
The Smartphone vs. the Camera Industry - Red_Tarsius
https://photographylife.com/smartphone-vs-camera-industry
======
starky
Maybe because this is something very close to my wheelhouse, but this article
seems to be overly wordy for something obvious.

Smartphones are simply more convenient than a standalone camera can ever be.
Add on top of that the incredible computational imaging capabilities that have
been developed over the past few years and the quality of images you can get
from the size of optics and pixels that these devices have is amazing and more
than good enough for 99% of people. There is nothing that the camera industry
can do to access this market in any meaningful way.

The standalone photographic camera industry is going to be reduced to
professionals and enthusiasts that need/want things like reliability and
ruggedness, long focal lengths, creative control, and the process of taking a
photograph.

Sony and Fuji are really the only two companies that really get the current
camera market IMO. Sony is putting out technologically amazing cameras that
are bringing smart auto-focus systems, high resolutions, video, etc. that
catch the eyes of tech enthusiast photographers and professionals alike. Fuji
is selling a whole experience of the art of photography. Canon and Nikon are
selling to... Canon and Nikon users.

At the same time, these companies also obviously don't get it. I still can't
figure out why someone hasn't added computational photography and a
smartphone-like user interface for the enthusiast crowd (Why are you still not
listening Sony? Your cameras were literally built on Android!). Why do we
still have to mess about with camera tethering when it should be seamless to
have photos transfer to a device for professional shoots, or to your
smartphone for posting to social media?

~~~
CarVac
I think the problem is that there are two nearly polar opposite desires for UI
and processing, that require totally different approaches to a camera.

One is the smartphone user who desires good quality for whatever the
situation, who just wants a photo uploaded to Instagram or whatever, NOW. They
don't want to learn how to adjust exposure compensation to expose-to-the-right
for optimal raw image quality.

This user wants lots of R&D spent on computational photography, lots of
processing power on the phone, and a simplified UI that just gets out of the
way.

The other is the enthusiast photographer who shoots for either pleasure or
maximum quality.

This user wants all the control, all of the time: they've invested time and
effort into nailing exposure, mastering autofocus, all while composing
beautiful shots. A smartphone interface is not what you want: the best images
are often captured in difficult environments where a touchscreen just gets in
the way and you _must_ have hard control points.

As far as processing goes, they don't really need any of it; they'll often
just process in post. Just gimme the raw data and that's all I need.

Can any manufacturer manage both? Much less in the same camera? For a
competitive price?

I'm not sure.

~~~
kenhwang
I think Sony could realistically do both in one product. They already make
flagship smartphones that are hardware-competitive with everyone else's
flagships. They supply the camera sensors for everyone's flagship product.
They have the best DSLM and reasonably competitive lenses.

Just take their current flagship smartphone, double the thickness to fit a
halfway-between-smartphone-and-full-frame sensor, an SD card slot, ability to
export RAWs, and a compact zoom lens, and sell it for like $2000. For extra
credit, make a standard lens mount and make it swappable and now you have the
manufacturer lock-in that keeping Nikon alive. The margins on the camera
business plus the refresh cycle of the phone business might actually save both
those divisions.

Instead Sony's camera division and smartphone division are too busy trying to
not step on each other's feet and both are suffering for it.

~~~
megaremote
> Just take their current flagship smartphone, double the thickness to fit a
> halfway-between-smartphone-and-full-frame sensor, an SD card slot, ability
> to export RAWs, and a compact zoom lens, and sell it for like $2000.

And no one will buy it. It has been tried before, by Nokia.

~~~
IgorPartola
Yeah just like nobody would want a social network because MySpace and
Friendster tried it. And nobody would want a tablet, Apple already tried that
with the Newton.

Not saying you are wrong but “Nokia tried it” is not any kind of marker.

------
jseliger
The strangest thing is the camera industry's non-response to smartphones.
There's a fellow named Tom Hogan who writes in extreme detail about the camera
industry and noticed years ago that camera makers should open up their APIs
and work much harder to integrate with smartphones. Here's one recent example
of that message: [http://dslrbodies.com/newsviews/are-customers-asking-
for.htm...](http://dslrbodies.com/newsviews/are-customers-asking-for.html)

 _Still, Apple discovered a user problem—stringing together multiple apps to
create a one-step process—and is trying to solve it. Are the camera companies
doing the same? Doesn 't seem like it._

 _So for now I can only dream about the camera that lets me load some
variables into the EXIF data of an image (hashtags, caption, destination,
resize choice, priority) while shooting, pushes that over to my phone via
something like SnapBridge, and then because that phone app supports Shortcuts,
allows me to say "Hey Siri, Output Images with Priority 1." Plus, when I get
home be able to say to my computer "Hey Siri, Archive all Images."_

Camera makers have done some half-assed wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC integrations
with smartphones, but for the most part the camera still lives on its own,
still uses out-of-date SoCs, and generally behaves like the year is 2005, not
2019. The various cameras I've used aren't even smart enough to do simple
things like transfer a selected image to a given social network whenever the
camera gets within range of a wifi access point it knows. And almost none of
the camera makers seem to be serious about working on this problem. It's like
Sony missing the iPod (a useful analogy because Sony is in the camera industry
and, apart from its imaging sensor division, has missed the wave yet again).

