Comment by Krisando | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Krisando | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not the grand parent.

> The Pixel, though, in my opinion, produces pretty bad photos.

I've had the opportunity to play with iPhone 14, it has 12 megapixel cameras, but I find that the image quality is no difference to 8 megapixels of detail, and if you use third party applications that can take pictures without post processing, it's often closer to 6 megapixels and the grain in the image is not great. Smart phones don't appear to be resolving the detail advertised.

> I shoot in RAW

Shooting raw on my Android phones (since the iPhone 14 won't let me) shows there is clearly very little dynamic range, which when trying to do beautiful processing on skin tones or such, come out very flat (regardless if going for natural or unrealistically perfect).

I do a lot of photography in poor lighting, I over expose a lot so I can the details in the shadow, and then bring it back down in post processing in raw. Try to do anything similar on phones, terrible grain. Leave it to the phone processing, it does some really bad approaches at AEB with post processing and not very good handling on the HDR merge, plus the exposure time is huge, meh.

> But I suppose that my eye is good enough to know real bokeh from fake.

It's not convincing to me because you can see stuff like the background between strands of hair in focus. I imagine it's only going to get better at that.

The biggest problem with phone photography is sensor size currently and it seems unlikely we're going to have larger sensor sizes when it requires more flange distance for the optics.

Yeah, the iPhone doesn't have the best camera by any means. But having received some RAW photos from one, I feel like they at least don't look super shitty before you push them. Now, they do not compare to RAWs from my actual cameras (whether the R5 or 5Diii). But they at least might be worth looking at.

The iPhone does shoot RAW, by the way: 12-bit DNG, but apparently perhaps only on the Pro models. Also, the 48MP camera of the iPhone 14 Pro (this is the model whose RAWs I viewed, but I don't own one) can produce 48MP DNGs. In good light they can look decent enough for what they are.

The Pixel 6 Pro just takes smeary photos. Their NR and compression makes them look blocky like screencaps from a video.

I also have used the Sony Xperia 1ii (used to own this phone for a while). This was supposedly a phone with a focus on the camera. In my experience, it looked pretty bad.

The fake bokeh will get better, I'm sure, but it can never beat the real deal. Real shallow DOF already exists; sure, faking it will get closer, and that's probably enough for the average Joe, but it's not like we can't just keep using the real thing, which doesn't have the potential flaws.

The thing about larger sensors, of course, is that they require lenses that project a larger image circle — and phone lenses can't really be like ILC lenses because, well, the form factors conflict. You can't stuff a 135/1.8 in your pocket; the laws of optics are what makes those lenses as big as they are.

I had been hoping for metamaterial lenses to solve the physics problem, but that recent demo made it clear consumer applications are a very long way off. I can't actually find the demo, but it was someone from one of the three letter agencies showing it off on a stage. Maybe someone else will have it. It only shot in monochrome. The quality was good, and the lens was a lot smaller than an ordinary ILC lens on a camera you'd normally need to get that quality. But the presenter didn't offer much hope of it being better quickly. The demo was for a very specific scientific application.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com