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Comment by whitehouse3 | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I rented a full-frame mirrorless from the local camera store some months ago because she wanted nice pictures of our first puppy. As it turns out, this experience went much like a take-home test drive for a luxury car. After a few days, we returned the camera to the rental desk then walked ten feet and bought an identical unit.

We paid $3500 for the privilege with no regrets (so far). I forgot pictures can look so good: high resolution, pleasing background blur, and most important it's just a camera. It doesn't have reddit, or HN, or email, or pinterest. It sits about the house where we can grab it quickly. It goes in the day pack on hikes. It blows every other webcam out of the water.

And it has smarts to compete with our current-gen iPhones, which we increasingly tuck away to combat distraction. Fast autofocus and face-recognition are lifesavers and often outperform the phones. It's like photography on easy mode. Which it should be considering the sticker price.

I get that the best camera is the one you have with you. But we carry our phones less and our camera more. It's silly and sad that we can't exercise more self-control. But from our privileged perspective, a dedicated camera was a great investment in our quality of life.

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I accepted the "phones are so good that you don't need a separate camera" conventional wisdom by default. Then I tried a mirrorless aps-c. I'm shocked at how much better its photos are. Yes, the phone is adequate for Instagram but if you view similar photos on a 4k monitor there is a much bigger difference than I expected, even for photos that aren't challenging for the phone (landscapes with plenty of light).

Also, the selfie camera on your phone is probably MUCH lower quality than the main one on the back. Have someone else take your picture instead if you have the option.

Cell phones are just great for having with you everywhere. You're out and about and kids are doing something cute at the playground you want to remember? You don't need a $5,000 camera back at home, you need something with you now.

But almost any dedicated camera that isn't down in the complete crap price range will blow a cell phone out of the water, for two major reasons. First, optical zoom, the number one thing I miss with my cell phone. Second, it is at least somewhat more likely that your "12MP camera" really is 12 MP with your real camera, whereas it's fairly likely you "12MP" cell phone is a lie [1].

This is even in the $150/200 range, long before we get to the ability to change lenses or all those other pro features. My ~$200 camera from 10+ years ago still takes better pictures than my cell phone, because even though my cell phone nominally beats it on megapixels, my camera actually uses all of its pixels to obtain real information from the scene, instead of being a bullet-point feature on a device that isn't even primarily a camera.

So, to anyone reading this, if this sounds interesting, you don't even have to go to the big, expensive stuff; my kid literally bought a camera at a garage sale for $5 that also takes better pictures than my cell because it had like 8x optical zoom. It cost me more to find a functional battery than the camera itself did. It's not hard or expensive.

[1]: Test: Take a picture in broad daylight, the best possible lighting conditions. Move the picture to your computer. Zoom in until you can see all the pixels clearly. Can you see sharp edges, or do you see a whole bunch of multi-pixel blobs of the sameish color, even around sharp edges? If the latter, your "pixel count" is a lie; it doesn't actually have that much resolving power.

The blobs appear to come from aggressive noise reduction on iOS. I think they’re better if you shoot RAW, which is an option with a third party camera app.

It's not just that. The lens itself doesn't have enough resolving power. When light passes through a tiny aperture, it becomes irreversibly blurred, enough to be detected by the micron-scale pixels in the camera sensor.

Camera phones will try to re-sharpen the image, but some information is always lost. It's especially obvious looking at things with fine detail and sharp edges, like tree leaves against a bright sky.

"The lens is sufficiently prone to diffraction that you won't get the full value out of the sensor's resolution" is a very different statement from "the sensor's resolution is not really 12MP". Saying "The camera isn't true 12MP" suggests the latter, not the former.

I deliberately stayed away from claiming a cause in my post, because I don't know the cause. I only know the result of the system as a whole; every cell phone camera I've had in the last 10 years does not actually take pictures at its claimed resolution, even in broad daylight. (I can also say it can't solely be over-aggressive JPG-ification, because the result doesn't match that; the 'blobs' I refer to cross the JPEG DCT boundaries freely. I can't say bad JPEG-ification isn't part of the problem, though.)

I tend to buy last year's midgrade phone because I don't really need the latest and greatest. Maybe the top end really does take the full photos they claim, but that still leaves a lot of cell phones that are lying.

Most of the recent cell phones take perfectly adequate pictures, considering the amazing disadvantages they are laboring under. It's just that if you downsample the pictures to 2 or 4MP, you're basically losing no information.