 _Edit_ I forgot to add that I believe Sony just introduced a new $1400
flagship camera, the a6600.
[https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6975583891/sony-a6000-a610...](https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6975583891/sony-a6000-a6100-a6300-a6400-a6500-a6600-what-
s-the-difference-and-which-should-i-buy). It has a 4-5 year old sensor in it
and software that is even older. Kitted out from scratch with high quality
lenses, it's probably $2,500 – $3,000. Imagine how many iPhones Apple would
sell if the sensor were not much changed from the 6s and the camera software
not changed at all.

~~~
reaperducer
Not to mention how every phone camera geotags every image automatically, but
that's still a bulky $500 add-on for DSLRs, _if_ it's even available for your
model.

~~~
kenhwang
My 5 year old DSLR has GPS tagging for every photo. I mostly keep it off
because it kills the battery. I suspect most serious photographers don't care
about geotagging.

~~~
reaperducer
_I suspect most serious photographers don 't care about geotagging._

If by "serious" you mean "studio," then you're probably right.

But there are plenty of "serious" photographers that find geotagging very
useful. Newspaper photographers, travel photographers, scientific photography,
etc...

------
freetime2
Most of the images in that article were outdoors with lots of natural light,
stationary subjects, wide angle compositions, and a large depth of field.
Basically ideal conditions for smartphone photography.

I find that in many everyday situations my smartphone just doesn’t cut it.
Trying to take photos of my kids running around at dusk or indoors, for
example. Or trying to take a decent portrait.

I bought an A7iii to take photos in these situations, and I’m really glad that
I did. I don’t always take it out with me and there are lots of situations
where my smartphone strikes the right balance between quality and convenience.
But my a7iii has allowed me to capture great images that I will cherish for
the rest of my life and probably wouldn’t have been able to take with my
smartphone.

~~~
vosper
How old is your smartphone? My wife just upgraded from an iPhone 6S to an 11
Pro and that new camera is impressive. Things have come a long way even in
just the last few years, we should assume they’ll keep getting better for at
least a little bit yet.

~~~
freetime2
It’s an iPhone X, so about 2 years old. No doubt the iPhone 11 Pro is better.
But Sony is due to release the a7iv next year and they have been improving
their cameras with each generation, too (though not as fast as smartphone
cameras).

~~~
matwood
I just went from an X to an 11 pro. The X was known for poor photos in low
light.

With that said, the 11 pro takes great shots with little fuss. But, my d7100
with a 50mm prime still easily beats it in image quality. I want to get to the
point where I don't need to carry around my d7100 (or an DSLR), but we are not
there yet. Then I have shots like this, that I don't see how I would ever have
caught on a phone camera.

[https://www.instagram.com/p/BiQT2t9j7GG](https://www.instagram.com/p/BiQT2t9j7GG)

------
leeoniya
> Thanks to all the CMOS sensor advancements, we now have cameras that can
> produce amazing dynamic range and very little noise

i shoot with a pretty recent APS-C Nikon D7500 & good glass these days and i
can tell you that its dynamic range is still nothing compared to what a new
(or even older) iphone can get by bracketing a shot at 960fps and stacking it
automatically for you. i would happily sacrifice half its resolution for the
kind of dynamic range you effortlessly get with an iphone.

i had a good Fuji mirrorless X-T2 and its low latency electronic viewfinder
sucked the battery dry in an hour and lagged + looked like shit in low light.

sad.

~~~
CarVac
The dynamic range is there in a raw file. You just need to apply tonemapping
the way cell phones do it.

My 2008-era 1Ds3 still crushes a modern phone (I have a Pixel 2) in dynamic
range when processed properly, and a D7500 is even better still, not to
mention the latest full-frame models like the D850 and such.

Phones do, counterintuitively, have the advantage in extreme low light because
they're able to stack multi-second exposures very reliably. But then again,
I'm comparing my phone against a 2008 camera... the very best latest full
frame cameras might be on par (at an extreme depth of field disadvantage
though).

~~~
cookingrobot
From what I can find the 1DsIII has a dynamic range of 8.8 stops and the
iPhone 11 has 10 stops. Have you found measurements otherwise? Single exposure
cameras are really no match for computational photography in this area because
it gives an effectively infinite dynamic range. You can take the equivalent of
a long exposure photo for every shadow on a sunny day.

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
But then when something moves, it will look weird, right?

~~~
greggman2
At 960fps all 10 shots were taken in a 1/100th of a second. So same as 1 shot
at 1/100th. Probably good enough for most shots except sports/action and my
guess is the computational photography can deal with that too in various way.

~~~
sudosysgen
No, you can't do full sensor readout at 960fps. You can only do 960fps by
shooting at 2MP and keeping only 8 bits of data per pixel (or even less). Full
sensor readout rates on phones are closer to 20-30 fps IIRC. And even that
comes with caveats (no exposure adjustment, shutter speed must be faster than
a certain amount, etc..). And that's at the low resolutions phones have. And
then when you start hitting the limits of readout speed you start increasing
rolling shutter issues and so on.

------
zaroth
What's the TAM for a new iPhone model, versus the TAM for a new SLR? I'm
guessing the iPhone wins by at least 2 orders of magnitude. EDIT: At the end
of TFA they have this chart [1] which shows while camera sales peaked at 121
million units in 2009, in 2019 it's 1.4 billion smartphones sold versus 15
million cameras.

Camera performance continues to be a major differentiator / selling point and
upgrade draw for smartphones. Therefore to draw in that next $100 billion in
device sales, companies like Apple can spend orders of magnitude more dollars
investing in the phone's camera performance than a legacy camera company can
invest in their entire device.

