the same subjects, this reasoning becomes very order-dependent, we don't know the order of the photos taken, so we shouldn't be judging the photos on things affected by that.
We should, however, so judge the claim that the photos are directly comparable, as is attempted here.
I honestly can't tell what the site author is trying to do. Criticizing oversaturation is reasonable. Claiming the camera is responsible for differences in pose and composition is madness.
All these photos also seem to be taken at a further distance at a higher zoom with the digicam. Use 2x mode on iphone and step back a bit and the perspective/distortion should be similar. 12mp is still plenty. Also, they didn't mention if they turned off face smoothing on the iphone.
Google a couple years ago, however, made a big stink that they were forcing an always-on filter to "enhance" the appearance of dark skin on Pixels, so yeah you might need a real camera to get accurate photos of subjects with darker skin if you have a pixel.
There isn't an "accurate photo" that you can objectively adjudicate. All digital camera outputs are highly processed to get appealing results. The fact that you think Real Tone on the Google Pixel was "a big stink" only tells us about you, not Google.
It would have made more sense if they explained it as part of an overall tonemap accuracy update. Which does probably produce better overall results to be fair.
what? You can literally objectively see how much more “normal” they look on an actual camera. Especially the guy on the left, he looks atrocious on the iPhone
Do you know how childish you sound? That specialized equipment that does one thing really really fucking well is expensive? Is this supposed to be a gotcha
Framing is different because of bad lens choice on the photo part (why always shoot wide angle??) and this skews the results immensely and unfairly (composition is the most important thing in a photo).
Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.
All cameras imprint their own color signature to photos, so I really don't understand what you're talking about. Some people buy exclusively Canon cameras because their JPEG profiles give "good" skin tones straight out of the camera. Does that mean they are "accepting" Canon's opinion of what skin should look like?
Yes. Everyone does, with every manufacturer, and Apple evidently has determined their visual style. At least they also provide you with an optional semi-raw output you can freely edit if you so desire.
Not really. Look at the sky, it's very different between the two. This is something I've noticed constantly with iPhones in particular. To the point where I don't bother trying to take photos that focus on the sky or sunset as it heavily processes the results (extreme oranges and deep blues).
Those are the colors people like. Go and look at how photographers usually try to make skies more dramatic for clients in all kind of photoshoots (weddings, events, postcard pictures, etc.). That's what the market wants. You can disagree, but it's not like smartphone companies are incompetent and don't know how photography works (not that you have made this claim)
I don’t think we disagree. It’s the broader point of phones now doing the editing for you. If you enjoy photography then this is “worse” as you would prefer to do that yourself in Lightroom. If you don’t enjoy photography this is “better” as your result look great without additional effort (for me it’s the former).
Phones have always been designed for "normal" people, nonetheless manufacturers are actually giving pros more tools than ever. Smartphone photography might have been less processed in the early 2010s, but the outputs were difficult to edit and jpeg only. At least nowadays the big players allow you to shoot also in raw formats. Before smartphones, "normal" people who wanted to take photos without bothering too much would have simply shot in JPEG and blindly trusted the color decisions from the camera manufacturer, or by the chemical engineers at the film/development/printing factory.
I also think there’s something special about looking through a viewfinder.
Even in new cameras (where the viewfinder itself is a tiny screen) something happens when you frame a photo this way, that doesn’t happen when you use the back display (or a phone).
I don’t know if it’s down to physically using one eye, or the psychology of bringing your eye to the camera’s eye, but it feels different (and I like it)
"in the iPhone photo, the player is "leaning". His (long) feet are on the left and his head is on the right of the image. In the right image, the image accurately portays his balanced and confident stance. "
The subject seems to have moved. His expression is different, how he holds the stick is different. Hard to believe that the stance remained the same meanwhile.
There's so much wrong with this article it's difficult to know where to start, but the fact that they didn't bother to take the photos at the same time with an equivalent focal length makes the entire thing pointless.
A couple of things, some of which are difficult topics to broach:
1. Every dude here is pretty unattractive, so the question is which camera gives them enough camera makeup to hide it. If you shake your head at this, take a peek at this: https://i.imgur.com/vdD5r8M.jpeg Every dude is mewing for his life in the latter photo
2. They aren't making the same face for each shot, so all of this is a waste of time. That's so much more important.
3. The only real difference is just the background being blurred or not. Otherwise it's a totally different pose for each guy.
That's not a particularly great test, because every camera will be great outside in the sunlight, and those photos are some of the least technically challenging ones you can take. Even a phone from 15 years ago won't be that bad at it.
Modern computational photography does a great job of dealing with tricky conditions though.
iPhones always take "decent" photos even under tricky conditions, but they never take great photos. I would take 10 great photos over 100 decent photos myself.
I regularly take photos outside, at night, in ambient light with my Fujifilm X-Pro3 and 56mm f/1.2. I'm stretching the limits of it a bit, using high ISO and as low a shutter speed as I can get away with.
In the same lighting conditions, an iPhone will basically take 3-5 shots and composite them together in software. The result, predictably, is unusable for most moving subjects.
iPhone camera is perfect for getting an instant/algoritmically-processed HDR-enabled photo that looks nice on the phone screen and social media. Oh it's also great for macro due to physically being small.
For everything else, actual camera hands down!
Though for its size and availability iPhone camera is great!
The iPhone blurred background is completely synthetic. It uses multiple cameras to build a depth map of the scene, and then blurs whatever isn't at the depth of the subject of the photo.
If you're asking "how do you do", you can select "portrait" when taking the photo, or go to the photo in your gallery after the fact, pick "edit", pick "portrait", and choose a fake aperture ("f/1.4") and focus point to use. The results are ... mid.
The differences are subtle to me. I see them but it doesn’t prevent me or my family from printing and hanging iPhone photos. I want to hang fun photos from family vacation for the memories.
I was born in 95, so my childhood is well documented by my mothers digicam. When I look back at the photos, it is very obvious they are way better than iPhone photos that many parents are taking today.
While i don't disagree, it's good to take into consideration the way people took photos back then vs now. I'd argue that today they are more of a commodity than they were back then, so people thought more before they took the shot(at least for some photos).
The opening statement of the article is almost insulting in how badly it abuses correlation, causation, and the concept of cause and effect.
It effectively states that people don’t print photos anymore because phones produce bad photos.
But back in the film camera days you literally had to develop and print the photos to see them. There was no universal device for viewing photos that you always had on you.
Yeah, removing the quotes from the title in the submission (which may have been done automatically or by a mod) completely changes the meaning of the title as read.
It's a genre of clickbait titles that I support since the content actually supports the opposite, for journalistic effect. It's very funny when people who never read the content and share an article are exposed.
I've been a Nikon user for decades, once I purchased a digital Nikon SLR, I was in heaven. Now, with my cell phone camera taking really nice pics, I don't carry the SLR as much. If I want to print and hang a photo, if it's a close up shot, I use my phone. If it's a larger view pic, I use my SLR.
iPhones have wide angle lenses but they are NOT fish eye lenses as stated a couple times in the article. They definitely distort things but a fish eye lens distorts things in a very different curved way rather than keeping lines straight like a regular wide angle lens.
No. Sony and Olympus both made interchangeable-lens cameras with no screen or viewfinder meant to pair with phones. Realme made a prototype phone that can take an attachment to mount Leica M-mount lenses: https://petapixel.com/2025/03/04/realmes-ultra-phone-concept...
In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible.
It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.
Anyone out there feel like making an app that fixes the distortion and then fills in the missing edges of the rectangle with generative ai? I’d sure enjoy using such an app.
If we’re going to berate mobile phone cameras I’d like to offer my take as someone who uses off camera lighting: it’s bullshit that we still don’t have any way of doing flash sync. I want to be able to control my Godox three point lighting system. I can trigger it with my Canon P that was made in the 1950s (which has no electronics whatsoever!), but not my iPhone that’s over 60 years newer.
Smartphone cameras have always been shit, the best thing about them is that you have them all the time.
But then I bought a Ricoh GrIIIx, which is very pocketable and takes amazing photos. Even has a handy remote view function through WiFi. I don’t bother with my phone anymore.
This is a great article, thank you for this. I will save it as a reference. I usually get unsolicited advice from people when I use my Fujifilm camera's about how a smartphone would shoot better. Even though I own one of the latest iPhone's, there's no comparison between the two.
I don't mind the comments but there's always someone. There's also people with the latest phones who come and brag about their photo quality. I'm always nice about it and give my talking points about the sensor sizes and the lenses as quickly as possible.
Sometimes they are more aggressive about it and start to question my competence. I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's as I'm usually in the middle of a few things during events. I liked how the article mentioned amateur photographer (which would describe me) so it addresses some of these concerns. It also uses examples of older cameras that are very affordable.
Next time someone is coping from Big Tech marketing about the camera on their smartphone, I'll show them this. All the "Pro"s use iPhone camera, right?
Honestly those people are fucking worst. Somehow having an actual camera makes people feel…inadequate? Like cmon dude, let me take my photos why do you have to start saying “oh my phone takes better photos, and i can use it to watch YouTube”
I wish the images had been taken at the same height. Especially when taking images of a person and evaluating their faces, taking one from a lower angle and another from a higher angle does not allow for good comparison.
I am also not exactly convinced that this supposed iPhone picture of those kids is actually an image taken at 1x.
They're still over saturated. Skin tones always have a cosmetic/tanned look compared to real life. Mirrorless camera photos have a lot better output. You can see that even in the first sample comparison. If you look at the photo on the iPhone right when you took it, it doesn't look like the subject you just took a photo of. It's always over saturated compared to real life.
But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject.
But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects).
Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground.
BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)
I never use flash and real cameras are still in a completely different league. There are tons of advantages, but I think the biggest different is dynamic range. Faces, hair, etc. look so dark on phone photos. And even if I try to manually push up the exposure and let it blow out the background, it will still never give me bright faces indoors.
Of course then there's the lack of detail and watercolor effect to try to fake detail, distortion, etc.
> connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject
fucking hell
“fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.
Wedding photographers use bounce flash because indirect light is flattering and not everyone is supermodel-beautiful.
I don’t know where you’re partying that the ceilings aren’t painted white (they usually are because the problem of color cast on reflected light applies to normal room lights as well) but I’ll take color balance I can fix in post over harsh shadows from direct fill flash.
> “fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.
“Specialist thinks the broader domain should universally adhere to the way things are optimized in their area of focus” is not an uncommon thing to see on HN, though its more commonly seen with specialists in different kinds of programming than photography.
Yah you can't fix color balance from bad color cast.
