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Is the iPhone 'Years' Ahead of Android In Photography? (9to5mac.com)
Former Google senior vice president of Social, Vic Gundotra, said that Android phones are years behind the iPhone when it comes to photography. In a Facebook post, Gundotra said: "The end of the DSLR for most people has already arrived. I left my professional camera at home and took these shots at dinner with my iPhone 7 using computational photography (portrait mode as Apple calls it). Hard not to call these results (in a restaurant, taken on a mobile phone with no flash) stunning. Great job Apple." 9to5Mac reports: In response to a comment suggesting that the Samsung S8 camera was even better, Business Insider spotted that Gundotra disagreed. He said that not only was Apple way ahead of Samsung, but Android was to blame. From Gundotra's Facebook post: "I would never use an Android phone for photos! Here is the problem: It's Android. Android is an open source (mostly) operating system that has to be neutral to all parties. This sounds good until you get into the details. Ever wonder why a Samsung phone has a confused and bewildering array of photo options? Should I use the Samsung Camera? Or the Android Camera? Samsung gallery or Google Photos? It's because when Samsung innovates with the underlying hardware (like a better camera) they have to convince Google to allow that innovation to be surfaced to other applications via the appropriate API. That can take YEARS. Also the greatest innovation isn't even happening at the hardware level -- it's happening at the computational photography level. (Google was crushing this 5 years ago -- they had had 'auto awesome' that used AI techniques to automatically remove wrinkles, whiten teeth, add vignetting, etc... but recently Google has fallen back). Apple doesn't have all these constraints. They innovate in the underlying hardware, and just simply update the software with their latest innovations (like portrait mode) and ship it. Bottom line: If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone. If you don't mind being a few years behind, buy an Android."
Ah, the good old Apple vs Android argument. Always good for click/flame bait on tech "news" sites.
If you use a DSLR to make family photos in restaurants, then yes, your phone has replaced your DSLR.
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Buy a camera. If your iphone camera is so great let's see it zoom without losing resolution, or focus some place else. Thought so. Those photos look just like photos from anything. You can tweek them with software all you like but it's essentially a filter. Your iPhone camera is just as limited as any other smart phone camera and showing off glowy pics of your kids isn't going to change that.
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If you truly care about great photography, you own a proper CAMERA.
FTFY...Born-again iFan
... There is no reason why 'Samsung camera' on a Samsung phone couldn't be equal or better than the iPhone camera - just because it may take them time to convince Google to add it to an official api doesn't preclude Samsung from implementing it themselves. Sounds more like iPhone fanboy rambling than a genuine issue.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines clearly states that the answer is 'no' to any headline containing a question. Betteridge's Law proves that the iPhone is not years ahead of Android in photography. Period. End of discussion.
Apple is ahead. For instance, the current MacBook is a marvel of technology and the exact notebook I would want. I *will* take others a few years to catch up. However, I don't want to spend 1400 Euros on a device like that, so my 2011 MB Air will have to do for another few years - which I know it will relyably do.
Same goes for iPhones. Yeah, some things are ahead, but then again, my Moto G5 Plus has a pretty good camera and pretty good software for handling the images. I couldn't really say the the iPhone offers everything I would want from a phone camera and besides, my G5+ costs less than half as much as an equivalent iPhone when considering all the specs, so there is no incentive for me to leave the Android space. Since I usually know what I'm doing when I get a new device and know what to look for.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If you care about photography you buy a camera. Full fucking stop. It's about the lenses and no iPhone has a lens that gets close to what a DSLR for a resonable price offers.
And if you are cashed up? L-Glass. LOL just LOL if you think an ITurd will touch L-Glass on a good body.
This is Apple we are talking freely about!
Competition? bah! Humbug!. Choices? No one needs them.
Here this guy is trying to convince us that people who care about photography who mess with SLR cameras, aperture, speed and all those things are easily daunted by a few choices in the Apps.
The very same Microsoft which was so dismissive of choices became an ardent supporter of competition and consumer choice when it came to standards. With straight face it argued its deliberately misnamed OOXML "standard" is a good because you need competition between "standards"!
This guy is a photographer. He has just discovered what innovation can be packed on the processing side. Probably he was messing with RAW format picture because he would never "trust" the default jpg converter packed in Nikon and Canon. Now suddenly he is all ga-ga about software doing one button click post processing.
It is very much possible he is a good photographer. He should stick to his area of expertise and stop assuming being good, or even a great photographer, makes him an expert on computers, software and open source.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The post is flame bait, whatever. Sony phones have cameras that are years ahead of the iphone. That said, nobody who knows anything about photography expects a phone to replace a DSLR. The sensors and lenses simply cannot be even remotely similar, due to size limitations in phones.
I mean he should know better than me but... Samsung are in control of the hardware and software, there no reason why they can't write drivers all the way down to the camera itself and then expose that to their app only. Infact that's how things like the fingerprint sensor worked pre-official Android support - they had Samsung-specific API. That API happened to be open for all to use but it doesn't have to be, if they were to write their own private API that would be fine. I believe to be certified they would have to expose the camera to Android standard interface too for other apps to use, but there is nothing stopping them doing extra shiny things with their own software that Android doesn't natively support.
As far as cellphone photography (???), Google's own Pixel/Pixel XL has very likely the best camera out there.
Odd post, Gundotra isn't a photographer. But we all have opinions.
I'll trust my wife's opinion, because she *is* a professional food photographer. When we're out to dinner and she just has to make a photograph (usually of *my* food, but I'm well used to this now), she typically bypasses her iPhone 7 and asks for my Pixel XL. Why? She says she can make better photographs, get a smoother response especially in the shadows, with the Pixel. But she'll be one of the first to tell you that the difference is really pretty small.
I'm thinking Mr. Gundotra has an axe to grind with his former employer. Which is OK, but this is a funny way to deal with it.
"Here is the problem: It's Android."
Perhaps I'm wrong, but unless a multi-billion dollar global megacorp like Samsung is legally beholden to Google's Android OS, the one to blame here is Samsung.
Don't like being held back? Then develop your own damn mobile OS and innovate. Your competition sure as hell did.
Now that's just weird - "fcamera" AKA Frankencamera was a project started by MIT that came out on a variety of non-apple platforms (including android) quite a few years ago and it provided all that you see on the default apple camera app now and more.
I really don't know how this article made it past the editor since it shows nothing other than ignorance of what's available on other platforms, or even cross-platform including apple.
If only because Android is a nonexistent phone, there are many different actual implementations, some of which may be, but none of them have to be and they are not forbidden from being better so that not one can be as good or better than an iPhone.
Additionally, the iPhone 3 is still an iPhone. Is the claim that the S3 is years behind the iPhone3 for its camera?
The entire thread is BS and the submitter should be shot to the betterment of mankind.
Iphone is Hardware, Android is Software. How could a serious comparison be made?
Yes, I am aware that the writer probably meant "Iphone is years ahead of smartphones running android" but that just shows the faults in his argument.
Imagine I make a movie-grade camera which runs android (not too far off, considering the wealth of functions those cameras tend to have): Boom, now "Android" is at least 30 years ahead of any Iphone.
How apple users are bewildered by to many options when taking photos.
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Former Google senior vice president of Social...In a Facebook post...with my iPhone 7...Android was to blame.
Sure sounds like someone needs therapy to help him get over his firing.
Fuck the iPhone.
Let me tell you about my grandparents. They used to love photography. They had a decent little pocket camera they'd take with them wherever they went. They'd snap tons of photos of just about everything. Some of them were really good too, but the majority of it had to do with family outings and events. Over the span of maybe 10 years, they collected about 130GB worth of JPGs. If you ever needed anything from a previous party or something, getting photos was only a phone call away.
Then, one day, they bought an iPhone.
Immediately they started taking pictures with that thing instead of their pocket camera (the one with a proper flash and a real CCD sensor). Their reasoning was that because it was such new technology (plus being advertised so actively on TV), it must be better, right? And therefore they should be using that instead of their trusty old pocket cam.
I've lost count of how many "moments" that fucking phone has destroyed. The images are either too bright, too dark, washed out, streaked (almost like the shutter was open for too long), or out of focus. They're old people so it takes them a minute to pull out the phone, remember how to operate it, and take a photo. Because there's no preview on the LCD after you take the picture (it just animates down into your camera roll), they rarely remember to check anything afterwards- they just assume it's good and put the phone away again. I'm not even going to bother mentioning how iCloud seems to downsample images transferred through it from one device to another, since I've noticed some wonderful compression artifacts showing up on their photos above and beyond the absolute garbage spat out by the iPhone in the first place.