Another major factor is that the massive processing power of the phone can be
leveraged for image capture, just as it can be leveraged for gaming, and web
browsing. Users can amortize the cost of all that computing power and fast
storage across the several major categories of tasks that a smartphone can
perform. So a processor that makes perfect sense in a smartphone is going to
be very hard to justify in a SLR, versus integrating the minimum set of ICs
required to process the image, with a low-power processor to run a bare-bones
UI. Likewise the BOM for the screen on a smartphone is worth investing
hundreds of dollars into, whereas the screen on an SLR is kind of like the
backup for the viewfinder.

Finally, the raison d'être of a camera in 2019 is to share photos with friends
and family, using perhaps the built-in Camera app, but most likely a dozen
other social apps which all have their own custom UI, filters, and
accoutrements. An SLR will simply never be as effortless and fun to use for
this purpose as your smartphone.

[1] -
[https://www.instagram.com/p/B2b8pEDIBDb/?utm_source=ig_embed](https://www.instagram.com/p/B2b8pEDIBDb/?utm_source=ig_embed)

------
tjr225
And yet the photos I take on my 7 year old mirror-less camera look eons better
than anything I take on my iPhone?

~~~
jrockway
I feel the same way. I keep seeing these amazing iPhone pictures in giant
subway ads and on blogs like this... but never get similar results myself.

To some extent, I fear that "the eye" of the public has simply forgotten what
sort of photographs are possible, and are happy with snapshots taken in
perfect conditions, which do look OK on phone cameras.

Remember the old architectural style with tilt-shift lenses, where tall things
would imposingly loom over you with perfectly parallel lines? You can remove
the "distortion" from tiling your camera up in software, but it tends to look
pretty terrible compared to a camera on a tripod that is perfectly level and
is just taking the image from the bottom of the image circle.

Remember how it's nighttime half the time, but you never see good pictures
taken at night? Stars exist, waves bend into glass, and the moon can glow over
your mountains and valleys. But not if you're holding your camera in your hand
and have a fingerprint on the lens. So we don't see those pictures anymore.

Even product photos in ads look pretty bad a lot of the time. You can get a
white table and take a snapshot with your cell phone, but it looks like you
did. Maybe it doesn't matter, though.

Ultimately, the problem the camera industry has is that very few people need
to take perfect pictures in tough conditions. Fine art, wildlife, sports...
phone cameras just don't yield as good of results as a larger camera. But not
many people are taking that kind of picture. They just want to say "hey
friends, I went to this place, look at it" or "look at my friend here". And a
phone camera is great for that. It's the perfect balance; it takes up 0 space
(since you were carrying a phone anyway), and the image quality is good
enough. Smaller dedicated cameras (like an RX100) just don't provide much of a
leap in quality.

~~~
macintux
> ...So we don't see those pictures anymore.

I think you’re mistaken.

The people who would take stunning photographs with any equipment available to
them, still do so.

It’s just that there are nearly infinitely more photographs floating around
because the tools have been democratized, and thus it’s harder to find the
spectacular ones.

~~~
jrockway
What I meant to say is that Apple cherry-picks one photograph in perfect
conditions, people think "wow, what a great camera, must buy!" and then
totally miss the opportunity to photograph in non-perfect situations without
realizing what they're missing.

If I were Sony or Nikon or Canon, I would buy the subway ad next to Apple's
and show a stunning night shot as their example. In comparison, the iPhone
camera might not look like such a must have. (Especially in a world where
"dark mode" and the color blue are so popular, I think it could work.)

~~~
FireBeyond
Hell, Apple was busted a few years ago calling a DSLR image an iPhone picture,
when someone looked at the EXIF data.

~~~
macintux
Huawei and Samsung (at least twice) have been caught doing that. I’d need a
citation to believe Apple has done so.

------
pjc50
Key pullquote after a lot of waffle on the meaning of "phone":

> Why should anyone who wants to take decent pictures suffer through the pain
> of spending thousands of dollars on a camera system, many hours of learning
> how to use the camera and how to post-process images from it, when the
> alternative is to use a small, portable and idiot-proof device that they
> have in their pockets at all times?

Smartphones are _amazing_ now at producing decent pictures in adverse
circumstances. The amount of manual effort required to produce an equivalent
with a DSLR in post processing is therefore going up.

Is there room for a iCamera, with the smartphone processing but large
interchangeable lenses? Maybe. Are the camera companies able to build it? No.

------
btrettel
I'm not an expert on optics, but one thing I remember from my high school
photography class (using film, perhaps dating myself a bit) is that smaller
depth of field basically requires a large sensor. I guess you could imitate
this automatically with software, but it's probably not a coincidence that
every photo in the linked page has very large depth of field. To me, this
would be a fair reason to prefer a more "normal" camera.

Edit: The article linked below says I'm wrong about why phone cameras have
wide depth of field. Based on skimming it, I'm right in that phone cameras
will have wide depth of field, but it's due to the the small focal length.

[https://fstoppers.com/education/no-larger-sensors-do-not-
pro...](https://fstoppers.com/education/no-larger-sensors-do-not-produce-
shallower-depth-field-254158)

~~~
bigdubs
they're getting really close simulating shallow depth of field with depth
sensors and computational photography, but in the same way there is no
replacement resolution-wise for 8x10 and other large formats, its better just
to use the real thing

~~~
mc32
If people demand it they may simulate medium format. But yeah seeing large
prints from LF or MF cameras the whole image looks very different, more
immersive of the scene.

