IPhone 5 vs. Canon 5D Mark III | Hacker News Reader

IPhone 5 vs. Canon 5D Mark III

dcurt.is

7 pointssuperchink10 comments

Stacks up? What I'm seeing from the iPhone image is a lot of noise reduction, despite the shot being taken in daylight.

In anything but daylight, there's no way this would be any comparison.

The color, contrast, sharpness and noise from the iPhone is so far behind the SLR it's not funny.

"Stacks up" doesn't mean it's a replacement, it means that given the size, price, and multifunction nature of the iPhone 5, its camera performance is worthy when compared to the SLR compared along the same metrics. I definitely find myself carrying my SLR fewer and fewer places as phone cameras get better and better, because there are a greater percentage of available photo opportunities that I feel can be done by the phone.

> it means that given the size, price, and multifunction nature of the iPhone 5, its camera performance is worthy when compared to the SLR compared along the same metrics.

Worthy of what? And what metrics? You just listed a ton of caveats and then said that it's "worthy" based on unnamed metrics.

No, the iPhone doesn't "stack up", nor should it. It's a camera phone compared to a very high-end DSLR. It falls far short of the DSLR in image quality metrics. The images are noisy. They aren't sharp. There's glare galore. And that's okay, because it's a camera phone, and the primary use case is snapping photos of friends to upload to Facebook or show other friends at the bar.

The fact that it meets your needs doesn't mean it "stacks up", though, any more than a Honda Civic "stacks up" against a Ferrari. Yeah, it gets you to/from work, but in terms of performance, it falls way short (again, as it should).

Since the pixel race is on, light sensors on consumer camera / smartphones are bandwidth consuming sewer pipes. It's only watchable if downsampled, I don't see the point. Old 4MP cameras didn't suffer this problem.

Predictably DSLR's image has much narrower depth of field, essentially producing non-interchangeable photos. For comparison to be interesting he had to set diaphragm to the same value as iPhone.

But iPhone's camera is impressive nonetheless. I haven't seen 5, but even 4S has very impressive (i.e. "smart") metering system, it just guesses correctly on so many occasions, and sometimes I wish that 5D Mark 3 would have something similar.

And this new panorama feature in iOS 6 works on 4S as well, and, while simplistic, is very nice.

Setting the aperture on a DSLR to match the aperture of the iPhone won't make the depths of field equal. In fact, the iPhone was at f/2.4, while the DSLR was at f/2.8, which would give the iPhone the shallower depth of field if aperture were the only factor. (The biggest other factor here is sensor size.)

I agree. If anything, what this shows me is how much better the 5DIII is. This is pretty much the ideal scenario for a camera phone (i.e. tons of light coming from a reasonably attractive angle), and still the iPhone camera looks really rough compared to the 5D (which, to be fair, it should given the price gap). In the iPhone image, I see tons of noise reduction, tons of noise (strangely), no sharpness (that "no stopping" sign looks pretty rough), and a bunch of glare (gobs of blue glare from the bottom left and numerous white "stripes" that make it seem kind of like this was shot through a fish bowl).

I wouldn't say the iPhone "stacks up" in any meaningful measure here. It's a good camera phone. It might even "stack up" against a point-and-shoot. It doesn't stack up against a modern high-end DSLR, though.

Stacks up as in "it's crap compared to"? If you know how a digital sensor works (and photography for that matter), you know damn well that the sensor in an iPhone is small, which has a direct impact on the dynamic range of light coming in.

In its category (phone cameras) the iPhone is decent enough (though not even the best) but comparing it to a high-end full-frame DSLR is really rotten apples to freshly picked Jaffa oranges.

Hmm, the iPhone's photo is so far from "stacking up" to the 5D's photo.

I wonder if he meant to say how far the quality has come from the 4s?

On a scale of 1-10, if the 5D is a 10, I would put the iphone 5 at a 6. So maybe the 4s is at a 4 according to DC?

To illustrate this DC should also put an image taken with a 4s. But to put a 6 next to a 10 and say it "stacks up". Thats like saying a honda civic stacks up against a porche 911. It doesn't.

However, you could say today's civic stacks up much better than the 1980 civic to todays porche 911...

if that guy can't spot the difference, what is he doing with a $4k camera?

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