Eventually they started to notice a pattern and just kinda stopped taking pictures, because it was always one disappointment after another. Somehow or other, they managed to blame themselves for the shitty pictures their iPhone was taking. They'd see the fancy commercials on TV and basically go "well, if they're taking such awesome pictures with their phone, and we're not, it must be us". It took us almost 2 years to convince them that wasn't the case and that they needed to stop using the phone for pictures and start using their pocket camera again. Once they did, everything went back to normal. They can take out that camera, turn it on, check the top dial to make sure it's on the green square (automatic), and pull the trigger. The LCD shows them the picture for 5 seconds after taking it so it's trivial for them to see if it turned out (which it almost always does) or retake another if it didn't. It takes bog standard SD cards (which are cheap as hell these days) and it Just Works (TM), unlike Apple's overpriced fashion oriented bullshit.
So yeah. Maybe Apple is "years ahead" of Android, but they're both decades behind a decent pocket camera (nevermind something like a low end dSLR).
That makes no sense whatsoever. I have an iPhone and I have 8 or 10 camera apps. Each one has strengths and weaknesses, including the standard Apple Camera app. In fact over the last 3 releases Apple has been opening up more of the camera APIs and functions to app developers, resulting in more camera apps rather than fewer.
This gundo guy knows nothing about lenses, focal length and sensors or he's deliberately lying. Real photographers use real cameras. Iphones and other cameraphones are good for street photography at best. Computer people are, as always, dumb or liars.
I'm waiting to the day where the phone (with some aid from Tah Cloud) just reckons how the scene should look like, given the time of day, GPS coordinates and phone attitude (mix in temperature, nearby WiFis and noise level to taste) and offers you that as a photo.
(Google Street View and Roomba Home View plus some Samsung TVs and Amazon whatsitsname images are already in Tah Cloud -- why duplicate that effort?)
Only missing: Facebook Bathroom View. Soon at a web merchant near you.
Ditch the expensive optical sensor.
That's progress!
My daughter took a picture with an iPhone of a her little sister in the garden. There's a winged unicorn flying over her head. All this "computational photography" and "AI" is great, and maybe some people want wrinkles removed and teeth whitened, but I prefer a camera that produces an accurate record of light that entered its lens.
Wasn't Google years ahead in photography with its Pixel? (Except for some other, specific problems like the price point)
And then.. Vic falls into his own trap: When he says the iPhone is ahead, is he talking about hard- or software? While ignoring the difference on that side of the iOS/Android fence, he not only differentiates that for Android, he also gives that as the reason!
But when there are Android phones with crappy cameras and phones with top end hard- and software (like his Samsung example or my Pixel example), how does the phone operating system decide if a phone is ahead or behind iPhone?
It makes sense to have the iPhone as a benchmark as there aren't many hardware models.
bickerdyke
nt
The article reads like a parody. Is an ex-Google employee seriously raving about an exclusive feature on his iPhone 7 that copies a feature launched by Google in 2014?
Dxo mark is the defacto standard when it comes to judging cameras, and the Google Pixel has the best smart phone camera, rated 3 whole points over the iPhone 7. My brother and I both compared shots as he's an apple sheep, and I'm an android sheep. The pixel photos were overall better.
See: https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Pixel-smartphone-camera-review-At-the-top
You guys aren't giving Apple enough credit. And before you accuse me of shilling, let me say I don't own any Apple products -- not one. I have a Google Pixel and love it. It does have a great camera. But I'm also a photographer, and what Apple has done is significant.
They brought "depth of field" to small-sensor photography, and that is no easy task. "Depth of field" is what gives you that effect of a foreground in focus and a blurry background (or vice versa, like in some movie transitions). Normally, to get that shallow a depth of field, you'll need a combination of 1) a big sensor and 2) a big lens and 3) ample ambient lighting so you can shoot with the big lens's aperture wide-open. Apple managed to make it work without any of those three things.
That's all so well and so good, especially if you're just snapping your kids right in front of you, it gives nice results, no arguments. You say you are a photographer though, would you consider replacing your camera with an iphone for any kind of significant work? Thought not.
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If you do indeed have a Google Pixel, you should be able to verify that Google has this feature too, and they have had it since 2014, so they are precisely -2 years behind Apple on this.
So what? The point in GP's post is that this technique has been made point-and-click, and therefore now available to people without the knowledge or equipment to do it the professional way.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Depth of field is why everything is in focus on a small-sensored camera. Llack of depth of field is what allows blurred backgrounds and subject isolation.
Moron.
And oh, Apple's bokeh-simulation isn't "just" meh, it royally sucks and looks totally artificial. A gimmick.
Also,the Canon lenses you mention are far from "amazing." The 1.4 is merely ho-hum, and the 1.2L is merely good at best.
BTW, a 40 year old Spotmatic with an SMC Takumar lens that blows that Canon out of the water runs about 35 bucks on Fleabay right now. Yeah, it's film, but that same lens can be attached to just about any modern DSLR or mirrorless as well.
Product placement, fake tech reviews, and stories like this don't work when you make it this obvious.
Let's just look at Netflix's new series, Ozark. It's a fun series, but it's a bit strange that everyone is driving the exact same car.
Then in the middle of some scene the camera zooms in on someone using their phone to start one of the cars.
Yeah, that's not an obvious ad at all.
Android has plenty of problems. I should know, I port it to new devices for a living.
But not being able to develop post processing or whatever for it is not one of them.
Maybe Samsung hasn't chosen to do it, and that might be a valid argument.
Maybe Samsung has done it, but they didn't properly integrate it, and that could be a valid argument.
But "Android is open source, and therefore shit, and perpetually behind the times" is not a valid argument.
So what? The point in GP's post is that this technique has been made point-and-click, and therefore now available to people without the knowledge or equipment to do it the professional way.
So what? The suggestion in the article is that the era of dslr is on its way out to be replaced by (i)phones, this guy says the camera software is getting really good. I say that's great for snapping your kids or your dinner but it's not a replacement (not that op is suggesting it is). People aren't doing it the professional way though are they? They're just getting professionalish results in certain settings. Which again is great but limited.
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But I'm also a photographer...
ample ambient lighting so you can shoot with the big lens's aperture wide-open
Yeah, right. A photographer...
OP literally dedicated a paragraph to point out that a DSLR is better overall, so I don't get your snark. He'd clearly not do what you propose.
But the best camera is the one you have with you, and 99% of the time, for 99% of people, that's the camera on the phone. Most photographers had long ago figured "decent depth of field needs a real lens and a wide aperture. It's physics and optics." which is 100% still true, but Apple managed to approximate the effect on a phone in a good enough way that, while the technical quality (pixel count, optical sharpness, optical clarity, etc) isn't too different, the aesthetics of many pictures just got a notable kick.
Cool is cool, regardless of platform. I'm still sticking with my Nexus, but i'll give Apple a tip of the hat when appropriate.
-- My Sig is a P228.
I assume I can attach my Nikon 300 mm telephoto lens and my 19 mm architectural lens to it, yes? And, of course, it has a hot shoe for my flash.
Sounds like a perfect DSLR replacement!
What about Lytro and light field technology? That looks pretty slick too. Also Gundatra is a tool.
Just reading that I can tell this is a person who doesn't actually understand technology. He might be a manager, but he doesn't understand half of what he's saying.
Or photography. Great photography comes from how many different apps have access to the underlying hardware functionality? Suuuure..
First, this:
> But I'm also a photographer, [...]
Then, that:
> Normally, to get that shallow a depth of field, you'll need a combination of [...] ample ambient lighting so you can shoot with the big lens's aperture wide-open.
To shoot with wide-open aperture, what you do need is *less*, not *more* light (otherwise you get an overexposed shot).
Brought to you by...
> 404 Clue Not Found ( 763556 )
Indeed.
Depth of field is some artsy-fartsy garbage like black-white instead of color.
In video games its a crude hack to mask the failures of the engine, together with motion blur and 30fps for "cinematic experience".
Let the viewers decide for themselves what details in the photograph is important to them.
What counts is the picture quality, the light sensitivity of the sensor combined with its resistance to optical noise (common problem with smaller CCDs).
