
With the iPhone 7, Apple Changed the Camera Industry - paulsutter
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/with-the-iphone-7-apple-changed-the-camera-industry-forever
======
l33tbro
I've got big boy cameras and big boy lenses (not bragging, just saying), but I
really do love having a current Iphone. I pull it out almost every day for
really high quality reference stills. Even better, I can zoom in and do color
work in phone while waiting for a coffee or between meetings.

I think the author here got a few things slightly wrong (he's a writer in a
2016 newsroom - give him a break), but he's right that Iphones have totally
changed the camera industry. Sure, there's a small percentage of people like
me who need gear that is higher calibre that give the extra 10 percent, but
you can really get exceptional images with an Iphone. I really don't see why
people would buy a consumer level camera anymore.

~~~
philtar
The author is Om Malik. He should know better than this.

~~~
ihuman
How come? I have not read his previous work, so I don't know how he writes.

~~~
kkhire
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_Malik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_Malik)

------
guelo
I'll wait to see the reviews but I'm sure the 7+ camera will be more evolution
than revolution. Premium phones have been taking good enough photos for at
least a couple years now. This will be a continuation of existing trends.

~~~
gaius
I thought so too, but I felt the urge to get back into SLR photography
recently so I picked up an old Nikon D3 on eBay and the difference between it
and my iPhone SE is like night and day. No matter how you tweak them small-
sensor photos just look flat and drab in comparison, or garishly
oversaturated.

~~~
jacobolus
Both flat/drab and garishly overcolored pictures can be easily fixed in
Photoshop, except when noise or lack of dynamic range gets in the way (i.e.
the detail never gets captured, or one or more color channels get clipped).

The problems with phone cameras (and small sensor cameras more generally) are
(1) hitting the resolution limits of the optics, (2) noise, (3) lack of
dynamic range, (4) lack of choices in quality lenses, (4) fixed aperture,
which means no creative focus effects, and poor performance in low-light
settings, (5) software based (and therefore slow and sometimes inaccurate)
manual controls over shutter speed, focus, flash, etc., (and more generally, a
much less efficient or adaptable physical user interface than a dedicated
camera) (6) often limiting output formats, with lots of in-camera processing
wiping out data from the raw image.

Any 6+ megapixel DSLR (e.g. the ones from the early 2000s) with a nice lens
easily outclasses the iPhone or any other phone camera, in the hands of a
photographer with basic competence.

On the other hand, phone cameras are _amazing_ for their ridiculously tiny
size, and their cost is obscenely low after the economies of scale kick in.
They take much better pictures on average than the <$50 35mm film cameras from
the 1990s, especially when the photographer is a complete beginner (those are
the cameras I think of as their spiritual ancestors).

~~~
gaius
Oh yeah; I remember too realizing that I didn't need my A4 scanner anymore, a
phone cam picture was good enough to email a readable document! They're
impressive no doubt but SLR technology hasn't stood still either.

------
currywurst
Dual-camera setups for phones are not new at all, yet only Apple gets the
props for "changing the camera industry" .. For the other vendors it's a
"gimmick" !

~~~
sharkjacobs
Ford didn't change the transportation industry when he invented the Model T,
he changed it when he put 15 million of them on the road

~~~
emilsedgh
I find the comparison to Ford stupid. When Ford cars came out, cars weren't
easily accessible to public. Ford did that.

It also applied to original iphone.

But now, other phones are on par regarding quality and accessibility with
iphone and they've had this feature for long. Your comparison simply doesn't
apply.

Apple, at this point, is only a marketing gimmick.

Unfortunately after several years of using Android phones, I got an iphone
(6s) this year. It's simply a bad phone. I'm getting a new Android device this
week.

~~~
tommymachine
The fastest smartphone CPU was last year's chip from Apple. The old Apple chip
just got beaten by the new Apple chip which is 40% faster than second place--
which is still the old Apple chip. Even if the camera stuff wasn't better in
any proprietary way (it is), it still operates on the best chipset in the
world by a huge margin.

So I guess if you're looking for a marketing gimmick in all this, you might
say Apple's engineering dominance is a pretty good marketing gimmick. I mean,
I can't really think of a better 'marketing gimmick' than designing better
core technology, patenting it, and using it as a platform for launching other
new tech that also contains better core technology. I'm even hesitant to call
it a gimmick. It's more like... the actual way capitalism is designed to work.

~~~
emilsedgh
Is the CPU speed the most important and only factor?