ALL photos look good with direct flash. Never use bounce flash. And indirect lighting is never flattering. EVER. Fire any photographer that ever uses bounce flash. Nobody wants their muddied color.
I was also a photo editor with thousands of photographer submissions. I can always tell which ones used bounce flash. A sure sign of unprofessional amateurness.
I get that people have a desire to maintain their lazy habits, but my job was to make sure they understood they sucked at photography.
Is it just me or is color saturation a huge deal with iphones? I take a pic of myself, and it literally makes it portrait like and changes my skin (makes it smoother and more transluscent). I take a pic of the outdoors, and if there is text somewhere far away, it mangles it. I get iphones are mostly sold for social media influencers these days and beauty standards matter, but damn it I just want it to scan stuff and take photos of my family. There is a big problem with image fidelity.
I honestly can't see much of a difference that couldn't be explained by the photos not being taken simultaneously. I definitely can't tell enough of a difference that I wouldn't put the photo in a frame on the wall (which people almost certainly do, despite the author's assertion that "you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed")
Edit: Is this just a good bit of sarcasm/shitpost? If so, it's just a tad too subtle.
Bingo. You also need to know your camera. I have a d7100, a Z5, and the latest iPhone pro. For quick snapshots it's really hard to beat the iPhone. If I can get very close to something, the iPhone can also do some cool things.
My d7100 might be one of my favorite cameras of all time. I've taken very nice picks of birds mid-flight that would be very hard to do on a phone (impossible?). But, it's not a camera you pull out your pocket and start shooting snapshots. It takes time to learn and post-process.
They are all just tools, pick the right one for what you're doing. And sometimes the right one is the one you have with you :)
It's subtle shitpost. He's playing the angle of camera bros that just can't accept any Tom, Dick, or Harry with an iphone could take a 95% comparable photo but don't call themselves photographers.
I have smartphone photos on my walls. They look damned good.
Is this person going around asking all of their friends what kind of camera they used to take the photos they have on display? Or are they just sure they can tell from looking?
You absolutely can tell from looking, and you don't even need to be trying. Whenever I show people photos from trips or of my kids or whatnot, they immediately notice the quality ask "You took this on your phone!?" (since I'm showing the photo from my phone library and that would be the default assumption). Sure, people are used to phone photos and they're fine, but even laymen who aren't thinking about judging photo quality immediately notice and appreciate the quality of a real camera photo.
Someone didn't try the power of Google pixels phones. Recently, many of my iPhone friends and family envy the pictures taken from Google Pixel 9 pro vs their latest iPhones. It's hands down the best camera and image processing.
Have you seen them on desktop or compared to a 20yo sensor without computerized photography? The post is not about iPhone cameras per se, but about small phone sensors + computerized photography. The author probably has that iPhone.
It's still not going to come anywhere close to a real camera. Phone cameras with their tiny sensors have physical limitations that cannot be overcome, I guess until the day they are regenerating the entire image with AI based on what it expects the scene should look like with a real camera.
To me, the "hotdog skin complexion" aspect is a dead giveaway for when a photo was taken on an iPhone. It's so over the top and unrefined that I wonder how not only Apple let it happen, but seemingly entertain it/make it worse over generations of devices? Certainly such photos won't "age well"? And it's not like it has to be this way because of technological limitations, take Pixel photos, for instance, they get their colors much more balanced and faithful.
Same with Pixel, which actually did it years before I'd presume.
I'm white as ghost. Pixels are determined to make me looked tan for absolutely no reason. I mean, maybe I look 'better', arguably, but it's not me. Is that what people want?
I bought the kid some newfangled Polaroid type thing, and she uses that way more than phones anymore for photos. Maybe the kids will be ok.
The points really boil down to:
1. Difference in focal length/ position.
2. Difference in color processing
But…the article is fairly weak on both points?
1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or whatever the focal length is.
2. Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone and the other camera. It’s again, no different between the two.
It’s a poor article because it doesn’t focus on the actual material differences.
The phone will have a smaller sensor. It will have more noise and need to do more to combat it. It won’t have as shallow a depth of field.
The phone will also of course have different ergonomics.
But the things the post focuses on are kind of poor understandings of the differences in what they’re shooting and how their cameras work.
I disagree, I thought the article highlighted the differences beautifully. I'm on a professionally color calibrated 27" monitor that came with one of those color calibration "certificates" at the time of purchase. The second I loaded the article, the differences were just stark. The skin tones alone were a dead giveaway.
It is no secret that Apple does a lot of post processing on their mediocre photos to make them look good - more so than most other Androids - because, it's all software. But, from the article, it is understood that the author is trying to point out that Apple could've done a better job to represent skin tones more accurately atleast. The fish-eye defense for Apple is totally understandeable, but, why are we defending the weak skin tones? Every year, they keep launching and claiming grandoise statements "This is the best smartphone camera out there is".
And no, this is not a limitation of smartphone sensors. In fact, if you look at the latest Xperia series from Sony, they have the same software from their DSLRs translated into the smartphones that addresses the skintones perfectly well.
I hope we can skip past the biases and personal preferences we have towards Apple and treat them neutrally like any other manufacturer. This "Apple can do no wrong" narrative and attacking anyone who points out their flaws is just tired and boring at this point.
>more so than most other Androids
It the old days Apple used to somewhat pride themselves with taking more "realistic" photos. While Android had it the other way around and basically post processes a lot of things as well as colouring. Mostly used for Social Media like Instagram.
And then came iPhone X. They started changing the colour of Sky and sharpening a lot of things. To the point of a lot of Photos taken by my camera looks great but also looked fake.
> And then came iPhone X. They started changing the colour of Sky and sharpening a lot of things. To the point of a lot of Photos taken by my camera looks great but also looked fake.
The phone processing is lagely shaped by social media culture. Camera makers also started to incorporate in-camera editing features on vlogger targeted models.
> Camera makers also started to incorporate in-camera editing features on vlogger targeted models.
DSLRs had in camera lighting correction during shooting and post-processing since 2016 or so [0].
[0]: https://www.nikonimgsupport.com/eu/BV_article?articleNo=0000...
You’re somehow both reading far too in to my comment (none of my comment is specific to Apple) and not reading my comment enough (because you m missed the point about color profiles)
I’m not defending the default color choices, I’m saying that they’re comparing apples to oranges because they’re comparing an output designed to be opinionated with one that’s designed to be processed after the fact. The iPhone is perfectly capable of outputting neutral images and raw files.
The non-iPhone pictures are probably also in-camera jpegs so they are also 'opinionated', not RAWs.
I would go so far as to say: if you're using in-camera JPEGs, you would probably be better off with a cellphone.
That's a very contemptuous thing to say.
Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable, they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.
I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.
You're completely off base on the focal length argument.
A traditional camera has the choice and can choose the most appropriate length; an Iphone is locked in to a fish-eye clearly put in there to overcome its inherent limitations.
So it doesn't really matter "if it's fair" or not, because it's not about a fair comparison, it's a demonstration that a traditional camera is just better. Why should the traditional camera use an inappropriate focal length just because the Iphone is forced to?
Every hardware have it's limitations, my DSLR don't fit in my pocket for instance. But that wouldn't be a fair point when comparing photo quality against a smartphone.
Comparing quality with non equivalent focal lengths is as pertinent as to mount a fisheye on the DSLR (because you can!) and then claim that the smartphone have less distortion.
Yes and no. Modern phone cameras are strong enough that you can crop out the centre and get a passable image as if taken with a longer focal length.
The biggest real differences between iPhone and whatever ye-olde-good-standalone-digital-camera are sharpening/edge enhancements and flattening of lighting.
If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly.
The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing.
Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones.
The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image.
But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment.
(Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.)
Agreed, in particular the distortion of the players on the ends, the smaller shoulders and chest, as well as the lean can all be attributed to the wider lens used on the iPhone (and as such that the photo was taken closer to players). I'd guess the author was using the "1x" lens on the iPhone, a lot of these issues go away if they use the "3x" or "5x" lens. I'd even consider that most of the jawline change of the player is simply the angle of their chin/face as well as expression.
The 2x mode of the wide lens is basically the standard “nifty fifty” of a big camera and what the author should have compared to. The 1x is 24mm equivalent which is a focal length I don’t particularly care for, but I get why they picked it (easy to frame a group of people indoors).
For portraits the ideal length is 85mm equivalent which would be 3.5x, rumored to be on the next iphone pro. At this length there is minimal facial feature distortion without getting the flattening effect you get at longer focal lengths.
I'll kindly disagree with you. Like the other commenter, I'm on a 27" HP business monitor comes with color calibration certificate, and the differences are very visible. Moreover, I'm taking photos as a hobby for some time.
The angle, different focal lengths doesn't matter in rendering of the images. The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people. Moreover, we want to be liked as human beings, it's in our nature.
So, phone companies driven by both smaller sensors (that thing is way noisier when compared to a full frame sensor) and market pressure to reduce processing needed to be done by end users (because it inconveniences them), started to add more and more complicated post-processing in their cameras.
The result is this very article. People with their natural complications reduced, skin tones boosted on red parts, sharpened but flatter photos, without much perspective correction and sometimes looking very artificial.
Make no mistake, "professional" cameras also post process, but you can both see this processing and turn it off if you want, and the professional cameras corrects what lens fails at, but smartphones, incl. iPhone makes "happy, social media ready" photos by default.
As, again other commenter said, it's not a limitation of the sensor (sans the noise). Sony supplies most of the higher end sensors in the market, and their cameras or other cameras sporting sensors produced by them got the "best color" awards over and over again, and XPeria smartphones comes with professional camera pipelines after that small sensor, so they can take photos like what you see.
I personally prefer iPhone as my smartphone of my choice, but the moment I want to take a photo I want to spend time composing, I ditch default camera app and use Halide, because that thing can bypass Apple's post-processing, and even can apply none if you want.
>Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone
How do I disable Colour processing?
I think you can get RAW on iPhone? I don't own one so I can't confirm.
On my Pixel RAW is also available, even moreso with the non-standard camera software.
Yes, I shoot in RAW by default most of the time. It can be quickly turned on and off from the stock camera app without even leaving the main screen.
You may have to enable it once in Settings -> Camera -> Formats; I've been using it so long I don't remember what the defaults are. But once you've done that, it's in the top right of the camera app - just tap where it says RAW.
This does not address the detrimental parts of computational photography.
Which I’m personally failing to witness consistently by the “evidence” in this article.
Most of the photo examples here were somewhere between “I can’t tell a significant difference” and “flip a coin and you might find people who prefer the iPhone result more.”
Even less of a difference when they’re printed out and put in a 5x7” frame.
Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0. You already own one. You were going to buy a smartphone anyway for other things. So if we are going to sit and argue about quality we still have to figure out what dollar value these differences are worth to people.
And the “evidence” is supposedly that people aren’t getting their phone photos printed out. But let’s not forget the fact that you literally couldn’t see your film photos without printing them when we were using film cameras.
The problem with computational photography is that it uses software to make photos "look good" for everyday users. That may be an advantage for those users but it is basically a non-starter for a photographer because it makes it a crapshoot to take photos which predictably and faithfully render the scene.
Lots of apps gives you other options for how to process the image data.
I've had a bunch of "high-end" digital SLRs and they (and the software processing the raw files) do plenty computational processing as well.
I completely agree that all else being equal it's possible to get photos with better technical quality from a big sensor, big lens, big raw file; but this article is more an example of "if you take sloppy photos with your phone camera you get sloppy photos".
Your brain also uses software to make what you see look good
I can see a noticeable loss of detail in the iPhone sample photos. Personally, I prefer cameras that prioritize capturing more detail over simply producing visually pleasing images. Detailed photos offer much more flexibility for post-processing.
> Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0.
Many people buy a more expensive smartphone specifically for the better camera module. These are expensive devices! It's good marketing that you perceive that as "free", but in reality, I spend way less money on my fancy camera (new models every five years), than my iPhone-loving friends on their annual upgrades.
Can you really have a 70mm focal length on a phone that is less than 10mm thick? I thought it was simulated by cropping the image from the actual very short focal length.
Usually it's "FOV equivalent", e.g. scaled to a full frame sensor size. Tiny sensor size means you maybe have a 10mm focal length, but the size of the sensor relative to 10mm makes it the FOV of a 70mm lens on a full frame camera.
You see similar when people are comparing APS-C, micro 4/3, or medium format lenses.
Physics really works out such that the smaller you make camera sensor, the smaller you can make the lens. Full-frame lenses tend to be markedly bigger for equivalent quality compared to, say, APS-C lenses.
However, due to physics there is also no working around the quality issues of a small sensor. Photosites get less light and produce more noise, and automated noise suppression costs detail and sharpness.
I wonder whether tiny lenses of equivalent sharpness and clarity as their larger equivalents would be much more expensive or impossible to produce (sure, less material, but much finer precision required), but it probably doesn’t matter because the tiny sensor already loses enough sharpness that better lenses won’t contribute much.
> Physics really works out such that the smaller you make camera sensor, the smaller you can make the lens.
At some point the wave-like nature of light starts to bite. Can't really go much smaller than a micron per pixel. So a millimeter sized chip gets you 1 megapixel. 50MP mean ~7mm. (back of the envelope caveats apply)
> Full-frame lenses tend to be markedly bigger for equivalent quality compared to, say, APS-C lenses.
Only if you define quality as field of view.
For light-gathering ability and background separation/bokeh, you need a lower f/number on APS-C than on full-frame to be equivalent: A 35mm f/1.2 lens on a 24MP APS-C sensor will take pictures that look nearly identical to a 52.5mm f/1.8 lens on a 24MP full-frame sensor. (Assuming crop factor of 1.5.) Both will have an aperture size of 29.17mm (= 35mm/1.2 = 52.5mm/1.8), will capture a 37.9° x 25.8° FoV.
Almost all important properties of lenses are determined by field of view and the aperture diameter: Amount of light gathered, background blur, diffraction, and weight.
The illumination-per-area on the full-frame sensor will be 2.25x lower, but the area of the sensor is 2.25x larger so it cancels out such that both sensors will receive the same number of photons.
Background blur is determined by aperture diameter, field of view, and the distances to the subject and background. Since the two lenses have the same aperture size and field of view, you'd get the same amount of background blur for a given scene.
For many lenses (particularly telephoto lenses), the size and weight are primarily determined by the size of the front element, which needs to be at least as big as the aperture. For wide-angle lenses, you start needing a front element that's significantly wider than your aperture for geometry reasons -- the subject has to be able to see the aperture through the front element, so that relationship breaks down.
(Also with lenses where focal length << flange distance, you start to need extra optics to project the image back far enough. This can mean that a wide-angle lens can be more complicated to build for APS-C than for full-frame on the same mount. Take for example the Rokinon 16mm f/2 at 710g / 87mm long versus the Nikon AF-D 24mm f/2.8 at 268g and 46mm long. This isn't relevant to phone cameras, since those don't need to fit a moving mirror between the sensor and the lens like SLRs do. Phone camera makers can put the lens exactly as far from the sensor as makes sense for their design.)
Slow telephoto lenses for DSLRs are pretty much the only place where crop sensors have an advantage. DSLR autofocus sensors generally need f/5.6 or better. Thus, for a given field of view, you need a bigger aperture + front element for the full-frame lens than the "equivalent" crop-sensor lens -- e.g. a 300 f/5.6 with its 53.6mm front element is going to be heavier than a 200 f/5.6 with its 35.7mm front element. However, as mentioned above, the 300 f/5.6 on a full-frame camera will gather 2.25x as much light as the 200/5.6 on the APS-C sensor. Mirrorless cameras can typically autofocus with smaller relative apertures. This is why you see Sony selling an f/8 zoom and Canon selling f/11 primes for their mirrorless mounts -- this sort of lens just wasn't possible on DSLRs. On mirrorless, you could have a 300 f/8.4 full-frame lens that would be truly equivalent to the 200mm f/5.6 APS-C lens.
I specifically said “equivalent focal length”. Equivalent focal lengths are relative to a 35mm sensor unless otherwise specified, and the actual focal length reduces with sensor size providing the same fov.
By having a tiny sensor, the current iPhone pro has a range of 15-120mm.
Yes, periscope lenses are fairly common on phones. 10x "optical zoom".
Does anyone have experience with aftermarket add-on lenses? Theoretically, they can help with the focal length.
My entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water.
Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.
However:
- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)
- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine
Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
I agree with your iPhone camera advantages, but to that list I'd add that I'm already going to buy an iPhone, which means any comparison of value for the price is effectively between the price of a camera (which for even an entry-level mirrorless isn't exactly cheap) and literally zero dollars. You could argue that the phone would be cheaper without the nice camera to make for a fairer comparison, but such a product doesn't really exist.
This applies only if you assume that you are not willing to spend more on a phone with a better camera and a lot of people do. I have friends who decided to buy an iPhone over way cheaper Android phones in the past, because "the iPhone camera was so much better". Funny enough, the differences were obviously negligible when compared with any actual camera.
And upgrade frequency. You might give your old iPhone another year or two if the phone isn’t your limiting factor for photo quality.
$200 for iphone pro vs regular (I only got Pro for the camera). But otherwise, yeah.
I get sent a lot of photos of me cosplaying at conventions, and something I've noticed is that the phone photos are almost always nicer in general. The people who do photography as a hobby seem to always edit the photo too extreme and you get whack HDR type effects or they just aren't as skilled at manually setting settings as the iphone auto mode.
But, the dedicated camera photos are always massively higher resolution. You can zoom in on details and they look great, while phone photos seem to use AI upscailers and they look bad
Wack HDR is usually the sign of a novice photographer, assuming it's not the phone (my experience is that phones go absolutely insane with the HDR and saturation).
We all go through a period of abusing HDR and saturation, but we usually get over it.
There’s a saying in the photography world:
”The best camera is the one you have on you”
> ”The best camera is the one you have on you”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_Jarvis
Which only holds true if you don't care much about the result.
I've seen people trying to take photos at an airshow using their phone camera. A small black dot in the centre of frame, rendered as an Impressionist oil smudge by post-processing. Was that worth even trying?
The best camera+lens combo is the one suited to the scene. Anything else isn't.
The point is: who cares what the “best” camera is if one doesn’t have it with them to take a photo of the fleeting moment anyway?
Not really, because the scene you want to capture is there at that moment and probably wouldn’t be there anymore if you went back to the apartment/hotel/camera store and swapped out for a technically better kit. That’s what the “best camera” saying is about.
Not only is the iPhone always in your pocket, but it’s easier to carry and deal with.
I remember hearing a story from a well known photographer about a trip he took with a few others, including his wife. They woke up early to head out on a small boat in a lake or something. He was lugging all this gear and having to put a lot of focus into tuning the settings on his camera, he was pretty miserable. Meanwhile, his wife was enjoying morning with no baggage and snapping pics with her phone. She ended up having the best picture of the day, while actually enjoying herself, by not being bogged down by the gear.
Dedicated cameras have their value, but it’s been decreasing for years, and requiring higher and higher levels of skill to make it worth it. Most people could improve their photos dramatically by learning about framing and light, while just using a phone. These things have a much bigger impact on the resulting photo. A professional with an iPhone will always take a better and more interesting picture than an amateur with a DSLR for this reason.
There's always micro four thirds. I think it's a bit of an underappreciated format, really. It can have really compact cameras, and also they tend to have quite a lot of fancy tech in them.
If I transition from semi-pro to pro I am thinking of picking one of those up because the 300mm lens is the equivalent of a 600mm and good for taking pictures of birds but fits in a reasonable backpack. Built in focus-stacking is another advantage over my Sony.
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/tech/android-phones/xiaom...
Lagniappe: https://youtube.com/shorts/shLpGFTQeNQ
Mirrorless APS-C platforms pushed micro 4/3 out, similar footprint with APS-C sensors is hard to beat.
True, but I think micro 4/3 still can be a good deal smaller. It's just that a fair amount of the cameras didn't make good use of that.
There are also great deals on used micro 4/3 lenses
I put a 90mm prime [1] on my Sony, set it to aperture priority, put the strap over someone's head and deputize them to get headshots ("frame it up with the viewfinder and push the button") and they do OK so long as the light is predictable. I wish I could tell the auto mode to let the ISO go higher than it will because I do noise reduction in developing such that there is no real quality loss at 6400.
[1] takes lovely portraits and no focus to deal with
Viltrox, Sirui, Sony themselves, and Samyang have all kicked out really nice 85mm fast primes. $600 down to $400, listed in decreasing weight order (down to 270g!). Yes, whatever you have: it's a massive amount of gear to carry compared to a phone. But what results!
The past 2-4 years have been amazing for lenses: Sony's willingness to let other people make lenses has been an amazing win for photography.
What has changed is the last four years is that Chinese and Korean lens makers have caught up in a big way, and are now producing excellent optics at a fraction of the price with AF and weather sealing (as of now, primes only). For example, the Viltrox Lab and Pro series, or the Samyang 135/1.8. The other Chinese manufacturers are a cut below.