~~~
i_am_proteus
The available resolution of LF, even from "only" 4x5, beats full-frame digital
handily. It's also simultaneously cheaper (dollars) and more expensive (time).

------
adrr
I don’t get why the camera industry doesn’t implement phone camera
technologies into the cameras. They could easily do smart HDR features and
merge multiple exposures into an image. Also they could make exposure smarter
which smarter phone cameras tend to nail. Sure you can fix most of it with raw
files but that inconvenience is why i reach for my phone instead of DSLR
especially when taking pictures of my kids.

~~~
CarVac
The inconvenience of processing raw files is why I wrote my own software [0]
to do the tonemapping to truly make a wide dynamic range scene look natural on
a low dynamic range display.

Now I spend mere seconds processing each raw image, and they look way better
than I can get with the default processing on a smartphone.

When you have the benefit of a large sensor, you don't actually need multishot
HDR capture; even older cameras have plenty of dynamic range, as long as you
expose properly.

Now if only there were a camera with a beefy processor that I could port my
software to run on...

[0] [https://github.com/CarVac/filmulator-
gui](https://github.com/CarVac/filmulator-gui)

------
ekianjo
> But that’s just the start of the problem. Once beginners get their first
> camera system, they quickly realize that their expenses and time commitment
> do not stop there. All of a sudden, their computers are not fast enough to
> post-process those high-resolution images and video. Their storage is
> insufficient. Their computer screens that used to handle web browsing and
> occasional gaming just fine, are no longer good enough – they now need IPS
> monitors and screen calibration tools for a consistent editing experience.

That's the biggest difference between a market where casual users just want to
take "pictures" vs the semi-pro market where users actually start caring about
the process in itself rather than just the final outcome. It's not like "one
size fits all" at all. I use both DSLRs, Mirrorless and smartphones to take
pictures and I know when I want to use which. I also know that a DSLR picture
is going to take more time to edit and all but I enjoy the process and I also
find the picture is massively better than anything I can take with a
smartphone: there's not even a metric where the best phone can compare with a
medium-priced DLSR. I also know that my DLSR pictures will still look great 10
years from now while my smartphones pics are for instant consumption only and
a good 75% of them are borderline junk (too much noise when it gets darker,
distorsion, not taken exactly at the right moment, slightly blur, etc).

For me this is the same difference between people who buy computers just
because they need one and hardcore gamers who assemble the best piece of
hardware they can get their hands to because they have very specific needs or
wishes. Looking thru a huge list of hardware options, comparing prices, is
also fun if you are in the right mindset - and this is not "for all people".

~~~
floatboth
> my smartphones pics are for instant consumption only

ehh, I have a photo from the iPhone 4 printed out and hanging on the wall,
still very happy with some shots I took with it :)

> too much noise when it gets darker

To be fair, many older DSLRs (Canon 600D) have horrendous performance at high
ISO too, while smartphones have Night Sight type stitching of multiple
exposures, but these require steady hands and non-moving subjects of course.

~~~
ekianjo
DSLRs have also got better with time as smartphones improved too. Their
dynamic range for one has improved dramatically in the past 5 years.

------
jillesvangurp
This rather long article describes the past, not necessarily the future.

Basically, what the author identifies and yet misses is that most phones these
days are no longer phones. A normal camera has similar capabilities except it
has better optics and happens to not have a 4g/5g chip in it (typically) or be
used for taking calls.

The status quo of the last 15 years is basically convergence of devices around
a form factor that fits in your pocket that is good enough but frankly a bit
awkward for many things. They've gotten uncomfortably big and yet are still
uncomfortably small for many things (like typing). You only have one phone and
the myth companies like Apple are built on is that that one phone comes from
them and is the center of your life.

However, making phone hardware is getting so cheap now that you can produce
fairly decent ones for around 100$. Manufacturers like Apple have been looking
to expand in the camera domain to justify higher prices. If you look at the
most expensive phones, their number one feature is always the camera.

The next logical step from a technical point of view is separating those two
again. After all, if phones are cheap, there's no good reason why any camera
can't be a phone as well. The only reason that's not happening is that
traditional camera manufacturers (like most electronics manufacturers) are
lousy at software. Eventually one of them will figure it out.

Another thing that I've been expecting to happen is that Apple will figure out
that selling just 1 device to people with too much money is bad business.
Right now they have a one size fits all phone and that's it. You buy it and
then you replace it after a few years. The next logical step here is to own
multiple devices and start treating them more as accessories to be used in
different contexts. The phone you use while biking to work might be different
than what you use while you are sitting on the bus or at home. It might not
even be a phone. It's like owning just one pair of shoes for jogging,
weddings, office, and gardening. Once companies figure out how to make
switching from one device to the next seamless, there's an enormous amount of
potential for all sorts of specialized devices to be sold that seamlessly
integrate. Including high end cameras.

~~~
speedplane
> I've been expecting ... that Apple will figure out that selling just 1
> device to people with too much money is bad business. ... You buy it and
> then you replace it after a few years.

Creating a device that every person needs to replace after a few years is a
very sound business model. The issue is how many years you generally need to
replace it. Apple used to be able to convince folks to replace their phone
every two years. Now a two year old phone is not bad at all, and many people
are moving to a three year cycle or even longer. This is significant, if 50%
of folks move from replacing their phones every 2 years to 3, that's a 16%
drop in sales.