How does iphone compare to other phones in a bigger picture?

~~~
tommymachine
Chip performance is the bottleneck everything on a phone has to run through.
It can give a proprietary boost to a brand if they put out better performing
chipsets. Is it the only thing in a phone that matters? God no! But a better
chipset allows the peripheral tech (touchscreens, cameras, etc) to do more
sophisticated stuff more easily. So chipset performance affects the big
picture more than any other component.

It's hard to zoom out and compare peripherals and overall design without
getting into personal taste and preference. To measure personal taste
empirically, you could look at profits. Higher profit means people aren't
buying on price but on perceived value and personal preference.

iPhone is a huge winner here. Apple actually books a majority of the
smartphone industry profits every quarter -- more profit than every other
company combined (in 2015 it was 91%). It's hard to charge high margins when
you don't have some proprietary unfair advantage like faster CPUs.

Samsung et. al sell more phones and have more revenue, but they make a
fraction of the money because their value prop competes on price. In fact,
Samsung is the only other company that made a profit selling smartphones in
2015, everyone else lost money or broke even. CPU performance is a huge part
of that story. Samsung has the second fastest CPUs. That's a difference
between first place and second place of almost 100 billion dollars. Third
place is you're fired.

------
1_2__3
"Venture capitalist predicts death of companies that compete with companies in
his portfolio" I suppose could also be the headline.

~~~
paulddraper
What about "someone puts their money where their mouth is"?

~~~
Joof
Most people put their mouth where their money is in my experience.

~~~
paulddraper
To-ma-to

------
Animats
You can get unprocessed image files out of the Iphone 6.[1] There's an app for
that.[2] Now Apple's own app does that, too.

[1] [https://www.cinema5d.com/apple-ios-raw-photos-iphone-ipad-
pr...](https://www.cinema5d.com/apple-ios-raw-photos-iphone-ipad-pro/) [2]
[http://jag.gr/645pro/](http://jag.gr/645pro/)

~~~
Synaesthesia
I believe RAW output only works on the iPhone 6S or newer.

------
throw2016
Like they say the best camera is the one you have with you.

Mobile cameras and social media have completely transformed consumer
photography with selfies and spur of moment pictures taking over from an era
of old style 'event' pictures that required intention.

You can't take selfies with your DSLR or even compacts, or lug them around for
casual spur of moment shots.

Leaving aside this PR piece for iPhone 7 marketing the growing quality of
mobile phone cameras have already long impacted the lower end camera market.

DSLRs are limited to pros and enthusiasts, with mirroless sharing some spoils
in that market. The bulk of the market that would buy a lower to mid end
camera now has little reason to.

Depth of field or 'bokeh' for those lovely isolation shots is not possible
given physical sensor and lens constraints. Apple's dual camera approach with
the iPhone 7 seeks to change it and the early shots do look interesting but
also a bit artifical. Not the natural flowing isolation you would get from a
full frame sensor for portaits at 80 or even 50mm.

------
dingo_bat
I don't see anything that Apple has done with 7 and 7+ camera that is remotely
new for a flagship smartphone.

~~~
paulrouget
It's the first time the bokeh effect is successfully implemented. AFAIK,
competitors never managed to get it right (see HTC for example).

------
rado
Did NYT have a look at the bokeh samples? They are not that good and in
everyday use the flaws will show. Isn't 56mm portrait rather than telephoto?

~~~
ChristianGeek
In addition, the bokeh feature only works on portraits.

BTW, since when is there such a thing as a "12 megapixel lens?"

~~~
joemi
> In addition, the bokeh feature only works on portraits.

That's the first I've heard of that. Can you back that up? Seems like it'd be
easy enough to get it working on any image with depth to it, so it seems odd
that they'd limit it.

~~~
scarlac
While explaining the feature in the presentation, Phil Schiller explained that
it did face detection to find the foreground. In addition, the camera mode is
called "Portrait" in the Camera app. While it is still speculation until next
week, I think it's reasonable to be skeptic about its ability to use produce
bokeh on images with no detected faces. Presentation:
[https://youtu.be/NS0txu_Kzl8?t=1h12m25s](https://youtu.be/NS0txu_Kzl8?t=1h12m25s)

~~~
jychang
> While it is still speculation until next week, I think it's reasonable to be
> skeptic about its ability to use produce bokeh on images with no detected
> faces.

