Whilst I will in fact get this phone, this review unintentionally manipulates you into a favorable opinion. It's not just in the competency of the photographer, but also in the choice of subjects.
It's near impossible to make ugly photos in Tanzania, even with low-end skills or gear. The subjects, scenery and light conditions are naturally very beautiful on their own. The output will be visually attractive and you'd not easily notice any lack of technical attractiveness.
Compare this to photographing technical test charts or you walking the dog at night. As the subjects themselves are unexciting, it would be better suitable to analyze technical image quality.
Another interesting aspect of analyzing the quality of mobile photography is that counter intuitively, mobile phone screens are drastically superior to most desktop monitors. Mobile screens increasingly are OLED for deep contrast, wide gamut for richer colors, and have a pixel density that is a multiple of desktop screens.
Most photos taken on a mobile phone completely fall apart when viewed on a big screen, as it then becomes obvious how much of a smudge they are.
That said, we've come a long way, and I am impressed.
It was a revelation that the warm colors and soft morning light I'd seen in National Geographic images of Africa as a child were real. In Ghana during the Harmattan, every morning and evening just look like that; it is incredibly beautiful. With that knowledge, I'm prepared to believe that other places in Africa might be similar.
The iPhone 13 review primarily made me want to go travel.
Technically, I still prefer the output from more-traditional imaging systems. The ergonomics of phone-cameras don't yet work for me, either.
What I was struck by from the article, though, was that the iPhone images were good-enough to be publishable from a photojournalism context. As these imaging systems are generally incremental improvements, that means the camera in your pocket right now can do it, too.
Find interesting subjects in compelling light, frame them in a way that says something you wish to convey or remember, and push the button. f/8 and be there.
For some reason, I’ve never adjusted to using it. Anytime I try, I either lock my phone (by also hitting the lock button), or it’s off center and/or blurry due to the additional pressure required to hit the volume button (they require considerably more force than a typical shutter button on a camera, especially with some cases).
So I just stick to using the onscreen dot (which, as you all have said, has other ergonomic issues).
Back in the old internet days, there was a camera review site that always took the same picture of some toys on a shelf. It was pretty boring photography, but did a great job a highlighting the difference between cameras.
GSMarena still does this for every phone they review.
They are the benchmark for phone reviews and technically reproducible experiments. Anandtech is amazing too, but they they have very low coverage over phones and are usually pretty late to the party.
Arstechnica took a picture of a stuffed Koopa and Goomba in low light conditions with every phone they reviewed for years and years. It was great because they could put together a gallery of images to compare directly between phones. They seem to have moved onto some Ratchet and Clank figurines for the most recent reviews however.
That always irks me about review sites.Anand and Toms hardware do similar things with hardware benchmarks. I understand that use cases and workloads change overtime so you need to change up your test methodology but there always seems to be a lack of continuity and instead an abrupt change over.
I progressively upgrade my gaming rig and my video card is from the stone age (2017), when I eventually get around to upgrading I won't be able to compare it to newer cards.
I'd like to see review sites progressively update their tests so you can at least track progress by comparing A to B to C to D even if you can't directly compare A to D.
Loved the knowledge of the community at dpreview, however, the software used for the forum was hideous. It seems they have changed it since last I used it.
Compare to a similar compilation of Tanzania safari shots[1] captured at 2160p on a Panasonic GH5 with Leica 12-60mm F2.8-4.0 lens (an example amateur enthusiast choice). Ignoring the obvious difference in lenses, the GH5 has a 225mm^2 sensor size compared to 44mm^2 for the iPhone 13 Pro or Pro Max (approx. 5 times larger) and a much larger individual pixel size.
When looking at individual frames mid-motion (anywhere in the videos), the iPhone 13 has a noticeable lack of background detail (blocky and smudged backgrounds).
The video shared here proves that photography skills such as using shallow depth of fields, golden hour lighting, fast motion, wide angles, etc can produce a result that hides camera limitations and is potentially more enjoyable than poorly thought out shots on an expensive camera.
Does OLED really give better images compared to a good LCD?
I bought a Sony Xperia 5 II - thinking the OLED would give me a better picture - and it objectively looks much much worse than my much older LCD based Xiaomi 5 Note Pro (the camera is also amazingly worse)
I then went to the electronics mall nearby, and I noticed that the OLED laptops (from Asus) will have a much less vibrant image than a something like a Macbook or Huawei
I dunno if this is just a personal-preference/psychosomatic, or if there is really something to what I've observed. Would be curious if anyone has more info
Your mind is probably conflating brightness with vibrance, which makes sense because most electronics malls are quite well-lit which helps you weed out the weaker, 250-nit panels that Asus is trying to scam you into buying again.
I looked up some specs and that seems likely what's going on. Interesting observation :). I've also gotten the impression the bright lights tend to make matte screens much worse
> I bought a Sony Xperia 5 II - thinking the OLED would give me a better picture - and it objectively looks much much worse than my much older LCD based Xiaomi 5 Note Pro (the camera is also amazingly worse)
Objectively? How did you measure that? Or did you mean subjectively?
I think what you say is true, but it seems to imply that this article is saying little more than "this phone camera is uniquely great, because look how pretty these few pictures are." In fact, the content of the article is more about this photographer's experience with this phone camera, and specifics about how he uses it versus how he might use alternative cameras.
