[HN Gopher] Smartphones wiped out 97% of the compact camera market
___________________________________________________________________
Smartphones wiped out 97% of the compact camera market
Author : joos3
Score : 343 points
Date : 2022-12-02 10:25 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asia.nikkei.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asia.nikkei.com)
| ant6n wrote:
| And I thought smart phones are the compact camera market.
| chobytes wrote:
| Im surprised by all the folks who always pop into these threads
| saying theyve replaced their XXXX-expensive-dedicated-camera with
| their phone. Outside of wide DoF, wide FoV, well lit shots I find
| my camera and iphone to be pretty incomparable.
|
| If apple starts letting us swap the glass out one day we might be
| have a fight but currently I just dont see it being one at all.
| nradov wrote:
| As a casual underwater photographer, it's sad to see the compact
| camera market dying. I like having compact cameras that I can put
| into (relatively) inexpensive housings and bring along on scuba
| dives. My current Olympus TG-6 works really well, but we might
| never see a new model in that product line.
|
| A few companies have tried to build underwater housings for
| smartphones but they don't work very well. Too hard to control
| the touch screen, and they don't work with external strobes.
|
| Larger mirrorless cameras seem to still be going strong (for
| now). But the underwater housings are much more bulky and
| expensive.
| xvector wrote:
| XR glasses will do the same to the smartphone, and I can't wait.
| OJFord wrote:
| I just came back from Delhi, and thought similarly (just camera
| specifically rather than smartphone actually) there, that I'd
| have loved to have something like Google Glass, but more subtle
| looking, for discretely taking photos without standing out so
| much - I missed a lot because I just didn't feel comfortable
| framing the shot, looking like such a tourist (I was visiting
| family, didn't see anyone else like that) - but of course I did
| _look_ at them, would 've been great to just touch the side of
| my glasses or whatever to take the photo.
|
| Day to day though, as a smartphone replacement... unless/until
| I need prescription lenses I don't think it's enough to make me
| want to start wearing glasses.
| cypress66 wrote:
| XR glasses don't solve the HID part (I don't think people will
| start pointing at things in the air. Even if they do it's much
| more tiresome).
| cesarb wrote:
| > I don't think people will start pointing at things in the
| air.
|
| There are other possible input devices. For XR glasses, the
| most natural would be some sort of gaze tracking. Another
| option would be an indirect device like a mouse or trackpad
| (most desktop and laptop users don't point directly at things
| in their screens), or even a set of cursor keys for menu
| selection.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm not sure. Watch didn't replace the phone. (Although if the
| watch took photos I might just leave the phone at home more
| often.)
| Damogran6 wrote:
| The watches that took photos _sucked_...which was one of the
| reasons I'm betting Apple didn't include one on their first
| (and subsequent) Apple watches.
| obmelvin wrote:
| Don't worry, gen z will bring them back with their quest for
| "vintage" photos
|
| https://petapixel.com/2022/12/01/tiktokers-are-obsessing-ove...
| mstaoru wrote:
| One word - bokeh.
|
| You can get a Fuji X-E4 + XC 35mm f/2 for ~US$1000 new, and I'm
| yet to see a phone camera that can shoot something like this
| https://img.photographyblog.com/reviews/fujifilm_xc_35mm_f2/... -
| it's an enjoyable setup that will continue being ahead of any
| flagship phones for years to come. Not to mention that it's a
| hell of a rabbit hole and a great hobby.
