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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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... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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
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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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.
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.
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.
Isn't post processing something better left to a desktop with a really big screen so you don't screw up the original with your phone's post-processing software? After all, if you really care but insist on using a phone camera, you want the best original to work from.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
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.
This might have been true 5 years ago, but currently, the increase in light collection due to the large and fast (in an aperture sense) lens commonly found on DSLRs and high-end compacts is far, far greater than having a more sensitive (leave alone larger) sensor. Sensor area in particular is the new megapixel - the masses will flock to whatever has the highest value, regardless of whether the optics are matched to it, or any good at all.
Making really good photos in really challenging (especially low light) conditions is physically impossible with the tiny lenses on most phones. Because in the end, your S/N ration is limited by the number of photons your lens captures, and a modern, properly designed, good-quality digital camera (even a cell phone one) gets close enough to that limit so that only aperture area matters.
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.
I care enough about photography to use both. It takes a DSLR to do justice to outdoor grandeur, to macro shots of insects at close range, to high-quality portraits, shooting a lighthouse backed up by the summer Milky Way, or to catching the architecture and reflections in big cities. Different situations take different lenses, and light-gathering power always helps.
But in social situations, as soon as you pull out a 'real camera' you put up a wall of separation between yourself and people right in your vicinity. You are no longer part of the scene but become an outside observer Taking A Picture. Phones, on the other hand, are so ubiquitous today that nobody notices them. You can use them in restaurants (not for food, like the amateurs, but for the people), at parties, in offices, on crowded sidewalks, and in places like casinos, where the sight of a 'real camera' causes security staff to come running.
If Cartier-Bresson were alive today, he would be carrying an iPhone 7+.
What you are describing is an interchangeable lens camera (ILC). A DSLR must have a mirror by definition. Vibration is not the primary motivation for removing the mirror, it is overall system size and weight reduction, as this allows a much smaller lens and body. (moving the back of the lens closer to the focal plane allows more compact lens designs, especially on the side end). Also, to clear up a misconception, mechanical shutters are alive and well, though many cameras offer digital shutters as an optional shooting mode. And there are drawbacks to mirrorless cameras, as they focus more slowly and some people do not like looking into an eyepiece monitor instead of looking through the lens optically.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I would take the DSLR that my 9 year old son got for his birthday (an 11 year old Cannon EOS 30D with the cheap kit lens) over any cell phone camera. That 8 megapixel APS-C sensor even with that cheap 17-80mm kit lens (approximately 28-135mm 35mm equivalent) produces better images than any cell phone camera I have seen.
The camera he got was one of my wife's cousins who is into digital photography and they had long since upgraded so that camera was just collecting dust on the shelf. My 9 year old has been really into photography and wanted a better camera than my wife's point and shoot that he had been using some times and I didn't want him to learn on my film SLR as now that would be an expensive exercise in failure. When he starts getting really good with what he has (when the equipment is the limiting factor) I will likely get him a better lens and maybe a telephoto converter or extension tube set for it next.
Time to offend someone
(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 ]
His point was that even someone with very pedestrian standards for picture quality could recognize that Cnet's review was not worth a lick.
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.
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.
"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.