I've got big boy cameras and big boy lenses (not bragging, just saying), but I really do love having a current Iphone. I pull it out almost every day for really high quality reference stills. Even better, I can zoom in and do color work in phone while waiting for a coffee or between meetings.
I think the author here got a few things slightly wrong (he's a writer in a 2016 newsroom - give him a break), but he's right that Iphones have totally changed the camera industry. Sure, there's a small percentage of people like me who need gear that is higher calibre that give the extra 10 percent, but you can really get exceptional images with an Iphone. I really don't see why people would buy a consumer level camera anymore.
I too have real cameras and real lenses, and I love my iPhone camera. I love it so much I am considering buying the iPhone 7+, not for the awful bokeh, but for the versatility of the two lenses.
With my iPhone 6s I was slightly disappointed that the ultra aggressive noise reduction ruined some of my shots in very good lighting (other from the same series were fine, some were just totally destroyed though), but it seems the new support for raw images will solve that issue too.
It's a camera that is always with me, and considering the technological constraints and limitations, it works exceptionally well.
The shot that you make with the camera that you have with you is always better than the photo you don't get with the camera that you left at home. Having paid my dues learning to operate a 4x5 view camera, I grok that fully.
As I once told a friend who was berating my closet full of Canon lenses because "everyone knows Leica makes the best lenses" I said: "Take a look at your last vacation photos. Now take a look at any randon issue of National Geographic. Ask yourself: Am I really being limited by the glass?"
Somebody that understands composition and light can make better photos with a phone than a hack with the best "big boy" camera.
Same here. I have some lenses that create wonderful bokeh (e.g. 85mm f/1.2). The 7 Plus bokeh effect looks like a blur, but who knows they could train a conv net to make it more bokeh like.
The big advantage of the 7 Plus to me is that the 56mm lens is better for portraits so it's pretty exciting.
there's really nothing magical about bokeh that requires machine learning imo. Lens blur can be approximated perfectly (by human perceptual standards) given a good depth map, you just have to use a disk-shaped kernel instead of a gaussian distribution, then vary the size of the disk based on aperture size and distance to the object. Simulating lens blur is a pretty well researched topic at this point.
There are other things that go into making these images more "realistic", like adding chromatic aberration, barrel distortion and halation, but by and large these things are affectations borne of nostalgia and not actual improvements to image quality.
I'll wait to see the reviews but I'm sure the 7+ camera will be more evolution than revolution. Premium phones have been taking good enough photos for at least a couple years now. This will be a continuation of existing trends.
I thought so too, but I felt the urge to get back into SLR photography recently so I picked up an old Nikon D3 on eBay and the difference between it and my iPhone SE is like night and day. No matter how you tweak them small-sensor photos just look flat and drab in comparison, or garishly oversaturated.
Both flat/drab and garishly overcolored pictures can be easily fixed in Photoshop, except when noise or lack of dynamic range gets in the way (i.e. the detail never gets captured, or one or more color channels get clipped).
The problems with phone cameras (and small sensor cameras more generally) are (1) hitting the resolution limits of the optics, (2) noise, (3) lack of dynamic range, (4) lack of choices in quality lenses, (4) fixed aperture, which means no creative focus effects, and poor performance in low-light settings, (5) software based (and therefore slow and sometimes inaccurate) manual controls over shutter speed, focus, flash, etc., (and more generally, a much less efficient or adaptable physical user interface than a dedicated camera) (6) often limiting output formats, with lots of in-camera processing wiping out data from the raw image.
Any 6+ megapixel DSLR (e.g. the ones from the early 2000s) with a nice lens easily outclasses the iPhone or any other phone camera, in the hands of a photographer with basic competence.
On the other hand, phone cameras are amazing for their ridiculously tiny size, and their cost is obscenely low after the economies of scale kick in. They take much better pictures on average than the <$50 35mm film cameras from the 1990s, especially when the photographer is a complete beginner (those are the cameras I think of as their spiritual ancestors).
Oh yeah; I remember too realizing that I didn't need my A4 scanner anymore, a phone cam picture was good enough to email a readable document! They're impressive no doubt but SLR technology hasn't stood still either.
Thank you. Fast, cheap, good, pick two, today, tomorrow, and the next. While the definitions of the three terms will change over time, Apple has not slain the project triangle, but they continue to push the "good" part.
Dual-camera setups for phones are not new at all, yet only Apple gets the props for "changing the camera industry" .. For the other vendors it's a "gimmick" !
When Microsoft was on top, Apple fans used to say "it's not about marketshare or profit" and then they would proceed to compare Microsoft to McDonald's.
So, it's hilarious to me that today the number one statistic quoted by Apple fans is about how much money Apple makes or how many units they've sold.