My thinking: to a layman's eye this looks like I could have taken these photos with an iphone 6. would be nice to see a comparison of iphone 6 photos with iphone 13 photos of the same subject
> This is an article about the iPhone 13 Pro camera. If you can afford it (...)
Some people who purchase iPhones can't really afford them in the sense of having hundreds of dollars of disposable income, and either save their asses off to treat themselves or take loans.
Apple controls a 20% market share of the smartphone market. Do you really think 20% of the whole world can simply spend $1k without batting an eye?
Even in the US close to 40% of it's population cannot afford an emergency expense of up to $1k, and the US is one of the nations leading in purchasing power.
There is more to life than well-paying STEM jobs in the US.
Is it just me or does it feel a little off-putting that he doesn't bother to post the pre-edited photos? What the picture looks like after potentially hours of tweaking in lightroom is less interesting for the average consumer than what the pics look like without any editing IMO.
Don't get me wrong, it's still valuable to see what CAN be accomplished, but most people aren't going to spend that amount of time, so show us how much work you had to put into post-processing for those results. Otherwise it just kind of feels like an advertisement for Apple.
This is a professional photographer. Editing is part of the photography process, just as important as taking the picture in the first place and sometimes even more important to the end result (that is to say, a poorly edited photo is often worse than just having never taken the photo at all).
There are many, many, many more reviews out there on the internet that show casual, unedited photos from this camera. I think this person's use case and exhibition are interesting due to his entire workflow.
The more surprising aspect to this review (maybe I missed this part, I skimmed) is how there wasn't much discussed about having a bigger and more ergonomic hand mount for the phone when shooting. I don't even mean with all sorts of nifty expensive stabilizers, just something to hold onto the phone and shoot better. I did see use of a small tripod at one point and a mount to a vehicle but for the hands, nothing.
Maybe I'm getting old but I find it difficult to shoot good photos even with the bulkiest of phone cases, while also being able to hit the shutter without shifting my camera drastically.
I personally use a Note so the S pen works great as a built in remote shutter (especially nice for tripod shots) but I can't for the life of me get good shots with the UI shutter or even volume/side button rockers. Sure you have voice controls or shutter timmers but timmers are not ideal in most shooting conditions from my experience, unless you have humans. You can also burst or drop frames from video but ick, shooting professional photos with a phone as is seems unnecessarily uncomfortable to me.
I haven't tried this but apparently the Apple watch has integration for showing you a preview & letting you take a photo. More expensive for sure but probably similar utility as the pen approach?
But professional photographers who spend as much time editing as photographing won't be purchasing this phone with that intention. That would be lunacy, as their profession/hobby likely already has had them invest thousands into professional equipment.
This is directed towards those taking pictures for social media. Advertising (that's what this is) in this way implies that you, yes you, could be as good as a professional photographer. Except, you also have to dedicate the time and vast expertise, like a professional photographer would, to get pictures like theirs. They cleverly leave that part out.
The article has an entire section about how he often uses an iPhone to shoot for clients and specifically about how he sets up the phone to do so. I thought the "shoot mode" was pretty clever and I didn't know that you could setup those kinds of automations. It was a nice "pro-tip" that I could see myself using.
I can accept that he really likes the product, but even then, the point of the article is broken.I cannot imagine any scenario in which a professional photographer would use a mobile device for legitimate client work, unless he is paid by Apple. There is no way in hell it is on par with professional equipment. The battery alone is a huge detriment to field work.
To your points, these are nice new features. That in no way means that a professional photographer should say "you can be as good as me with these new features!"
He's shooting in raw, if you do that you _have_ to post process because otherwise it'll look flat and listless because raw is capturing as much information as possible so that you can choose later how you want it to look.
I'm curious as to what value would that provide most end users of the content? If you're a photographer perhaps you have software for processing the raw file and you want to see what you can do with a raw file; however I still feel that for most end users this would be useless. I would be one of the few I think that may play around with this.
Wouldn't help much for a "camera review". The raw would just be a black-and-white mosaic that would look awful. What you want is the processed jpeg out of the iPhone along with the edited ProRAW. I'm not sure if the iPhone can do this but a lot of cameras can shoot in RAW+JPEG mode.
Traditional RAW* wouldn’t be a black-and-white mosaic. It just would be data. RAW’s need to be demosaiced to be seen visually, which makes it dependent on software (or algorithm).
RAW formats can/usually have a thumbnail/preview embedded. I convert all of my Nikon RAW files to Adobe DNG (Adobe's RAW format) and I have a Leica camera that uses DNG natively. When I convert, I can chose to have a full-sized preview embeded. This makes certain software give a faster preview.
Sorry If I’m misunderstanding something, but aren’t both of the things you mentioned already a reality? I thought RAWs included jpeg already, and Bridge already has an option to prefer that.
Pre-edited photo is a myth. Cameras capture light values far exceeding dynamic range of any output media. Fitting scene-referred data into capabilities of screens or paper is always a subjective art and is ultimately photographer’s job.
In digital, all “unedited” means is using camera firmware’s interpretation of raw values; especially with complex processing in modern phones this isn’t a very good measure as scene recognition can be hit or miss and the algorithm is a black box.
(What could be indicative is posting scene raws alongside exhaustive development presets, of course.)
It could be helpful if one could assume if you took the same photo in the same location by the same phone, the result would look the same, which I don’t think would be a valid assumption anymore.
Sure, no photo is unedited. But there is a difference what is the effort of post-processing. Is it none, a few seconds, a few minutes with Lightroom, or hours with Photoshop?