Also, Sigma and Tamron (both Japanese) are putting out more higher quality lenses compared to a decade back. With optical quality rivaling Sony's own G Master series and the Zeissen.
I would love to do: - set aperture priority (fully open for most cases) - set shutter speed to AUTO with a limit (never open for longer than 1/100 s) - set ISO to AUTO with a limit (never go above 6400)
If there is insufficient light, then by all means, the camera should adjust the shutter speed past the limit, but not until it has used all the available "reasonable" ISO range.
It's a shame I have to wrestle my Sony a6400 to get something even remotely close to this.
My entire photography career I was incredibly frustrated that there was no good way to change the minimum shutter speed in aperture priority.
Sure, I could go into a menu and change it from the range of 1/60 or a second to 1/200th (or 1/250th, depending on the camera), but that was it. This is on Nikon, btw.
But yeah, give me more options damnit. It’s something that comes up so frequently when shooting that it blows my mind it’s not an option.
Does this help? https://old.reddit.com/r/SonyAlpha/comments/1dzr9oy/psa_mini...
I love the idea of that 90mm prime.
But usually when I have passers-by take photos, the context is that we are posing in front of a church in Europe or something, and space can be limited.
I can't very well ask people to take a photo and but first to take 20 paces back and then do a crouch!
My wife wants to see our shoes as well as the church spires in the same photo. Maybe a 35mm or even 28mm would work well in our case.
Pro tip: 28mm on full frame (or equivalent) is exactly the same focal length as iPhone 1x ;)
Definitely thinking of getting another prime but a ‘normal’ one with autofocus doesn’t really do anything I can’t with my zooms, I like 7artisans primes and might get one that is crazy wide but those are manual focus and take more skill —- I was so happy to get home and see I nailed this one
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114042752203552070
I find that photos from a prime look better in some undefinable way. Maybe it's because there's more light coming through, or maybe it's just easier for them to make a prime with great optics than a zoom with great optics.
I shoot on manual with auto-ISO straight to JPG (I don't have time for RAW editing), so my prime photos tend to have lower ISO's and I end up with a faster shutter.
All your points are true, but primes tend to have more character as well. I’m no optical engineer so I can’t speak as to why, but it seems like they have more choices on prime design than they do on zooms.
I’m suspicious that a lot of the apparent inherent benefit of a prime lens is that it can’t zoom, which forces the person holding it to think a little bit more about composition.
It would be an amusing experiment to compare a prime lens to a zoom lens that it somehow fixed to the same focal length. Maybe level the playing field a little bit by applying distortion correction to both lenses.
There’s a lot more to it, but I attribute a lot of ‘better in some way’ to microcontrast followed by how the lens handles the transition to out of focus detail.
Yeah, back when I had a Canon my only lens was a wide angle prime. I really like that Sony 90mm prime, DxO says it is Sony's best lens and I think it is.
Ever since I started shooting sports indoors (often w/ that 90mm prime or a 135mm prime) and started to depend on noise reduction I process everything with DxO and tend to use a lot of sharpening and color grading. One day I went out with the kit lens by accident and set the aperture really small and developed the "Monkey Run Style" for hyperrealistic landscapes that look like they were shot with a weird Soviet camera.
The lens I walk around with the most and usually photograph runners with is the Tamron 28-200 which is super-versatile for events and just walking around, I used it for the last two albums here
https://www.yogile.com/537458/all
but for the Forest Frolic I used my 16-35mm Zeiss but it was tough because it was raining heavily -- I was lucky to have another volunteer who held an umbrella for me, but I couldn't lean in. The last one (Thom B) was not color graded because I'd had some bad experiences color grading sports when I got the color of the jersey wrong but now I use color grades that are less strong -- at Trackapalooza the greens just came out too strident and I had to bring them down.
To give you some idea of how powerful noise reduction is, this shot
https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lv32zudu2c2d
was done in ISO 80,000 with that Tamron -- I wouldn't say it looks perfectly natural for a picture of cat that was not standing still in a room in a basement that is amazing.
Incredible, in the 90's I could barely take a picture of my dog in broad daylight, and it cost money for the film, and I had to wait forever to get the photos back, and then the dog was blurry.
BTW your yogile album is private.
See these
https://www.yogile.com/forest-frolic-2025#21m
https://www.yogile.com/trackapalooza-2025#21m
https://www.yogile.com/thom-b-2025#21m
I have no nostalgia for film, I could not afford to take 1500 film photos at a sports event -- even a photo like this which doesn't seem that remarkable
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114401857009398302
wouldn't have come out that good handheld with a 35mm back in the day.
There's measurements to support your feeling that primes are better than zooms: https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/11/stopping-down-some-... and https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/02/things-you-didnt-wa...
On many Sony models, you can set the camera to aperture priority instead of auto, set ISO to Auto ISO, and then change the max ISO to whatever you want; this is what I do in your situation.
If I set aperture priority to "maximum possible light in", I often have an issue that when there is insufficient light, the camera decreases shutter speed instead of cranking up the ISO (to the set upper limit), which would be much more desireable. This results in blurry images due to the longer exposure. I would much more prefer a grainy image over a blurred one in this case.
Do you know if there is any option of setting a limit on shutter speed while in aperture mode?
(I understand I can go full manual, but that just doesn't allow for the same point-and-shoot experience in changing light conditions.)
Sony a6700 can. https://old.reddit.com/r/SonyAlpha/comments/1dzr9oy/psa_mini...
> but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in
And so, the reasons why Fuji and point-and-shoots are popular. Lots of “serious” photography enthusiasts don’t really get this and call Fujis “hype” cameras but it’s like bashing Wordpress because most people don’t want to learn AWS to post cat pics.
> The iPhone is always in my pocket
Rationale for both point-and-shoots as well as Leica (also hated by lots of serious camera people ;)).
This is the opposite of my experience.
I went from a D300s kit with about $10k of lenses to Fuji. I had an X100s, then an X-E2, and now an X-Pro3.
The X-Pro3 especially is light, has excellent physical controls, and very much feels like a vintage Leica. It's what I'd consider an "art camera" -- not what I'd choose if I were shooting weddings regularly, but perfect for street photography, family stuff, and perfectly capable of higher-end commercial work if you're willing to put up with its quirks.
The quirks are the point, though.
They were popular. Are they still? Just observationally there are two groups left, phone users, and people with very expensive complex setups. Everyone who would have bought those simple cameras moved on to using phones.
By the numbers, the casual cameras are having a quiet turnaround.
Fuji and Ricoh can hardly keep their X100 and GR cameras stocked. Fuji added extra production capacity in China because it exceeded their expectations. I brought them up specifically because the serious camera people rag on them for being hype cameras, but I see plenty of everyday people with them. Go to places like the High Line in NY and there’s folks with A6700s and various X-mount cameras in addition to the serious full-frame mounts. Leica is doing financially well because of their Q series.
I think five years ago you could say it was just two groups, but by the numbers and by what I see in the streets, the point and shoots have been prematurely declared dead. Fuji and Sony are meanwhile figuring out how to sell APS-C to a more casual crowd, after the other old players effectively left that market.
I think these are good points. It boils down to: are you interested in photography or do you just want to have photographs? If it's the former, get a camera. If it's the latter, stick with the phone.
> are you interested in photography or do you just want to have photographs?
If it's the former, take the time to understand not only your gear but also light and image processing (whether digital or film). If it's the latter, and you are a stickler for pixels get a digital camera, if not stick with the phone.
I'm interested in photography, but I won't buy a digital camera. My last film camera was a Minolta 700si (in the 90's) and a camera bag full of lens and flashes and other gadgets (filters shades etc), but was a far cry from the $10k professional camera with professional studio film processing. If you understand your gear, light, and how the images are going to be output (film or digital processing) you can get great images from whatever you are woking with.
Photography vs Photographs isn't about how many pixels a camera has or other limitations of a camera. It's what you do with it. Back in the day I preferred black & white film because I could control the entire processing cycle (I wasn't very good at color processing when the local camera shop could do it faster and better). Now I like the challenge of Photography with the limitations of a phone. Does that make it not "real" Photography? or not a real interest in Photography?
To me that where the difference is for "photography", a phone and dedicated digital camera are still digital. They are still processed and captured with the same medium, so learn it and understand it.
One might have greater ability to capture more light and thus not need the same amount of processing or setup, but it's still processed and produced from digital pixels. Both allow for any amount of post processing, but you have to know how to shoot with the device especially if there are more light capture limitations like a phone. If you just want photographs, put either in auto mode and you get what you get. Paying more for a dedicated camera just makes it easier to do, that doesn't make it "photography" over a more physically limited but still digital, phone camera.
I sort of agree, but I also think there is lot that goes into taking interesting photos as an art beyond the technical capabilities of the camera you are using. Certainly a good camera can produce a better end product and can enable dimensions of creative freedom that's more difficult with a smartphone. But the process of picking an interesting subject, figuring out the angle and composition of the frame, finding the right light and time of day, etc, are all independent of the camera you're using and something you can explore with just the smartphone you already have in your pocket.
I differentiate between photos for memory and records, and Photos for Photography as an art form.
I get what you’re saying, but I was a wedding photographer for ten years and that’s a job where ideally you’re doing both. That carried over to my personal life.
Not that I don’t ever take snapshots - I do - but instead of just taking a picture of your kid from eye level, you can get down on their level and wait until their head is turned so they’re shortlit from light from the window.
Of course, in that job you also quickly learn that the moment trumps everything. A technically awful photo of a great genuine smile or someone falling in the lake or whatever is usually better than an incredibly composed and lit photo of a person just sitting there…usually.
Also:
- your entry level mirrorless is ~$300 of camera HW vs ~$80 of camera HW on the phone (very very rough estimate of sensor+lens BOM)
- the mirrorless doesn't have any of the physical constraints of being tiny and fitting in a pocket, which directly impact image quality
iPhones cameras are really amazing given the constraints.
Phone cameras don't come close to any of my "real" cameras with my decades of experience shooting and composing ... but phone cameras absolutely obliterate anything I was shooting with a film camera as a beginner back when film was a thing. I have also arguably learned far more about photography with my phone, because of its portability and zero cost experimentation, than I have with ANY "real" camera.
But, perhaps most importantly, along the lines of what others have noted: you know, my phone camera may not be as good, but I have zero complaints about the impromptu photos of my kid growing up that I could never have caught with anything else.
I would add that part of the reason it’s ~$80 of hardware is absolutely economies of scale.
It’s a lot easier to pump out quality parts for less money when you order 10 million of them and potentially helped finance a factory to build them.
i mean, he didn't say that the iphone camera was bad, just that it doesn't stand up to dedicated gear (which it doesn't, but a lot of people will tell you, especially apple's "shot on iphone" marketing campaign, that it will).