I myself, also having been around the Apple world for both eras, see plenty of intersection.
It's almost as if many of the people who lived in the 90's are still alive today, including the Apple fans. I personally have many friends who were Apple fans then and now.
The same people are mostly still around. But the people who talked about Apple being superior in form or function despite being inferior in profit back in the 90s are not the people who today talk about how Apple is great because they're so crazy profitable.
I find the comparison to Ford stupid. When Ford cars came out, cars weren't easily accessible to public. Ford did that.
It also applied to original iphone.
But now, other phones are on par regarding quality and accessibility with iphone and they've had this feature for long. Your comparison simply doesn't apply.
Apple, at this point, is only a marketing gimmick.
Unfortunately after several years of using Android phones, I got an iphone (6s) this year. It's simply a bad phone. I'm getting a new Android device this week.
The fastest smartphone CPU was last year's chip from Apple. The old Apple chip just got beaten by the new Apple chip which is 40% faster than second place--which is still the old Apple chip. Even if the camera stuff wasn't better in any proprietary way (it is), it still operates on the best chipset in the world by a huge margin.
So I guess if you're looking for a marketing gimmick in all this, you might say Apple's engineering dominance is a pretty good marketing gimmick. I mean, I can't really think of a better 'marketing gimmick' than designing better core technology, patenting it, and using it as a platform for launching other new tech that also contains better core technology. I'm even hesitant to call it a gimmick. It's more like... the actual way capitalism is designed to work.
Chip performance is the bottleneck everything on a phone has to run through. It can give a proprietary boost to a brand if they put out better performing chipsets. Is it the only thing in a phone that matters? God no! But a better chipset allows the peripheral tech (touchscreens, cameras, etc) to do more sophisticated stuff more easily. So chipset performance affects the big picture more than any other component.
It's hard to zoom out and compare peripherals and overall design without getting into personal taste and preference. To measure personal taste empirically, you could look at profits. Higher profit means people aren't buying on price but on perceived value and personal preference.
iPhone is a huge winner here. Apple actually books a majority of the smartphone industry profits every quarter -- more profit than every other company combined (in 2015 it was 91%). It's hard to charge high margins when you don't have some proprietary unfair advantage like faster CPUs.
Samsung et. al sell more phones and have more revenue, but they make a fraction of the money because their value prop competes on price. In fact, Samsung is the only other company that made a profit selling smartphones in 2015, everyone else lost money or broke even. CPU performance is a huge part of that story. Samsung has the second fastest CPUs. That's a difference between first place and second place of almost 100 billion dollars. Third place is you're fired.
i keep a spare iphone just to test iOS exclusive apps. I can't stand iOS. it's god awful. maybe I'm just a nerd but I find android to be so much better. doesn't feel restrictive.
I do get upset at google though -- i wish they did more to make it easier for developers to port their apps to android. also the iOS version of apps are built better, it sucks to have a garbage version of snapchat on android. but the sacrifice is worth it to have the physical back button.
Nokia sold millions of camera phones that were the best of the market and the Iphone actually brought it down for a while:
"The launch of the initial iPhone may have harmed mobile camera tech development. There was a rush was to put touch screens on everything and cameras seemed to be less important all of a sudden when busting out a top-end spec list."
The fake Bokeh from the dual cameras looks like flat circles with Gaussian blur applied. It's a useless gimmick, I can't imagine ruining real photos with this look.
Well, it still serves the purpose of emphasizing the foreground. It does, however, not look like the depth of field you would expect from a 'real camera'. But I don't see it as 'ruining' photos. It's just a tool in your toolbox for creating pictures.
It's very bad, but it's not on the market yet, possibly because it's so bad. Considering they have real depth information though, I don't see why it can't be made to work correctly. We'll see when it's actually released.
Also my understanding is that there's no blending of images between the two cameras at all. You literally use only one camera or the other. There are existing systems on the market that do this correctly to obtain a much higher quality of image than what is possible with only one camera alone. I would expect Apple to implement this in a future software update.
Some Canon cameras can do phase detection autofocus at f/8. Let's put a 35mm lens on the camera. That means that light rays that are used by the AF system are separated by 4.375mm. Very comparable to the distance between the two iPhone lenses.
The way depth information is determined with phase detection autofocus is very similar conceptually with how you'd generate a depth map in software from two separate cameras.
Granted, not all cameras can do phase detection AF at f/8, and at 35mm you have enough DOF that the accuracy of the AF is not that critical. But they can do AF at f/5.6 accurate enough for a 50mm lens. That gives you 8.92mm separation. Still comparable to iPhone.
That's not quite how it works. The separation used by the AF is completely fixed by the distance between the (at least two) microlens+aperture+sensor systems that make up an phase AF sensor.