It is true that there is a difference in the amount of manual tweaking, but at the same time any remaining objectivity in “unedited” phone-produced output-referred (non-raw) images is fading fast. In other words, imagine if the technology by your link is silently incorporated in the next version of iOS Camera app without you knowing—and I’m not even sure this is an outrageous exaggeration.
I have an iPhone and I am always disappointed with the results when compared to a mirror less and DSLR. If you see the lions picture closely there is no sharpness. There is a lot of computational color magic that goes behind the scenes to make the images pop but when you look closer they are obviously no where close to pro-am cameras.
I have a DSLR and I now don't bring it along anymore. I have three kids, so I already have to carry around a lot of stuff and children, so there is no more room or energy for my DSLR. My phone is always in my pocket though.
I recently invested in some phone lenses by Moment and I am very excited about them. They also fit in my pocket and I can pop one on my phone in about 10 seconds.
> I have a DSLR and I now don't bring it along anymore. I have three kids, so I already have to carry around a lot of stuff and children, so there is no more room or energy for my DSLR. My phone is always in my pocket though.
I also have kids, and no phone without seamless, automatic cloud backups and the ability to transparently take "Live Photos"[0] is at all interesting to me now. I don't care how good the stills are, if it doesn't have those two things.
[0] Live Photos are a feature of Apple phones where it captures a few seconds of video before and after you snapped a photo, including sound. Tap and hold on the photo to play the video. They're basically magic, especially if you have kids. Like the moving photos in Harry Potter. They also make photos with waterfalls in them really cool instead of reliably terrible.
Yes! Live photo's are amazing. My kids get a good laugh out of the loops you can create with them too. But I also love looking back at the live videos of a few years ago. They make a still really come alive. Great feature!
this is the reason I loved the Ricoh GR series of cameras, an APS-C sensor that genuinely fits in almost any pocket is incredible, it's not for everyone but I wish there were more companies trying this, even the X100 cameras are too big for that
Consider switching to a APS-C type mirrorless or Micro Four Thirds. They might not be as good as a full frame DSLR, but the lenses are a lot lighter and compact. So instead of carrying around a backpack you can easily fit everything into a small messenger bag which you can easily take everywhere.
A ukulele is easy to carry around, but is pretty pathetic sounding compared to a proper acoustic guitar when it comes time to actually play songs.
For the average consumer who doesn't know how to play music at all, maybe the ukulele would be a nice option. If you hand a professional guitarist a ukulele, and tell them it's a proper guitar, they will probably laugh at you.
That a ukulele is smaller is actually the opposite of what I'm looking for. I don't need a smaller guitar. I need a nice one, that plays and responds like I'd expect a guitar to.
I would never use a ukulele as a way to somehow replace a recording of a traditional guitar, even though it's more convenient.
There are thousands of photographers who feel this way about DSLR's.
If it doesn't fit your current/busy lifestyle, cool - the ukulele works for you. But don't pretend the ukulele is / can be a guitar. Popping lenses onto an iPhone camera is like putting an amplifier onto the ukulele. You're still trying to make something better that is, due to its size alone, never going to have the depth or quality a guitar or DSLR would have.
Also, I'm not dissing the ukulele, here. I'm trying to provide an example that just because a tool can work for a purpose, doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job.
If you hand a professional guitarist a ukulele, they will probably laugh at you.
From personal experience, if you hand a professional guitarist a ukulele, he will play the shit out of it and make it sound better than you've ever heard a ukulele sound.
Beyond that... a Ukulele, while a stringed instrument like a guitar, it's purpose isn't to replace or compete with a typical 6 string guitar. It's designed to do something different, it has a totally different tonal characteristic.
OP, is making a weird comparison is all I'm sayin I guess.
I realize this isn't the main point but the uke is kind of famous for being beloved by famous guitarists. George Harrison had a lot to do with that. He supposedly would keep a bunch in his trunk. I believe he gave Tom Petty two to get him going; as Tom told it, George came back to give him the second one because "you never know."
> Is it just me or does it feel a little off-putting that he doesn't bother to post the pre-edited photos?
This is a professional photographer writing a review targeted at other professional photographers, so it feels appropriate to post photos shot and developed as a professional photographer would.
Regardless, the article is more about features like the new macro mode with short focus distance and the performance of the telephoto lens. Those don’t depend on manual post-processing.
I agree 100%. One of the biggest things I'm curious about is how bad the artifacting is on features like focus racking and the macro lens. Sure it's cool to see a photography showcase, but it doesn't really feel substantial as a review. His rhetoric is also extremely awkward, like here for example:
> As I watched this piece, particularly the interview in Cinematic mode, it dawned on me that we’re moving beyond the world of just computational photography and into the realm of computational videography. The release of Cinematic mode marks another one of those fundamental shifts where software, unbounded by the limitations of hardware, has opened up entirely new possibilities in the creative process.
This is not a new experience, it's just one that Apple put inside your iPhone. Reading stuff like this really makes me wonder how critical they're being here, because it seems like "it shoots photos better than the last one" is enough to warrant a perfect review. And if that's the case, every camera system on every phone ever is perfect and there's no point to reviewing them at all, because you can rest assured knowing your next phone will have 25% better digital zoom, or whatever.
I don't think they did tweak it that much. The chromatic aberration and distortion from the lens is still visible. Maybe a bit of colour work and changing the shadows was done. Probably still very representative of what the iPhone's camera can do.