(There are similar effects with video. The aforementioned 10+ year-old camera I had suffers from this as well. It has a "720P" and a "1080P" video mode, but based on my experimentation, both modes get real video out at about 400-500 "real" lines of vertical quality. I can squeeze either video's source down to that size and when I compare the full screen result to the original, I can find no difference whatsoever. I imagine more modern real cameras probably do a better job here; this thing is pretty old now, obviously.)

Not very.

Raw will help with color and exposure, up to a point. But it can't fix focus. You are still reliant on photons hitting a sensor. The more of them you have the more information you can work with. A 8MP camera with 1/2" CCD is going to look a hell of a lot better than a 20MP camera with 1/4" CCD.

>But almost any dedicated camera that isn't down in the complete crap price range will blow a cell phone out of the water, for two major reasons.

I suspect this is probably why you're seeing the sales numbers drop too. The big camera makers have been relying on the cheap units to bring in the money. They're transitioning now to relying on expensive, high end units instead. It's a much smaller addressable market though.

At some point I think it will be largely a professional thing. Eventually the computational photography will look good enough to make up for the space constraints of a phones' lens. But the downside will be that any photo taken with your phone will look kind of samey and be poor at getting fine detail. And having your own camera with manual control options will let people feel more in control of what they're doing.

I disagree. My iPhone 7 usually takes better shots than my Canon 800D unless I actually put my photography knowledge to work. I'm scared. It's just better at calculating exposure, aperture and ISO sensitivity than the DSLR. And does great job at post-processing to hide its optical and sensor limitations.

Do iPhone photos look better when zoomed in? Of course not, but they do look better at "normal" scale, which is what counts IMO. And of course this only applies when you shoot "standard" scenes, the DSLR (with lenses) gives you ability to shoot things that the iPhone just can't.

Am I ditching my DSLR? Of course not, but that's only because I'm willing to invest effort in actually taking great photos, which isn't trivial (to me) and is much harder with the iPhone.

> Yes, the phone is adequate for Instagram but...

Maybe true, but I pretty much only post photos on instagram (using a 5 year old mirrorless camera I found for less than a new good smartphone), and non-experts consistently ask me how I am able to get such high picture quality. So non-photographers can detect the difference between modern smartphones and 5 year old mirrorless tech.

my wife focused on her instagram for her jewelry business for a while. it took about 1 day for her to realize that phone photos were totally inadequate for the quality she wanted to deliver. I'd be surprised if any pro instagrammers really used phone photos for the majority of their work.

Ex-photoj here, I just bought a 2012 Fuji mirrorless for £110 with WiFi to instagram with. Even this area is becoming cheaper to get into. This camera spanks my iPhone XS for photo quality. Now. But give it a couple more generations...

I don't really believe this. One of the major advantages of real cameras is the sensor size. More sensor size gives you more SNR / dynamic range.

All of the tricks used in a smartphone could be used in a real camera. If they were, then real cameras will always have many stops of dynamic range advantage.

All technology has constraints, and pictures are made within them. Dynamic range may or may not be an advantage, because there are only so many levels that can be reproduced for the viewer. RGB, for example, only gives you 256 shades of grey. It might mean more options for the photographer, in that you end up with more information in the highlights and shadows, but ultimately the decision to compress one or the other needs to be made if making a black-and-white print (for example) and you end up with the same picture.

if you have more stops of light available you can get a picture closer to what the eye actually sees. You can see the difference between a crop camera and medium format camera right now if you take a landscape with the sun in the frame, and that is only a few extra stops of light (recall that EVs are logarithmic so each stop is 2x the light). Most cellphone cameras have a native dynamic range that is just over 1/2 that of a crop sensor camera. If the crop sensor cameras used the same tricks as your cellphone, they would be able to do very impressive HDR in-camera.

It’s all true, but the point I was making is that photography isn’t just a technical pursuit nor are those tricks and abilities the things that everyone looks for. There’s more to photos than simply reproduction. None of these things has really shifted the overall quality of photography in the last 100 years as much as it has shifted the way photos are made. And that second shift is pretty much done.

I really disagree! The shift from film to digital allowed photographers to remove the price per photo aspect of photography from the equation, but only recently has the dynamic range, resolution, etc of digital matched properly developed film. Now, digital actually surpasses it. People are generally able to practice photography without going broke, which is an amazing development.