Has the HDR workflow improved? I'm not talking about the ugly tone mapping, I mean proper bit-preserving HDR, out of the camera.
All the displays I own are HDR, and something like a picture of a sunset, or even landscape, is so much better on my phone than my older Canon DSLR.
2025 Lightroom and Photoshop have a vastly better HDR workflow for working with RAW and exporting to AVIF or JPEG with embedded HDR luminance map that shows up correctly on iOS or in Chrome on MacOS with the display set to HDR. I don’t know about Android or windows.
I have re-exported files that I took in 2007 with the Nikon D7 that I kept the raw files for. They are vastly improved with modern processing (and noise reduction) vs what I exported from the same negative back then. The bit depth was always high enough.
Curious what camera model you have. I've been meaning to get into photography and I'm looking for a decent starter camera.
It depends on your budget and interests. In terms of sensor size, Micro Four Thirds (from Olympus and Panasonic) is generally the most affordable, but it comes with a smaller sensor. APS-C offers a middle ground, while Full Frame is the most popular and typically delivers the best image quality.
Personally, I use Sony APS-C the most because of its smaller size, lighter weight, and more affordable lenses. Among APS-C systems, Sony and Fuji offer the widest lens selection. Fuji gear tends to be overpriced now, but it does have a stylish look.
Micro Four Thirds lenses are usually cheaper and more lightweight.
If you're shooting fast-moving subjects like birds or Formula 1 racing, Canon and Nikon are the most popular choices. They offer a wide range high performance lenses designed for demanding situations.
I bought a Canon RP which came with a 24-105mm zoom. I think it was CAD 1000 a couple of years ago, but it looks like that has inflated to around double now.
I went with the recommendation of Ken Rockwell who is both experienced and opinionated, and said to buy that one at the time. https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/recommended-cameras.htm
He was right!
- small, especially if you put a 50mm prime lens on it (which costs ~ CAD 150 by the way)
- light
- full frame sensor (fundamentally better photo quality, but need bigger lenses to zoom)
- battery life is OK but not great. You can easily get through a full day of touristing with one spare battery though.
Get a Fuji
Can’t go wrong with Fuji. It’s fucking expensive now though
I've had passer-bys take group photos with a real camera, no problem. What issues do you run into?
"Which button do I press" comes up every time; other times it's focus or zoom level that's out.
On the iPhone, ~everyone on the planet instinctively knows how to do it.
I usually just tell people.
> "Which button do I press"
The Big One.
> focus
It's automatic. (If I'm handing a stranger my camera.)
> zoom level
This is maybe the hardest one, I guess, … but I do think most people have seen enough TV cop dramas to instinctively know. Or, they can just take the photo at the zoom I've handed them, and it won't be a big deal. Walking forward a few steps is also like zooming.
100% agree. I went on holiday at the start of this year and took my iPhone 15 Pro with me. I bought a mirrorless camera and went back because I was that disappointed with it. No joke. I regret using a phone for most of my family photos for the last 10-15 years and should have just used my old D3100 instead.
I think the processing is getting worse. I look at photos I took with my Nexus 6P and they look much nicer than my Pixel 7/9Pro photos. At some point everybody decided that the most important thing about photos is preserving as much dynamic range and having no noise. This makes the photos look fake and unpleasant.
Yeah agree with that. I’ve got a backup pixel 7A. That does some horrible things to photos.
It’s really a night a day difference once you spend just a little amount of time learning your camera. I always show people the difference in quality with two photos of my wife and kids during Fourth of July.
One shot is with my iphone15, the other with my Fujifilm xt5. It’s such a stark difference
Do you show them on a monitor or large prints or on your phone?
I’ve long thought the main “issue” with people not realizing the difference is that they’re just looking at photos on their phones, where the images are so small it’s harder to appreciate the difference. I rarely try to take photos apart from snapshots with my phone because I’ll invariably be really disappointed when I view them on my monitor.
Which camera do you have?
Canon RP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44725774
The new(ish) Adobe Project Indigo attempts to rectify some of these - it generally captures pictures in a more SLR-ish manner, even when it outputs HDR. It does RAW capture and has decent control options if you want that.
However, it's a battery hog and can be a bit sluggish to get going, and there are some weird interactions with the built in photos app (if you crop the photo after the fact in the Photos app it pushes all the colour towards purple in the thumbnail, but not in the actual image).
I'm already happy enough with the image quality that I can overlook these flaws, which will hopefully get fixed over time. People should try it to see what they think.
My phone is too old for this app :(
The distortion of faces near the edges of iPhone photos is, in my opinion, the biggest issue with iPhone photos. So much so that I avoid being at the edges of group photos specifically for this reason. And it gets worse as you approach the edge of the frame. If you are barely in-frame, you will look like you've gained 30lbs and you've just had a stroke.
Yeah, and it’s an interesting problem because for a lot of casual photos, most people won’t care. But once you do care, there’s suddenly no recourse.
Folks will say it’s just the focal length. But can you crop when your sensor is already that small?
These are some good examples. I'd love more on this.
I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone.
I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc.
But I've come to the conclusion that once you start look closely there's absolutely no comparison.
One thing I've started doing is creating custom photo books from all my photos. It's really helped me focus my photography. When doing this though I've noticed how edited phone photos are, as well as how poor the quality actually is (particularly in low light).
The quality issue is understandable (it's physics). The editing issue is a bit more insidious I think.
All in all, if you just want to view phone photos on your phone, they look great. But if you're actually interested in photography and printing, you should get a dedicated camera.
I took my Fuji XT-2 and 27mm pancake lens on a recent trip, after leaving it at home the previous few. Every time, I find the Fuji takes more work and skill than I have to develop good photos after the fact. I too often blow out the sky, for example.
Unfortunately, the less I use it, the worse I get. So snagging my "nice" camera for a vacation, then spending a lot of time making sure I lug it around and use it, and then having the results be, frankly, bad, is really frustrating. In particular, I have quite a few photos that are.. either blurry, or out of focus, and it's hard to tell which. I am pretty careful to ensure I hold the camera still, and have a sufficient shutter speed, but I'm definitely messing something up.
I need to take more time to practice at home rather than capturing a thousand frames over 3 weeks and hoping they're good (like the bad old days of film!)
digicams are making a huge comeback among young adults. Even a pocket digicam is a big step up from iPhone imo.
The CCD digicams that are trending aren’t known for the technical quality of their sensors of lenses or whatnot, but the CCD low dynamic range aesthetic
I have a Ricoh GIII which is astonishing for its size. That said, it’s expensive so probably not an entry level pocket camera.
The GR III? I’m curious how the autofocus is on it, I tried one out at B&H but I think the autofocus was busted
Photos taken on an iPhone are good, unless you:
* zoom in
* print them
* watch them on a bigger screen
Sometimes I compare photos I've taken over 10 years ago with Sony NEX-5 with photos I take today with an iPhone. There's no competition, APS-C from 15 years ago is still solid.
Anyway, the best camera is the one you have with you, so in that sense iPhone is great.
After reading the article I might dust off my DSLR, however the fact that I have my iPhone with me most of the time will never change - so more than 99% of my photos/videos will be captured by that thing.
It was a nice analysis of wide angle lenses, what processing is needed to adjust for the physical limitations, and on processing picture.
From there:
> Real cameras capture shadow more accurately.
> professional cameras
That's saying that real cameras don't use wide angle lenses nor have an image processing pipeline, and professionals of the field have adequately labeled cameras.
This kinda makes the whole piece so shallow and weirdly ideological, when it doesn't need to be. People interested enough in the craft will spend time knowing their gear, the strength and limitations, and work with it.
Phone cameras now give more and more access to the underlying mechanisms and RAW formats. There's of course tons of photos I'd want to put in my wall coming from my phone, they're just really great for subjects that properly match the lenses strengths. iPhones or Pixel phones aren't perfect or ideal in all conditions, but what camera is ?
My only significant gripe with phone cameras is that they oversharpen everything. Sharpening can subjectively make things look better as long as you don't zoom in too much, but has one significant problem: desaturation. In high-detail high-contras areas, e.g. the foreground grass, the sharpening pushes many of the pixels towards black or white, which are, notably, not green. This has the overall effect of desaturating these textures, and is the impetus for
Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.
Unfortunately, if the phone camera images are processed without oversharpening, the results are extremely soft.
Also, the wide lenses on most phones are actually very heavily distorted nearly to the point of being fisheye, and made rectilinear with processing.
Yeah, and even with sharpening it's noticeably softer when you zoom in on the photo.
For fisheye, I guess it would have been more accurate to say: the perspective distortion is present in both photos and is stronger for the iphone photo due to a shorter effective focal length, and there is no noticeable fisheye/barrel distortion in the iphone photo.
My expectation is that in a few years from now, the raw photo taken by the mobile camera will merely serve as an input to some AI image generator which will then produce a top-quality pro photographer grade image at whatever resolution you like with whatever changes you command ("without all those 1000s of tourisms in front of the Louvre except my wife"). The photo will be fake but will capture the scene that you have in mind better than any pro photographer could.
Have yet to see AI doing anything remotely close to real life image even now.
uncertain what to think about this comment. Are you living under a rock?
In 2021, Samsung introduced a feature called Moon Mode that, without the user's knowledge, substituted an artificial intelligence image of the moon for a moon photo.
Moon-gate: Samsung fans are mad about AI-processed photos of the moon : https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/samsung-says-it-adds...)
The amount of people who get really defensive when people actually point out that, no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera is kinda crazy.
> no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera
9 times out of 10 when I see someone making this claim it’s engagement bait. They know it triggers people and generates interactions.
I think most people are well aware that they’re not the same. The point usually made is that it’s amazing that we can get such good photos out of something that fits in our pockets. In well-lit scenes you really can get some impressive image quality out of those tiny devices.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a single actual case of this. But I also haven’t seen a single actual case of anyone having any loud opinions about their phones for many many years now. I might just be finally old.
I take a iphone and a nikon z5 with me. in their defense, if you dont' know what you're doing, the iphone will consistently take better photos. my z5 photo beat it any day but I had to learn how to be intentional with it in order to get that difference.
I just started looking at photos and videos we took on vacation. I have an iPhone 16 Pro.
And when I use the Photos app on my Apple TV to review a couple videos I took, I'm surprised at the weird, wavy quality I'm seeing in them. It's really strange.
I will compare this to the videos I took with my Sony a6700. But until then, I'm surprised at how odd the videos looked on a large OLED TV. Might be compression from iCloud or something. Can't quite explain it otherwise.