The pre-edited photos are in proRaw format, is that format viewable in a browser? Outside of posting the raw files for download, any means of making them viewable on the web would involve some form of editing, even if it's the process iOS does automatically.
I do agree though that it would be useful to state how much time and effort was spent in lightroom and PS.
Would be nice if downvoters explained why. I looked it up and you can't embed raw format images in a web page without converting the file which compresses the dynamic range.
Asking for someone to post the unedited version of a raw photo is a big misunderstanding of what that format even means.
I can't help but shake off the weird tricks that Apple do to the video and images that make these videos obviously shot on an iPhone. You can see the lack of sharpness where de-noising occurs, and where the colours are blobbed together. I think marketing the iPhone as being anything close to a replacement for a DSLR, even be it an entry level 100 dollar DSLR is silly as there's clearly a difference in quality just from camera sensor size and higher quality lenses. Especially editing iPhone photos using Lightroom limits you as many of the pre-processing steps compensate for the small lens and the small sensor.
The iPhone's camera is great for what it is, but it's definitely not anything close to a replacement of an entry level DSLR and shouldn't really be marketed as such.
> The iPhone's camera is great for what it is, but it's definitely not anything close to a replacement of an entry level DSLR and shouldn't really be marketed as such.
The iPhone isn’t intended to compete with DSLRs because it’s literally a phone that fits in your pocket.
Phones don’t compete with DSLRs because they serve different purposes.
I can’t realistically carry a DSLR or mirrorless camera everywhere. I can, however, keep my phone in my pocket all the time. That’s why it’s so great to have these reviews from professional photographers to show what’s capable in the context of the phone.
It’s not about DSLR versus iPhone. It’s about what’s possible from the device I always have in my pocket.
> The iPhone isn’t intended to compete with DSLRs because it’s literally a phone that fits in your pocket.
I'm not sure how you measure "intent", but I think there's fairly strong evidence that smartphone cameras have harmed the DSRL market. Sales are about half of what they were in 2008. This isn't just people moving to mirrorless either. Sales of all camera formats are down. Smartphones basically killed the market for compact cameras, whose sales today are down about 90% in the same timeframe.
Smartphones killed the market for low end compact cameras, because the average consumer uses their phone instead of a shitty $200 entry level camera.
The high end stuff is doing well with content creators and professionals. You can see this in the move upmarket of things like Sony A6600 ($1400 APS-C camera) and RX100 series ($1300 compact camera) that are aimed at creators in the attention economy. I think from here on we'll see smartphone needs driving sensor development, but that doesn't mean the camera market is dead.
> The high end stuff is doing well with content creators and professionals.
The high end stuff keeps getting better, just like every technology keeps getting better, but I don't know if it's "doing well" in the sense that overall sales of high end camera gear are increasing.
As far as I can tell, that entire market segment is shrinking. I'm not saying it's dead or even dying, but I do think it's getting smaller.
The iPhone certainly didn’t help, but just as important is the fact that progress has slowed. Remember the digital camera of 2000 vs 2010, and then 2010 vs 2020. I can take excellent photos with a 10 year old digital camera, and dreadful ones with a 20 year old.
I think your portability point is a fair one and also what motivated 35mm photography about a hundred years ago. But I think the DSLR vs phone comparison is flawed. There are plenty of wonderful point-and-shoot cameras that easily fit in your handbag, satchel, or whatnot and can give any phone a run for its money with its bigger sensor and larger glass – without being a bulky DSLR. It is a spectrum is what I am trying to say I guess.
Curious if you have such a camera on your person every day? It’s an extra thing to charge, you can’t edit and post directly to social media, getting pictures backed up is not automatic. It’s a totally different experience and for most people, they don’t want to hang large prints of their photos at home. They just need enough quality to show their friends and family.
Firstly, I feel I got a bit swamped with replies to my initial comment. So I will try to address it all here.
I used to carry a small camera at all times in my bag, yes. Mostly a Canon G11 and at times an Olympus XA. But this was a long time ago as I no longer pass by any points of real interest (to me) on my commute.
But, let me get back to what I am trying to convey. From my perspective, phones on cameras (combined with social media) created a new class of photographers that would be most closely related to those that previously had cheap point-and-shoot cameras (if even a camera at all) with fixed lenses that are easy to operate but gets the job done to document something. The results will be subpar, but that does not matter as the point is not something abstract like “bokeh”, the desire is to document something visually to have it become a memory or communicate an event to someone else visually in a less artistic sense than a “real” photographer. This is why I find discussions about how digital depth of field is not authentic largely to miss the point. This class of photographers do not care, they want good aesthetics – yes – but it is not something they actively seek out like a “true” photographer.
But here is the kicker, I doubt that without a readily available camera in their phone these people would ever have become photographers in the first place and this is why the camera phone vs DSLR discussion annoys me. This new class of photographers did not make a conscious choice between shooting with a phone, point-and-shoot, mirrorless, or DSLR. They used what was already there to communicate and when a new camera phone comes around they enjoy the fact that they get better aesthetics out of it than their old one. In a sense, I doubt they even view their phone as a camera in the first place.
So, it is a spectrum ranging from camera phone up to medium format madness. But I think most of these discussions are had by the 5% such as myself (and yourself) that consider weight, dynamic range, glass, etc. Rather than the 95% who probably do not even perceive themselves as photographers in the first place – although they certainly are.