Honestly this argument that DoF contributes to the quality reminds me of the same bogus about tube-amplifier having a "warmer" sound. This ignores that the warmness is actually just a distortion (i.e. an error) that sounds pleasant. An amplifier should reproduce the input signal as accurate as possible. Distorting it is then the job of the equalizer.
Gundotra said: "The end of the DSLR for most people has already arrived.
Total idiot, for most people, the DLSR never arrived in the first place. Most people don't care about getting the highest quality pics - what they have is more than good enough for taking way too many pictures of cats and restaurant meals.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
iOS is built to run on a specific set of hardware with very specific set of camera components. Thier applications are compiled practically down to the assembly language level. You can easily be take it down to the bare metal programming level if you want. So you app can be highly optimized for speed and functionality because you are locked into a specific set of platforms.
Android takes more the Java approach of 'write once, run anywhere.' You can write and app once and will run on multiple generations of an OS and hardware. But this approach costs you speed and functionality.
And before you Android zealots go crazy, yes you can write Android apps in C++ and similar languages. But with the variety of hardware, especially the variants of ARM processors and MIPS starting to come back. To get bare metal compilation done a developer practically has to write a different version of the same application for every platform.
For example I have cellphone that uses almost the same hardware as a dev board I have. My cellphone runs great for making calls and basic web browsing. But the same phone can run a basic word processor for on the go notes. The dev board can be way more productive running the full OpenOffice suite.
Samsung gets around this issue by writing platform applications, like the camera apps. It optimized for the processor and the application. While the DSLR may be dying, the concept of specialize hardware for photography will never go away.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I've had various iphones in the family, and usually the iPhone lags behind other models in camera. Till iPhone 6, I don't think the photos were great at all. You need the following for good photos 1. Sony sensor (literally the best) 2. Carl zeiss lens (this is good for sure, others, you may have to test) 3. Good display (without which you won't really enjoy your hires photos) iPhone doesn't seem to use sony sensor / carl zeiss, they believe in their own technology. I have a Lumia 950 that is just great at photography. iPhone comes nowhere near. Some of the sony android phones are also very good. in general, the low cost models lack the camera that you're looking for. Nokia 8 is expected to be good here. It has the right combination.
First, anyone who thinks any cell phone is better than a DSLR has no clue how to use a DSLR, or has never used a DSLR for serious photography. Maybe their style of photography does not require a DSLRs capabilities, but the photos will still always be better with a DSLR. It's the physics of sensor size and optics.
As to Apple vs Android, I've used both and Apple cameras suck a bag of dicks. I find that Samsung phone photos clean up and augment nicely while Apple photos are just a mess if pushed even slightly.
Why else would we get to read obviously paid-for propaganda pieces about its supposed massive superiority?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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Wow ... way to completely miss the point .... and show total lack of comprehension of the physics of lenses
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
They did this by combining photos shot simultaneously with the iPhone's two cameras, each with a different field of view, into a sort of depth map, and then applying a blur filter over the parts of the photo it identifies as the background. That is a combination of great engineering and computational magic
It may be a great feat of engineering, but not what (DSLR) photographers are looking for.
Yes, it's true that you can get better photos with a DSLR [...] which takes at least a few hours of training for most people.
So, in short: DSLRs are for people who appreciate the absence of digital shenanigans, who know what they are doing, and are prepared to invest money and time to learn how to use their tools. I fail to see how the iPhone is introducing the end of the DSLR, except for those who did not need a DSLR in the first place.
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Samsung and some of the Chinese are well ahead of Apple on cameras. With dual lens, instant focus, high speed, all manner of clever post-processing algorithms.
*Google*, are not Android in most areas, they don't even define the most popular mutli-window system currently (Galaxy Note does), they certainly don't define how an Android phone should look or work, and don't define the cameras since most of the popular phone makers skin Google's shit efforts, and use their own camera apps.
IMHO, Google have lost their way. They're currently turning Android into a crap Windows clone by bolting on Chrome and it's a joke. I honestly wish someone would fork them at this point.
https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles
To me it seems like almost all the top phones do about the same, with an edge to Android phones for now.
instead of "Is the iPhone 'Years' Ahead of Android In Photography?".
It would be much more interesting comparing the security and cryptographic capabilities of IPhone vs Android.
In the age of regular civilians vs "global adversaries" this (security/cryptography) would be more relevant...
yes its flame bait
yes correctly interpreting the colours is pointless since apple has forged them previously to make it "look better"
what complete and utter rubish this man espouses clearly he cant even use the platform he helped create...
They brought "depth of field" to small-sensor photography, and that is no easy task. "Depth of field" is what gives you that effect of a foreground in focus and a blurry background (or vice versa, like in some movie transitions).
I think you meant to say HTC and LG brought "depth of field" to small-sensor photography on Android two years ago.
And yes, the iPhone camera sensors, which are made by Sony, are pretty good also.
There is a name for this, "bokeh", which is the aesthetic quality of the background blur
To put an ultra-fine point on this, there is a name for saying the "aesthetic quality of the background blur" has a name: BULLSHIT.
To a real photographer with a real camera, "background blur" is "created" with a featured called DEPTH OF FIELD and refined with another feature called LENS FOCUS.
Everything else is just a filter.
"If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone."
No! If you truly care about great photography you have dedicated purpose built camera. You to not use your phone for quick snap shots only, not for anything you'd take the time to think about composition for.
Finally you certainly don't do your post processing on the device. You use a PC/Laptop/Macbook etc with real photo editing software, and large color corrected screen to see what the heck you are actually doing.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Actually, it can be.
Here's the rub. When most people think "Professional Photography" they think a guy toting around a big-ass camera with a huge lens to grab art shots out in the wild, action snaps of athletes in mid-run, or great photos of people at fantastic events.
That's the realm of DLSR and always will be. Insert endless arguments on shutter speeds, depth of field, light and shadow, macro lenses, normal lenses and telephoto lenses, color gamut and one digitizer versus another. Sorry but a camera phone can't compete.
However, most of your professional photographers spend a lot of time in studio shooting stuff. Coffee cups, t-shirts, gold-tipped cables, knick-knacks. That's a good bread-and-butter gig. An iPhone would be fantastic for that, and really is preferable to a big DLSR because you don't need the huge support tripods and you can sync it up to external flashes and all sorts of monitors.
Right now the DLSR rules the studio for everything, but I know at least one professional commercial photog who has a dedicated phone just for running out endless product shots for customers.
Having owned numerous Nexus devices and numerous iPhones - I've used both.
My wife noticed that the pictures I took with my 5X and 6P were just nicer than the pictures taken with our iPhone 6S and 7.
And I suck at photography - but somehow the nexus cameras enabled a half-ass photographer like me to take pretty decent pictures.
I prefer iPhone for everything else, but cameras on Android, generally, are pretty damn good.
Article says "the end of the DSLR for most people" (emphasis mine), and I'd say they're exactly right.
If this technique arrives to lower-end phones, the people who buys a DSLR for family photos and lacks the skills to use it properly will now be better served by a camera phone that provides results equivalent to a DSLR on automatic.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
You can tell this guy is an uniformed dufus when you read this:
"The end of the DSLR for most people has already arrived"
No camera phone will ever replace DSLR's for professional photographers. Most people had "toy" DSLR's. Actually what most people had were "point and shoot" cameras.
He did and my line was more directed at TFA than himself. Probably could've put that across better. You're right though, the best camera is the one you have and with your phone you're mostly taking relatively close up anyway and the better that can be then the better it is.
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Their bottom line is:
If you tend to shoot portraits and that's what matters to you most, the iPhone 7 Plus is an obvious choice. Portrait mode is dSLR-esque, and we only expect it to improve by the time it gets a public release. But if brighter colors, sharper detail throughout the backgrounds of photos and capable low-light photography is more important, it's the Pixel. I have to admit, I initially thought Google over-promised on its new flagship -- especially after those disappointing Nexus cameras -- but I was wrong. It's a new chapter for Google phones and this one earned its name.
...few of them hold a candle to Nokia's offerings from several years ago. Shame.
"I left my professional camera at home and took these shots at dinner with my iPhone 7 using computational photography (portrait mode as Apple calls it). Hard not to call these results (in a restaurant, taken on a mobile phone with no flash) stunning. Great job Apple."
Pack it up, guys, this argument's over. All it took was one photographer's shitty anecdote about their own work. With a such a rock-solid foundation and irrefutable premises, we can finally put this whole issue to rest.