| gernb wrote:
| the artificial bokeh in current phones it good enough for most
| people. It might not be what you want, but the same is true of
| every part of a smartphone camera. is night shooting as good on
| a phone? No, but is the computationally enhanced night
| photography good enough for most people? Yes. Same with bokeh
|
| I'm too lazy to get my DSLR out of the closet but here's a F1.8
| shot from a Sony RX100
|
| https://pasteboard.co/LuNcEAPrjquh.jpg
|
| And here's the same shot from my iPhone in portrait mode set to
| 2 different levels of fake bokeh
|
| https://pasteboard.co/8cBjb7EoKjhq.jpg
|
| https://pasteboard.co/MR4AnkS8bqfN.jpg
|
| On top of which, most people look at photos on their phones,
| not blown up to poster size in some art gallery
| joenot443 wrote:
| Artificial bokeh (like in Portrait mode on an iPhone) is
| getting better and better. It went from looking cheesy to
| somewhat natural in only a few years. It'll be a while before
| it's close to the example you gave, but I can imagine a future
| where Camera.app has a "tap to blur" feature using live CV
| object detection.
| hef19898 wrote:
| If you use artificial bokeh, and why stop there, probably not
| taking pictures to begin with and just use AI to create one
| is the way forward.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'm a serious luddite in a lot of ways but don't see a
| meaningful difference between blurring the background by
| focusing the lens a certain way, and blurring it after the
| fact using depth information captured in the photo.
| aembleton wrote:
| Because you want to capture memories but not necessarily
| everthing in the field of view.
| toqy wrote:
| In the hypothetical future scenario where the output is
| good enough I don't think there's much of a point in making
| a distinction between something that is optically
| manipulated via lens vs done so via software.
| folkrav wrote:
| The point was most people don't justify put $1000 on a separate
| camera when they already have one that does maybe 80% of the
| job in their pocket at all times.
|
| I agree, it's really fun though. Never had great gear, but I
| used to just drive around my town with a tiny pocket tripod
| trying to find new spots to shoot with my Canon SX260HS in
| 2012-2013. Spent some time with borrowed cameras in school a
| bit later too. There's definitely something soothing about just
| going around looking at things that look interesting, point,
| tweak, click, then rediscovering the whole thing on your PC for
| some editing later. The experience is kind of lost with how
| instant picture taking has become with phones basically just
| taking the shot and post-processing it however they like.
| monokh wrote:
| I think you would be surprised just how close to this depth of
| field look you can get with phone cameras these days. Its
| mostly digitally enhanced but it takes a real good eye to tell
| the difference.
| c7b wrote:
| I for one am quite glad that modern AI-powered cameras have
| increasingly less blur on their images. I know that focusing on
| one depth is how physical lenses (including our eyes) work, I
| know that it can be an artistic tool. But for most of my
| photos, I don't care and I'd rather not have it. If I can get a
| 'tourist' picture of me and some monument, and have both well
| visible, I'd prefer that over the 'correct' way of being
| focused on only one. If I want to put an artistic touch on my
| photos, I'll use an app that gives me blurs and a million other
| options, but I'd prefer to have an unblurry version to start
| from.
| appletrotter wrote:
| > I'd prefer that over the 'correct' way of being focused on
| only one.
|
| I don't see how that's more 'correct,' by anyone's
| definition. It's pretty common to go for wider depth of field
| for landscapes and a lot of portraits.
| _visgean wrote:
| You can just use higher f number.
|
| > If I want to put an artistic touch on my photos, I'll use
| an app that gives me blurs and a million other options
|
| most of them wont do it correctly. You need to have full
| understanding of the debpth to do it which does not seem to
| work well. E.g look at the edges of the articifical bokeh
| usually the subject wont be separated properly..
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I had a Sony Xperia that did a pretty good job.
| chobytes wrote:
| The optics depend so much on physical size that phones have to
| fake this stuff. Idk why apple doesnt just cut the crap and
| just release like a m43 with swappable glass rather than all
| this silly multiple sensor stuff.
| hef19898 wrote:
| They got rid, the story wnet, of a 3.5 mm headphone jack to
| make the phone slimmer. Only to have the alrwady slim optics
| stick out. Not sure tge same company would go for replaceable
| lenses.
| low_common wrote:
| My iPhone 13 Pro Max portrait mode can produce a near-identical
| picture to the one you linked.
| nolok wrote:
| It's not there yet, but progress is being made fast on that
| front
| singularity2001 wrote:
| as a layman all I see is a blurry image. doesn't apple have
| software to add blurriness to pictures?
| saddestcatever wrote:
| There's a certain irony that the primary feature separating
| smart phone cameras and traditional cameras is the ability to
| purposefully make "blurry photographs".