I have no shortage of friends who asked me why I bothered to buy a real camera, but if you're a hobbyist photographer, it's nice to use a real camera and have full control. There are apps that do let you do this on a smartphone, and it's definitely more convenient.
But there's something about the real photos (with real Bokeh) that still look much better to me.
When I owned an S21 Ultra, I found the photos were horribly paintbrushed due to excessive machine-learning. They look nice on a little screen, but pixel peeping is terrible.
Using a OnePlus 12 now, and find the photos much less overprocessed (and wavy).
iCloud videos look terrible on Apple TV, the first time it caught me by surprise too. The originals are significantly nicer.
I upgraded to the 16p instead of buying a new wide angle lens. The real bokeh is definitely nicer though.
I'm always sad when I pull up holidays photos on my monitor. Even though Pixels make great photos, they're great only on small OLED screens. Gonna clean the dust out of Nikon D3200 with proper lens and use that instead. Casual photos will be made byy wife anyway
It might not be for everyone, but digging in the camera controls helped tremendously for me.
In particular, manual focus with the actual focus scale (no tap around on some surrogate object) and in-focus indicator, control to set a lower ISO in scenes where the phone wants to pull a faster image, or set a higher shutter speed even on darker situations.
Or on the pro line you get the option to stop automatic lens switching, which gives a lot more control (stay on the best lens/sensor and adjust for it yourself, instead of the phone trying to be clever)
All in all it stops being a point and shoot, and there will be a more missed pictures because of wrong settings, but the highs are also a lot higher in my experience. And it can go back to the "all auto" mode anytime.
On my Pixel, I'm always torn with using GCam or another camera app. GCam photos are definitely better on small screens, but every time you zoom in, you get AI artifacts, letters that shouldn't be here. It basically reconstructs the image from the original and blurrier photo. The other apps without these transformation lead to better quality on zoomed photos but the overall preview looks less good. This is especially true when digital zoom is involved.
Like this or worse? https://yager.io/comp/comp.html
Way worse. At least here the text looks like the original.
Here is an example of what that looks like: https://imgur.com/Q4J5BHi
In case it isn't obvious due to the zoom and lack of context:
- The texture on the top and windshield don't exist, it's plain gray.
- The letters on the card actually read something, here it's gibberish. Sometimes half a letter, sometimes a texture that doesn't exist.
I have a Pixel 6 Pro. I played a bit with it's raw format when I got it. It's fairly impressive; especially for night time photography. When that came out, both Apple and Google sourced their sensors from Sony. I think that's still the case. At the hardware level, there's not that much difference between cameras in different phones. Most of the differences are created in software.
The dng files that come out of my Pixel phone down sample from 50 mega pixels to 12.5. You can't access the original 50 mega pixels. So each pixel has information from 4 "real" pixels. That's fairly effective for getting rid of noise. I took some night shots with it and it holds up pretty well. It actually makes Google's night vision AI mode a bit less impressive because the starting point isn't that bad.
My other camera is a Fuji X-T30. The lenses and sensor are clearly better on that one if you look at the raw files. More detail, dynamic range, etc. But at night it's kind of weak (noise). And if you are into that, Fuji's film emulation produces pretty pleasing jpg files without a lot of work. I shoot raw so I tend to ignore that. But it's a somewhat fair comparison because in both cases there isn't much post processing. Except the Fuji isn't doing a lot of AI trickery and is just relying on a good results that come out of the camera and applying a prefab tone mapping that resembles what film used to do.
The difference of course is that with the Fuji, you are making lots of creative choices with focal range, depth of field of the lens (aperture), shutter speeds, and ISO while you are shooting. You don't really have that with a smart phone (though you can have some control). The iphone and pixel phones fake some of this stuff and some people like the portrait mode with the fake bokeh. Lens quality is amazing given the size of phones these days. But it's not the same as shooting with a proper lens and they do have some real physical limitations.
And if you shoot raw, you gain a lot of control over tone mapping etc. Not for everyone of course. But also not the end of the world with the right software. I use Darktable for this and if you dial that in properly, it's not actually a lot of work.
That being said, my pixel takes decent photos without a lot of effort and there is value in that. I have it with me by default and that is invaluable. I only use the Fuji a few times per year. But there's less art to using a smart phone. Point and tap on the button and hope for the best.
Computerized phone photography is not for desktop viewing, printing, etc. It appears to look "amazing" on phone displays - probably optimized for that.
And nowadays unless you professionally shooting photos for a billboard, bedroom poster or newspaper advert - that is clearly enough. 99%+ of photo viewing is done on a phone or tablet screen.
I got interested in photography during my travels, and my wife is very interested in it.
I bought a decent camera. I really enjoyed playing with it, and spent some happy hours learning about it. I even took some decent photos (well, I liked them anyway).
But in the end, carrying it became a chore and trying to take off-the-cuff photos during adventures took too long. I found that we needed to go for specific "photography adventures" with the camera, with the intent of taking photographs with the camera, in order to use it. If we were going for a trip without the specific aim of taking photographs it was just easier to use the phone cameras.
Also the camera photos were stuck on the camera, while the phone photos were instantly usable in social media, and shareable from the Google/Apple Photos. I have a portable drive folder somewhere with all the camera photos, but I never see them. The phone photos are a search away.
I think it's the difference between "being a photographer" and "taking photos". I am not a photographer, I just want to take some photos and share them with my friends. They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again. All the comments in the article are accurate but meaningless in this context.
On the other had, if you're a photographer and want to take a photograph that someone will hang on their wall, all the comments in the article are accurate and relevant.
Why can't you be both? I am an amateur photographer, but it doesn't mean that I carry my camera with me everywhere that I go. I see photography as a hobby, so when I feel like I want to do "hobby things" I bring a camera with me. I prepare myself to do so. It doesn't mean that I don't use my phone camera at all (in fact I upgraded my phone purely for the "better camera").
If you are just taking snapshots to share with friends, then it makes sense to not bring the camera. But if it's your hobby, where you sit down and take time and care to take a photo, then it's a different game altogether.
I don't often print my photos out and put them on a wall, but I do have my own photography blog where I post the photos I take (with a camera). I think the article is still relevant to that kind of scenario too.
I think the purpose of this kind of page is to outline differences between taking a snapshot and taking a photo. This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time. It also attempts to combat the prevalent myth that more megapixels = better photos. Yes that myth still exists in 2025.
yeah agree. I decided I wasn't a photographer, though I'm still interested in it.
> This is to argue back at people who think that taking a photo with an iPhone is just as good _in any situation_ and think that _anyone_ with a camera is wasting their time.
"Never argue with idiots. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Seriously, are there people who think that iPhones are just as good as dedicated cameras, and can still tie their own shoelaces?
My biggest gripe is with iPhone photos today is the way small details get mangled beyond recognition. Small text looks like it was sent through a hallucinating LLM (which it probably was!)
It feels like things are going backwards. I was never much of a pixel peeper, but in my last few iphones, 14/15/16 pro, I'm regularly noticing the airbrushing of all of the things.
I recently switched to an imported phone with a bulky 1" sensor (Vivo X100 Ultra) and although far from my Sony mirrorless, the quality of shots and color science went up dramatically compared to my older Pixel 9 Pro (way overprocessed) and iPhone 13 (way oversaturated and pretty low-res). This is not to say there's no AI or strong computational component to it, but larger and more expensive sensors, which still have not found their way in mainstream phones, do bring massive advantage if they are not killed by excessive AI processing (as, sadly, I saw multiple times when test-driving Samsung Ultra phones)
Ironically enough, the Vivo ("Zeiss") color science also looks more accurate than most phones I've owned, and is pretty flexible at editing time.
woah I am the author. I don't even have analytics set up on this site, but hope everyone enjoys it!
Feedback: I absolutely love the idea of doing analysis like this, but it's incredibly frustrating to be shown photos that were clearly taken at different times when the subjects naturally don't look exactly the same. Like for example who's to say that player isn't actually leaning? The second photo sure doesn't prove anything. And comparing them side by side feels like an exercise in frustration.
I would probably (if possible) repeat this idea but with photos taken at the same time, with cameras as close to each other as possible. If at all possible I would also try to use as similar of a lens as possible, if only as a 3rd comparison point to compare the other two to.
The building shot perfectly illustrates all his points, very little difference between them.
The child in the surf is almost identical. Maybe a few ms of difference, look at the foot position.
The facial structure differences in the players were striking despite not being identical shots.
you'll have to believe me when I say they are not leaning. They were just standing there posing for the photo.
Would love for someone else to get more scientific about it, but I think the results would be the same.
> you'll have to believe me when I say they are not leaning. They were just standing there posing for the photo.
I mean, if believing your words were enough to convey the message, then there'd be no point in taking the second photo and comparing them.
The point here isn't whether you're telling the truth (of course you are), it's about being able to see what's going on and get an intuitive feel for what changes and what stays the same. When I said "who's to say they're not leaning" my point wasn't to call you a liar; it was to say that that question is what immediately arises in your audience's brain, and it's completely distracting. Trust can't correct for the visual discrepancy, even if I had taken for the photo myself.
I was pretty irked by that as well. The change from smiling to not smiling affects face shape. But at least the building and car photos were stationary enough to illustrate the fisheye quality.
One observation i'd expected to see is sensor size versus apparent focal length - this might be at least one of the reasons for distorsion. iPhone camera is ±7mm, which is ±4x crop factor in 35mm terms - but it's marketed as ±26mm.
There is apps like Halide or Photon that have a Process Zero or TrueRaw mode that is more natural. Of course a phone is just an other tool with different constraints. I gave up paying 2 or 3 times the price of my phone for a dedicated camera. I like the lightness and integrated software to edit photos and share them on the spot. I made that sacrifice knowing I’ll never have the same quality but I don’t have to carry a big camera now. But for passionate people who want the best you can’t replace a dedicated camera with a phone
What kind of camera was used for the non-iphone shots?
sony a6400 with sigma 30mm f/1.4, but then the child one is a 2004 Digicam I think a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W5
I like the comparisons! I think it's 100% fair to compare the "out of the box" images from the iPhone to other cameras. With that said, some notes:
I think a lot of the differences you're seeing are the result of FOV differences; the iPhone camera is a ~24mm equivalent, which is much wider than most people would shoot on a dedicated camera. That wide-angle distortion is just a natural part of the 24mm focal length, but not really the iPhone's fault.
The other effects you're seeing are related to Apple's default image processing, which, at this point, most people would agree is too aggressive. This difference goes away if you shoot in ProRAW and process your photos in an app that allows you to dial down (or ideally turn off) local tone mapping.