That shouldn't be a limitation in the technology though, just a implementation
detail. Emulating DoF would work whether you have a face in the photo or not,
it's just easier to lock on to a face as your primary focus.

~~~
joemi
I'm thinking that if they still let you tap to select what to base the
brightness on in this mode, they might be able to extend that to the focus so
that it can work with non-face photos. Keep the part you tap on in focus (and
anything else at that distance), blur the rest. Though that might not allow
you to do independent brightness... Hmmm... Anyway, it's pure hope/speculation
at this point.

------
ohthehugemanate
So... how much does a promo piece like this cost for Apple? And how do I get
one for MY startup? (Only half joking)

~~~
rimantas
add costs for the new camera R&D and there you have it. Or are you one of the
"Apple is just marketing, no substance" guys?

~~~
314
Until the new iphone is actually iut in the wild, or Apple release sone real
sample images - how could this speculation possibly be substance rather than
marketing?

~~~
rbanffy
Last time I read about it, they had more engineers working on the camera than
anyone else.

~~~
314
But that does not provide any substance to the opinion that it will be good.

~~~
rbanffy
No, but it shows they are trying hard.

~~~
314
It will be interesting to see what they produce. The market for external lens
is quite varied now on previous iphones. A lot of the processing they are
introducing on the new phone will be tuned for the characteristics of the two
lenses. I wonder how external lens will work on the camera (if at all)?

------
cabirum
How is it better than the 20MP Zeiss optically-stabilized DNG enabled camera
in my Nokia 930? The article reads like a big and not very trustworthy advert.

~~~
rangibaby
2 years is a long time in mobile cameras at this point. The Nikon D700 from
2008 shoots at 12MP but still one of the most highly regarded DSLRs (used is
still ~$800).

More important than MP is the quality of the sensor and lens, and I bet there
is a lot of development and improvement in the "small" category.

Just because Zeiss made the lens doesn't mean it is better than anything else.
Your only guarantee if you see the the word Zeiss is that it will be expensive
;-)

I'm not an Apple fanboy or anything and definitely prefer any SLR (digital or
otherwise) to phone potatocams, but they are getting better so quickly.

~~~
cabirum
D700 being still relevant means sensor tech is moving slower than the rest of
mobile industry.

I didn't mean to accentuate specifically on Zeiss brand. My point is there's
nothing revolutionary in today's iPhone 7 compared to 2 year old Lumias. Some
big things (optical stabilization) are even missing. And it's sensor+software
seem good enough even today.

------
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------
chaostheory
It was iPhone 4 that changed the camera industry. The iPhone 7 is just
continuing the trend. Sure there are still stand alone cameras with better
quality than a smart phone... but who carries a camera who isn't a hobbyist
photographer?

~~~
madaxe_again
If anything, the Sony Ericsson t68i was the firing gun for convergence. I used
to use it frequently - not just as a novelty. Would send them via mms where
they'd then be published on my website - 140 chars, image, etc - my personal
Twitter in 2002.

But either way, Apple didn't invent camera phones.

~~~
chaostheory
How? Did t68i even come with a camera?

~~~
manicdee
It did, literally, come along with a camera. You plugged the camera in to the
charging socket. The photos were terrible: not even 256 colours, resolution in
the order of 200 x 300. I used it twice and packed it away forever.

------
rocky1138
Is this an article or an advertisement?

~~~
iammyIP
It's pretty obvious that this is a down to earth critical analysis of the
technical features of a new portable telephone, released by some company.

------
kylehotchkiss
Ehh. I like that people can take better pictures but the biggest thing i'd
lose is the personality of my 35mm f1.4 - it has a character that makes my
pictures feel more lively to me. But always nice to have a better camera for
Instagram quick pics! If only the photos app wasn't an unorganized heap of
pictures of travels, receipts, and other documents..

~~~
pavelatanassov
So true, the Camera Roll gets quite a mess with time because all types of pics
go to the same place. Fortunately, there's already a solution to that. With an
additional, complementary photo library like the Utiful app one can cleanly
divide the family and vacation photos from the receipts, screenshots, etc.

------
brudgers
New technology has radically altered the camera industry every ten years or so
since the 1820's[1]. Just consider the givens of Apple's camera: solid state
storage, CMOS image sensing, in camera image processing, live scene preview,
auto-focus, auto-aperature, etc. Not to mention the radio transmitter
infrastructure that makes instant image sharing possible and the electronics
technologies that make always carrying the camera in one's purse a benefit
rather than a burden.