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Wait till you hear about cameras which primary feature is the
| ability to purposefully make photos you cannot even see until
| days later, much less edit in any convenient way. You must
| fully replace storage every couple dozen of shots and dynamic
| range is just awful compared to my phone's HDR. (Sarcasm ofc,
| love film)
| jimnotgym wrote:
| ...and how that is a remarkably fast growing area!
|
| They can't make film quickly enough.
| _visgean wrote:
| yeah but thats not what bokeh is. You can notice almost
| instantnly natural bokeh and it behaves.
| balls187 wrote:
| Ironically that image is terrible example of why a $1000 camera
| setup is better than my $1000 smartphone, and a perfect example
| that the photographer is far more important.
|
| Also most folks these days consume photographs on their
| smartphones and not on larger screen devices.
|
| I'm a prosumer photographer with a fairly sizable collection of
| high end Canon glass, and I now vastly prefer my iphone (since
| the 13pro) to my SLR setup
| bamboozled wrote:
| > I'm a prosumer photographer with a fairly sizable
| collection of high end Canon glass, and I now vastly prefer
| my iphone (since the 13pro) to my SLR setup
|
| For what type of photography? Seems hard to imagine you'd
| "prefer" your phone over a nice lenses, but I guess it's less
| hassle to just use the phone?
| chrisBob wrote:
| Bokeh and long range. My favorite lens was a 24-105 F/4 for a
| very long time, but that has been replaced with my phone. Now
| my 150-600mm lens (for wildlife) is the only thing that is ever
| mounted.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yeah, this.
|
| Outside, on a clear day? My iPhone rivals my Sony A7ii for
| SURE.
|
| But in less than ideal situations, I can still do better with
| the Sony. BUT this is because I'm an enthusiastic amateur with
| pro-level tools and some modicum of know-how. For an average
| Joe, those things are probably lacking.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| This. If you're at the push-button-get-picture level there's
| no point to anything beyond a flagship phone. And that's
| where most people are.
| dbrgn wrote:
| I have the Fuji X-S10 and the fantastic XF 56mm f/1.2. I love
| the sharpness and bokeh that this combo delivers. Definitely no
| match for a smartphone.
|
| On the other hand, my old Pixel 3a delivers much better dynamic
| range in low-light situations with its HDR mode. (Of course, it
| only looks good on the phone, not on the computer screen, but I
| sometimes wish the Fuji hat better HDR.)
| dsego wrote:
| Fuji has dynamic range settings DR100, DR200 and DR400 which
| can help for sooc jpegs. I only wish my xt-30 did auto-
| bracketing, instead of having to combine the bracketed
| exposures manually on a computer.
|
| https://fujixweekly.com/2017/10/18/fujifilm-x100f-dynamic-
| ra...
|
| https://www.jmpeltier.com/fujifilm-dynamic-range-settings/
| dbrgn wrote:
| Yep, I'm aware of that and usually have my camera set at
| DR200. But of course it's still not close to the dynamic
| range that HDR+ creates on a smartphone.
|
| Here's an early-morning photo taken with the Fuji:
| https://tmp.dbrgn.ch/DSCF7064.JPG (Either DR200 or DR400,
| not sure anymore). And here with the Pixel 3a:
| https://tmp.dbrgn.ch/PXL_20220709_033446459.jpg Of course,
| the photo taken with the smartphone has lots of artifacts,
| looks mushy when zoomed in, and the optical quality is far
| from the Fuji. In other words, it looks good on the phone,
| but not on a computer screen. But considering the
| differences in sensor size, it's still very impressive.