If you have an iPhone that shoots 48MP ProRAW, don't be afraid to crop the image significantly, which increases the effective focal length and makes the image look more like a dedicated camera. It also increases the apparent bokeh, which is actually quite noticeable on close-ups. With the RAW you can then quickly edit the image to end up colors which are much more faithful and natural.
If anyone out there doesn't have a Pro model, they can shoot RAW photos in 3rd party camera apps, including Lightroom, which is free.
To my knowledge none of the photo oriented cameras of the market have the processing capabilities of a modern iPhone.
These things can casually record 4k 60 for as long as your storage can survive with the best OIS. Night mode photo check. HDR mode check.
I wish Apple was selling their processing hardware to camera vendors.
a6700 can do quality 4k120 for as long as you want and has IBIS, HDR and real lenses.
I know what I'd rather take pictures with.
Isn't that because the processing is not supposed to happen in-camera?
I basically agree with the author that the iPhone's camera is inferior to dedicated cameras, at least in the hands of a photographer who's learned to use them. To me it's striking that there's even a question. My first camera as a child was a cheap film camera[0], and the first digital cameras I saw firsthand, as cool as they were at the time, had even worse quality. Now smartphones have much better quality for people pointing and shooting and do it while crammed into a device that does many other things.
Now, I'd hate for dedicated cameras to go away. I love shooting on SLRs, digital and film. I see smartphone cameras not as pretenders to the throne but as democratizing tools lowering the barrier for entry and a great way to get shots when you don't have your dedicated camera.
[0]: for the record, the issue with the camera was that it was cheap and I didn't know what I was doing, not that it was film.
At least the "real" camera won't be hallucinating detail that isn't there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365510
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482085
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39926633 (sanity prevails)
If you read through the thread on that top story, it wasn't a hallucination. There was really a leaf in the shot.
Reminds me of the Xerox bug: https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0?si=b9ke9s1LHWm1WsdU
I prefer what the author calls “hot dog skin” in the examples
I see lots of framed iPhone pictures. I have a few in my house. They’re not big, but they’re pictures of happy moments that are worth printing. Using the 5x lens helps, but good composition, cropping, and fine tuning colors does as well.
Most of the issues noted are because of the wide angle lens of the iPhone. The more expensive iPhones (the Pro models) have 3 lenses one of which can produce photos similar to a traditional camera.
Yes, the distortion noted in the article is also seen in wide angle lenses on traditional cameras.
The iPhone photo in the blog is iPhone 16 Pro which has the 3 lenses (I am the author).
And which lens was used?
which lens on my iPhone? Just the camera app like everyone else. For the good photo, it's a 30mm lens on Sony a6400 (45mm equivalent)
There are three different lenses on the iPhone 16 Pro. Which one gets used is determined by the "zoom" level you pick. The "0.5x" picks the widest angle lens, the "1x" and "2x" use the same lens, and the "5x" uses the third lens.
If you wish to reduce optical distortion and can get farther away from the subject, you'll want to pick the "5x" zoom. Think somebody else here said it was a 105mm equivalent, which sounds about right.
Intermediate values are obviously crops... although given that the 0.5x and the 1x lens are both 48mp sensors (IIRC), and the resulting image is typically 12mp, it doesn't make as big of a quality difference as one might ordinarily think.
Yes, but on the camera app, you should set 3x to use the longest lens. This will avoid distortion.
It appears the long lens on that phone is 120mm-equivalent ("5x") and any intermediate zoom is just cropping. A 2x "zoom" (crop) would get pretty close to the field of view of the author's dedicated camera lens, but with further reduced image quality.
Actually using the iPhone telephoto for a group photo like the one shown in the article would require the photographer to stand a considerable distance from the subjects, and then we might start noticing a little perspective distortion from the 45mm-equivalent lens on the Sony.
Please, stop posting about cameras. You’re embarrassing yourself and everyone else.
What’s with this overtly hostile attitude.
For mid to long ranges, a dedicated camera with A Big Lens is still the way to go, but for wide angle and landscapes the better iphone cameras are very competitive.
Similar to what? IQ? Amount of light capture? The first is a function of the second.
Longer effective focal length, reducing wide-angle distortion.
This is exactly it. A lot of the author's comments about skin tone and 'flat' colour are spot on though.
To your point, take six steps back and use the 5x zoom on an iPhone Pro and you'll get a much better effect.
As they say, the best camera is the one you have in your pocket. Physics means it can never replace a large sensor with a large lens...
... But Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, The Beach, Trainspotting, 127 Hours) was quite happy to film 28 Years Later entirely on the iPhone 15 Pro Max [1].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/28-years-later-danny-boyles-new-...
For 28 Years Later, note that while the iPhone sensor did in fact ultimately collect the photons for the movie, they attached substantial professional-grade glass to the front to augment the phone camera.
My understanding is that all that extra gear is mainly to enable more ergonomic manual control for things like focus. The matte box and ND filter are probably the biggest boosts to image and motion quality, and there are affordable ways to get those on your phone.
I see iPhone pictures posted on walls all the time, because most people aren't pretentious.
The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
Don't underestimate the power of the subject's comfort and state of mind. Gramma is happy to get the picture, she doesn't care how it got taken.
> The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
What an odd thing to infer. Just a really large leap.
> Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.
Considering there are 2 photos of the same subjects, this reasoning becomes very order-dependent, we don't know the order of the photos taken, so we shouldn't be judging the photos on things affected by that.
We should, however, so judge the claim that the photos are directly comparable, as is attempted here.
I honestly can't tell what the site author is trying to do. Criticizing oversaturation is reasonable. Claiming the camera is responsible for differences in pose and composition is madness.
The claim is that the pose hasn't changed, but how the camera represents the pose has, due to distortion, perspective, et al.
All these photos also seem to be taken at a further distance at a higher zoom with the digicam. Use 2x mode on iphone and step back a bit and the perspective/distortion should be similar. 12mp is still plenty. Also, they didn't mention if they turned off face smoothing on the iphone.
Google a couple years ago, however, made a big stink that they were forcing an always-on filter to "enhance" the appearance of dark skin on Pixels, so yeah you might need a real camera to get accurate photos of subjects with darker skin if you have a pixel.
There isn't an "accurate photo" that you can objectively adjudicate. All digital camera outputs are highly processed to get appealing results. The fact that you think Real Tone on the Google Pixel was "a big stink" only tells us about you, not Google.
It would have made more sense if they explained it as part of an overall tonemap accuracy update. Which does probably produce better overall results to be fair.
what? You can literally objectively see how much more “normal” they look on an actual camera. Especially the guy on the left, he looks atrocious on the iPhone
How else to justify spending thousands on a device that can only shoot pictures?
> a 2004 Sony Digicam with a paltry 5.1 MP
thousands rubbles?
Do you know how childish you sound? That specialized equipment that does one thing really really fucking well is expensive? Is this supposed to be a gotcha
Competence. But you're right something is off here.
Framing is different because of bad lens choice on the photo part (why always shoot wide angle??) and this skews the results immensely and unfairly (composition is the most important thing in a photo).
Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.
"you will have the average complexion and you will like it" rofl
who are you quoting?
it seems you accept having your skin color changed by the iPhone algorithm... I do not accept that so was making light of it
All cameras imprint their own color signature to photos, so I really don't understand what you're talking about. Some people buy exclusively Canon cameras because their JPEG profiles give "good" skin tones straight out of the camera. Does that mean they are "accepting" Canon's opinion of what skin should look like?
Yes. Everyone does, with every manufacturer, and Apple evidently has determined their visual style. At least they also provide you with an optional semi-raw output you can freely edit if you so desire.
Not really. Look at the sky, it's very different between the two. This is something I've noticed constantly with iPhones in particular. To the point where I don't bother trying to take photos that focus on the sky or sunset as it heavily processes the results (extreme oranges and deep blues).
Those are the colors people like. Go and look at how photographers usually try to make skies more dramatic for clients in all kind of photoshoots (weddings, events, postcard pictures, etc.). That's what the market wants. You can disagree, but it's not like smartphone companies are incompetent and don't know how photography works (not that you have made this claim)
I don’t think we disagree. It’s the broader point of phones now doing the editing for you. If you enjoy photography then this is “worse” as you would prefer to do that yourself in Lightroom. If you don’t enjoy photography this is “better” as your result look great without additional effort (for me it’s the former).
Phones have always been designed for "normal" people, nonetheless manufacturers are actually giving pros more tools than ever. Smartphone photography might have been less processed in the early 2010s, but the outputs were difficult to edit and jpeg only. At least nowadays the big players allow you to shoot also in raw formats. Before smartphones, "normal" people who wanted to take photos without bothering too much would have simply shot in JPEG and blindly trusted the color decisions from the camera manufacturer, or by the chemical engineers at the film/development/printing factory.
I also think there’s something special about looking through a viewfinder.
Even in new cameras (where the viewfinder itself is a tiny screen) something happens when you frame a photo this way, that doesn’t happen when you use the back display (or a phone).
I don’t know if it’s down to physically using one eye, or the psychology of bringing your eye to the camera’s eye, but it feels different (and I like it)
"in the iPhone photo, the player is "leaning". His (long) feet are on the left and his head is on the right of the image. In the right image, the image accurately portays his balanced and confident stance. "
The subject seems to have moved. His expression is different, how he holds the stick is different. Hard to believe that the stance remained the same meanwhile.
the player in green has a substantial lean as well. Download the photo and crop and you can see it.
There's so much wrong with this article it's difficult to know where to start, but the fact that they didn't bother to take the photos at the same time with an equivalent focal length makes the entire thing pointless.
How do you take a 45mm focal length photo with iPhone?
I said "equivalent" - the 2x lens is a 48mm equivalent so that difference would be almost invisible to most people.
A couple of things, some of which are difficult topics to broach:
1. Every dude here is pretty unattractive, so the question is which camera gives them enough camera makeup to hide it. If you shake your head at this, take a peek at this: https://i.imgur.com/vdD5r8M.jpeg Every dude is mewing for his life in the latter photo
2. They aren't making the same face for each shot, so all of this is a waste of time. That's so much more important.
3. The only real difference is just the background being blurred or not. Otherwise it's a totally different pose for each guy.
That's not a particularly great test, because every camera will be great outside in the sunlight, and those photos are some of the least technically challenging ones you can take. Even a phone from 15 years ago won't be that bad at it.
Modern computational photography does a great job of dealing with tricky conditions though.
iPhones always take "decent" photos even under tricky conditions, but they never take great photos. I would take 10 great photos over 100 decent photos myself.
They really don't.