The microlens/aperture system of the AF masks essentially the back plane of the lens (which follows from the exit pupil) for the AF sensor (interacting mainly with the exit telecentrism of the lens, which is why AF speed and acccuracy can widely vary with lens type, even if the same f-stop is used). Also a reason (besides the fact that many digital sensor designs perform better with telecentric designs due to increased scattering and reflections in the sensor itself compared to film) why modern lenses are almost always strongly telecentric designs.
A completely separate matter is the circle of confusion which is indeed directly related to the aperture of the lens.
(I hope I got most of the optical terms correct, I don't normally discuss this topic in English)
>The fake Bokeh from the dual cameras looks like flat circles with Gaussian blur applied.
You can trivialy make a great bokeh implementation that's not merely a Gaussian blur.
And I don't see much horrible in these examples -- perfectly fine I'd rather say, if a little overemphasized. But you can get totally blurry bokeh from some lenses, including smeared highlights instead of nice little circles...
It probably is just a Gaussian blur applied to a depth map. The halo artifacts on the colored spots are a bit bad; they could have chosen better examples. Then again, it's not bad for what essentially is a research prototype.
Since it's done in software, Apple could use a more uniform circle kernel instead of a Gaussian kernel to do a more authentic bokeh style.
Like they say the best camera is the one you have with you.
Mobile cameras and social media have completely transformed consumer photography with selfies and spur of moment pictures taking over from an era of old style 'event' pictures that required intention.
You can't take selfies with your DSLR or even compacts, or lug them around for casual spur of moment shots.
Leaving aside this PR piece for iPhone 7 marketing the growing quality of mobile phone cameras have already long impacted the lower end camera market.
DSLRs are limited to pros and enthusiasts, with mirroless sharing some spoils in that market. The bulk of the market that would buy a lower to mid end camera now has little reason to.
Depth of field or 'bokeh' for those lovely isolation shots is not possible given physical sensor and lens constraints. Apple's dual camera approach with the iPhone 7 seeks to change it and the early shots do look interesting but also a bit artifical. Not the natural flowing isolation you would get from a full frame sensor for portaits at 80 or even 50mm.
Yes, 50mm is a normal lens, but telephoto is a lens design. It doesn't have anything to do with focal length. Even some wide angle lenses have a telephoto design!
It is true that telephoto designs are usually used on long lenses, however, and for normal lenses on 35mm you don't usually employ telephoto designs.
> In addition, the bokeh feature only works on portraits.
That's the first I've heard of that. Can you back that up? Seems like it'd be easy enough to get it working on any image with depth to it, so it seems odd that they'd limit it.
While explaining the feature in the presentation, Phil Schiller explained that it did face detection to find the foreground. In addition, the camera mode is called "Portrait" in the Camera app. While it is still speculation until next week, I think it's reasonable to be skeptic about its ability to use produce bokeh on images with no detected faces.
Presentation: https://youtu.be/NS0txu_Kzl8?t=1h12m25s
> While it is still speculation until next week, I think it's reasonable to be skeptic about its ability to use produce bokeh on images with no detected faces.
That shouldn't be a limitation in the technology though, just a implementation detail. Emulating DoF would work whether you have a face in the photo or not, it's just easier to lock on to a face as your primary focus.
I'm thinking that if they still let you tap to select what to base the brightness on in this mode, they might be able to extend that to the focus so that it can work with non-face photos. Keep the part you tap on in focus (and anything else at that distance), blur the rest. Though that might not allow you to do independent brightness... Hmmm... Anyway, it's pure hope/speculation at this point.
I was thinking that this would be interesting for product photography but not sure whether it would work. For example, if I'm shooting a row of coffee cups for the side (diagonally) but want the front cup to be in focus and rest in the row gradually going out of focus.
[Edit]
The point being Apple uses algorithm to detect face to 'compute' the depth of field - would the same work for any random object? I'm not sure about this.
stereo depth still has a lot of issues - eg. if you're shooting a white wall or other feature-less object. Not sure if they have better algos but if you use an off-the-shelf stereo package from OpenCV or ROS there are lots of holes in the depth map even in ideal cases.
They probably focus on the portrait application because it has the least amount of corner cases.
Thanks. I don't watch the presentations anymore, so I hadn't heard about that. I think you're right that it's reasonable to be skeptical, but it may also just prove to be an implementation detail. But with the info we have now, yup, sound like it's just for portraits.
Thanks for clarifying that. I was slightly irritated as the article name-dropped bokeh but then went on raving about the processor, not coming back to bokeh to pick up the dangling reference. So the iPhone just blurs what it considers the background in post-processing? This sounds like it just might work if done right. I think I'd still wish for manual focus though :)
Given a perfect depth map there is no reason lens blur can't be replicated exactly. They probably just chose some bad photos for the demo, or possibly there's some placebo effect happening.