The article also ignores the limitations that any small sensor camera has due
to physics. Photons arrive within a poisson distribution. The Nyquist limit is
hard. Magical designs can't change that.

None of which is to say that the new camera won't be good for some definition
of 'good'. But the enabling technologies of snapshots are not changing.
Neither is the pace of change in photography.

[1]: and image making since at not all too dissimilar intervals since the
Reneissance e.g. printing press, oil paint, _camera obscuras_ , optics,
perspective].

------
dintech
Ironic that for an article about cameras, it features a really badly took
photograph.

~~~
acdha
Do you have a script / ad-blocker? They seem to have a poor responsive image
script which starts with a really low-red thumbnail and then loads the full
version after the rest of the page has loaded.

------
gniv
So if two cameras are better than one, why not three, or four? I assume the
hardware is not too expensive (compared to the cost of the phone), and then
you can have really nice optical zoom capabilities.

------
oDot
Is there anything to do about the tiny sensors in mobile phones?

~~~
rpeden
The short, trite, unsatisfying answer: keep improving the quality of tiny
sensors. Due to size constraints, we can't shove massive sensors into
smartphones.

But we can keep improving what small sensors are capable of, and we can
probably still make improvements to the software that processes the raw data
the sensors capture.

We can also hope for innovation in the technology behind digital image
sensors. We've seen lots of innovation, but the fundamentals behind the CMOS
and CCD sensors we use now haven't changed in a long time. I'm not qualified
to comment on the viability of it, but perhaps something like this will end up
being useful: [https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1365289912/invisage-
brings...](https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1365289912/invisage-brings-long-
promised-quantum-film-smartphone-sensor-to-market)

~~~
foldr
>Due to size constraints, we can't shove massive sensors into smartphones.

Interestingly, though, it's not really the size of the sensor that's the issue
but the focal length of the lens required to give a usably narrow field of
view with a larger sensor. You could probably squeeze an APS-C sensor into a
smartphone, but you couldn't use it with an 8mm focal length.

So there are two potential routes to go here. Progress in telephoto designs
for very small lenses, and multi-lens cameras.

------
mtgx
I assume Apple's camera app won't do this anytime soon, but couldn't a third-
party developer enable it to shoot 3D videos?

~~~
Sanddancer
Not to a meaningful quality. The lenses are really close together, and they're
of different focal lengths, so getting images from both sides to match up is
gonna be a chore at best. Were the two lenses on opposite sides of the camera,
it would become a lot more interesting, but as it stands, no.

------
BadassFractal
The pro DSLR market has been pretty stagnant in the past few years in the
traditional Nikon vs Canon space. Very marginal improvements from generation
to generation, mostly small incremental iterations on already existing
functionality. Sony is doing some interesting work with the mirrorless stuff,
so maybe that will go somewhere.

Wonder why we're not seeing more competition in this space. Major players too
entrenched already and not enough money for others to try to break in?

~~~
4ad
DSLRs are a very mature technology. Phone cameras, not so much. Hell, DSLRs
were mature even when the first iPhone was released, almost a decade ago.

------
foobarbecue
Ugh. Another article by someone with no background in the subject he's
covering. 12-megapixel lenses eh? That's a lot of pixels for a lens.
Professionals call "digital negatives" DNGs, do they? I wonder what
professionals call raw... I love the social commentary and analysis in the New
Yorker but they should probably steer clear of tech.

~~~
matwood
The article is liberal with its language, but makes good points backed up by
facts. The point and shoot market _was_ killed by the smart phone. The camera
market has become the smart phone and the DSLR. DSLRs may be safe for awhile
because they provide advanced features that are hard to match in a phone sized
device, but as a non-professional photographer I find myself reaching for my
phone more often than my DSLR.

I love using my DSLR, but I hate dealing with the workflow. If I take a
picture with my DSLR I have to put the SD card in my computer, load up
Lightroom, edit, export, and finally upload/share the picture.

~~~
ksml
I agree that the smartphone killed the point and shoot industry, but I think
it's pretty far overboard to say that Apple is revolutionizing the camera
industry with the iPhone 7. They added another lens, which is certainly nice
but not revolutionary, and they added some depth of field effects, which are
nice but look pretty bad compared to actual shallow depth of field.

Edit: Also, you definitely don't need to fire up Lightroom to share photos
from your DSLR; I think practically any DSLR can shoot JPG. Many DSLRs can
also share photos to phones via wifi or Bluetooth these days. Mine didn't come
with such a feature, but Nikon sells a $20-30 adapter that adds that
capability.