I regularly take photos outside, at night, in ambient light with my Fujifilm X-Pro3 and 56mm f/1.2. I'm stretching the limits of it a bit, using high ISO and as low a shutter speed as I can get away with.
In the same lighting conditions, an iPhone will basically take 3-5 shots and composite them together in software. The result, predictably, is unusable for most moving subjects.
The best camera is the one you have with you!
iPhone camera is perfect for getting an instant/algoritmically-processed HDR-enabled photo that looks nice on the phone screen and social media. Oh it's also great for macro due to physically being small.
For everything else, actual camera hands down!
Though for its size and availability iPhone camera is great!
Beginner Photographer's pictures would compare better if they used a wider depth of field so the background objects are sharp, like the iPhone pics.
But, conversely, how do you do the narrow(er) depth-of-field in the iPhone when you want it?
The iPhone blurred background is completely synthetic. It uses multiple cameras to build a depth map of the scene, and then blurs whatever isn't at the depth of the subject of the photo.
If you're asking "how do you do", you can select "portrait" when taking the photo, or go to the photo in your gallery after the fact, pick "edit", pick "portrait", and choose a fake aperture ("f/1.4") and focus point to use. The results are ... mid.
> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall?
I stopped reading here. Every photo on the walls in my house came from some smart phone.
The differences are subtle to me. I see them but it doesn’t prevent me or my family from printing and hanging iPhone photos. I want to hang fun photos from family vacation for the memories.
I was born in 95, so my childhood is well documented by my mothers digicam. When I look back at the photos, it is very obvious they are way better than iPhone photos that many parents are taking today.
While i don't disagree, it's good to take into consideration the way people took photos back then vs now. I'd argue that today they are more of a commodity than they were back then, so people thought more before they took the shot(at least for some photos).
The opening statement of the article is almost insulting in how badly it abuses correlation, causation, and the concept of cause and effect.
It effectively states that people don’t print photos anymore because phones produce bad photos.
But back in the film camera days you literally had to develop and print the photos to see them. There was no universal device for viewing photos that you always had on you.
Shouldn't this be "bad"? BTW, as an independent photog I have been looking for something like this, even thinking about making it myself.
TFA has the title in quotes, as though it is a reply to someone saying it. Must have got lost on submission
Yeah, removing the quotes from the title in the submission (which may have been done automatically or by a mod) completely changes the meaning of the title as read.
It's a genre of clickbait titles that I support since the content actually supports the opposite, for journalistic effect. It's very funny when people who never read the content and share an article are exposed.
This article is evidence of iPhone cameras being really amazing intermingled with lots of words about things
I've been a Nikon user for decades, once I purchased a digital Nikon SLR, I was in heaven. Now, with my cell phone camera taking really nice pics, I don't carry the SLR as much. If I want to print and hang a photo, if it's a close up shot, I use my phone. If it's a larger view pic, I use my SLR.
iPhones have wide angle lenses but they are NOT fish eye lenses as stated a couple times in the article. They definitely distort things but a fish eye lens distorts things in a very different curved way rather than keeping lines straight like a regular wide angle lens.
I see what he’s saying, but I also see all the iPhone photos printed and hung on the wall.
> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall?
I have a photo I took on my iPhone 6S on my wall. It’s a crop of a panorama taken from the top of a sand dune in Namibia.
Wasn't there a phone with a lens mount system using that maker's existing lens eco system? I cant remember the maker. Sony? Nikon?
No. Sony and Olympus both made interchangeable-lens cameras with no screen or viewfinder meant to pair with phones. Realme made a prototype phone that can take an attachment to mount Leica M-mount lenses: https://petapixel.com/2025/03/04/realmes-ultra-phone-concept...
They are good until they aren't.
In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible.
It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.
Why can’t the fisheye distortion be removed with software?
It can, but the result of doing that is not a rectangular picture. You can crop it again, but then you lose a big part of the edges.
Anyone out there feel like making an app that fixes the distortion and then fills in the missing edges of the rectangle with generative ai? I’d sure enjoy using such an app.
If we’re going to berate mobile phone cameras I’d like to offer my take as someone who uses off camera lighting: it’s bullshit that we still don’t have any way of doing flash sync. I want to be able to control my Godox three point lighting system. I can trigger it with my Canon P that was made in the 1950s (which has no electronics whatsoever!), but not my iPhone that’s over 60 years newer.
All recent smartphone camera are good.
Smartphone cameras have always been shit, the best thing about them is that you have them all the time.
But then I bought a Ricoh GrIIIx, which is very pocketable and takes amazing photos. Even has a handy remote view function through WiFi. I don’t bother with my phone anymore.
This is a great article, thank you for this. I will save it as a reference. I usually get unsolicited advice from people when I use my Fujifilm camera's about how a smartphone would shoot better. Even though I own one of the latest iPhone's, there's no comparison between the two.
I don't mind the comments but there's always someone. There's also people with the latest phones who come and brag about their photo quality. I'm always nice about it and give my talking points about the sensor sizes and the lenses as quickly as possible.
Sometimes they are more aggressive about it and start to question my competence. I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's as I'm usually in the middle of a few things during events. I liked how the article mentioned amateur photographer (which would describe me) so it addresses some of these concerns. It also uses examples of older cameras that are very affordable.
Next time someone is coping from Big Tech marketing about the camera on their smartphone, I'll show them this. All the "Pro"s use iPhone camera, right?
> Next time someone is coping from Big Tech marketing about the camera on their smartphone, I'll show them this.
I'm not sure anything good will come of showing them this article.
Just say "yeah" and move on.
> I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's
Problem solved.The actual answer is not to engage in the discussion.
“I prefer the photos I take from this camera.”
Honestly those people are fucking worst. Somehow having an actual camera makes people feel…inadequate? Like cmon dude, let me take my photos why do you have to start saying “oh my phone takes better photos, and i can use it to watch YouTube”
I wish the images had been taken at the same height. Especially when taking images of a person and evaluating their faces, taking one from a lower angle and another from a higher angle does not allow for good comparison.
I am also not exactly convinced that this supposed iPhone picture of those kids is actually an image taken at 1x.
They're still over saturated. Skin tones always have a cosmetic/tanned look compared to real life. Mirrorless camera photos have a lot better output. You can see that even in the first sample comparison. If you look at the photo on the iPhone right when you took it, it doesn't look like the subject you just took a photo of. It's always over saturated compared to real life.
But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject.
But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects).
Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground.
BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)
I never use flash and real cameras are still in a completely different league. There are tons of advantages, but I think the biggest different is dynamic range. Faces, hair, etc. look so dark on phone photos. And even if I try to manually push up the exposure and let it blow out the background, it will still never give me bright faces indoors.
Of course then there's the lack of detail and watercolor effect to try to fake detail, distortion, etc.
> connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject
fucking hell
“fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.
Wedding photographers use bounce flash because indirect light is flattering and not everyone is supermodel-beautiful.
I don’t know where you’re partying that the ceilings aren’t painted white (they usually are because the problem of color cast on reflected light applies to normal room lights as well) but I’ll take color balance I can fix in post over harsh shadows from direct fill flash.
> “fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.
“Specialist thinks the broader domain should universally adhere to the way things are optimized in their area of focus” is not an uncommon thing to see on HN, though its more commonly seen with specialists in different kinds of programming than photography.
Yah you can't fix color balance from bad color cast.
ALL photos look good with direct flash. Never use bounce flash. And indirect lighting is never flattering. EVER. Fire any photographer that ever uses bounce flash. Nobody wants their muddied color.
I was also a photo editor with thousands of photographer submissions. I can always tell which ones used bounce flash. A sure sign of unprofessional amateurness.
I get that people have a desire to maintain their lazy habits, but my job was to make sure they understood they sucked at photography.
I must be a blind, I literally just can't see what this guy is talking about.
Is it just me or is color saturation a huge deal with iphones? I take a pic of myself, and it literally makes it portrait like and changes my skin (makes it smoother and more transluscent). I take a pic of the outdoors, and if there is text somewhere far away, it mangles it. I get iphones are mostly sold for social media influencers these days and beauty standards matter, but damn it I just want it to scan stuff and take photos of my family. There is a big problem with image fidelity.
I honestly can't see much of a difference that couldn't be explained by the photos not being taken simultaneously. I definitely can't tell enough of a difference that I wouldn't put the photo in a frame on the wall (which people almost certainly do, despite the author's assertion that "you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed")
Edit: Is this just a good bit of sarcasm/shitpost? If so, it's just a tad too subtle.
For what it is worth, all my printed and framed photos were on the iPhone, despite having a great SLR camera.
The best camera is the one you actually have on-hand at the moment you need to take the photo and that often ends up the phone camera.
Bingo. You also need to know your camera. I have a d7100, a Z5, and the latest iPhone pro. For quick snapshots it's really hard to beat the iPhone. If I can get very close to something, the iPhone can also do some cool things.
My d7100 might be one of my favorite cameras of all time. I've taken very nice picks of birds mid-flight that would be very hard to do on a phone (impossible?). But, it's not a camera you pull out your pocket and start shooting snapshots. It takes time to learn and post-process.
They are all just tools, pick the right one for what you're doing. And sometimes the right one is the one you have with you :)
It's subtle shitpost. He's playing the angle of camera bros that just can't accept any Tom, Dick, or Harry with an iphone could take a 95% comparable photo but don't call themselves photographers.
I have smartphone photos on my walls. They look damned good.
Is this person going around asking all of their friends what kind of camera they used to take the photos they have on display? Or are they just sure they can tell from looking?
You absolutely can tell from looking, and you don't even need to be trying. Whenever I show people photos from trips or of my kids or whatnot, they immediately notice the quality ask "You took this on your phone!?" (since I'm showing the photo from my phone library and that would be the default assumption). Sure, people are used to phone photos and they're fine, but even laymen who aren't thinking about judging photo quality immediately notice and appreciate the quality of a real camera photo.
Someone didn't try the power of Google pixels phones. Recently, many of my iPhone friends and family envy the pictures taken from Google Pixel 9 pro vs their latest iPhones. It's hands down the best camera and image processing.
I would be willing to bet I have photos in my archive that cannot be reproduced on any modern smartphone, that I took in ~2004 with a Nikon D70.
Have you seen them on desktop or compared to a 20yo sensor without computerized photography? The post is not about iPhone cameras per se, but about small phone sensors + computerized photography. The author probably has that iPhone.
It's still not going to come anywhere close to a real camera. Phone cameras with their tiny sensors have physical limitations that cannot be overcome, I guess until the day they are regenerating the entire image with AI based on what it expects the scene should look like with a real camera.