| (Fuji also has a built-in HDR mode, but so far I wasn't
| fond of the results.)
| dmos62 wrote:
| That's a nice comparison.
| temp_account_32 wrote:
| Well for good bokeh you need a large sensor or a very wide
| aperture, which is hard to achieve in the form factor of
| smartphones.
| tallclair wrote:
| You can also achieve it with multiple cameras spaced out.
| It's computational, but not exactly faked.
| farazbabar wrote:
| Agree with bokeh: This was taken with a Leica m9 using f0.95
| 50mm noctilux lens: https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlist.com-
| vbulletin/2000x133...
| Joeri wrote:
| This was taken using an iphone 13 mini (not pro) in regular
| mode.
|
| https://share.icloud.com/photos/0dectlquUI6Ur6vDCWrYw6oHg
|
| Not so bad IMHO.
|
| Edit: this one is more pronounced, again not in portrait
| mode.
|
| https://share.icloud.com/photos/0c9pBN5Fy2yL0fuSYrX4j3BnA
| [deleted]
| codeulike wrote:
| What about torch market?
| visarga wrote:
| I see a parallel, the smartphone ate the other devices, the
| language model is eating human tasks by the thousands.
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| I never understood why almost no modern compact camera has built-
| in geotagging capability.
|
| In my opinion it's a very useful feature, but what I usually find
| in modern cameras is only the possibility to connect via
| Bluetooth to a smartphone, where I need to install an app to
| provide the coordinates to the camera for geotagging.
|
| Then I see cheap low-end smartphones that have built-in support
| for GPS+Galileo+GLONASS+Beidou and I wonder how much would it
| cost to insert such electronics into a camera.
| jeffbee wrote:
| GNSS receivers suck a massive amount of power, and nobody wants
| their camera to need charging daily. You accept this on your
| phone because you were going to charge it every day anyway.
| Personally, I think it makes a lot more sense for everything to
| access location information from my phone instead of every
| device having an expensive, power-gobbling radio.
| jws wrote:
| There is a timing problem with geotagging. If I am going to
| turn on my camera, snap a photo, and expect a geotag, then the
| GPS had to be already running. It takes a while, seconds to
| minutes, to get a location from power off. That leaves a few
| compromised choices...
|
| - leave the gps on all the time. This gets you a geotag but you
| have to charge your camera every day, like your phone.
|
| - update the geotag when turned on, but use the previous
| location for any shots until there is a lock. This is ok for
| rough location but users aren't going to like that the first
| picture of a trip has the wrong location if they don't warm up
| the camera first.
|
| - stay on after a picture is taken long enough to get a lock
| then rewrite the picture with the location. This works, unless
| you take the card out and hand it to someone before the
| rewrite.
|
| Nabbing the location from the cell phone gets you a live
| location for free.
| pmontra wrote:
| I own a Sony DSC WX500. I bring with me when I go on vacation
| with a 30x zoom I can get great pictures of animals and with my
| phone I can't. I transfer pictures from the camera to the phone
| over its own wifi and a Sony app (not very good) to have a backup
| and to send some of them to my friends with whatsapp or telegram.
|
| A camera with an open API is be great. Sony would only have to
| provide a basic app and somebody would create a great one for
| profit or for the fun of it. Sony would keep the money from the
| hardware sales. No idea if they have some cloud offering for
| cameras and if they profit from it.
| somat wrote:
| Would it not be fair to say that compact cameras gained network
| connectivity? I mean we call them phones but transferring sound
| is pretty much the least of their duties anymore.
| codingdave wrote:
| I love how powerful my phone's camera is. I use it, I love it, I
| love the apps to identify birds, plants, etc with it. It takes
| great snapshots, and is so quick to whip out and get a decent
| photo.