~~~
vcarl
It's not going to kill professional photography, but the folks who buy a DSLR
for the bokeh might not have a reason to buy that camera. Might shrink the
market for DSLRs.

~~~
coralreef
I'm curious to know how well the bokeh/shallow depth works on the 7+. By the
looks of it they use facial recognition and machine learning to determine what
not to blur.

This means objects and figures that aren't faces might not be tuned too well.

~~~
_s
I don't think it's that complicated; more of a diff between two focus points
from the lenses.

~~~
coralreef
did you see the presentation?

------
denzell
It sounds like the dual lense plus is a game changer.

Is the single lense standard version significantly better than the previous
model?

~~~
nicky0
It is an improvement. Notably it has optical image stabilisation now.

------
toast0
I hope they don't drop the 3.5mm jacks on DSLRs now too...

------
billions
Apple realizes smartphone development has stagnated industry-wide. Rumors are
that they have gone from a 2 year iPhone refresh to 3. I think it's obvious
Apple has failed to innovate on 6s and 7 iPhones. This could be a downturn for
the company, with a lack of product leadership. The only way this innovation
gap could bounce back to growth is if product leadership has refocused to
unannounced future products. Self driving cars and wearable technologies would
be candidates for markets that could make meaningful impact on Apple's bottom
line.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Phone is mature now, no one can think of any huge advances to be made without
any unforeseen disruption. New product categories represent the way forward,
but Apple still has to keep milking the iPhone cash cow.

------
krzyk
I'm not sure how a phone with a 12MP can change an industry if flagships
releases year ago had 21MP. Adding another lens is nice but if you are still
1/2 of the resolution of a DSLR or other phones it is quite funny to call it
revolutionary.

~~~
johnloeber
MP resolution is not so important. What really matters is lens quality. You
can get DSLRs with 12-18 MPs that take pretty nice pictures, though at a lower
resolution. There were indeed 16+ MP snapshot cameras five years ago, but the
pictures they took were generally rubbish, because of poor lens quality.

~~~
cptskippy
Lets not forget image sensor size. The smaller the sensor or the higher MP for
the same dimensions means much more noise and lose of image fidelity.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
On the flipside, the smaller the sensor, the deeper your field of view becomes
at a given aperture (f-stop). This is really great for phone cameras, since it
makes focusing a lot easier.

Think about it, when was the last time you got a photo or video that was out
of focus on your phone? With a full-size sensor DSLR at f/1.8, I've seen
professional broadcasters really struggle to deliver in-focus images. In fact,
most broadcast cameras for television have significantly smaller sensors in
order to get wide DOF at a large aperture.

I mean sure, super-shallow DOF with tons of bokeh can look really pretty when
done well, but for 99.9% of people it would give crappy out-of-focus shots.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Can anyone explain why this is downvoted? If you want confirmation/more in-
depth info, here is a great post on how sensor size affects DoF, using real
examples from a full-frame DSLR compared to an iPhone 6:

[https://photographylife.com/sensor-size-perspective-and-
dept...](https://photographylife.com/sensor-size-perspective-and-depth-of-
field)

From that article, which has actually done the math:

"This iPhone at 4.15mm and f/2.2 gives you a similar field of view and depth
of field as a full-frame camera with a 30mm lens set to f/16 does."

------
petre
This article misses the fact that aside from the small lens/small sensor
issue, smartphones have shitty camera ergonomics. Yes, they're great people
who want a point and shoot at all times with them, but I doubt they will
replace cameras. Displace cameras and disrupt the camera market they will, as
the have done with the PC market. Still, you need a PC, Mac or laptop to do
real work (programing, office, photo and video editing etc.). Phones and
tablets are more suited and used for proof reading. You still need a camera to
do any sort of professional photography efficiently. Camera and photography
enthusiasts will also continue to buy cameras. Yes, everyone will now be able
to shoot and share professional looking photos with the new iPhone. Cool.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
This is much like post PC: PCs aren't dead, but many people don't bother
having them anymore. Likewise, I used to buy a camera every few years, but
I've completely stopped that now, since I'm not a professional.

So the camera and PCs markets that used to be growing as non professional
consumers bought the new tech are now contracting! If you company makes
cameras for consumers, that business is in trouble, and you can often only be
so large with a more niche professional product.