The Revenant would have been impossible to shoot even 10 years ago, the demands on the sensor or film would have been too great. This means the story couldn't be told at all! So the technology actually enables people to take photos that would have been otherwise impossible.

I'm also suspicious that the second shift is "done". I suspect the technology will always be pushed further at the high end of the camera technology market which will trickle down. Similarly, I suspect the software innovations used by Google / Apple will trickle down into the software of dedicated cameras, which will further widen the quality gap between the formats.

Quality isn't all about reproduction, it is also about creative possibilities. Right now, none of the smartphones can take a photo of a moving subject in low light. They depend on averaging frames which leads to subject blur. This isn't a minor detail, it's the difference between a photo and no photo.

I have an 8 or so year old APS-C and I honestly prefer my (new) phone’s pictures most of the time. It is just so much better at calculating exposure. With my camera I feel like I am constantly battling with blown out highlights and usually end up underexposing every picture and hoping I can fix exposure later. The dynamic range of a picture by default from my phone is just so much better. Of course when you zoom in or view on a large monitor the phone is going to lose out in other ways. I am sure newer cameras are better in this regard but it still goes to show how much phones have improved. Or maybe I just don’t know how to use my camera...

Dynamic range has been increasing with each generation, as well as better metering. I bought a micro 4/3rds Olympus E-M10 3 years ago and it blew my APS-C Sony A330 that I had been using for years out of the water in every aspect.

I love my phone camera (Pixel 1) but if I want to take professional quality pictures I pull out my E-M10.

Congrats on your purchase, I wish I went with mirrorless when we bought our DSLR camera back around the birth of our first child! I thought I would want access to all the available lenses and accessories for an established product.

But my photographer friend was right - mirrorless are better for amateurs and have one huge benefit: they can record video much more easily since they can focus and record at the same time.

If you're going from mirror-based to mirrorless and stay with the manufacturer, there's always adapters meaning you can continue to use your existing lens collection without losing functionality such as auto-focus or stabilizers.

Switching manufacturers is a different beast however and you'll likely be limited to manual focus and a gimbal/in-sensor for stabilization.

Some Canon cameras (80D, 90D, 7D), have on dual pixel CMOS focus points that work in video mode. It is clear things are moving to mirrorless, but I feel we are still in the transition period for lens and focus technology. For certain type of photography either manual or traditional cross type focus points work best still. I think the biggest benefit of mirrorless cameras for amateurs is size and weight, the best camera is the one you have on you.

I'm a huge fan of the Olympus u4/3 range. The size is, for me, just right. Small enough to toss in a backpack with other things during travel and camping. Light enough to wear on a sling most of the day without discomfort. And still really nice photos.

About once a year, I consider moving to Fuji. Or to some other larger format mirrorless. But, the size and weight penalty just isn't worth it.

All that said, my wife's old Canon S90 compact is near the end of life. I thought about buying her a replacement, but I may just splurge on an iPhone XS instead.

I'll second the canon micro 4/3 cameras. Great for traveling, very small, and good selection of lenses.

On my last trip I think the weight/size of my dlsr equipment was cut in 1/3 with the same focal range.

(the picture in this article is comparison of camera/lens size..)

https://www.wildernessshots.com/why-you-dont-need-full-frame...

No doubt it was just a typo, but you mean Olympus and Panasonic, not Canon.

I don't think micro 4/3ds gets enough credit for how convenient the smaller lenses are. I know full frame mirrorless is all the rage now, but even my dad's and brother's (respectively) APS-C gear is much larger and heavier when it comes to lenses.

Yup. The "cheap" primes from Olympus and Panasonic are fantastic. I have the Oly 17mm f.18 and 25mm f1.8 and one or the other lives on my second body.

Heck, even the "large" 12-40mm F2.8 Pro lens on my primary body is about the same size as a mediocre kit lens on a full-frame SLR.

The 45mm 1.8 is absolutely fantastic, too.

And the best thing: these lenses are sharp wide open. On other systems you get 2.8 lens, but need to stop it down to 4.0 be useful. On u4/3 you get 45/1.2 and you can use it at 1.2.

Glad to see some Olympus and micro four thirds fans in this thread. I also sold my Nikon D7100 and pro lenses (24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8) after realizing that I rarely take them out because of the bulk and weight. Got E-M1mII and E-M10mII and some nice lenses instead (12-40/2.8, 7-14/2.8, 45/1.8, 75/1.8, Panasonic 20/1.7). Love, love it. So glad I trusted this rather spontaneous decision. Initially I was thinking about getting the FF Nikon D850. Now I cannot imagine buying a DSLR.