Apple's real challenge is to keep innovating to convince folks to keep to
shorter phone life-spans. However, as Moore's law keeps it's pace towards the
graveyard, that will be be harder and harder to do.

~~~
matwood
> This is significant, if 50% of folks move from replacing their phones every
> 2 years to 3, that's a 16% drop in sales.

Which is why Apple has pushed in to services and other halo devices (Apple
Watch, AirPods) around the phone. People incorrectly think that a drop in
iPhone sales means fewer people using iPhones. While that may happen at some
point, I think the iOS user base is steady/still growing. It will take time,
but Apple is already working to make themselves less dependent on the 2 year
upgrade cycle.

~~~
speedplane
> People incorrectly think that a drop in iPhone sales means fewer people
> using iPhones. ... Apple is already working to make themselves less
> dependent on the 2 year upgrade cycle.

We should not be cheering this initiative, it's a sign of bad things to come.
It means that hardware innovation is slowing, and to compensate, there has to
be more software innovation. Software innovation is relatively easy to copy,
and the most profitable business models involve selling personal data to
advertisers. It'll be harder for Apple to compete in this market, and they
will be strongly tempted to make compromises with user privacy to satisfy
growth and revenue expectations.

However, the root cause of this, is that hardware innovation is slowing, which
is largely due to the death of Moore's law. Few are thinking about the
profound changes that will arise if Moore's law does indeed come to a complete
stop, Apple's business strategy is just one small example. If Moore's law does
hit a dead-end (it's currently on its last dying wimper), there will profound
affects through society, our economy, and our general expectations for the
future. It's frightening that more people aren't sounding the alarms about it.

------
fock
Was to a birthday of a person just having his first child. There were photos
of his childhood/life, not stellar, but just sentimental, physical pictures of
his life. Judging from what is sold in all the crap decoration stores around,
people have a real longing for this kind of sentimental stuff. I think a lot
of them will awake horrified in 10-20 years, when they notice that all this
sentimental stuff is basically horridly groce and barely printable, because
they just bought an iPhone every year or two because of the camera, instead of
just doing the (sustainable) thing of using their phones for what they're good
at and getting a small camera for catering to sentimentality (think Sony RX100
- class).

And yeah, basically if it's just sentimentality, maybe a rough, blotty sketch
of reality might suffice, but given that photos are kind of unnecessary from
this angle, I somehow find trading quality and money for arguable convenience
sort of schizophrenic.

As for the aspect of getting pictures of the camera: my cheap big-C-things
have an alright app for that, I think it even does raw-files. A USB-
cable/card-reader certainly also does the job.

Seeing this, as it is, I wonder how many people really need higher quality
_and_ high troughput. The small minority of one-person-online-only-celebrity-
cos might profit from convenience and fast turn-around times of even better
smartphone cameras, but this is a really small minority. Everyone else doesn't
really need both. Professionals (aka selling pictures compared to selling some
lifestyle) will still need the quality and all the sentimental people who
think they need to shoot crappy photos, would be better served by other things
for their obvious long-term-needs. Still, seeing how much emphasis marketing
places on plainly overpriced smartphone cameras, it's a fair guess, that the
latter group today is mainly concerned with their ephemeral and completely
commercialized social-media presence noone will remember tomorrow.

~~~
foldr
Modern smartphones take much better photos than 35mm compact cameras ever did.
People have way more family photos of way better quality than they ever used
to.

~~~
guidoism
I completely agree. But there was a period of several years, maybe 2010-2016
when they didn't. And especially at the beginning of that time, oh, I remember
cringing when I saw friends' baby pictures they took at the time with their
phones.

I'm culpable of jumping ship to the new but worse technology too early myself,
but in this instance I didn't stop carrying my "real" camera until the iPhone
6s.

~~~
subpixel
I am taking photos of my small child with a new iPhone and a Fuji X-series and
the latter is so far superior it is no contest. I expected the new iPhone to
be a big improvement over my 6s but in most of my use-cases it is not - low
light, interior shots.

~~~
guidoism
Yeah, low light. Definitely. It's not something I shoot much anymore.

There was a period where phone photos looked bad even when viewed on phones,
then for a long period of time they looked great on the phone but when viewed
on a monitor they were absolute shit.

------
Terretta
The photos in the article illustrate two things at once:

\- How amazing the iPhone XS Max cameras already are

\- How far there is to go before they feel as “photographic” as something shot
with a big lens big sensor DSLR.

The curve moved a lot with the iPhone 11 and the latest Android devices, but
if you shoot thousands of iPhone photos and then pick back up your full frame
Nikon D4 or Sony A9 with some big glass (say, an 85mm 1.2 or a 24mm 1.2),
you’ll realize something was missing.