Srsly. Stahp.
He was senior vice president of Social at Google. We all know how social went for google :). To me it seems like he is comparing oranges and pears.
Why can't Samsung make a great camera (or two cameras, as other Android phones use like HTC) and make their camera software to use it at full potential?
Do they have to pass through google standard api to access it? I really doubt it.
They make the device driver for the camera, at the very least they can use some mechanism to access that driver (ioctl the most basic) and exchange data between the app & driver. Samsung phones only come with Samsung camera app, use that if it has the feature you want and that's not exposed in the standard android camera app.
This guy says the problem with Android is that Samsung can't export their special camera features to other (camera) apps, meaning that some other apps can't do interesting stuff with that feature. Fair enough and very likely. But then he talks about portrait mode on iphone, which is iphone camera app feature, not a feature provided by a third party app on iphone. If Samsung does not have is not because of Android but because Samsung did not implement it (meaning they don't have two cameras and the software to do combine the images and do the bokeh).
Former Google senior vice president...
Note the first word - FORMER.
The rest of the post is FUD. Oh no, I have two apps which can take a picture! Oh the humanity!
The reality is that the hardware in Apple and Android phones is very often identical. Just like the hardware in Apple computers is identical to many laptop and desktop PCs sold with Windows or Linux.
Not to mention the effect that appropriate use of DoF can have to enhance an image; sometimes you really need to soften out a harsh background to avoid distracting from the primary subject, or (even more challenging) balance the exposure so that you can put all the attention on the subject by having it as the only thing in an image that is perfectly sharp. The real skill in photography comes from knowing what to leave *out* of an image, not how much you can cram in.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
It was Apple vs. Windows! You kids and your hooky bajooky clicky phones! *shakes floppy drive cable*
"Former Google senior vice president of Social, Vic Gundotra, said that Android phones are years behind the iPhone when it comes to photography."
Better written as:
"Current Apple executive, Vic Gundotra, said that Android phones are years behind the iPhone when it comes to photography."
Apple poached the guy, *of course* he's going to trash talk his former company, that's what he is *paid* to do.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Nonsense.
Nothing more annoying than having a half-blurry photo.
If the object really is the only thing interesting in the photo, why not cut it out and paste it on a black background instead?
And if that fails, have some neon-colored text in comic-sans "This is important" with an arrow pointed to the object.
Honestly I think most people are just overcomplicating things needlessly.
If you care about photography you use a dslr with good lenses, and use you phone for making calls.
> You're [...] right
Accepted :-)
And to get more on-topic, that would mean that (small, shallow) depth of field, which is a limitation of "grown up" cameras (which can, and is utilized as means of expression by artists, like artists do all of the time with their imperfect instruments, but is a bitch if you, e.g. are trying to get a macrophotograph of a beetle, because then the second leg to the left is sharp, but the right eye isn't) is something the iPhone is simulating *in software*?
That would be a reason for me to never touch such a perversity, sorry.
Photographers use depth of field to selectively isolate the parts of an image that are intended to catch your attention, which the human mind does by instinct when you look at something. Macro photographers in particular used haul out the tripod and the big lights for shooting at nothing less than f/22 to 'keep everything in focus' for every image. Today there is an assortment of macro lenses available that will open up to f/2 or faster. This enables you to isolate, by available light, a fast-loving little spider against a picturesquely blurred background.
Have you actually looked at the quality of those photo's? Even in the default low resolution that facebook uses for the timeline it's clear that the quality is not great. If you the click it to get a higher resolution one it's really clear that it's not great quality. A P&S camera will give you a better quality picture in the same conditions, and a DSLR much better. But people might be happy with that quality, he clearly is.
So then let any photographer do it in Photoshop then, if post processing counts.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"ample ambient lighting so you can shoot with the big lens's aperture wide-open" - I guess it's been a while since you had a fast lenses. It's actually the opposite. You can't shoot wide-open when there's a lot of ambient light, unless you also add a filter, or increase the shutter speed. On a bright day, shooting at f2.8 you sometimes have to jack the shutter speed up into the thousands.
My wife loves her IPhone 7, But when she wants a good picture from a phone she grabs my Samsung galaxy as she hates the poor quality from the iPhone (she has had that complaint for the last 3 iterations where my equivalent galaxy has been superior). I have told her to just switch but she loves everything else on the iPhone better because lets face it android is a bucket of shit when it comes to consistency and usability (I can live with that for the flexibility though).
Not sure if it is bokeh. But Android camera has a mode where you scan the field around the subject, low to high and it estimates the depth of field and adds a blur.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Several years ago I bought a DSLR. I'm not a professional photographer, but my phone camera didn't even come close to cutting it. Today I wouldn't buy a DSLR camera unless I was literally going to be a professional photographer. My phone takes great pictures, better than I even need..and I always have it. Sure, I could get better pictures with a DSLR, but I just don't need it. That's the only way phones are replacing DSLR cameras.
Most people do not use DSLR camera, they use point-n-shoot digital from the likes of Sony. No mobile device can match even an ancient DSLR device, the sensors are still garbage and require near perfect lighting conditions due to the tiny aperture and the lens are a joke. Sure, they're fine for drunks goofing around and children's parties, but as soon as it gets dark, you're looking at grainy shit more fitting for instamatics and 110 film of the 80s.
It depends. Sure you can't replace a DSLR for professional studio work but many professional photographers now depend on phones (especially the iPhone) for places where a $2k purse of heavy gear would be a significant issue (think urban, war and nature photography), even short movies have been shot entirely on phone devices.
Phones are small, portable, are connected to unlimited storage capacity and have a sensor as good as many DSLR, even though it doesn't have the optics.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
No, 'smooth Bokeh' is (possibly) artsy-fartsy garbage. Depth-of-Field is physics and the same principle is used by the pupil in your eye. If you look at something in the foreground, is the distant background in focus? No. So your eyes are artsy-fartsy are they?
The fact is is a performance hack in games has nothing to do with anything. I hate playing games where everything in the Z plane is perfectly in focus - it is unrealistic and separation between foreground and background elements is useful and important.
The iphone is not really using the lens for image quality, it is using software. So then wouldn't Photoshop processing count too? Is iphone better than android processed with Photoshop?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
But anyone that shares idea that the DSLR has been replaced by the smartphone is merely showing how little they actually know about the art and science of photography. There is a lot of physics going on that is related to some things like sensor size, which dictates lens focal length, and has a related effect on f-stop.
This has a marked effect upon the look of the image.Due to the size and especially the thickness of smartphones, you will have to use a small sensor, which will necessitate a very short focal length lens with an extremely short distance focal plane. Which will give the images a particular look, usually referred to as "Lensey". There are some software attempts at things like depth of field, but they aren't terribly good, looking like amateurish Photoshopping, and complete,y missing the circle of confusion effect. And then there is digital zoom.
Now after that dissertation, I have to say that smartphone cameras are nothing short of amazing technology. They are remarkably sharp, with nice color rendition. In short, a wonderful replacement for the 110 film and early phone cameras. A great device for family shots. I use mine in a pinch.
But as an adequate replacement for a DSLR? Not so much.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Do you see the contradiction with these two statements?
"Android is an open source (mostly) operating system that has to be neutral to all parties."
"They have to convince Google to allow that innovation to be surfaced to other applications via the appropriate API. That can take YEARS."
If Android was operating as open source (by Google and Samsung), then the development of new interfaces could be done directly by Samsung, then contributed back. rather than just waiting for Google.
In reality, Samsung does not understand open source, and they would not normally contribute back. But Samsung does understand the cost of forking without contributing, so they just work with the existing framework. And Google does not really encourage or want an open development model. They want to develop the core framework entirely at Google.
Btw, what specifically is missing from the camera framework?
Normally, to get that shallow a depth of field, you'll need a combination of 1) a big sensor and 2) a big lens and 3) ample ambient lighting so you can shoot with the big lens's aperture wide-open. Apple managed to make it work without any of those three things
Shooting with the "big" lens' aperture wide open requires the least amount of ambient light at any particular ISO sensitivity and shutter speed.
You have to remember that a 2D photo in and of itself is a distortion of the real world. The real world is in motion and is 3 dimensional. Blur provides cues as to what is going on in that picture. Imagine a fabulous shot of a car going 200 mph. The details of the car are clear while everything it's moving past is blurred. If everything were in focus, the car could be parked for all you'd know.