Any flaws aught to be in the depth map generation, so things being inappropriately blurred.
Until the new iphone is actually iut in the wild, or Apple release sone real sample images - how could this speculation possibly be substance rather than marketing?
Well, this is not the first iPhone Apple releases. By this time one could make some opinion is Apple "just marketing", or do they really produce something. Sometimes something competition has no answer to, like A9, A9X, A10.
It will be interesting to see what they produce. The market for external lens is quite varied now on previous iphones. A lot of the processing they are introducing on the new phone will be tuned for the characteristics of the two lenses. I wonder how external lens will work on the camera (if at all)?
How is it better than the 20MP Zeiss optically-stabilized DNG enabled camera in my Nokia 930?
The article reads like a big and not very trustworthy advert.
Objectively, it's apples and oranges (pardon the obvious pun); the sensors and lenses are completely different, as is the software on the phones. One is not 100% better or worse than the other, they each have strengths and weaknesses that more or less balance them out.
Subjectively, it's whatever you prefer. I'm with you; some of the Nokia Lumia cameras easily outperform the best Apple has ever offered, and I say that as someone who currently uses an iPhone 6. If I wasn't so concerned about the future of Windows Phone I'd still be on that platform, since the camera is the second most important part of a smartphone for me (the most being stability/reliability, which Windows Phone 8.1 had but Windows 10 does not, hence my switch to iPhone).
2 years is a long time in mobile cameras at this point. The Nikon D700 from 2008 shoots at 12MP but still one of the most highly regarded DSLRs (used is still ~$800).
More important than MP is the quality of the sensor and lens, and I bet there is a lot of development and improvement in the "small" category.
Just because Zeiss made the lens doesn't mean it is better than anything else. Your only guarantee if you see the the word Zeiss is that it will be expensive ;-)
I'm not an Apple fanboy or anything and definitely prefer any SLR (digital or otherwise) to phone potatocams, but they are getting better so quickly.
D700 being still relevant means sensor tech is moving slower than the rest of mobile industry.
I didn't mean to accentuate specifically on Zeiss brand. My point is there's nothing revolutionary in today's iPhone 7 compared to 2 year old Lumias. Some big things (optical stabilization) are even missing. And it's sensor+software seem good enough even today.
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It was iPhone 4 that changed the camera industry. The iPhone 7 is just continuing the trend. Sure there are still stand alone cameras with better quality than a smart phone... but who carries a camera who isn't a hobbyist photographer?
I recently bought a Huawei P9 for my daughter - it has a camera by Leica and that is also supposed to be a very high end camera, all for a fraction of the cost of a new iphone
to me it looks great, much better than what i have on my LG G4, but that is not an expert opinion.
I had a disaster with the iphone 5c, the phone kept breaking down from simple use and i had to fix it several times before i gave up; for me that killed any warm feelings for apple, with android you can at least try another vendor, without having to learn a totally different UI.
If anything, the Sony Ericsson t68i was the firing gun for convergence. I used to use it frequently - not just as a novelty. Would send them via mms where they'd then be published on my website - 140 chars, image, etc - my personal Twitter in 2002.
But either way, Apple didn't invent camera phones.
No one said they did. The suggestion is that the iPhone 4 was a watershed in cameras on smartphones. For a while the iPhone was considered the benchmark, and still is in many ways. As ever, the bigger number of pixels that other devices have does not necessarily mean better cameras. Optics play a huge role. Other mobile devices have caught up and some have exceeded the quality of the iPhones camera, but that doesn't change the fact that the iPhone 4 was an important milestone for smartphone photography.
> The suggestion is that the iPhone 4 was a watershed in cameras on smartphones
Whilst it was the first iPhone to use a contemporaneous sensor, rather than cost-saving with previous-gen, it was still only a 5MP OmniVision OV5642 at the same time as Sony was installing 8MP sensors of a similar backlit configuration.
Ironically Apple switched to using Sony's Exmor sensors for later models.
It did, literally, come along with a camera. You plugged the camera in to the charging socket. The photos were terrible: not even 256 colours, resolution in the order of 200 x 300. I used it twice and packed it away forever.
It was an attachment that plugged in the bottom of the phone. I don't remember being particularly impressed by the quality of the photos. It was getting chucked in with the phone eventually
Ehh. I like that people can take better pictures but the biggest thing i'd lose is the personality of my 35mm f1.4 - it has a character that makes my pictures feel more lively to me. But always nice to have a better camera for Instagram quick pics! If only the photos app wasn't an unorganized heap of pictures of travels, receipts, and other documents..
