I didn't say a phone camera isn't better for the average consumer... I use my phone camera far more often than my actual camera...
But there's no world in which it's technically superior to a real camera, especially one with in-camera processing or in the hands of a professional with access to and skill with professional post-processing software.
A minor and pedantic point, but could we stop with the idea that smartphone cameras are somehow not 'real'? They are enormously sophisticated imaging devices that comprehensively outperform, for example, the 35mm film SLRs that many photographers were using in the 90s. An iPhone 14 enables you to take technically superior photos to the photos that professional photographers were taking only a couple of decades ago.
> An iPhone 14 enables you to take technically superior photos to the photos that professional photographers were taking only a couple of decades ago.
I really don’t agree, and honestly it depends on what categories you’re judging it on.
Film cameras from 20 years ago probably have better dynamic range than your phone. They probably have comparable resolution. You have a lot of options with lenses, so you can get lots of different looks.
Full frame size lets in lots of light. Photography is all about light - no amount of processing is going to make up for the size of a sensor on an iPhone. Let’s not even bring medium format into the discussion.
Hell, I’d say they could take photos that were technically superior to iphones over 100 years ago with tintypes and such. (Film was actually lower resolution than what came before it. ) There are lots of stunning portraiture, with a lot of clarity, from the start of photography that would be impossible to replicate with modern cameras.
Have you ever used a 35mm film camera? I’ve taken loads of photos on 35mm film because I enjoy the process, but the technical quality in terms of resolution and dynamic range is clearly inferior to that of a modern cell phone camera - even if you are using very high qualify scans or wet printing. And the difference in color accuracy is even more stark.
The amount of light that’s let in depends entirely on the aperture diameter, not the size of the sensor. Sometimes you can use a larger diameter on a 35mm camera if you don’t need a lot of depth of field; but equally, modern digital sensors are usable at ISOs where film is not. The acid test here is night photography. If you want to take night portraits, you're going to have a far better time of it using a modern cell phone than a 35mm SLR with, say, an f1.8 lens. Even with a wide aperture lens and 400 ISO film, you'd be lucky to get a shutter speed faster than 1/15th of a second.
You can of course get more resolution with a larger format (I enjoy 4x5 myself). However, using medium or large format film cameras is a massive step down in terms of practicality and rules out entire genres of photography that phones excel at. I enjoy lugging my 4x5 film camera around and I very occasionally I get a nice photo out of it. Even when I do, the version I take on my phone is inferior in terms of resolution (not actually that important) but better in every other respect. You can drive yourself insane trying to get a 4x5 negative that doesn't have any uneven development or scratches.
The bottom line is that a modern cell phone is a vastly superior general purpose photographic tool to anything that was available in the 1990s. We all (in rich parts of the world) have access to cameras that professional photographers would have killed for a few decades ago. Thus, it annoys me when people compare these incredible devices unfavourably with "real cameras". It's pure gatekeeping.
> The amount of light that’s let in depends entirely on the aperture diameter, not the size of the sensor.
That’s wrong. The size of the sensor, the aperture size (and of course the distance between the two) are all factors that together on this.
Saying the sensor size is the reason is also wrong, but the size of the sensor is a factor in the equation - and the sensor being so small forces manufacturers to go with wide open apertures. It’s not ideal for every shot.
> Even with a wide aperture lens and 400 ISO film
If I was shooting at night, why would I use 400 iso?
> You can drive yourself insane trying to get a 4x5 negative that doesn't have any uneven development or scratches.
Sounds like a good time for a hobbyist.
> Thus, it annoys me when people compare these incredible devices unfavourably with "real cameras". It's pure gatekeeping.
I’m not the one gatekeeping. Cell phone cameras are real cameras. They’re just different.
You say it’s good for general shooting, I’m talking about professional and hobbyist use.
I will say though, it’s just an interesting fact AFAICT - digital cameras are still behind - or are only just hitting parity - in terms of dynamic range.
>That’s wrong. The size of the sensor, the aperture size (and of course the distance between the two) are all factors that together on this.
For a given angle of view, the amount of light incident on the sensor depends solely on the diameter of the aperture (the absolute diameter, not the f number). You can see this visually in the comment I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33426540
If you really want to think of it in terms of a combination of sensor size and f number, you can do so. But it's easier just to look at the size of the hole the light is going through – which not surprisingly, determines how much light ends up being collected, once you fix the angle of view.
>If I was shooting at night, why would I use 400 iso?
Because films with higher ISOs are unacceptably grainy for most uses.
I agree on your first point, it is the amount of light coming in through the aperture. A wide open aperture lets more light in.
The point is just that they have to balance DOF and brightness in their designs. It’s a multi-variable equation, and sensor size is one of the factors that constrains the options you have available all things considered.
Like you said
> once you fix the angle of view.
And of course they’re limited to relatively small apertures anyway.
> Because films with higher ISOs are unacceptably grainy for most uses.
Not in my experience! This is just nitpicking now.
We can keep getting more and more technical, but I think you understand how it works.
You’ve made your point. You don’t like gatekeeping. I’m not gatekeeping.
Sorry, there’s something about discussions of the relative merits of camera systems that seems to get everyone very hot under the collar. Indeed, I think we have both made our points based on our own experience.
>They are enormously sophisticated imaging devices that comprehensively outperform, for example, the 35mm film SLRs that many photographers were using in the 90s.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm impressed by what smartphone cameras do these days, but the Nikon F100 snuck into the 90s and beats the pants off my iPhone 14 Pro's camera, while still being very much in the hobbyist/prosumer price range.