|
| Yet at the same time, I hate holding it out to look at the screen
| to see what the photo will be as I take a photo. A camera with an
| eyepiece lets you hold it tight to your face, locking your arms
| at your side, and decrease any wobbling of the camera due to body
| position. That makes it easier to focus (and I actually can use a
| manual focus), zoom, and track moving targets, and gives you a
| bit more flexibility on settings for the shot.
|
| Not that compact cameras solved any of that particularly well,
| either. But I'm keeping my dedicated cameras until phones figure
| out better ergonomics for those of us who grew up being used to
| that level of control.
| brezelnbitte wrote:
| I hate iOS color rendering though and I tried RAW. I ran the TMB
| (100mi in Alps) with phone and compact film camera and only 1
| iPhone photo made the cut. The colors are too saturated esp the
| sky with the fake polarizer effect and the color transitions more
| abrupt. Everything looks way too cool in tone and muddy when I
| try to warm. And this is on a 13pro. My damaged film (noisy from
| X-rays at airport) was still far better with softer color
| gradations and better overall rendering. Fuji XE4 is also far
| better than phone. I hardly use my phone camera.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| To be honest I've always found the auto white balance of every
| iPhone (SE, SE2, 12) I've had to be quite terrible and
| inconsistent for modern standards under artificial light.
| Roughly equivalent to 1st generation Nikon DSLRs (>20 year old
| tech). Pictures with the built-in flash are also really
| amazingly bad, worse than any compact I've ever had. The SE and
| SE2/3 have terribly tinting with the built-in flash as well.
| The 12 is much better here but still pretty bad. Close focus is
| no good - worse than old DSLR kit lenses. And ultra-wide on the
| 12 is so noisy and bereft of details that it's really just a
| gimmick.
|
| On the other hand, night mode works quite well and it's a
| camera you almost always have with you.
| 0xakhil wrote:
| After I used a dslr camera for few months, I notice small ugly
| artefacts in my iPhone 12 mini's pics. Along with that,
| smartphone pics has a weird distortion which is very noticeable
| with the wide angle lens, but it is noticeable now to me with
| even the regular lens. Sort of like background compression, which
| i find pretty ugly. I think this is a physical limitation of a
| small sensor and lens. Not sure why nobody has fixed that with
| computational photography. All I want is to have my pics look
| like a shot with standard 50mm lens. I don't care about bokeh
| actually.
|
| You won't notice these things until you are familiar with pics
| from a dslr camera.
| pzo wrote:
| Smartphones wiped out probably even more markets:
|
| -alarm clocks
|
| -calendars
|
| -calculators
|
| -compass
|
| -mobile gps
|
| -flashlights
|
| -mp3s
|
| -voice recorders
|
| -camera recorders
|
| -pocket cameras
|
| -pagers
| DonHopkins wrote:
| -hotdog detectors
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIci3C4JkL0
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/not-hotdog/id1212457521
| jesusthatsgreat wrote:
| The only thing they beat smartphones at is optical zoom. And
| that's pretty important and one of the few areas where
| smartphones still lag and can't crack due to their size. Add 10x
| optical zoom to a new iPhone and watch it crush all former sales
| records.
| JayStavis wrote:
| _Introducing Stable Diffusion Zoom!_
|
| Jokes aside, I wonder how much of the computational photography
| in smartphones today is "hallucinating" and showing something
| perceptually nice versus photos that are physically accurate.
|
| Something tells me that most users don't care about accuracy of
| the content as much as it looking nice, so I wouldn't be
| surprised to see faked optical zoom based on hallucination
| techniques soon.
|
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/stable-diffusion-...
| jwmoz wrote:
| I'm actually looking at buying a nice simple older compact to
| maintain the look and feel of older digital pictures.
| upofadown wrote:
| Make sure you can actually get batteries for it...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Funny, this video just came up on my YT feed last night:
| https://youtu.be/H4e90hYMnhg
|
| He (photographer) explains the draw of decade-old digital
| cameras. Apparently not a lot of cash will get you some nice
| older digital cameras -- some of them quite high-end for their
| day and, as he says, maybe even preferable to some of the more
| recent offerings.
