Hacker News Reader

Comment by tachion | Hacker News Reader

But of course they have - every major smartphone manufacturer is eating the whole consumer camera market alive for quite few years now.

View on HN

Nobody has done this with a full frame sensor, as far as I know. I'd be interested to see smartphone image processing with a sensor that size.

There is fairly new Zeiss camera that implemented the whole "camera OS" with Android and even included mobile Lightroom editing capabilities. I guess it's as close as it gets right now. My theory is that the main Japanese companies are extremely conservative and they don't pick up such changes easily - see how Canon and Nikon completely missed mirrorless and suffered huge market loss to Sony.

Nikon made a mirrorless camera series (Nikon 1) that was very capable (the on-sensor AF was great). But they chose a 1" sensor (2.7x crop)

Canon's M-series was similar, they didn't go all in on "pro" features, instead focussed on a consumer market that was shrinking rapidly.

The problem wasn't the technology, the problem was the fear of cannibalizing their own DSLR sales.

Most image processing has to do with imitating full frame sensors (better low light photography, DOF, etc.) So I'm not sure if full frame/APSC/Med-format cameras need the same image processing that camera phones have. Also, most people who use the bigger sensor cameras are probably pros. Most of them would prefer a "blank slate" and use RAWs.

Camera phones have significantly better processing than newer full frame cameras at this point; obviously they can't take the same pictures, but full frame cameras can't do HDR, noise stacking, night mode etc very well. You can do it by hand by shooting raws and editing them together but it's inconvenient. The autofocus is also more advanced in iPhones with lidar.

I assume part of this is that the camera companies are Japanese and refuse to pay any engineers more than $20k a year.

My Olympus does in-body HDR, noise reduction with stacking, low-light handheld with sensor stabilization, and more. It's not "full-frame" but full-frame is a meaningless condescension from the 35mm crowd.

Full frame sensors are quite useful indoors because you can shoot 50mm-e without having to be twice as far away.

For real pretension you have to get a Leica.

Besides that, the main problem with the processing in those cameras is they don't do it to RAW, only to 8-bit JPG, so nothing for HDR displays. iPhone can do fused RAW, 10-bit HEIC, and takes HDR photos and has an HDR display to show them.

It looks like they still don't really plan to add it: https://www.dpreview.com/interviews/9195902169/interview-son...

but at least if they had better bracketing options we could do it ourselves.

yes, but perhaps this is because of other things? Like that a person is going to have their phone with them anyway? Even if a phone camera is only 1/2 as good as a consumer camera, the ease of use and convenience is going to win the 99% of the market which doesn't care about 'professional grade' results. And the 1% that does care is going to buy a SLR.

Not better tech (better as in takes better photos), rather more convenient tech which is good enough.

Good enough for most people's point-and-shoot, but a smartphone camera is by no means competitive for anything beyond that. Hobby photography is fairly common too, and most people won't be using smartphones for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com