So true, the Camera Roll gets quite a mess with time because all types of pics go to the same place. Fortunately, there's already a solution to that. With an additional, complementary photo library like the Utiful app one can cleanly divide the family and vacation photos from the receipts, screenshots, etc.
New technology has radically altered the camera industry every ten years or so since the 1820's[1]. Just consider the givens of Apple's camera: solid state storage, CMOS image sensing, in camera image processing, live scene preview, auto-focus, auto-aperature, etc. Not to mention the radio transmitter infrastructure that makes instant image sharing possible and the electronics technologies that make always carrying the camera in one's purse a benefit rather than a burden.
The article also ignores the limitations that any small sensor camera has due to physics. Photons arrive within a poisson distribution. The Nyquist limit is hard. Magical designs can't change that.
None of which is to say that the new camera won't be good for some definition of 'good'. But the enabling technologies of snapshots are not changing. Neither is the pace of change in photography.
[1]: and image making since at not all too dissimilar intervals since the Reneissance e.g. printing press, oil paint, camera obscuras, optics, perspective].
Do you have a script / ad-blocker? They seem to have a poor responsive image script which starts with a really low-red thumbnail and then loads the full version after the rest of the page has loaded.
So if two cameras are better than one, why not three, or four? I assume the hardware is not too expensive (compared to the cost of the phone), and then you can have really nice optical zoom capabilities.
The short, trite, unsatisfying answer: keep improving the quality of tiny sensors. Due to size constraints, we can't shove massive sensors into smartphones.
But we can keep improving what small sensors are capable of, and we can probably still make improvements to the software that processes the raw data the sensors capture.
We can also hope for innovation in the technology behind digital image sensors. We've seen lots of innovation, but the fundamentals behind the CMOS and CCD sensors we use now haven't changed in a long time. I'm not qualified to comment on the viability of it, but perhaps something like this will end up being useful: https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1365289912/invisage-brings...
>Due to size constraints, we can't shove massive sensors into smartphones.
Interestingly, though, it's not really the size of the sensor that's the issue but the focal length of the lens required to give a usably narrow field of view with a larger sensor. You could probably squeeze an APS-C sensor into a smartphone, but you couldn't use it with an 8mm focal length.
So there are two potential routes to go here. Progress in telephoto designs for very small lenses, and multi-lens cameras.
As foldr mentions they're a feature, the remainder of the optical system scales quite shockingly in proportion to the sensor.
I'm sure there are plenty of further incremental improvements to be made to small sensors, but there are real physical limits on how much charge a tiny cell can capture before becoming saturated. For that reason, even if advancements are made in small sensors, a physically larger sensor with access to the same tech will likely always have a dynamic range advantage
Not to a meaningful quality. The lenses are really close together, and they're of different focal lengths, so getting images from both sides to match up is gonna be a chore at best. Were the two lenses on opposite sides of the camera, it would become a lot more interesting, but as it stands, no.
The pro DSLR market has been pretty stagnant in the past few years in the traditional Nikon vs Canon space. Very marginal improvements from generation to generation, mostly small incremental iterations on already existing functionality. Sony is doing some interesting work with the mirrorless stuff, so maybe that will go somewhere.
Wonder why we're not seeing more competition in this space. Major players too entrenched already and not enough money for others to try to break in?
Ugh. Another article by someone with no background in the subject he's covering. 12-megapixel lenses eh? That's a lot of pixels for a lens. Professionals call "digital negatives" DNGs, do they? I wonder what professionals call raw... I love the social commentary and analysis in the New Yorker but they should probably steer clear of tech.
The article is liberal with its language, but makes good points backed up by facts. The point and shoot market was killed by the smart phone. The camera market has become the smart phone and the DSLR. DSLRs may be safe for awhile because they provide advanced features that are hard to match in a phone sized device, but as a non-professional photographer I find myself reaching for my phone more often than my DSLR.
I love using my DSLR, but I hate dealing with the workflow. If I take a picture with my DSLR I have to put the SD card in my computer, load up Lightroom, edit, export, and finally upload/share the picture.
I agree that the smartphone killed the point and shoot industry, but I think it's pretty far overboard to say that Apple is revolutionizing the camera industry with the iPhone 7. They added another lens, which is certainly nice but not revolutionary, and they added some depth of field effects, which are nice but look pretty bad compared to actual shallow depth of field.
Edit: Also, you definitely don't need to fire up Lightroom to share photos from your DSLR; I think practically any DSLR can shoot JPG. Many DSLRs can also share photos to phones via wifi or Bluetooth these days. Mine didn't come with such a feature, but Nikon sells a $20-30 adapter that adds that capability.