| roland35 wrote:
| It wiped out my DSLR camera too. I'm no professional photographer
| but I bought a refurb Canon t5i rebel when my son was born back
| in 2016. Phone cameras were still pretty poor at that time, but
| have gotten much better to the point where I rarely take out the
| DSLR.
|
| It does take amazing portrait pictures! And better pictures using
| indirect flash in low-light conditions. But video is pretty bad
| unfortunately - mirrorless cameras fix the focusing issue but
| they were not as easily available back when I bought my camera.
| Sakos wrote:
| "The best camera is the one you have with you" and the usual
| trope.
|
| I struggle to remember the last time I felt a need to take my
| mirrorless camera with me and I think it'd be a bit weird to
| take it with me on my daily commutes or when I'm meeting a
| friend for coffee or whatever.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| For me it's the contrary.
|
| When I didn't have a DSLR I was taking a lot of pictures on my
| phone. Since I got one a few years ago, I almost never take
| phone pictures anymore (even if I don't have the DSLR with me),
| because I know the quality will be subpar.
|
| Why even bother taking a picture that will look awful when
| looked at on anything bigger than a smartphone screen?
| cainxinth wrote:
| In my mind and in my car
|
| We can't rewind, we've gone too far
|
| Pictures came and broke your heart
|
| Put the blame on VCR
| unclenoriega wrote:
| Smartphones killed the camera star?
| jleyank wrote:
| Probably wiped out the gps market also. My map supplier for my
| phone gave up and I assume it was from trying to compete with
| google maps. Was a loss for me as the maps worked offline....
| "Good enough" and only one thing to remember.
|
| Nailed the pager, voice recorder and related markets as well.
| radiorental wrote:
| The gps market is alive and well for marine, aviation and
| outdoor/offroad/motorcycle niche markets.
|
| fwiw, google maps has download & offline functionality. Click
| your profile icon top right and select the area you want
| offline. I use it all the time for backcountry hiking (along
| with OSM apps) and going abroad where I dont have data.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Isn't Google Maps limited to a tiny little 100MB chunk or
| something? Fine for hiking, less fine for cross country road
| trips. Here Maps has free offline maps that will let you grab
| entire countries/continents if you have the space for it.
| aaronax wrote:
| I enjoy passing the time on airplanes with my phone held up
| near the window to get a GPS signal, and then look at the
| names of towns and landscape features far below as I pass
| them by. It is quite surprising how anything you can see
| tends to be 10-20 miles off to the side of the plane, until
| you start paying attention to the quantity of 1 mile
| cropland squares. Then you truly appreciate how high you
| are!
|
| This takes 100-300MB per state--I use OsmAnd via F-Droid of
| course.
| gorbypark wrote:
| I don't know the limit but it's larger than 100MB. I
| currently have about 300MB saved with one chunk (the entire
| country of Andorra) sitting at 120MB alone.
| thepangolino wrote:
| nameless912 wrote:
| I dunno if this is as true for Aviation as it was 5 years
| ago. With Foreflight and the Stratux external GPS/ADS-B in
| boxes, it's becoming harder and harder to justify in panel
| GPS for light-sport/hobbyists/GA. I'm willing to bet that in
| the next 3-5 years we'll see a shift in general aviation to
| panel mounted "headless" GPSes that communicate with your
| iPad via GPS and are still coupled to a glass MFD/autopilot,
| but all the management would be done with an external device.
| roter wrote:
| More and more boaters are using tablets & phones as the apps
| give you access to charts and your instruments (e.g. wind,
| AIS).
|
| Antennas solutions are increasing to get cellular reception
| farther offshore that feed into a wifi router.
