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Comment by l33tbro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

And he's trying to use language that is more universal, less techie. It could always be editors changing the language of course...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_Malik

I too have real cameras and real lenses, and I love my iPhone camera. I love it so much I am considering buying the iPhone 7+, not for the awful bokeh, but for the versatility of the two lenses.

With my iPhone 6s I was slightly disappointed that the ultra aggressive noise reduction ruined some of my shots in very good lighting (other from the same series were fine, some were just totally destroyed though), but it seems the new support for raw images will solve that issue too.

It's a camera that is always with me, and considering the technological constraints and limitations, it works exceptionally well.

Indeed. "f/8 and be there." as they say.

The shot that you make with the camera that you have with you is always better than the photo you don't get with the camera that you left at home. Having paid my dues learning to operate a 4x5 view camera, I grok that fully.

As I once told a friend who was berating my closet full of Canon lenses because "everyone knows Leica makes the best lenses" I said: "Take a look at your last vacation photos. Now take a look at any randon issue of National Geographic. Ask yourself: Am I really being limited by the glass?"

Somebody that understands composition and light can make better photos with a phone than a hack with the best "big boy" camera.

Same here. I have some lenses that create wonderful bokeh (e.g. 85mm f/1.2). The 7 Plus bokeh effect looks like a blur, but who knows they could train a conv net to make it more bokeh like.

The big advantage of the 7 Plus to me is that the 56mm lens is better for portraits so it's pretty exciting.

there's really nothing magical about bokeh that requires machine learning imo. Lens blur can be approximated perfectly (by human perceptual standards) given a good depth map, you just have to use a disk-shaped kernel instead of a gaussian distribution, then vary the size of the disk based on aperture size and distance to the object. Simulating lens blur is a pretty well researched topic at this point.

There are other things that go into making these images more "realistic", like adding chromatic aberration, barrel distortion and halation, but by and large these things are affectations borne of nostalgia and not actual improvements to image quality.

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