It's not going to kill professional photography, but the folks who buy a DSLR for the bokeh might not have a reason to buy that camera. Might shrink the market for DSLRs.
It actually works surprisingly well, but I've not traded in my SLR. Being able to do something similar with a second lens -- or even using Project Tango sensors -- to avoid the post-exposure motion would make it more useful, but I suspect still not as versatile (and even with my SLR, the difference between my relatively cheap lenses and borrowing someone's more expensive lenses, on the same body, is quite obvious).
I don't doubt that the iPhone will shrink the market for DSLRs eventually, but I don't think it's going to do it to a significant extent just yet (not much more than it already has been). I'm skeptical that people buy DSLRs just for the bokeh, and anyways the samples that they showed look nowhere near as good as real bokeh from a nice lens. I think non-photographers buy DSLRs because they still take better pictures than smartphones in certain situations, particularly when an optical zoom would be desired (e.g. A kid's performance or graduation). The new iPhone comes a step closer to potentially addressing some of those situations, but it's still limited; 56mm full-frame equivalent is not really all that zoomed in, and AFAIK there isn't yet any way to zoom between the 28mm lens and 56mm lens any better than traditional digital zoom (i.e. cropping and rescaling).
I'm curious to know how well the bokeh/shallow depth works on the 7+. By the looks of it they use facial recognition and machine learning to determine what not to blur.
This means objects and figures that aren't faces might not be tuned too well.
While being available to the whole world to see, the next time an hacker attack success happens or any bored Apple employee decides to search for "interesting" pictures.
Please don't imply random employees have access to an iCloud users data. There is ample proof in security architecture documents posted by Apple that would indicate your comment is ridiculous.
Nikon and Canon have also been stuck in a rut in recent years. Sony is coming out with all these new ideas (TLRs, the A7 series), while Canon and Nikon keep on churning out pretty much the same stuff they always have. Not only are they facing competition from smart phones, but on the higher end, Ricoh/Pentax now offers a full frame DSLR at 1/2 the price of similar Canon/Nikon models. The Pentax has some warts, but still, that's got to hurt Canon and Nikon a little.
I know pentax is trying to compete with the D800 level of SLR with their K-1, but the price is a few hundred more than the entry level nikon, canon & sony full frame cameras, and that is what they are competing with.
The entry level Canon and Nikon FF cameras do not have most of the higher end features the K-1 has. It competes pretty well with D810 and has some features the D810 lacks such as a GPS, wifi, a screen that can be moved or flipped up and possibly most importantly, in-camera 5-axis image stabilization.
Yet it has weather sealing, GPS, astrotracer, WiFi and other features that the entry level full frame offerings from Canon and Nikon don't. Sony has abandoned DSLRs in favour of mirrorless and fixed miror cameras.
Agreed on the workflow problem. The pain of using a DSLR has less to do with the form factor (size and weight) and more to do with the fact that the post-shot work is stuck a decade in the past.
And I think that's true even if you're a professional - as a professional, your shots should use your phone's cellular connection to upload the shots to Adobe Creative Cloud (or competing cloud) as you take them, so that when you open your machine to do post-processing work, your shots are all already there. Why should anybody be bothering with CF or SD cards anymore? Just store everything on your smartphone (did you hear the iPhone 7 will now have a 256 GB option?), which in and of itself is a buffer for your work before it gets transferred to the cloud.
Modular backs a la Moto Z are interesting because there's a lot of potential now for making "big glass" relevant again for prosumers. Make a modular back with a large sensor and a Micro Four-Thirds or F mount. The only real problem is getting OEMs to agree on a common standard that they would stick to for years, because nobody wants to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a camera back they won't be able to use next year when they upgrade their phone, and yes that's actually a really big problem, but leadership from Google (in the Nexus/Pixel lines) can really help here.
Yeah, but I would like to move those to my Dropbox, so I can get access to those files on both my desktop as well as my phone, and do it automatically for all the photos, so I don't have to have another manual step to move those files.
Or at least just move those files to my desktop only. But what I see is that Canon doesn't allow that (copy all files in the background to e.g. an ftp server), it has to have a phone or some strange proprietary Canon app.
For me it beats the purpose of having a wifi in a DSLR, I might as well just use SD card it the photos are not moved automatically where I would like.
"Almost all" might have been exaggerating...but I maintain wireless DSLRs are common. At the very least, the option is available enough that anyone that cares about it can have it.
Random Google Search: of Techradar's top 10 list of full-frame DSLRs, 7 have Wi-Fi.
The cameras on the list you linked to with built in wifi are the Nikon D750, Nikon D5, Pentax K-1, Canon 6D. That's 4/10, which is better than I expected, but still pretty poor.