But half of the magic of DSLRs is in the lenses, and unfortunately there is no single lenses that can work everywhere.
Regarding portability, yes point-and-shoots are portABLE, but in reality you don’t have them in your pocket 100% of the time, like you have a smartphone. You need to think about packing one more thing, that you may or may not need, so you won’t bother.
In summary, with a point-and shoot you are making two compromises: 1)photo quality 2)availability. In my opinion they are worse both than a DSLR and a good smartphone.
That's the thing, though. Many of us, especially men (but many women as well, including my wife) do not carry around a bag or wear a bulky jacket with pockets big enough for even the smallest mirrorless. So packing one along everywhere I go wouldn't be any more convenient than just grabbing the bag with my 7D.
Those aren't things you always need, though. If you commute to an office, sure, you probably take a bag with those things with you during that. But do you take that bag with you when you go out with friends? If you go to walk your dog in the park? Maybe you do, but I think most people don't.
Speaking for myself, if I'm going out without any special goal, I'll just have my phone, keys, and wallet.
Do you have an example of that kind of camera? My impression is the iPhone will beat any P&S below the $500 mark in dynamic range, speed, features and image quality, except for resolution.
I am by no means a professional in the field, but what DSLRs have over phones in terms of sensor size, phones have it in terms of computing power. And the same way we collectively could take a picture of a black hole, with “intelligence” we can sew back a good picture from multiple less good ones.
The one thing that can’t really be replaced is zoom.
In my hands the iPhone 12 consistently performs better in indoor conditions than my old a5100 (basically a more compact a6000), especially with the awful kit lens.
I like shooting outdoor on telephoto (135mm+), and there the phones are nowhere as competitive, and won’t be for a long time, if ever. Actually that’s where the progress in standalone cameras is: more compact telephoto lenses, sharper zooms, faster autofocus, even less noise. And no, multiframe fusion won’t help when you’re shooting quick action.
I used to have a DSLR camera and the pictures I've taken with it are fantastic. But I realized that lugging it around was a chore and whenever I wanted to take a shot in a jiffy, it was never possible for me. With a small kid, it became even more difficult to manage it because now I had a stroller and a diaper bag to carry. Once I forgot my DSLR on a flight in Asia and that was the time I realized I can't be bothered with it anymore. The airline found it and returned it to me. I sold it soon after that along with the lenses, tripod, and the camera bag to a photography student at a steep discount.
Edit: The point is that a smartphone camera may never compete with a DSLR on quality but its portability and convenience are unparalleled.
I feel exactly the opposite way: when making photo's with my mirrorless camera I've got the photo 'under control', while having to balance an expensive phone with bad ergonomics for photography feels like it's a chore to take a picture.
Just look at all these 'pros' who are promoting iPhone photography: they're lugging all kinds of gear (tripods, cages, lenses) with them to help them make use of the phone. Seems like a small stretch to me to also bring a proper camera instead of a phone.
Also have small kids, also shoot a (high end) DSLR. On the one hand I am all-in on the "always have it with you" side of phones. On the other hand, I've noticed in a collage of 4x6's, the best shots are all from the DSLR. The difference is dramatic.
I'm headed to Iceland in a few weeks and have been going back and forth on dealing with bringing the DSLR but I think this seals the deal. I think we'd all consider 4x6 on the small side of a print and if an iPhone doesn't provide decent prints at that size it has no hope at 8x12 or larger.
You might want to consider photographer insurance or a third-party warranty with weather damage coverage that covers you if it happens outside the country you're insured in. Camera companies boast about their weather sealing, but they don't guarantee it. You can get camera parkas to reduce the risk, but it's still a risk.
To be clear the iPhone shots are still great, but the DSLR is a cut above for certain scenes, e.g. low light portraiture. (full frame, 24-70mm f/2.8)
Sticking with one high quality lens & bringing no accessories helps a lot with the overhead. Pick up a tiny USB battery cradle & reuse your phone charger...
For low light portraiture get yourself an aps-c mirrorless with a modern 56 or 30/1.4 lens and get both image quality and portability, no need for full-frame now outside of pro sports or wildlife.
I'm currently using an iPhone 12 Pro Max, and the quality is quite good.
However, I also recently purchased an Olympus OM-D EM5 Mark III because I wanted more control and the ability to take better photos. This is a Micro Four Third's camera, and I think this is really the ideal "middle ground" for getting great shots without the weight of a full-frame mirrorless or DSLR.
It's not quite "pocket" sized, but small enough to throw in my over-the-shoulder bag, and I'll regularly take it on bike rides around the city I live in.
As others have pointed out, the best camera it he one you have with you, and the iPhone does quite well in more and more situations, but if you want the best of both worlds: interchangeable lenses, world class IBIS, full manual control in a small package that won't wear you out after a few hours, the MFT cameras are great.
I thought the same of my Fujifilm X100F.. and it's mostly staying at home while I go around. I just don't think about it enough. Whereas my phone is always in my pocket. Mind that I have an Android phone with a subpar camera, and yet I reach out for the iPhone of my partner when we go around and i want to take some pictures.
You just sold the phone for me though, instead of having to carry around a DSLR on a safari he carried a phone that would fit in the side pocket of the average camera case and still got magic...
A while back, I sought comparisons between the famous Lumia 1020 (with a 41 megapixel, 1/1.2" sensor in 2013^) and modern phones^^ and found quite surprisingly many. It seems like that's still happening; this website has many in detail, including one with the iPhone 12.[1]
IIRC the results had become fairly close between the 1020 and modern phones by late 2019, with the 1020 being markedly superior with post-processing turned down.