And yes, blur or "bokeh" can be used for artistic effect. Better lenses/apertures blur in a more pleasing way. You may or may not appreciate that but lots of people do. Photography is an art form and Apple likes to appeal to the artistic/creative types or wannabes.
Most of my pictures are just shots of the kids when we are out so when can send them to their grandparents. If I cared about good photography I would invest in a good camera instead of a phone.
I have been doing concert photography for several years. I shoot with a full frame camera that doesn't have built in flash (I have an external one, but flash photography is not allowed anyway). I am required to leave my camera after several songs. When I try to shoot with my iPhone I notice several things - very slow shutter, very slow focus, very slow startup time. I don't want to compare the sensor and the lens. When we are talking about pictures in daylight I have noticed something else - a white borderline around the edges in some cases, which to me seems like an over sharpening problem. Maybe the bokeh effect of the iPhone seems good enough to some people, but to me it doesn't. The closest to a DSLR killer are the mirrorless cameras. The best phone camera in my opinion is the Pureview 808. But again it was very slow.
Nonsense. Nothing more annoying than having a half-blurry photo. If the object really is the only thing interesting in the photo, why not cut it out and paste it on a black background instead? And if that fails, have some neon-colored text in comic-sans "This is important" with an arrow pointed to the object. Honestly I think most people are just overcomplicating things needlessly.
Or you could just take a picture of something in "portrait" mode and be done with it. No cutting. No pasting. No Arrows. Who is overcomplicating here?
Article says "the end of the DSLR for most people" (emphasis mine), and I'd say they're exactly right.
If this technique arrives to lower-end phones, the people who buys a DSLR for family photos and lacks the skills to use it properly will now be better served by a camera phone that provides results equivalent to a DSLR on automatic.
For most people sure, but the thing is, most the people it will be replacing the dslr for never owned a dslr to begin with.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
If you truly care about photography buy a f***ing camera!!
You guys aren't giving Apple enough credit. And before you accuse me of shilling, let me say I don't own any Apple products -- not one. I have a Google Pixel and love it. It does have a great camera. But I'm also a photographer, and what Apple has done is significant.
They brought "depth of field" to small-sensor photography, and that is no easy task. "Depth of field" is what gives you that effect of a foreground in focus and a blurry background (or vice versa, like in some movie transitions). Normally, to get that shallow a depth of field, you'll need a combination of 1) a big sensor and 2) a big lens and 3) ample ambient lighting so you can shoot with the big lens's aperture wide-open. Apple managed to make it work without any of those three things.
They did this by combining photos shot simultaneously with the iPhone's two cameras, each with a different field of view, into a sort of depth map, and then applying a blur filter over the parts of the photo it identifies as the background. That is a combination of great engineering and computational magic, and shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand. It is the only feature I envy of iPhones, and if I weren't tied to the Google ecosystem so much, I would consider switching just for this alone.
Yes, it's true that you can get better photos with a DSLR. To photographers, not all background blur is created equal. There is a name for this, "bokeh", which is the aesthetic quality of the background blur. Really amazing lenses like Canon's 50mm f/1.4 and f/1.2 are prized for their bokeh, despite not being able to zoom at all. But to get that kind of quality, you need to spend hundreds (if not thousands) on gear, take it with you in a 3-lb package, and know how to focus, meter, half-hold the shutter and shoot -- which takes at least a few hours of training for most people.
Apple shrank all that down to a button in a phone. It's not perfect, the bokeh is kinda meh, but sometimes good enough is good enough. No other phone to my knowledge has tried to do this. It might be similar to the technology Lytro light field cameras use (but I'm not sure). All in all, this is *actually innovation* and not just a minor spec upgrade, the kind of thing we should be lauding in the often-stagnant cell phone industry. At the end of the day, this is a pretty fucking huge leap forward for cell phone photography, and they deserve credit for that... even if I hate to admit it.
HTC did it first on th4e HTC One-M8
The crappy thing is you can't find a tablet with a decent camera, somehow they can cram them into a phone but can't figure out how to get one in a tablet form factor.
I'm not sure who has the best hardware available.
But it is faulty logic that Apple is better since Apple has one option and Android can have many confusing options.
The same logic means that my local gas station (which sells one model of point and click camera) is a far better source for good pictures than the camera shop (which sells myriad models of cameras).
Depth of field is how eyes work. You can't focus everything in your field of view at once. This is why a photo that's entirely in focus looks unnatural.
I would think that if you truly care about photography, then you own a dedicated camera.
You can buy a dedicated camera for maybe half the price of the latest iPhone that totally blows the camera functions of the iPhone away.
You just can't typically get the cost of a dedicated camera subsidized by the provider of your cell phone plan.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When it comes to low light situations, the size of the lens matters more than the sensor area. The problem is that even with a large sensor area, you still have electrical noise in the sensor itself - to overcome this, you need to gather enough light to overwhelm the noise signal.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Slide to the left.. Is that not unlocking?
Means that doing one type of slide "unlocks you" to the main menu interface.
While doing another type of slide will start the camera app (while not granting you access to anything else in the phone) - this even works if normal unlock requires a PIN or - as in recent iPhone - a fingerprint.
Still, it doesn't compete with simply pushing a shutter button.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
(disclaimer: iPhone (4) owner and photographer)
True among that minority of photographers that use bokeh as an artistic tool. Very true among the much larger number of people owning a camera seeking to justify themselves and the amount of money they spent and equating the same as skill and talent. (Look! My photo has cool bokeh! That makes it good! And me cool!) The quality of the bokeh is also popular among reviewers as it's something that can be tested and easily displayed on a computer screen. All this lends an air of excessive importance to something that's but one tool in a photographer's toolbox and is really only useful in a narrow range of circumstances.
The term wasn't even invented until the late 90's. And even then, it's use was relatively limited until the rise of photo sharing sites and the need for mediocre photographers to differentiate themselves from other mediocre photographers. As a result, it's become something like the 0-60 ratings you see in car magazines... Something few people use in the real world, but which has become a mistaken proxy for quality because of [cool|wow|sexy] factor.
And they did all that because bokeh is fashionable. And because it's fashionable, the ability to create it lends a mistaken sense of overall capability to the camera and creates a mistaken sense of accomplishment in the wielder because it "looks professional".
No other phone relies so heavily on selling sizzle instead of steak than the iPhone. No other phone has to rely so heavily on marketing to retain it's market share.
this is analogous to a button anyone can press.
The keyword here is not "anyone" but "press".
Please pay attention to the above posts, what the initial poster want is NOT universal access (so he can give the phone to anyone else to make the picture, without granting access to anything else in the phone).
Lots of smartphones, including iPhone, have special "different Swipes" that open the camera app straight without requiring the security pin or finger print.
What the poster wanted is to push down a shutter and immediately have a picture take, so he can take quick picture before the event interesting him finishes.
You just press the button and the picture is taken.
Sony smartphone have a dedicated hardware button that immediately takes the picture, mimicking the "immediateness" of pushing down a shutter.
Some smartphone (even non android one) do a little bit of button remapping so, as long as the camera app is running, you could immediately take a picture (but might lose the ability to set volume while the app is running due to limited amount of buttons)
iPhone needs you to swipe to start the camera app (or fully unlock it) and the touch an icon on the screen to take a picture. Yes, it could be done by "anyone" (your point), but it take a little bit more time than immediately pushing down a shutter button like on a real camera or the similar quickness of dedicated hardware button by Sony (and this speed is what interested the above poster so he doen't miss an interesting impromptu event)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I have iPhone users continuously amazed with my Android-based LG V20 camera. This phone has two cameras, a standard and wide-angle. It has a full on manual mode that allows one to adjust exposure, f/stop, shutter speed, white balance, ISO, etc. It also has a camera roll feature which is great. It displays the image in a multi-grid panel with several exposure/style settings. So you can easily select the one that is capturing the image most closely to what you want.
But the quality, is amazing. I have photos that folks have thought were taken from an SLR. And in fact, the quality of images surpasses the DSLRs I owned 10 years ago.
But I'm also a photographer, and what Apple has done is significant.
They brought "depth of field" to small-sensor photography, and that is no easy task. "Depth of field" is what gives you that effect of a foreground in focus and a blurry background (or vice versa, like in some movie transitions). Normally, to get that shallow a depth of field, you'll need a combination of 1) a big sensor and 2) a big lens and 3) ample ambient lighting so you can shoot with the big lens's aperture wide-open.