It's getting there, though.. give it a couple more years. Especially with things like Nikon's Snapbridge, which is very buggy right now, but the direction is right.
Yeah he's definitely not a social commentator, but there's still a big problem if you're writing about digital cameras and you don't know the difference between a lens and a sensor.
I didn't say they did. I said that if there's something wrong with this article, it's not because of a misguided attempt by the New Yorker to branch out into tech.
Interesting. I overreacted. Still, there are some telling errors in this article. I admit I didn't read the whole thing, and my quick scan happened to hit the worst parts. Still, the article misses the main question -- are large sensors still required for high quality images?
The most significant thing you get from a large sensor is image fidelity. That is, the pixel data you get out of it is more true to the actual scene captured. Smaller sensors start to experience limitations in physics, of which noise is a major component.
I think large sensors are the only thing required for high quality images. Capture enough light data and we can do everything in software - no lenses. Focus on this this and that, Bokeh blur algorithm #5 here and there - voila.
Sensors capture light. Lenses can be entirely virtualized in software. Whenever very large sensors become cost effective I'm sure smartphone cameras will all be "lightfield" cameras and there will be no more lense bulge. Post processing will also become way more interesting: https://pictures.lytro.com/charmingtoad/pictures/795243/embe...
Lytro cameras use lenses, too. In fact they use a huge number of micro lenses (in addition to larger traditional lenses) to capture the "light field".
"Very large sensors" also seems to means something different to you than it does to me. I would not want a full frame sensor (which I would only consider large, not even "very large") on my phone even if it were cost effective and didn't require a large lens.
Once our sensors are dense/sensitive enough (it doesn't necessarily have to be very large) physical lenses will not be necessary. The Lytro link is about interesting post processing. Today's lensless cameras are very new and very limited but the concept is sound and the technology will get there.
Eventually we will be reconstructing high quality photos from raw sensor data, applying all manner of algorithms to stabilize and accumulate brightness, stylized blur that isn't even optically possible, no shutter or lense or any moving parts really, and the whole thing will happen on your smartphone.
It's been a long time since I looked into this stuff in depth so I may have some details wrong. You are incorrect about the importance of sensor size. For a high quality image I'd prefer a larger sensor over a small sensor with more megapixels. For one example where small dense sensors are worse look at noise in the image. As the pixel density increases each pixel is getting hit by fewer photons. This reduces the true signal so your signal to noise ratio goes up.
Based on the use of Foveon sensors and light field tech from Lytro I wouldn't count on lens less cameras showing up in a phone in the next five years. A decade wouldn't surprise me but it's hard to predict tech trends that far out.
As Fredphophile pointed out, you're fundamentally wrong about sensor size importance. There are only so many photons hitting a given surface area unit. Smaller sensor size means more noise. You can't fight physics.
I'm not particularly bullish on lensless cameras either. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't expect those to meet modern quality standards in a small form factor for a long time.
Yes but Malik still sounds like an idiot. A DNG is a specific file format that happens to mean digital negative, but he means RAW. DNG is a proprietary raw format from Adobe. And no we don't call our RAW files "digital negatives".
That's misleading. DNG is patented by Adobe, but it's also an open, specified format, i.e. it's not "proprietary" in the sense of "can only be opened/used if you pay Adobe money or use/buy their products" which is what people are generally implying when they use the term "proprietary".[0]
DNG is a lot like Adobe's PDF format: owned and managed by Adobe, but with an open specification than anyone can implement/use. They even offer a free license to the DNG "patent", should that deter anyone. That said, unlike PDF, it has not (yet) become an ISO standard, although Adobe has indicated that they would like to see that happen.
It is a particular implementation of the RAW format, and specifically listed as "open, non-free". Which I would think most people would consider proprietary.
I could be wrong though. Can I write and sell software that reads and writes DNG format without having to sign an agreement or pay Adobe money?
You do not need to "sign anything" or "pay Adobe money" to make use of it. It's no different (in terms of usage) than someone open sourcing API documentation with an Apache license (or whatever).
Looking at the patent license, it applies "solely to permit the reading and writing of image files that comply with the DNG Specification". So if you try to create a derivative/modified format based on DNG for whatever reason, the patent license won't apply since the new format would not comply with the specification. (Though that doesn't necessarily mean there's actually a patent threat - hard to say without research what actual patents Adobe owns that apply to the specification, and when they expire or expired.) Also, the specification document itself is not under an open copyright license, so the spec for the modified format would have to be written from scratch (though it could refer to the original).
Not sure if there is much reason to fork the DNG spec in practice, but still the situation is fairly different from "open sourcing API documentation with an Apache license".
That seems fair though. When it comes to the DNG standard, you can use all this stuff freely. When it comes to another standard, make your own. I wouldn't call it proprietary.