Have you done any side by side comparison shots? Even with a high quality scan, you're unlikely to get the same resolution and dynamic range from a 35mm negative. And that's leaving aside the obviously vast differences in convenience and flexibility. (I'm old enough to have used 35mm SLRs, and I have absolutely no nostalgia for that era.)
I've long since lost or sold my F100, but you can go to Flickr or 500px and search for F100 photos - it's still relatively popular among people that want to shoot on film.
Doing a quick side by side comparison of the 'selfie in the woods' shot with a shot of a person with a beard on 500px ( https://500px.com/photo/89633601/ge-by-nika-topuria ), the F100 shot has similar levels of detail in the facial hair, despite being taken from farther away and with what looks to be a wider angle lens by my eyes. You can pick out single strands of hair and bits of fuzz on the subject's clothing, etc., as well.
Bokeh is, of course, massively better on the F100. And I'll take basically any of the Fujia films over the color grading in the iPhone.
Looking at landscape shots, it does appear you'll get more detail out of the iPhone camera ( https://500px.com/photo/10782613/silent-chorus-by-chris-froe... ), so I can't claim it's universally better, but I think the idea that phone cameras "comprehensively" outperform quality film SLRs from the 90s is false.
Without side by side comparisons it's hard to draw any conclusions from some random photos on Flickr. The concert photos you link to are good photos (which is the important thing, of course) but they're hardly excellent from a pure technical perspective. Look at e.g. the blocked out shadows here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ginandsake/32014019777/in/phot...
I guess you're just using the F100 as an example, but it's worth pointing out that the camera body is almost completely irrelevant to image quality with a 35mm film camera. It's all in the lens and the film. (Autofocus might be better on the F100 than on earlier SLRs.)
>And I'll take basically any of the Fujia films over the color grading in the iPhone.
You want the same color balance regardless of time of day or lighting? If you want to get accurate color balance with film you have to use color balancing filters to adjust for lighting and conditions.
There are tradeoffs, for sure. Even in that photo, the details you can see look better than the weird mess that iPhone 14 Pro produced at a concert the other night. I think that's largely due to whatever computational garbage is happening, but that's what the camera app gives me.
>I guess you're just using the F100 as an example, but it's worth pointing out that the camera body is almost completely irrelevant to image quality with a 35mm film camera. It's all in the lens and the film. (Autofocus might be better on the F100 than on earlier SLRs.)
Sure, though the body determines what lenses you can use, ergonomics, features like autofocus, etc. There was a lot of solid Nikkor glass available for the F100. We could also point out that the developing process is also important to quality, etc.
>You want the same color balance regardless of time of day or lighting? If you want to get accurate color balance with film you have to use color balancing filters to adjust for lighting and conditions.
I'm not sure how you get that from my statement. I think that the iPhone's color grading and computational stuff looks pretty awful, and think that Fuji made quite a few excellent films. I don't see where this says I wouldn't use a filter when needed for an SLR... I certainly make use of CPLs and NDs on my cameras today.
Though, I was misremembering when my go-to film was introduced - looks like the FujiColor NPH 400 came out in '02. I'm not sure what I was using prior to that as my standard film.
I don’t think there are any Nikkor lenses that work only on the F100. Nikon has always been pretty good about lens forward and backward compatibility.
There’s lots of nice looking iPhone concert photos on Flickr. I just don’t see any slam dunk there, sorry. But hey there's obviously a subjective component here. If you prefer the results from the F100, that's just as legitimate as whatever preference I have.
I'm confused about the color stuff because digital basically lets you do whatever color grading you want, within reason. Getting the exact colors that you want from film is an arduous process if you aren’t scanning and using a digital color grading workflow. You either need a big set of color correcting filters or you need to do complex work in the darkroom. (Color wet printing is a HUGE pain in the butt.) Back when I shot film for real in the 90s and got the films developed and printed by regular cheap consumer labs, it was pot luck how the colors came out. I think a lot of people have a kind of false nostalgia for film's color rendition based on the results of a film+digital workflow that wasn't available to regular people in the 90s. There's a similar effect with grain, which looks quite different in scans compared to wet prints.
The world where it's superior is when I'm making a short film and want to be able to shoot it without a camera rental budget. As a low-budget filmmaker, my options for cameras are
1.) My old Canon 80D. One time purchase, decently compact, short battery. Produces an okay-ish image with moderate effort.
2.) Renting something nicer than my Canon 80D. Bulky, requires lots of know-how to operate, expensive if I break it. Have to use special cords, cards, lenses, mounts, etc. Produces a top-of-the-line image with high effort.
3.) My iPhone 12 Mini. One time purchase, very compact, multi-hour-battery. Works indoors, outdoors, day or night. Plug-n-play, extremely user friendly. Produces a darn-good image with minimal effort.
I fully understand that it's not the best camera out there—but it seriously competes with everything up to fairly expensive professional cameras. I would not hesitate to use my iPhone for professional photography and videography if the client never found out about it (or was okay with it). At the end of the day, the ratio of quality to convenience it provides is simply higher than any other offering.
The OP didn’t say it was technically superior as a camera - they said it produced better photos. Which you can argue it does, with all the fancy post processing. The statement was only about the final result, which for the eyes for whom most peoples photos are presented to are excellent.
...feels like I'm saying a Keurig "rivals and surpasses espresso machines" because it can produce a better espresso than an arbitrary espresso machine in arbitrary hands.
Yeah, true. Not very meaningful though.
There's probably a McDonald's hamburger analogy here that's better, but, here we are.
My challenge to an ambituous reader looking to comment: make that one work too.
But there's no world in which it's technically superior to a real camera, especially one with in-camera processing or in the hands of a professional with access to and skill with professional post-processing software.