This generation of smart phone pictures are a little like listening to music
from speakers by Bose. All the fancy duct work sounds like a pretty good
simulation of real drivers, but there’s just less there there.

~~~
freetime2
I worry about how we will look back on today’s computational photography in a
few years. Early computer graphics impressed everyone when they first came
out, but haven’t aged as well as hand drawn animation or practical special
effects of the same era.

How will we look back on today’s artificially blurred backgrounds and
impossibly HDR photographs in a decade or two?

------
speedplane
Futurists have been talking about computers or "AI" creating artwork for many
years. They traditionally reference music, visual arts, and occasionally
written prose, but these en-devours have hardly caught on beyond niche
whimsical amusements.

It's pretty clear that the first type of "art" created by computers or "AI" on
a large scale is photography. Today, smart cameras don't just assist with
objective factors like lighting and focus, they make subjective decisions on
which areas to highlight, skin tones, shadows, parts of the scene to blur, and
a variety of other details that are typically in the realm of artistic
component of photography.

As a society, we have essentially determined what a "good" photo is, and have
programmed that into each camera that we carry in our pocket. There are many
upsides to this, but it raises an obvious question: are these cameras really
being programmed to create the "best" images, or are we being programmed to
believe that the images they create are the "best"?

Automation and AI are not a one way street; we don't just create machines that
think like us, the machines we create change the way we think.

------
watertom
What’s that old saying “the things you see when you don’t have a camera”. Now
I always have a camera.

I gave up my film DSLR in 1998, I gave up my digital DSLR in 2012, ago and
went to a superzoom, now I’m giving up my superzoom for an iPhone 11.

I’d rather become an expert with the a limited camera I always have, versus
being an expert with an almost unlimited camera I rarely have.

What’s funny is that I’m taking better pictures with the iPhone than I’ve ever
taken before.

------
dharma1
I wish there was an external usb-c video/stills camera module that would work
with smartphones and still fit in your pocket. Something the size of a
matchbox. Just the sensor (and maybe fast storage) on the camera module,
everything else on the phone - battery, processing, software, display - all on
the phone. Would be great if it supported raw stills and video, or at least
10bit h265.

Camera manufacturers can't make competitive software, and usually end up
gimping cameras because they have different competing product lines. Just give
us an external sensor with either a good fast fixed lens, or a reasonable lens
mount, to hook up to a phone/tablet, those do everything else better than a
camera. Usb-c has good enough bandwidth and can provide enough power to the
external sensor module.

For stills mobile phones with small sensors are already pretty close to DSLR
quality, for video it will be a while - the small sensor/pixel size means lots
of noise and you can't fix it with multiple exposure averaging like you can
with stills. Similarly faking shallow DOF for video is a much harder task than
for stills

~~~
nikhizzle
You are describing the dxo one.

~~~
dharma1
If it was open source (or had some way for users to keep improving it) and had
4k video with a 10bit codec, I would be all over it. Now it looks abandoned by
dxo

------
jtolmar
At this point, shouldn't a digital camera just be a smartphone with a weird
form factor? (Pile of optics and a viewfinder?)

~~~
freetime2
I would love to see Apple take a shot at this. It probably doesn’t make sense
for them to invest the R&D in a rapidly shrinking market, though.

Samsung tried building Android-based cameras a few years back, struggled to
gain any sort of market share, and got out of the interchangeable lens camera
market altogether. It’s a shame too because the cameras got really good
reviews.

------
rland
Big sensor, more photons per mm^2. There will not ever be a computational
substitute for a quadrillion additional photons.

The camera industry is totally backwards, though. That is true.

------
lrajlich
This author made a small amount of fame a few years back (2012) claiming the
dx format is dead. He was obviously wrong about that. He’s wrong about this,
too.

~~~
Rapzid
I must have missed the memo that the prosumer and enthusiast photographer
groups are drying up. I know a oddly large number of enthusiasts and would-be
pros around town and they all own DSLRs.. Half of my good friends own
expensive Sony point and shoots..

Nikon's stock is down over 2013 but I'm not seeing the end days reflected in
that. AMD was down for ages but computers didn't go out of fashion.

I recon smart phones will kill for-purpose cameras the same year they kill the
PC gaming industry.

~~~
matwood
> Nikon's stock is down over 2013 but I'm not seeing the end days reflected in
> that.

I would not point to Nikon as the DSLR bellwether (and I'm a Nikon shooter).
Nikon has moved into mirrorless at a glacial pace. The Nikon 1 system was a
joke. If I didn't have so much Nikon glass, I would have moved on to Sony
years ago.

The new Nikon Z bodies give me hope, but the Z6 and new Z50 made some weird
decisions particularly around memory cards. The Z6 uses the XQD which are
super expensive and the Z50 eschewed dual slots which I make use of in d7100.
The new Z mount also means I'm probably going to end up replacing many of my
lenses anyway.

------
cateye
There are a lot of comments like: "isn't it a good idea to integrate a
smartphone with DSLR".

But it has been already done in 2013:
[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-
DSLR...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-DSLR-
NX,23129.html)

Also [https://zx1.zeiss.com/](https://zx1.zeiss.com/) is coming (not soon)
with a fixed 35mm f/2 lens, a 37.4MP sensor, built-in 512 GB SSD storage,
integrated Adobe Lightroom and wifi to share.

Also remember [https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/hasselblad-
tr...](https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/hasselblad-true-zoom)
and [https://www.redhydrogen.com/](https://www.redhydrogen.com/)

So, I don't think there is an obvious solution. Just integrating a mobile
Operating system in a DSLR doesn't solve the underlying problems.

How many customers want to put a sim card in their camera to have a really
convenient way of sharing to social media?

Do users really want to edit and grade their photo's on a 6 inch display?

How many users find the pocket size form factor of an iPhone outweighing all
the photo quality advantages of a bigger lens?

So, maybe the conclusion is that these are different markets whereby the
casual camera mass market will use a smartphone and prosumer and professional
camera market don't have the same needs like smart image processing or sharing
on instagram.

------
ur-whale
The real interesting question raised by this article is it points out the
difference of innovation speed between traditional camera makers and phone
makers.

Why does such a difference exist?