^ considered significant as it was far superior at the time to every other phone camera and most point-and-shoots; also found in a more rudimentary form in the Nokia 808 from the year before
^^ For reference, the iPhone 13 seems to have a 1/1.65" main sensor in a 'Pro 12MP camera system'. IIRC, 48 MP sensors from Xiaomi in early 2020 were the first to surpass the 1020 in megapixel count, and a few uncommon phones over the years have had sensors of larger area.
The Iphone clearly does a better job now. When I highlighted the Lumia it was not in absolute terms, but the jump in quality from my previous phone, and Im hoping the I13 is a similar jump. Currently I have the X and it takes really bad photos.
But overall, I just loved everything about Lumia/Windows. Very non-intrusive. The e-ink layout took almost no power to run, had no apps in the store so very fast.. :)
Even now, I'm still fond of the Pivot control. Alas, side-scrolling for navigation seems to be a foregone paradigm; all that's left are horizontal lists. Maybe navbars and hamburgers positioned on the farthest edge of the screen are more usable, but the Pivot was just so Swiss! It's ironic, though, that the situation with home screens is inverted: orthodox launchers have horizontal pages, but the WP Start screen is vertical and unpaginated!
One app in particular, a WP original and exclusive, now comes to mind: Logic Games, a diverse collection of grid-based logic puzzles, had an extreme but effective take on this kind of navigation: nested horiz/vert scrolling formed a grid of phone screen-sized pages for puzzle types, and each page contained a grid of tiles for individual puzzles (sadly, 4D chess was not among them). I've yet to come across a more extensive unified set of grid-based puzzle implementations, though Simon Tatham's collection has similar spirit:
Phones are good for portability but for any once in a lifetime experience, I would rather take some real camera gear. The amount of computer magic the iPhone camera does to photos look good is plainly visible in the sample pictures in the review.
For what an iPhone goes for these days it’s possible to buy a used high grade camera body and a good prime lens if you can handle shooting with something a generation or two old. If you spend your time taking photos instead of reading blogs and taking photos of charts, you will be very happy.
I used to feel the same way 10 years ago, but the quality of phone cameras nowadays is incredible.
They have to make some compromises because of their size, so a pro with a DSLR is always going to win. But for the rest of us, phone cameras make it so much quicker and easier to get a good photo. And you don't have to lug gear around with you everywhere and spend ages fiddling with settings, tripods and lenses.
So, as a non-pro, I prefer my phone camera, even for once in a lifetime experiences - it actually means I get to experience more myself, rather than my experience being taken up by the camera.
It’s easy to tell from the photos in the article that the iPhone is making up a lot of the images. It’s like a dream, it looks perfect until you start paying attention, and your brain starts filling in the gaps with nonsense. To me, that’s not good enough for a cherished memory.
> And you don't have to lug gear around with you everywhere and spend ages fiddling with settings, tripods and lenses.
I feel like if you’re lugging a lot of gear around it should be to take a photo that is difficult or literally impossible to take with a phone anyway.
No one remembers events perfectly. You remember the highlights; your brain fills in the gaps with what it believes it remembers happens, sometimes going so far as to lie to you.
When faced with that fact, you can choose to feel that it elevates the importance of accurate recreation of the past in our photographs.
I'm more on the opposite side; I don't look at old photos to remember what happened. I look at them to remember how I felt when it happened. I'll never look at an old photo and think "what the; the goldenrod shade of that lion's mane had a 0.54% deeper saturation in real life, this camera sucks!" I'll be thinking "that lion was fucking awesome, and this photo makes him look fucking awesome."
So, maybe camera phones over-process and produce a dream-like representation of what happened. That's how everyone remembers how it happened anyway. There's certainly value in accuracy, but I'm not the New York Times.
Your brain does much much stronger “computational photography” on everything you see. Like, there is no hole around your nose, the physical hardware ain’t as good as the resulting picture, we do plenty of noise reduction, etc.
Compared to that, these AIs are mostly overhyped noice reducers.
I've pretty much stopped using my dSLR. My (android) phone isn't quite as good but so much smaller and more convenient its completely taken over. I'm torn whether I should upgrade dSLR because I love them, but will probably give up.
I'm a bit sad, but I've made the same decision recently.
I had an older mirrorless Sony that I really enjoyed using and taking pictures -- and honestly, I did enjoy the process but it was partially because I could take much better pictures than anyone who was just using a phone.
While shopping for a new camera, I just couldn't get past how much better phones have become and how much more convenient they are. I'm sure I'll still use my existing camera, and maybe look at buying an upgraded one used in a few years, but in terms of "Good Images per Dollar", it's just a no-brainer to spend that $1,000 on a 13 Pro instead of a new body.
Same here. I've even tried a compact DSLR and with a pancake lens to get some of the portability, but it's still relatively bulky and lacks connectivity. Technically the DSLR even has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but camera makers can't write software, so it's unusable.
I take pictures of birds and the iPhone camera is pretty much useless for it, but so is every camera without a super telephoto lens. I wish there was some kind of retractable zoom lens as an addon or something for the iPhone camera.
Moment offers a range of add-on lenses for iPhones. They have a 2x lens that can be mounted on the iPhone’s 2x for a total 4x. Not sure if that gets into the range you are looking for. Moment has a pretty good reputation for quality. There might be some other longer lenses out there by other manufacturers.