You're a photographer and think you need ample ambient light to shoot with a wide open aperture..... You just lost everyone who actually knows anything.
Lytro does way more than this.
At it's core, it does use the same super low quality depth maps that is typical from most depth from stereo solutions, but Lytro captures a number of view points all at the same time. It is then possible, using these view points, to focus and re-focus (including with effects like DoF) a photo after it was taken (by the user) as well as adjust the view angle.
The trade off for being able to do this is that the camera is quite low resolution internally and requires supersampling techniques to not look terrible.
As far as the best sensor I've seen on a phone (and I'm not really a expert that has kept up to date), is actually the Microsoft Lumina. It took images in 13 megapixels, and the images were really clear (Nokia hardware was always good). The camera was the one good thing about that phone.
Oh wait: Full disclosure: I'm not a professional photographer, but I am an Instagram addict. My phone is my primary lens
So, basically, you just said you're not a photographer and not really interested in good pictures; you have a phone and your criterion for it is "good enough for Instagram is good enough for me."
That's fine. But why did you keep typing after telling us to ignore your opinion.
Once upon a time open source was unquestioned around here. It's nice to see slashdot starting to acknowledge that open source has SERIOUS flaws and is, in fact, a really shitty way to develop most software. One look at the kind of software people *actually* use shows this to be true. Open source almost always leads to poor usability, shitty security and terrible features. Amateurs should simply not be doing software development. Period.
What the fuck?
most of your professional photographers spend a lot of time in studio shooting stuff. Coffee cups, t-shirts, gold-tipped cables, knick-knacks. That's a good bread-and-butter gig. An iPhone would be fantastic for that, and really is preferable to a big DLSR because you don't need the huge support tripods and you can sync it up to external flashes and all sorts of monitors
Sorry, but no. If you're in a studio you're controlling everything, including the image quality, and a camera phone just isn't going to do it.
The tripods are always there, so you don't tote them with you. The lights all work with your camera. The monitors all work with your camera. You're at peak photographer.
I know at least one professional commercial photog who has a dedicated phone just for running out endless product shots for customers
That's nice for him. For website photographs, or sharing previews of the final shot, for snap & run engagements, that may well be all that's needed. But in the studio, by the time you've added proper lighting, including the background, framed your shot, done any desired post-processing.. it's actually quicker to use a proper camera.
People's resume is a good place to start figuring out whether to pay attention to them. Gundotra is a "former Google seniorvice president of Social", responsible for Google+. Before that, he was "platform evangelist" at Microsoft. He seems to have no expertise or background in photography or art. His opinion on Andtroid vs. iPhone photography is about as worthless as that of a random cab driver... probably less so, since with a random cab driver, there's a good chance you'll actually be talking to a starving artist instead of a wealthy manager.
That can take YEARS.
Proper open solutions always take years longer than proprietary crap. That's because they're here to stay. And I'll happily wait those years. I've waited years for browsers to gain Flash features natively. I've waited years for Real Video to die. I've waited years for the browser wars to cease. I'm still happily waiting for GIMP to gain proper color depth precision. And I'll happily wait for Android to gain a proper Camera API while I'm waiting for native mobile apps to die in favor of mobile web applications.
Also I know a bit about photography and can only conclude that Vic Gundotra does not.
0x or or snor perron?!
They brought "depth of field" to small-sensor photography, and that is no easy task.
Oh, you mean the thing Google did on Android back in 2014...
Depth of field is some artsy-fartsy garbage like black-white instead of color.
In video games [...]
In photography it's used to create a specific image. You can have the whole shot in focus - great for landscapes - or really narrow the depth of field and only have the subject in focus - often used in portraits, but really valuable in things like nature photography where the subject may otherwise be hard to pick out from the background.
Let the viewers decide for themselves what details in the photograph is important to them.
No. I'm the photographer, I'm creating an image that I find aesthetically pleasing. You can like it or fuck off, and I'm not terribly fussed which.
What counts is the picture quality, the light sensitivity of the sensor combined with its resistance to optical noise (common problem with smaller CCDs).
Some photographers intentionally introduce noise. Or on film, grain. This changes the aesthetic, often for the worse but sometimes improving it.
Honestly this argument that DoF contributes to the quality reminds me of the same bogus about tube-amplifier having a "warmer" sound. This ignores that the warmness is actually just a distortion (i.e. an error) that sounds pleasant. An amplifier should reproduce the input signal as accurate as possible. Distorting it is then the job of the equalizer.
The sensor does its absolute best to capture exactly the light hitting it. So job done, to the limits of the technology.
As the photographer I configure the lens to change the light hitting the sensor. The sensor never sees an unblurred background if I choose not to allow it, and so the resultant image has a blurred background.
I may then decide there's too much sensor noise and smooth the image slightly, or convert to black and white because it better suits the subject or hides a distracting colour.
The equalizer equivalent is your monitor. You can change its brightness, alter its colour spectrum and turn it off. I still have control over the photograph and what I included in it, just as a musician chooses which sounds to include in their published works.
No, as usual.
To put an ultra-fine point on this, there is a name for saying the "aesthetic quality of the background blur" has a name: BULLSHIT.
You're telling me the blurred background on these two images has the same aesthetic quality?
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
https://i0.wp.com/digital-phot...
That's not a fucking filter.
Just another vendor who thinks that people are too stupid to be allowed to have a choice in how they use their devices, and therefore the best solution is the device that doesn't give any choices.
He LEFT google almost 10 years ago. Not to mention, some android phones have caught up and passed up the iPhone in regard to pinhole sensor cameras. They need a new category for smartphones. Instead of calling it photography, call it "snapshots", because you will never achieve a level of performance and quality, with sensors that are tens of times SMALLER than even most compact, and super zoom cameras, not to mention APS-C and full frame d-SLR cameras.
It's ridiculous to begin with. Comparing a specific phone to a platform? Has there ever been a requirement for Android hardware vendors to only manufacture phones with good cameras?
Apparently you missed most of the summary:
"I would never use an Android phone for photos! Here is the problem: It's Android. Android is an open source (mostly) operating system that has to be neutral to all parties. This sounds good until you get into the details. Ever wonder why a Samsung phone has a confused and bewildering array of photo options? Should I use the Samsung Camera? Or the Android Camera? Samsung gallery or Google Photos? It's because when Samsung innovates with the underlying hardware (like a better camera) they have to convince Google to allow that innovation to be surfaced to other applications via the appropriate API. That can take YEARS. Also the greatest innovation isn't even happening at the hardware level -- it's happening at the computational photography level. (Google was crushing this 5 years ago -- they had had 'auto awesome' that used AI techniques to automatically remove wrinkles, whiten teeth, add vignetting, etc... but recently Google has fallen back). Apple doesn't have all these constraints. They innovate in the underlying hardware, and just simply update the software with their latest innovations (like portrait mode) and ship it."
Are we all accountants now?
No, they aren't, and any idiot that has been following smartphone news for the past couple of years or so knows that not only they are all pretty much on par and using the exact same technology, currently Android phones are setting the trend for smartphone cameras and iPhone has just been following behind - which wasn't the case in the past.
And this isn't bad per se, it's just how things have been for sometime now. iPhone cameras are also far from being bad... there's just not much of a difference between them right now.
His argument is so bad that he even used a feature (Portrait mode) that showed up first on Android phones (the fake bokeh effect has been around longer on Android smartphones) to make his fanboy/troll/flamebait comment.
And by the way, it hasn't only been there in Android phones first, it actually came out first on alternative camera apps, which invalidates yet another part of his argument. The choice for alternative camera apps is also not exclusive to Android - iPhones have plenty of them.
It's just another guy who knows nothing about what he's talking about throwing his previous job around to make his comments even more shameful than they already are. The only thing that it proves is that there was a reason for him to get fired.
This is supposed to be a Tech (Nerd) NEWS site.
It is NOT supposed to be a "Linux Fanboi" site.
So why is there a Story-Tagging Category named "fuckapple"? Is there a Tag called "fuckandroid" or "fucklinux"? I think not.
Why? (can anyone give a NON-snarky, non Apple-Hating AC answer)?
Jeezus, people: What ever happened to journalistic integrity?
Fanboys have a habit of twisting a disadvantage into a full advantage. Much like how back in the Power PC days. Apple use to show how the Power PC processor had handled a few Photoshop filters better than Intel chips, while the Intel Chips were in general faster overall.