My wife is a part-time pro photographer in her 40's. She's looking to go mirrorless because, on long shoots, the weight of traditional cameras takes a toll on her neck and shoulders.

The great news is that there are some awesome full-frame mirrorless bodies out there.

Of course, because they're full-frame cameras, the glass is still big, so you don't get the hyper-compact size of a micro-4/3 body+lens, but it's still waaay smaller than, say, a 5D + a lens.

Full-frame glass can get quite small, too. A 35mm f/2 for the Leica M system weighs in at 250g/0.55lbs.

I believe the equivalent APS-C Fuji 23mm f/2 is around 200g/0.45lbs.

Of course, with the Summicron you give up such new-fangled innovations as, say, autofocus.

Yeah, that's a hard stop for some folks -- me included. I'm sure the AF material is a big contributor.

The glass for my Sony A7ii is significantly larger than (most) lenses I had for my Olympus m4/3 body. The exception is the main prime on both systems -- I have the Sony 50mm/1.8, which is about the same size as the Panasonic/Leica 25mm/1.4 that filled the same role on my Olympus.

Mirrorless is only a weight advantage in the APS-C size. At full frame there is almost no advantage.

Most of Sony's fe zooms are around the same weight (with some small benefits at wider angles) as an equivalent canikon lens, but it's the wide angle primes that you'll get a big size and weight benefit over full frame glass. The comparisons are complex, and lining up equivalent lenses only works sometimes, because many DSLR wide angle lenses are just zooms, since the primes are large anyways. Mirrorless lens designers have also doubled down on wide primes (like laowa's 15mm f2, or voigtlanders FE ultrawide primes) some of which don't exist for DSLR because they wouldn't be a good value/weight. But the mirrorbox in a DSLR means that the lens can't get super close to the sensor. So a 24mm DSLR lens will actually be a 40mm or so, with reducers put over the front. This means you get a larger lens overall, with more elements. So if you are going to go 16-35, 24-70, 70-200, then you won't see much size benefit. But if you shoot wider/standard primes, there are a lot of compact options for full frame mirrorless.

Sort of. Full-frame mirrorless bodies are most definitely smaller and lighter than their DSLR counterparts. The problem is the lenses, and those are a problem for two reasons.

One is that many manufacturers haven't taken advantage of how mirrorless changes lens design yet (the shorter flange distance enables a lot of design space), so you're still carrying a lens designed for a DSLR, but with a lot of hollow space between the back element and the mount. This is especially obvious with third-party lenses; e.g. it's well understood that a lot of Sigma lenses for Sony FE are functionally just their DSLR lenses with a built-in adapter.

The other reason why you don't see a big weight advantage with mirrorless lenses is that, where they are designed for mirrorless specifically, they tend to aim for "better" rather than "lighter. Lenses like the Canon 85mm f/1.2, the 50mm f/1.2, and the 28-70 f/2.0 are perfect examples of this.

However, lenses designed to take advantage of mirrorless can be smaller and lighter, when they have the same design goals — e.g. the latest (DSRL) Canon EF 24-105L f/4 weighs 795g vs the (Mirrorless) RF 24-105L f/4's 694g.

My wife also, though late 30s. She went from a Canon 5D to Sony A7 III.

The problem that I have with mirrorless is the inherent delay between what you see on the screen and the photo taken. I don't know if they have improved from the time I tried them.

The advantage of a mirror is that capturing the right instant is much easier when you're photographing subjects that aren't posing, such as children. You want to get that facial expression just right! Not a few hundreths of a second later.

That delay is much lower now than it was a few years ago. It’s now around 10-20ms for the best performing models.

Olympus has a feature they call Pro Capture. Camera takes a couple dozens of shots before you press the shutter, so you won't miss anything.

I still have a Canon 5D Miii and a lot of lenses for it. (I shot with EOS cameras pre-digital as well.) I do still use the 5D for certain types of shooting--mostly sports and anything that benefits from very wide or very long lenses.

However, assuming I'm taking photos with anything besides my smartphone (which I probably use a greater and greater percentage of the time), it's going to be my Fujifilm mirrorless camera. I think if I were starting over, I'd just go with mirrorless and just forgo the specialized cases that the DSLR and its lenses are better for.

> It's like photography on easy mode. Which it should be considering the sticker price.

