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Comment by arnaudsm | Hacker News Reader

Sure, here it is ! https://imgur.com/a/VyHLYqP

Protocol: handheld at 10 PM, 10 shots each, at different ISOs, picked the best one

The bottlenecks are different, but the sharpness is comparable.

  - The DSLR was limited by optics, it's blurrier with some chromatic aberration
  - The Phone has strong AI processing, I wish I disabled it

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Dynamic range is better on the phone, but otherwise the DSLR has sharper edges, less noise, nicer colors, and is less mushy (but that is possibly due to the "AI processing", so ditto about the "real" image). That said, noise reduction is usually more advanced on phones, and handheld with a kit lens at night with high-contrast zones is kind of the worst scenario for DSLRs (hopefully it was a stabilized kit lens at least).

You can read the words "Hotel Platinum" on the phone photo. And it's blurred and "mushy" on D5500. And the phone had additional glare from an oncoming train, and it still pulled out things out of the dark.

Depends on what you need, of course, but for most people the photo from the phone is superior.

> The Phone has strong AI processing, I wish I disabled it

It's still over-sharpened and probably used multiple shots to get high dynamic range, it's much more noisy too, and shows less resolution

Also the d5500 is a lower tier camera from 2015, the phone was released in 2021

They have the same used price, which is the point of my comparison.

Yes there's HDR bracketing, but we only care about the result.

One is blurry (optics), the other has artifacts (AI), but overall sharpness is similar.

TBH both photos look horrible compared to smartphones nowadays or is this just 100% crop? I'd like to see whole photo.

Yes this is a 100% crop to highlight the sharpness is handheld low-light, the worst scenario there is

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