[edit]:

Is it industry culture?

Is it because the DSLR camera market is too small to finance the innovation?

Is it lack of imagination? I mean the size of the DSLR platform lends itlsef
to way more computing power / features than a smartphone with the huge
constraint on size and power consumption.

------
jdhn
I love how the author broke down the user journey for capturing images with a
smartphone vs a camera, seems like there's still a lot of room to improve the
UX of shooting with a dedicated camera. I wonder why camera makers haven't
attempted to smartphone-ify (bad term, I know) their cameras yet, or have they
tried and failed at it?

~~~
jjav
> smartphone-ify

Not sure exactly what you meant, but that sounds terrible.

On my Nikon DSLR I can adjust just about any setting using physical buttons,
very fast, most often without even taking my eye off the viewfinder. The
camera UX is optimized for speed and efficiency.

On a phone, I'd be scrolling through touch screen menus to do anything. By the
time a shot is taken the subject is long gone (unless it's static scenery).

~~~
Cakez0r
I think there is still a lot of room for improvement with camera UX. It
boggles my mind that all cameras don't have 3 dials as standard - one for iso,
one for shutter and one for aperture.

------
IkmoIkmo
> And here we are, still wondering why the digital camera market is
> collapsing. Of course it is collapsing

No, nobody is still wondering that, not for many years. And indeed, of course
it is. That should've been the end of an article that could've been quite
prophetic in 2007/8, not a few months shy of 2020.

------
Lio
Weirdly I use my iPhone for photos but I don’t enjoy the process.

I still have my Nikon DLSR set up but when I want to “do photography” for fun
these days I use a Fuji X100F.

This is a somewhat limit camera although I can get fixed focal lengths from
28-100mm eqv. and it has some other neat tricks. I hardly ever shoot RAW now
and if I do I process the RAW in camera.

This means I can’t take ever possible shot but I really enjoy working with the
camera flaws and all. It’s only for fun so you get what you can.

What I don’t get is why the camera makers haven’t expanded on the creative
options for their systems. Why aren’t they offering flash systems with better
integration than say Godox?

Why don’t they offer control of flash colour temperature for balancing?

What about photo stacking in JPGs?

~~~
no_gravity
How much better are the photos you get out of the Fuji then the ones you get
out of your iPhone?

The Fuji X100F is about 3 times as heavy then a usual smartphone. So carrying
it around would quadruple the weight of my "camera equipment".

I wish somebody would run around with a pocket camera and a phone for a day
and then write a blog posts with comparison shots.

~~~
Lio
That’s an interesting question.

For convenience you can’t beat a smartphone. I only take the Fuji with me when
I’m specifically in the mood to take photos. I don’t blog but if you do then
maybe the camera you have with you is the best choice.

On the question of quality again it’s interesting. The latest generation of
smart phones are reputedly very good so I don’t know what the difference is.

The other thing is that with the X100F you get lots of control but no training
wheels. Smartphones lack control over what picture you get but you’ll still
probably get something pretty most of the time.

The Fuji has stuff like a leaf shutter so it will let you do certain tricks
with flash exposure you can’t easily do in post. It also has really good film
simulation and a good optical/digital view finder.

Now that’s pretty specific so if it’s not something you think you need a
smartphone will again be more useful.

------
scotty79
Half of the camera should be on your smartphone. Lens, sensor, power, some
buffer and some hardware gimmicks may stay on the camera, rest should be moved
to smartphone. Whole UI, image processing, nn processing, storage, editing,
basically all of software and computing power necessary should all be on
smartphone.

From the point of view of the camera user, smartphone should be detachable lcd
viewfinder. Or from the point of smartphone user, camera should be beefy
detachable lens and flash you can put on a tripod nearby when composing the
shot. People want better lenses and lightning for their smartphones. If they
are wireless it's even better.

------
schuke
I've always wondered if Apple could just make a camera. Or perhaps an
attachment via USB-C that has bigger lens and sensors. That'll be Game Over
for the Japanese consumer camera industry.

------
crystaln
I am not sure why I would read or anyone would write such a thorough account
of an obvious and largely beneficial technological trend. I do appreciate the
art tho and did skim the entire article.

Smartphones take astoundingly better pictures than almost anyone needs or
wants, and will only get better. There will always be some market for
dedicated cameras, however for most people they do not add any value.

------
sealthedeal
Seems to me, the biggest argument is iPhone camera is 12MP baseline DSLR is
24. If you are 100% certain you need that additional clarity in your photos
(maybe landscape) then you go with DSLR. Otherwise the smartphone is the way
to go for all your family photos and videos, etc. I would be VVV nervous if I
was a camera manufacturer...

~~~
fma
Megapixel is not the only thing that determines how good a photo will look.
That was a game played by manufacturers, just like how back in the day with
CPU people tried to measure a computer quality based on Mhz and Ghz.

~~~
pkolaczk
All other things being equal, megapixels do count. DSLRs have both better
quality in terms of dynamic range and noise AND more MP. More MP means more
details, less grainy, nicer noise patterns, more cropping flexibility. 12 MP
is good for internet, but not for high quality prints to hang on the wall. 12
MP from a Bayer filter is not even true 12 MP, but interpolated, much closer
to 6-8 real MP.

------
BeetleB
There are 2 reasons for the decline of the DSLR camera.