The 450mm equivalent of the long end of my 70-300 is just barely enough if the bird is nearby. 71mm is wider than the wide end (35mm equivalent) and far too wide for anything that'll run/fly away if I get close enough.
Even though I watched it in 4k the image was not 4k sharp, and random areas of the screen would get blurry/pixelated. Zoomed in shots look very bland. I own and iphone and I love the camera very much but this just convinced me that even the best phone cameras are nowhere close to a dedicated camera.
It's just that.....every time a new iphone comes out, there is a blog post exactly like this, showing some absolutely truly stunning photos taken with the phone. Like, world class. And then a new phone comes out next year and everything before it is supposedly garbage. I'm just not excited by the hype train anymore, no matter what you buy most pics taken in "normal" conditions just look like crap anyway.
I think they take advantage of the usual gap between the quality of dedicated cameras and the quality of displays most people watch the videos on. Here in 2021 with a decent HD screen, the 7D side is plainly better. There's just no contest on dynamic range and color reproduction. On a 2010 monitor? Maybe not so obvious. Jump to :29 and it's stark. The 7D side even seems to have some kind of film filter on it to intentionally make it look "old-fashioned."
Same for the 5D Mark 2 comparison. The phone has blown out highlights anywhere there's bright light.
Most people in 2021 are looking at these images on small phone screens and whatever sub-HD screen came with their laptop. That's fine until they want to print the memories they want to capture or get a better screen. I thought the photos I took with my 2007 PowerShot were great...until I got a D5600 and a full sRGB screen. The dynamic range and colors were atrocious, but they looked good when my frame of reference ruined color and dynamic range on any image or video.
Apple banks on people not thinking about what happens when display technology forges ahead and even entry-level screens reveal the flaws in the computational photography behind all their important memories.
The one thing I'm "jealous" of with iphones as an android user in terms of camera features are live photos, and how seamlessly integrated they are. Whenever friends take live photos, it just seems to capture the moment way better, even if it's just a second or two of video in addition to a fully post-processed photo. Really wish there was a standard file format for these and Google / all Android manufacturers would adopt it. It really adds a lot.
There's a lot of obvious flaws when looking at the images on a good monitor but that's part of the point I guess the images generally look amazing on a phone or when shared to instagram and displayed at a smaller size. Also suprised how much obvious compression artifacts there are on the hi res vimeo embed, very muddy and I imagine doesn't do the original footage justice.
Here's my gripe about conventional photography equipment coming from the big tech players, including new iPhones. They're processing with AI. Which means they train on a certain dataset... choose some parameters which they deem suitable, and apply this to everything.
And that's my issue: as soon as we jump in to explore some uncharted and new territory and capture and preserve it in an authentic way, we're capturing a false state. Even if raw can be captured, I fear most won’t. Consider that if you use Google photos to store your iPhone images, Google dings you for capturing raw (I remember from advertising literature some time ago that storage capacity was unlimited if you agree to have your images rescales, but limited if you choose to store them unscaled and unprocessed). What a confusing and strange pass to our posterity.
Can’t you take photos in RAW though, on iPhones at least? My assumption is that would produce a file w/o the AI processing applied that you could then process yourself, but I don’t know for sure if that’s the case.
I've been on some photography excursions where your main camera just starts to piss you off. Notably, stumbling through the woods trying to get macro shots of tree bark patterns. It's always nice to decide the chunky camera isn't working and revert to the phone, especially if it's a reliable shooter.
Having a tiny, powerful backup camera is a joy for shooting. It'll never be my main, but it has salvaged a shooting day here and there.
To me its not a question of some technical image quality but more so about expressiveness and the ergonomics of that expression. If you just want pretty pictures, then I think iPhone will probably work just great. But if you want to photograph for photographys sake then I feel like phone is still pretty constrictive and unergonomic. It's hard to beat physical dials, buttons, and rings positioned at your fingertips with touchscreens in the general case (admitting that there are cases where touchscreen indeed can be more convenient). Doing something like studio photography with iPhone still sounds like an exercise in pain. While the triple-camera setup certainly is improvement over single-cameras of past, its still only three options instead of the nearly limitless options you have with dSLRs, and you are getting compromises (like losing max iso) when you move off the "main" camera.
Dependig totaly on use case.
In my street photograpy days my best pictures came from two cameras: Rollei 35 (with zone focusing) and Leica M3.
But when you stop down and focus on composition and best possible result in camera, you need a diferent tools.
For the general public smartphones are ideal to "capture" the moment.
But quality cannot be accomplished without a biger than smartphone lens. Even entry level Sony RX has a Zeiss in it.
Comparing smartphone computational photography to professional photography is simply a marketing trick. Full frame sensor and adequate lens will give you always more data to push in post.
Smartphones have stagnated as innovation, so manufacturers are seeking differentiation and buyers motivation trough "better pictures".
> Smartphones have stagnated as innovation, so manufacturers are seeking differentiation and buyers motivation trough "better pictures".
And I dare say, some are succeeding in delivering "better pictures" (quotes yours). I have compared pics from iPhone 6s and iPhone 12 Pro taken in the same conditions, and I can tell you the improvements are very real.
I am with you. But the idea of "pro" is to market towards semi pros or amateur photographers, and this crowd has gear and tools to produce better quality.