As someone who did a lot of Intel and PowerPC programming back then, including optimized PowerPC and x86 assembly. PowerPC was technically faster even for general code. About 20% for CPUs of the same clock rate. Although I had many years more experience with x86 assembly, PowerPC also provided unique optimization opportunities that helped specialized code. Where Intel won overall was not having the better performing hardware (again, comparing CPUs with the same clock rate), rather they had a higher clock rate to overcome the inefficiencies of their architecture. "In theory" PowerPC had the advantage of a clean RISC design versus the legacy CISC of x86. CISC is much harder to design with and improve. However Intel overcame this by throwing tons of money into the project and frankly pulled off miracles. Looking back it was not that PowerPC failed to improve over time, its that no one (outside of Intel) expected x86 could reach the performance levels it has. Intel's engineers are miracle workers and deserve and enormous amount of credit. PowerPC expected Intel x86 to hit the wall many years earlier that it did, and PowerPC failed as a result.
That said, Apple's move to Intel was long overdue. Perhaps they should have never bothered with PowerPC and went from 68K to x86. Apple doubling their marketshare after the switch to Intel was not about slightly faster CPUs running native code. It was about being able to run Windows apps at reasonable speed even under emulation. Once on x86 CPUs they no longer had to emulate the underlying instruction set. Once they had this users no longer had to pick MacOS or Windows, they could have both. Even better, Apple added a dual boot option to run Windows natively when emulation might not be OK.
E.g. the one button mouse, oh how the fan boiz extolled its wonders!
Maybe some, balanced by the Windows fanboiz who ridiculed it.
Meanwhile halfway serious Mac users just plugged in a USB Microsoft or Logitech multi button mouse with a scroll wheel.
I left my professional camera at home and took these shots at dinner with my iPhone 7 using computational photography and blah blah blah...
Vic Gundotra has a professional camera only because the cost ($5k+) is nothing to him, not because he needs it or knows what to do with it. It's safe to conclude that Gundotra is an untalented amateur at best. Most probably, he has no clue what an f-stop is, or how shutter speed affects focus and why. There is just no comparison between what you can do with a decent camera (e.g., 5D3) vs a handset. Sorry, it's true. The cell phone has weight and availability advantages and that's it.
gundrota.credibility--;
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
People who buy DSLRs for family photos are doing it to show off, not to take photos. There are many excellent point-and-shoots that can take excellent family photos, though one must use them a bit to learn how they work (not all react the same way to lighting and portrait situations) and there remains a certain amount of dependence on luck. Must agree with farther above, though; making the "portrait mode" thing automatic will be a godsend to snapshooters, and even some semi/pros who need quick test & backup shots or find themselves for some reason without the tool they otherwise would use.
Phones are what Brownie Boxes and Instamatics and film-in-a-box cameras used to be - easy to carry and so available anywhere anytime. It's possible to do professional work with any of those, understanding their limitations - professional being understood as: knowing how to compose and expose the picture properly; and getting paid for it. And in some cases the point is simply to capture an event, regardless of the quality of the tools available - see: surveillance cameras.
Actually, it's a personal and artistic choice - both of the photographer and the viewer - as to which approach they might prefer in a given situation and what "message" the image is seen to convey. Most (by far, judging by my image sales figures) tend to pick and mix on an image-by-image basis, others see it as a more binary decision - I know another photographer who hates the long exposure effect applied to moving water, which used correctly can convey a sense of motion and/or create a more dreamy effect, who will always, without fail, use a fast enough shutter speed to freeze any motion in the water. That often results in some quite interesting takes on things, especially in low light where she is forced to use a wide aperture resulting in shallow DoF, but any water in her images is always frozen in time and seldom seems to have any sense of motion at all.
For some images you absolutely want 100% sharpness from front to back (e.g. most landscape photographs), for others you might find you prefer to use a shallow depth of field, either because it emphasises a given subject (e.g. to primarily show an animal but still depict its environment) or because it reduces background clutter (e.g. to pick out an athlete in front of advertising hoardings and spectators). Also, despite what many hipsters seem to think (which may be colouring Sciengin's view), DoF is not an all-or-nothing choice - you don't need to choose between everything in focus or the minimum possible razor blade thin zone of sharpness with maximum bokeh. In fact, the real skill with selective DoF (because it's often bloody hard to get just right) is selecting the precise aperture you need to achieve the required amount selective focus in order to have the entirety primary subject sharp and soften the rest.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
and have a sensor as good as many DSLR,
I was with you until that point. No. Just no.
Bottom line: If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone. If you don't mind being a few years behind, buy an Android.
Bleh. Caveat: I happen to carry both -- an iphone work phone and an android as my personal phone. Side bar: The *only* good thing about the iphone's skinny, slippery, difficult to grasp anodized case is that it slips into the belt pouch next to the android phone without too much shoving. Further caveat: I make part of my living through photography.
Bottom line: If you truly care about great photography, stop fooling yourself and get a real camera.
Yes, the iphone takes good photos in bars, it recognizes faces and does some tricks with focusing and does a good job calculating average exposure and doing automatic noise reduction. And you can do cute things like add floppy ears and cat noses. As long as you're sharing to an app that ios knows about, sharing is relatively easy once you learn the tricks. For most people, this is good enough. Thus, "The end of the DSLR for most people". Remember that once upon a time, "most people" thought 110 film was great because the cameras were small and easy to carry around. "Most people" wouldn't recognize bokeh if it was biting them on the neck. The iphone, and let's face it, any midrange-or-higher Android phone already does better at photography than what most people need. But let's be real here: That's very different from "truly caring about great photography".
So yeah, my next camera is totally gonna be an iphone. No wait, it isn't. Because I really *do* care about great photography.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So a teleconverter is "just a filter?" Because in addition to changing the field of view (and therefore reducing the amount of light reaching the sensor), teleconverters will alter the blurring pattern. That's one of the factors to consider when deciding between different models. Blurring can be pleasing or jarring depending on the optics. But real photographers with real cameras already know this.
"If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone"
Pretty sure I read that as "If you truly care about great photography, you own a Camera"
Yes, iPhones take great pictures (for a cellphone), but even the newer ones can't touch my old Nikon P50, let alone a proper DSLR. If the argument is the number of Mpixels, please hand over your geek card right now.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Can it beat this Android phone made by Huawei + Leica ? Didn't think so.
The guy who made developers hate working for Google? The Microsoft exec who lead the Google effort against Facebook to such defeat? It's interesting to hear him be wrong again. Clearly angling for a senior position at Apple. Maybe he can lead their developer compactification project at the new campus.
I'll try the latest iPhone and see if it can keep up to my Nikon FX sensored DSLR with a Sigma 150-600mm Sport lens with a 1.4X teleconverter.
This article is phucking hilarious. What a waste of space for serious articles.
Vic Gundotra is a fucking cunt and I seriously hope he gets murdered for being the worthless pile of shit that he is.
Android is all plastic lens and a "giant" MP number. The iPhone is an integrated camera - much like every other component that creates the unified best smartphone. The only reason Android is talked up are media companies that want and need to sell popup & banner ads to 150 android system companies versus Apple who doesn't spend that much online. Keep that in mind and look at all the weasel words inserted in every review when comparing android to Apple (usually, I've been using it around my office for 2 whole hours and Android photos look just as great as the iphone according to me totally not hung over from all my free office beer and after Samsung sent us 8 dozen bagels).
Actually, one would think hardware in line with DSLRs that indulged in these "shenanigans" would result in even better photos than the iPhone. If I just wanted a simple mechanical device that worked in high definition, I'd use a 4x5 film camera and get a decent film scanner. And the 4x5 can do things I haven't heard of people doing with SLRs of any kind... like tilt the focal plane relative to the image plane to allow for a narrow depth of field along a subject that is not parallel to the image plane.
I do not have a signature
No other phone relies so heavily on selling sizzle instead of steak than the iPhone. No other phone has to rely so heavily on marketing to retain it's market share.
Actually, Samsung spends the most on advertising. But probably the metric would be the ratio of advertising dollars to market share.
I would assume you don't really care for any sort of objective measurement, though.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Er, yes it is my friend.
I don't have iphone 7 experience, but I find LG G4 (H815) cam superior to iphone 6s cam.
There are full auto / basic settings, but also - manual, with shutter times (ranging from 1/2000th to 30 seconds), EV, white balance in wide range of temperatures, manual focus. Quality of the lens and sensor is also very good.
