We finally have a new option – the Samsung S20. There are two others in the line.
However, reading the detail, it’s not an obvious improvement. They are still messing with the same tiny 12MP cameras, and the 64MP one has small pixels. Also one has to wonder which of these can deliver RAW, since the S10 can do RAW from only one of its cameras.
So really very little is coming for photography, and I doubt any of these will equal the old Nokia 808 from 2012
Bought an iPhone 11 and am blown away by the portrait mode (bokeh depth of field effect and the ability to change that afterwards).
vs DSLR
Little more nerdy/techie and different use cases
The end is near I think for consumer DLSR
Not blown away for purist reasons, but because this is going to transform my family snapshots
Amazing pictures! Does only the 11Pro have this camera?
I have iPhone X and Galaxy Note 9. While Note 9 boasts much better camera specs, iphone manages to deliver more pleasing results. I see this very clearly for the portraits pics.
I doubt that smartphones could be as good as DSLR when the composition gets challenging, e.g. low light, action, etc.Very interesting.
The technology is getting better all the time, although clearly much more in the image processing direction (producing nice looking ready to use jpegs) than the raw imaging direction. There is only so much silicon and glass one can stuff in a phone which is 7mm thick. Nokia made an amazing camera in 2011 but the phone was about 15mm thick (around the camera) and nowadays almost nobody would buy that.
My observations from the two videos:
I am sure DSLRs are going to become an even more marginal product. With probably under 10M/year sold across all brands you are looking at production runs of the order of 100k. Not yet too bad for production but they aren’t going to get cheaper. Jessops have more or less gone bust…
As he shows there are real benefits in shooting in RAW and this is arguably even more true with a phone – notwithstanding Apple’s excellent smart (e.g. their pretty well judged application of HDR) jpeg processing. This is why I am sticking with the old S7. The RAWs from that are identical to the ones from the S9; something Samsung wouldn’t want people to know. For trips to scenic places (but not ultra scenic i.e. no need for a DSLR) I bought a Canon G7X which works because I nearly always walk around with a waist pack, and it way outperforms any phone likely to exist for many years. But that market (pocket cameras) is also pretty dead now – some graphs posted further back in this thread.
One irritating thing I came across is that some cameras output RAW in some weird new format, not standard DNG. This is OK if you rent Lightroom as a part of the Adobe suite, for a tenner a month, for ever.
Snoopy wrote:
Amazing pictures! Does only the 11Pro have this camera?
11 Pro has a third lens, which is 2x telephoto. It’s the second wide angle lens on the 11 and 11 Pro that supposedly really improves the portrait mode as the use the Wide lens to improve the depth map.
Peter wrote:
It is easy to set up a photo which viewed full frame looks identical between a DSLR and a phone
That says a lot doesn’t it? Most people would view or crop close to full frame.
Peter wrote:
In the 1st video he does reveal that the Iphone pics were extracted as jpeg
Yes, this I did not understand – he’d better have taken RAW pics with the iphone. Whilst the iPhone JPG processing pipeline is probably second to none, it introduces artifacts that you start to recognise.
Peter wrote:
For family pics you don’t need a DSLR
Funnily enough that’s why some people with kids buy a DSLR – to get beautiful pics of their babies with bokeh. Now they no longer need to buy DSLR – just a better phone.
Peter wrote:
With hair, you don’t want to zoom in too much because you can see the artefacts
Yes, correct, that is a limitation that the photographer will need to take into account.
Peter wrote:
One irritating thing I came across is that some cameras output RAW in some weird new format, not standard DNG
Changing standards all the time is very annoying!
Honestly phone cameras have got to the point now I never want to be encumbered by a “real camera”. So if I go out to do photography, why not forget the expensive DSLR altogether, and get a good 2nd hand medium format camera and load it with Ilford FP4?
The one area where phones are just hopeless is serious telephoto. My iPhone 9 has limited zoom but the results are rubbish (to be polite). I have a pocket camera (not DSLR – Lumix DMC-ZS50) which has a 30x optical zoom, which I carry whenever I might want to take serious photos.
I took a bunch of pictures at an outdoor museum (Indian National Railway Museum) a few months back. Out of laziness I took the first few with my phone. Then I wanted some zoom so I got the Lumix out. Even for non-telephoto shots, the result was night and day (perhaps a bad metaphor for photography, but you know what I mean).
johnh wrote:
My iPhone 9
There is no iPhone 9 … ?!
johnh wrote:
The one area where phones are just hopeless is serious telephoto
Very true. I wouldn’t call it zoom, as it’s digital zoom. Optical zoom we have just seen arrive with the 2x telephoto lenses. Expect that to improve over the next few years.
johnh wrote:
Even for non-telephoto shots, the result was night and day
That is interesting as there is plenty of evidence that outdoors iPhones are at least on par with DSLR in a number of cases. Can you post some comparisons without zoom? Did you shoot with a advanced camera app such as ProCamera, or the standard camera app?