The smartphones cameras in general are good enough for general public and not so many of this audience will see the differences, especially when the most of the UX is to apply filters and post on Instagram, Facebook or other social channels which compress the heck out of the photos anyway.
Photographing an interesting composition with a camera of mediocre image quality is superior to not snapping a picture at all because you left the expensive DSLR at home.
“The best camera is the one you have with you”[1] because the one you don’t have with you can’t take the picture.
That article is indeed a counter quote but provides a really bad counter argument. Most people won’t leave their preferred camera at home because they are testing gear or have their only camera clogged with color film.
The professional will create meaningful photography with lowest quality tools available.
The amateur on other hand, will produce meaningless pictures even with most expensive and advanced camera or some smartphone labeled "Pro".
For usual memorabilia use cases normal people will be fine with a smartphone from 2014.
But if you are professional, who has knowledge and desire to capture a moment with enough quality, you will never leave your house without a camera. And this camera never will be an iPhone or any other smartphone. This use case will be the extreme exception from the rule.
If we are in the digital realm of photography, here are some cameras that will be considered adequate:
* Fujifilm X100V
* Ricoh GR III
* Sony RX100 VII
With this you can produce award-wining work, with iPhone you will produce mainly self-esteem or some form of social validation.
I think you underestimate how people perceive quality. I am by no means a professional, but I did take a lot of pictures with a 2015 smartphone and assure you that using a more recent camera phone makes my pictures look way nicer.
Just because people are not submitting photos to competitions doesn’t mean they can’t see noise, blurriness or plain having completely dark pictures when in a dim room.
The quote, as I understand it is mainly used so people don’t invest into expensive and heavy gear they will ultimately rarely use. (And as a personal anecdote, I wish I have followed it and bought a lighter camera instead of a dslr back when mobile phones still sucked at taking pictures)
This is logical.
With time and mass exposure to better pictures people perceive differences in quality better.
I have a problem with this "pro" label from Apple.
But the biggest problem is that technically educated people are failing into marketing traps and false statements as "cinematic mode".
I assume you don't expect people like me, who are shooting since film era, and perceive photography as a form of art, to follow along.
The Pro label is quite loaded. Afaiu the iPhone is really good for video where it can (and has been) used as a professional tool. Note also that photographers are not the only professionals who can be using a phone as their tool of trade. All that said, I’m really not expecting wedding and wildlife photographers to ditch their DSLRs any time soon.
The big camera companies have as well. How much better is Canon's or Sony's best camera this year than a year or two ago? They don't have the same constraints that a phone company has and it seems like there's not a lot of year-over-year advancement.
I would personally use something like DxoMark's tests as a starting point to evaluate cameras and lenses. EDIT: and such things as the camera on a smartphone.
That sets the starting point, and then I can compare as I go along.
I watched it in 4K on a large 43" 4K Samsung from 2 feet away and I can see a lot of problems. Some of it is compression artifacts but some is the iPhone. Honestly it doesn't look that much better than my 2014 OnePlus One phone with 4K camera.
I really hate the pitch and all these photog pros showing you how you can shoot movies or professional photos with a phone. They either use daylight which is 1000 times brighter than indoor or they use $10,000 of pro lighting. In that situation, any camera will work great. But wait till sunset or try and do some indoor shots and the tiny phone sensor and/or try and shoot some fast moving subjects that require decent shutter speeds and the phone will fail miserably.
The whole point in using a higher end $1000+ camera is that you can use it in 50% to 80% of lighting and motion conditions that a phone sucks in.
For those itching for better-than-phone image quality in a portable form factor, look no further than the Ricoh GR, which packs a huge APS-C sensor and an incredible lens into a tiny inconspicuous package.
Not disputing that it's small for a real camera and probably takes fantastic pictures, but it's still the size of 4 iPhones stacked on top of each other, which takes it out of the realm of easy pocket-carrying for me.
Personally I carry my GR on a (tiny) shoulder strap in the summer or in a jacket pocket in the winter. It would fit nicely into a purse too.
I carry my Pixel everywhere, but I simply detest using it for artistic photos because the touchscreen controls are simply too clumsy and the image quality, while good on-phone, just falls to pieces at home on my 4k screen.
My phone camera is amazing. I can take photos of my town’s basic foliage on my basic phone which looks like a professional stock photo. The resolution, saturation, sharpness, color correction would’ve seemed unbelievable 10 years ago.
I have an iPhone 8. I don’t see much improvement in these iPhone 13 photos.
Not really because it still "develops" the main photo properly while taking a short video. It will use a shorter exposure time so you might wanna drop it for low light shots.
I went on safari with duma explorer over the summer (https://www.dumaexplorer.com/) Hard not to take amazing photos with any camera. Unbelievable trip.
It's near impossible to make ugly photos in Tanzania, even with low-end skills or gear. The subjects, scenery and light conditions are naturally very beautiful on their own. The output will be visually attractive and you'd not easily notice any lack of technical attractiveness.
Compare this to photographing technical test charts or you walking the dog at night. As the subjects themselves are unexciting, it would be better suitable to analyze technical image quality.
Another interesting aspect of analyzing the quality of mobile photography is that counter intuitively, mobile phone screens are drastically superior to most desktop monitors. Mobile screens increasingly are OLED for deep contrast, wide gamut for richer colors, and have a pixel density that is a multiple of desktop screens.
Most photos taken on a mobile phone completely fall apart when viewed on a big screen, as it then becomes obvious how much of a smudge they are.
That said, we've come a long way, and I am impressed.