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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

> Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration.

Can't replace sensor area with anything other than more sensor area. Week ago I got the perfect demo of that when I filmed a happening at around 10pm with only some dim garden lights off the scene for light. Some other people had their iPhones, I had an f2 lens on my Z6 - while the videos from the iPhones looked like crap even on the phone screens, basically just blobs of dark noise, the Nikon produced a remarkably clean 4K video - at ISO 16000 or so - that made it look like the scene was lit by floodlights.

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With video you can’t “cheat”. You can’t gather up a second of frames and stack to one photo. That’s what phones to quite well. You only have 1/24s (say) to get the shot before you need to get the next one.

I bet an Iphone12 would have made better stills than my aging canon 60D which I try to keep at 1600 or lower. And that’s pretty remarkable to be honest.

> You can’t gather up a second of frames and stack to one photo.

Oh, but you can. A full second would make for a very choppy video of course so you don't have as long in which to do it as you might for a still, but there are benefits to be gained and the Pixel 6 series does exactly that.

https://9to5google.com/2021/08/02/google-pixel-6-video-hdr-t...

I don't understand, why is this ruled out? Assuming that phones reach a point where this is computationally cheap, what would be so hard about having a sliding window for each frame in the video?

Nothing prevents that, but if there is a lot of movement (which would be the point of using video) then the great results aren’t as easy to get. You can’t take a still of someone dancing in a dark room with an iPhone, you can take a still of someone standing reasonably still in a dark room.

Isn't this a similar problem to the blurry-face vs. leaf-face issue discussed? If yes, then one would hand it off to computation to figure out which parts matter and need doctoring, except scaled up to video.

The camera moving?

Then increase the rate at which frames get captured since the video is destined to be ≈24-30 fps anyway?

But the higher the framerate, the less time you have for exposure on each frame.

Oh yeah you definitely can. Multiframe mode on my old A7ii gets me all the way to 1/2 of a second handheld.

You have a 60D, which is very old, and it would still do much better than an iPhone 12 with a fast lens on top.

the iphone 12 has no depth of field so a larger sensor is anyway much better. there is no way around it. You cant hack your way to photography.

A shallow depth of field isn't always what you want though. Sometimes a shallow depth of field is good, sometimes it isn't.

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