The first is the complete lack of innovation. Without any meaningful APIs, end
users cannot do much with their DSLR. There's no app store where I can buy
apps to enhance my DSLR. There's a _lot_ of room for creative photography if
we could only program our own DSLRs. Smartphones, on the other hand, often do
provide such APIs. This is how you get people doing astrophotography on a
smartphone with a vastly inferior sensor.

The other reason is much more banal. For various reasons, people jumped to the
DSRL bandwagon thinking that would make for better photos compared to more
compact cameras (false for most people). DSLRs never should have become as
popular as they did. In the film days you had simple compact cameras and SLRs.
Only enthusiasts bought SLRs. That was the case in the early digital days, but
then around 2005 people suddenly decided to switch to DSLRs, despite their not
benefiting from them.

Over a decade later, people have realized that the eagerness with which they
jumped to SLRs was misguided, and are now back to using something convenient.
Unfortunately, camera manufacturers assumed this temporary rise in interest in
DSLRs would be permanent.

~~~
cthalupa
>The first is the complete lack of innovation. Without any meaningful APIs,
end users cannot do much with their DSLR. There's no app store where I can buy
apps to enhance my DSLR.

I disagree here entirely. The DSLR "app" market predates and has been the
inspiration for all of these apps we see on phones. Photoshop filters,
lightroom presets and actions, etc. All of the stuff that that inspired things
like instagram filters have been around for decades now, and have consistently
always been a step ahead on power and quality. You don't run them on camera,
but... you wouldn't want to! When you're shooting with a DSLR you're shooting
for consumption at higher resolutions than you can see on your LCD display.
You want to be able to look at things in more detail than you could ever do on
the camera itself.

>The other reason is much more banal. For various reasons, people jumped to
the DSRL bandwagon thinking that would make for better photos compared to more
compact cameras (false for most people)

You're right here, but I don't think people actually wised up to this.

If we're talking specifically about DSLRs, mirrorless cameras are just better
for most people at this point - Sony has almost single handedly rendered DSLRs
obsolete for the vast majority of use cases where people need prosumer or
professional cameras. If we're talking about prosumer+ cameras in general,
it's even simpler than your reasons: Most of the people taking pictures with
their phones are doing so for people who are consuming them on their phones.

You simply don't need a DSLR or mirrorless or medium format camera when
everyone viewing your pictures is also using a phone. People aren't getting
photos printed, and they're not viewing them on monitors. I'm really impressed
with my iPhone 11 Pro camera - it works fantastic! - for viewing photos on the
phone. But throw it up on my 4K monitor, and the pictures don't compare at all
to my old D5300, much less my a7r 3 or even my rx100 m7 (assuming good
shooting conditions and manual mode - the 11 Pro auto settings are quite good
and significantly better than the 5300, and in some situations seem to be
about as good as the rx100). I haven't gotten any printed to put up on
display, but just seeing how poorly they compare when I'm looking at them in
Lightroom, I wouldn't want to.

The way the majority of people consume photography has changed, and the
requirements for producing photos for that medium has changed with it.

~~~
BeetleB
> You don't run them on camera, but... you wouldn't want to!

I'm talking about APIs that control focus, aperture, shutter etc - not post
processing. Phone companies have performed more innovation on this front than
camera manufacturers.

I want to write a program that will focus stack for me. As in I want to tell
my camera to take N photos, each with a slightly different focal point. I want
to specify the boundaries (min and max focus). Bonus points if it stacks all
the photos in the body as well. Photoshop cannot do this for you.

You already see it in some phones - great nice shots with low noise because
the camera is taking N pictures and taking the median of all the pictures. Why
can't I program my DSLR to do this?

As for my other point - it was that most DSLR owners never needed a DSLR. They
were fine with prosumer/compact cameras, but decided to pointlessly pay an
extra for DSLRs. Some a huge amount extra for full frame. DSLRs never should
have been this popular. This story should have been about the decline of
compact cameras had that alternate history played out.

Why don't camera manufacturers allow me to do this? I know if I overdo it I'll
damage the lens, but that's simply not enough of an excuse. There are ways to
mitigate these concerns.

~~~
cthalupa
>Bonus points if it stacks all the photos in the body as well. Photoshop
cannot do this for you. >You already see it in some phones - great nice shots
with low noise because the camera is taking N pictures and taking the median
of all the pictures. Why can't I program my DSLR to do this?

I've been doing this in photoshop and lightroom for more than a decade now.
I'm not sure how this isn't doable in them?

------
overcast
Smartphones win on convenience. Standalone wins on focal lengths, and low
light performance from large sensors that smartphones will NEVER be able to
overcome. If you don't need those features, then you're not the target
audience, and can stick with a smartphone.

------
ggm
I enjoy using my Fuji x20 and if I could afford it I would get a xt3 or
similar.

It's not always about the result, sometimes it's about how you got there. That
said, my phone takes awesome snaps

------
intolerabletech
I'm so ignorant about cameras but have been curious... Smartphone
manufacturers keep adding additional lens. Is that simply to compensate for
not being a standalone camera? Am I complete idiot for looking at standalone
mirrorless/DSLRs and wondering if Google's smart tech + Pixel 4's multiple
lens are going to eventually eclipse standalone cameras? (My goal is to
eventually carry a camera and non-smartphone).

~~~
CarVac
It's to compensate for not having interchangeable lenses.

~~~
ghemsley
It is also to assist the computational photography features with the task of
simulating the effects of a larger sensor. Generally speaking, information
from multiple lenses/sensors is used to apply the selective defocus effect in
portrait mode.