Looking at the number of professional grade pictures taken with an iPhone, and the numerous photographs I've taken over the years - they were right.
Yeah, they can't remember the trivial operation it takes to take a picture with an iPhone, but they can follow the more complex procedure your list for using a P&S? You're either lying, full of shit, or both.
Then it's agreed! Come, let us celebrate!
-- My Sig is a P228.
I just took a look at the photodo information on the Canon 50mm f/1.4, the Pentax SMC-FA 50mm f/1.4, and the Pentax SMC-F 50mm f/1.4. Photodo rates the Canon 4.4, the Pentax FA 4.2, the Pentax F 4.6, and the MTF charts agree with the ratings. That said, they are all excellent lenses.
The Canon lens runs $350, and will couple with a Canon EOS DSLR.
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Yeah, Renoir and da Vinci did that a lot.
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Well, there's a poor car analogy. 0-60 times measure something that can be the difference between life and death. Bokeh, not at all.
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I haven't used the iphone 7 camera (I have a 6) or Android, but the I've found that the iPhone camera sucks hard. Every previous model has sucked as well. It's okay for holiday snaps and does well in good lighting, but using it for anything else soon reveals it's deficiencies. The Galaxy 5 (a friend had it) took waaaaay better photos than my iPhone 4, and another friend's Sony Xperia (not sure of model) took incredible low-light photos. Both were dramatically better than the iPhone.
The apps are getting better, but an iphone camera (at least for now) is never going to beat a DSLR. Yes, there are some remarkable images captured with the iPhone, but DSLRs give better results across a wider range. If you want convenience, there's nothing better than a phone camera.
361 (as of this writing) angry commenters can't be wrong!
If Android cameras were truly better this article would be CRICKETS
How's them 20+ megapixel 8+ MB file size noisy-as-heck can't-shoot-in-the-dark purple-pixeled sensors treating you, Androidkin?
> If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone.
If you care about great photography, you own a 40 megapixel Pentax 645 medium format digital backplane camera or a Hollywood-grade RED device or BF-Goodrich 110 reconnaisance pod (but an F-16 jet is needed to use it) or even a "Keyhole" series spy satellite in orbit for amazing paparazzi shots of Kim Jong Whoever.
> they had had 'auto awesome' that used AI techniques to automatically remove wrinkles, whiten teeth, add vignetting, etc...
That's not photography, that's re-touch!
Rumor says one phone vendor will release a new function this fall, which auto-removes unwanted people (passer-by, other tourists) from selfies and general photography you take. That's quite scary, considering how the USSR used to erase "damnatio memoriae" people from archived photos and movies (e.g. the "old communist comrades" purged by Stalin were gradually replaced or glossed over with silhouettes of generic red soldiers in the Battleship Potemkin movie and also the group photos used in the red press).
You basically confirm my point.
Grain and noise is even worse, you may as well scratch your picture once its printed out and scan it in again.
You are basically downgrading your equipement in the name of "aesthetics", not something related to common sense in any way or form.
But I guess such things are quite rampant in the world of art, if I look at what passes for art nowadays.
Compare for example todays paintings and sculptures with those sculptures of the renaissance where artists went out of their way to add even details like thin cloth on body all using marble. Or the paintings of neo-classicism.
I wasnt aware that they had cameras with DoF either.
So, maybe we should just, like, compare them?
Nah, just too much of a hassle, right?
No, I confirm that you don't have a clue.
Look at this photograph:
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-R0q...
You are claiming that this is artificially broken because the background is out of focus. The rest of the world recognise that the background is itself noise and blurring it out prevents it from ruining the picture of the girl and her bubbles.
But hell, you've shown your ignorance or hypocrisy already by suggesting this falls short of Renaissance artistry: I dont see any fucking detail in behind the portrait of Lisa Gherardini; I guess you must be unfamiliar with that particular painting.
I'm not a photographer, but to me the best photo is the one that looks the same as what my eyes see. Not some weird blurred background.
iPhones take notoriously bad photos.
Exactly. Allowing the background to be in focus would not have reduced the quality of the picture and would have been better for the viewers who care about such details.
It is you who seem to confuse things: I mentioned renaissance statues but neoclassic paintings. Those are at least 250 years apart.
Example of the first: Pieta by Michelangelo, Example of the second: Oath of the Horatii Those ladies in the background certainly are not necessary. Or even better (quality-wise) the stuff by Edward Blair Leighton. Notice all the "unnecessary" details in the background of his pictures which makes them stand out against the hacks and quacks of the later impressionists, expressionsists and all the various other shitpressionists that came later.
Allowing the background to be in focus would not have reduced the quality of the picture
No. It would have fucking ruined the picture.
You can choose to dislike the picture but that doesn't invalidate it, it doesn't stop it being a good picture and it sure as fuck doesn't mean it has reduced quality.
It has significantly higher quality because it's very intentionally helping the viewer focus on the subject: The girl, and her bubbles.
The background isn't the subject. The background is, erm, background. The background has no detail because it's not important, because it's a distraction, because it would detract from the subject of the picture.
This isn't "noise", this is very explicit and well executed intent. It's a clear tool available to photographers. You're talking nonsense. I can even prove it:
Example of the second: Oath of the Horatii Those ladies in the background certainly are not necessary.
Yes, they are. They're part of the story the artist is conveying. But lets look past the ladies, at the actual background.
Oh. We can't. It's been blacked out, with artificially strong shadow used to hide any detail at all. Why, you could almost describe it as blurred.
Oh look. Your very fucking example of what you're looking for matches exactly the artistic approach given in the photograph you're deriding.
Self awareness courses are available, you should look for one local to you.
Either way - big camera or smartphone - you are putting up an almost literal wall of separation between yourself and your friends, when you raise an object between yourself and them, and especially when you ask them to move around and get in the frame.
The big camera has two advantages that can mitigate this:
1. If you leave it in stand-by, a decent dslr can go from power-on to FOCUSED and taking the photo you want in less than a second, and often with a fraction of the exposure time in a low-light situation. You can raise it, compose, snap the photo, and lower the camera almost before anyone has time to react.
2. You can stand 35 FEET AWAY and do the same thing. :D
I decided to see what people were saying about comparisons between the iPhone 7 and the Google Pixel phones in reviews online, which seems to me the most fair comparison. Every single review suggested both cameras are pretty similar, though most gave the edge to the Pixel, while recognizing that each had their strengths and weaknesses.
Well, given that many SLR cameras are actually running Android...
I'm not sure where I was going with this.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Cameras weren't useful until the iPhone 4S at least. iPhone 4 is ancient shit now!
I have seen 35mm lenses that are designed to do just what you are describing. I know Nikon makes several tilt-shift 35mm lenses.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Try that on an iPhone when the temperature is sub-zero.
I'm not joking, this is a real-world experience of someone whose week-end hobby is ski instructor at my university :
Manufacturer have started to embed capacitive-touchscreen material on "under-gloves" for this exact reason (fumbling with touch screens).
Yup. The thing that you put under your ski gloves to keep you extra warm at very cold temperatures, the thing that you keep on your hand (so they stay warm) even when you remove the ski glove (to have more dexterity while rummaging through your back pack or pockets), manufacturer have managed to make it also double as a capacitive-touchscreen stylus.
Which is, in my opinion, ridiculous because the always thinner smartphone (never understood while people need phones so thin that you coudl cut cheese with them) coupled with body made out of metal (because plastic "looks cheap") means that if you take out an iPhone during freezing temperature, very often the battery will freeze and the phone will lose power after the first 2 swipes on the touchscreen.
(And although everybody buys touchscreen under-gloves. Much fewer people have decent powerbanks in their ski jackets).
Any photo is better than no photo!
And for the serious guys in cold-weather activities usually means a sport cam, which very often can also alternatively make a JPEG out of the sensors in addition to streaming a video to the SD card. (at the push of a physical button, or over some remote controlling mechanism).
Or simply use a rugged compact camera (my girlfriend uses an Olympus Tough TG-4. The lens mount even has an optionnal fish eye)
But then if you want an *ACTUAL* digital camera Sony make some of the best on the market.
They're known among other for their wonderful optical parts/lens (by Carl Zeiss).
But then you have to cope with the weird NIH flash format.
Though I hope they've jumped on the "tiny embed Linux server serving photos over Wifi" bandwagon as most manufacturer of modern cameras or even flashmedia.
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