I own both Canon and Nikon bodies and covert everything to DNG as a permanent storage format. Some cameras (Leica!) use DNG as their native format. If he's simplifying for the masses, its a simplification, but not much different from how I actually take photos.
I know that, but it's just one particular brand of raw image format. arw, cr2, crw etc. are also raw formats. I don't hear photographers ever speak of "shooting digital negative" -- you say "shooting raw."
Apple realizes smartphone development has stagnated industry-wide. Rumors are that they have gone from a 2 year iPhone refresh to 3. I think it's obvious Apple has failed to innovate on 6s and 7 iPhones. This could be a downturn for the company, with a lack of product leadership. The only way this innovation gap could bounce back to growth is if product leadership has refocused to unannounced future products. Self driving cars and wearable technologies would be candidates for markets that could make meaningful impact on Apple's bottom line.
Phone is mature now, no one can think of any huge advances to be made without any unforeseen disruption. New product categories represent the way forward, but Apple still has to keep milking the iPhone cash cow.
I'm not sure how a phone with a 12MP can change an industry if flagships releases year ago had 21MP. Adding another lens is nice but if you are still 1/2 of the resolution of a DSLR or other phones it is quite funny to call it revolutionary.
MP resolution is not so important. What really matters is lens quality. You can get DSLRs with 12-18 MPs that take pretty nice pictures, though at a lower resolution. There were indeed 16+ MP snapshot cameras five years ago, but the pictures they took were generally rubbish, because of poor lens quality.
Waaay back in the day, I worked for a famous news agency that you've all heard of. We had blown up on all the walls large prints of some award-winning images, 40"x60" or bigger that had come from cameras like the original game-changer for photojournalism, the Nikon D1 which were all of 2.7 megapixels. And these prints looked fantastic. Since then I have never cared about megapixel count, it's a relatively minor factor in the final quality of an image.
On the flipside, the smaller the sensor, the deeper your field of view becomes at a given aperture (f-stop). This is really great for phone cameras, since it makes focusing a lot easier.
Think about it, when was the last time you got a photo or video that was out of focus on your phone? With a full-size sensor DSLR at f/1.8, I've seen professional broadcasters really struggle to deliver in-focus images. In fact, most broadcast cameras for television have significantly smaller sensors in order to get wide DOF at a large aperture.
I mean sure, super-shallow DOF with tons of bokeh can look really pretty when done well, but for 99.9% of people it would give crappy out-of-focus shots.
Can anyone explain why this is downvoted? If you want confirmation/more in-depth info, here is a great post on how sensor size affects DoF, using real examples from a full-frame DSLR compared to an iPhone 6:
> when was the last time you got a photo or video that was out of focus on your phone?
Um... every day? Every version of Android released since Jelly Bean has made the focusing worse on my Nexus 4. Right now if I don't explicitly tap on a subject to focus then the camera will always take an out of focus shot.
Eh. Sensor size increases low light performances a lot, and gives much better performances per increase that lens quality. Besides, lowest I saw a phone go is f2.4, it's going to take a while to reach dslr quality
Not saying I agree with the revolutionary label, but if there's any example of a stat on a device turning into a semi-meaningless game of min/maxing, it's camera resolutions.
Much more people will decide to buy iPhone 7Plus instead of new DSLR when difference in photos is not so obvious for amateurs. Double-camera is a driver for this decision, not size of sensor.
This article misses the fact that aside from the small lens/small sensor issue, smartphones have shitty camera ergonomics. Yes, they're great people who want a point and shoot at all times with them, but I doubt they will replace cameras. Displace cameras and disrupt the camera market they will, as the have done with the PC market. Still, you need a PC, Mac or laptop to do real work (programing, office, photo and video editing etc.). Phones and tablets are more suited and used for proof reading. You still need a camera to do any sort of professional photography efficiently. Camera and photography enthusiasts will also continue to buy cameras. Yes, everyone will now be able to shoot and share professional looking photos with the new iPhone. Cool.
This is much like post PC: PCs aren't dead, but many people don't bother having them anymore. Likewise, I used to buy a camera every few years, but I've completely stopped that now, since I'm not a professional.
So the camera and PCs markets that used to be growing as non professional consumers bought the new tech are now contracting! If you company makes cameras for consumers, that business is in trouble, and you can often only be so large with a more niche professional product.
I think the author here got a few things slightly wrong (he's a writer in a 2016 newsroom - give him a break), but he's right that Iphones have totally changed the camera industry. Sure, there's a small percentage of people like me who need gear that is higher calibre that give the extra 10 percent, but you can really get exceptional images with an Iphone. I really don't see why people would buy a consumer level camera anymore.