I got a $500 Nikon DSLR about 4 years ago and came to the same conclusion. I usually set it to auto, and I'm astounded by the photo quality that comes out. Occasionally, I'll adjust exposure or focus manually, but for outdoors, auto "just works".

Sometimes I think I should have bought a mirrorless instead, but so long as my Nikon works and I'm satisfied with its quality, I'll keep using it.

I have an oldy Nikon D5000, and I really like it. The biggest bump in terms of photo quality was when I changed from auto-mode to manual mode and learned more about how the camera works and how to shoot what. It is so easy once you get a hang of it and your photos will get a lot better.

I had my Nikon D40 paired with 35mm since 2008 and its shutter failed late last year. It served me well at ~60k shutter count for more than 10years, taking beautiful photos of travel, my kids growing up and many important events; even at a measly 6mp at max 1600 iso, it performed superb.

For almost a year without my DSLR, most of my photos were shot using my LG G6 phone. It was okay and I insisted feeling it was good enough.

It was last Christmas when I was able to borrow a Canon 6Dmk1 paired with a good lens. Boy, I was in for a treat again; the sensor, fast focus, bokeh and low light performance all reminded me how far I've forgotten the joy of getting better pictures using a better camera. Got myself a 77d+24mm soon after to satisfy the cravings.

A pro tip for the LG G6, download the Google Camera from the stock pixel phone, it adds all the nice HDR+, and other features. It's made my G6 a completely new photo taking device.

Yes as I also have several GCam versions on my phone and I'm also a fan of HDR+ and the portrait mode. But we have to admit it has its limits compared against a far bigger sensor with better glass.

OM is saying our relationship with photographs has changed, but it has actually just grown to include the phone. Taking photos with dedicated equipment is still important to many people. I suspect all those sales previously were not going to people serious about photos.

No doubt, there is a huge difference between a real cameras and smartphones in terms photo quality. I still sold my digital fullframe recently, even though I tried to keep the setup physically as small as possible it always felt like extra luggage. I'm now using an old but very good compact film camera for those special moments, which is easy to use, super compact and makes great photos.

IQ aside ergonomics is also important. Real camera feels so much better in hand and it's so much easier to control it.

I purchased a Canon 5D MarkII many years back and still own it. The main issue is the size of the body and whatever lens is on it and having to worry about it when you take it somewhere. That is where phone cameras shine. But every time I break out I'm reminded how bloody amazing the pictures are.

It’s not exceedingly surprising that a 3500 camera performs better than a phone. Camera sales are falling because phones are getting better, but they aren’t at the level of high end prosumer gear. $3500 is a massive amount of money to spend on any personal electronic device!

Out of curiosity what specifically did you buy?

I'm interested, too!

It's the Sony A7III body with the new 24mm 1.4 GM lens. I upgraded its firmware to get the auto-focus features that debuted on the A9.

The lens is wide like a smartphone so the subject always fits in the frame. And it has enough resolution to crop later. But it's not so wide that it warps the image. Straight lines look straight. I take 15-20 pics/day and charge it once a month. It's light and small so I can shoot one-handed (very useful with pets and children).

One day I'll buy a telephoto lens with better reach. But the 24m is such a great "around-the-home" package. It will be my default for the foreseeable future.

For anyone with a Canon lens collection, the Sigma MC-11 adapter works great with (many)Canon* and Sigma lenses on the A7III.

*EF lenses, can't comment on Canon EF-S personally.

Try before you buy, if you can. The A7III's auto focus is slower on adapted lenses than on the EF lenses. It's still impressive, but the Alpha + EF combination is compelling.

how does the bokeh look for a cropped portrait? can you get a reasonably shallow depth of field with such a wide lens?

It looks better than you think it will. Nothing like the tack sharp backgrounds in a smartphone portrait. But not as melty as a longer lens. Ken Rockwell's [0] sample pictures are representative. His site doesn't allow hot links though. So to see a cropped portrait scroll to the fourth sample.

[0]: https://kenrockwell.com/sony/lenses/24mm-f14.htm

I have the same camera but with the 55mm lens. I'm really happy with it. I still have an old Canon Rebel that I bring to places I'm not comfortable bringing the Sony to (mainly the beach), and it's excruciating to go back to a DSLR, even though it still takes nice photos.

are we seeing a cycle ? from specific device, too all in one, back to specifics ?

According to the article - no. Most people are fine with their phone cameras according to these sales numbers.

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