|
| At anchor, I personally use Organic Maps and drop a pin after
| I'm properly at anchor. There are specialized "anchor watch"
| apps but this works for my purposes.
|
| Sailing used to be so simple...
| tyingq wrote:
| I wonder if the impact to the flashlight market was measurable.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I don't know, I have more flashlights now that smartphones
| are available.
|
| Thanks to LEDs, flashlights are now cheaper, brighter and
| last longer than ever. Even cheap flashlights are better and
| more convenient than phones at lighting. Because they are
| cheap and small, you can have one in every place you might
| need it. And the slightly more expensive ones can be powerful
| enough as a substitue to mains powered light bulbs for places
| like garages and storerooms. Also, smartphones don't replace
| headlamps.
|
| So maybe some people don't get a flashlight because they
| already have one on their phones, but some people (like me)
| actually buy more, because they are so cheap and effective.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Adding to this, phones are really awkward and expensive
| flashlights. I run caseless on my phone and you wont find
| my phone on me when working on a car if I have someone with
| me, but you'll find an LED flashlight in my toolbox.
|
| Its a common thing with multitools, lots of uses, not great
| at any of them.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Because they are cheap and small, you can have one in
| every place you might need it."
|
| Exactly my case. I have those for each bike, in every room,
| couple in my car and few in my basement office. I am a
| sucker for those.
| hengheng wrote:
| At the very least drove it into a niche, same as with GPS
| devices (Garmin still makes devices for triathletes, boats
| and packs of dogs), and cameras. Flashlights just have to be
| tacticool now, market's flourishing.
| hiidrew wrote:
| I like the term tacticool, first time seeing it!
| Jiro wrote:
| You can still buy alarm clocks too, even though your phone
| has one, just like it has a flashlight. Cheap alarm clocks
| are so cheap that only a slight benefit like always having it
| on your shelf is enough of a reason to buy one. (Expensive
| ones are decorations and not mainly bought in order to tell
| time.)
|
| Watches have gotten less popular though.
| DoingSomeThings wrote:
| Agree alarm clocks are cheap, but there's a very good
| reason to have one. Single use devices remove another area
| of phone dependence. Switching from waking up to phone
| alarm to dedicated clock alarm has been a huge help for me.
| It allows me to charge my phone in another room and create
| at least one no-phone zone in the house.
| low_common wrote:
| You're an outlier.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| I still prefer a real watch - taking a peek at my wrist is
| easier than having to dig my phone out of my pocket,
| flipping open the lid of the case and turning it on. That's
| true both in summer (just need to lift my wrist) and
| winter, too (I might have to dig my watch out from
| underneath my jacket and gloves, but to take out my phone
| I'd have to take off my gloves, too, so still a more
| cumbersome procedure.)
|
| Plus lock screen clocks rarely (never?) seem to come with a
| seconds display (even inside the full clock app I still
| need to flip a settings switch in order to turn the seconds
| display on) - while I don't necessarily need actual seconds
| accuracy that much, knowing whether it is xx:xx:05 or
| xx:xx:55 certainly _does_ make a difference when I need to
| catch a train /tram/bus/... and am cutting it fine once
| again.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| There was a silly horror movie called _Crawl_ that came out a
| few years back. It 's about killer alligators during a
| hurricane in Florida.
|
| The least-believable part of this very silly movie was that,
| at the beginning, the main guy in it left his cell phone
| upstairs when he went to the dark basement to work on
| something in the house (pipes? I don't remember), which ended
| up causing the rest of the movie to happen. Of course he'd
| have taken it with him, for the flashlight if nothing else
| (and there are _lots_ of other aspects of a smartphone that
| are super-handy when doing that kind of work).
| eCa wrote:
| For offline maps I use OsmAnd Maps. The only thing I miss is
| the satellite view.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Spying-ad-supported "free" services are suppressing a bunch of
| markets. Also suppressing open source (why work on a free open
| source messaging app, say, when none of your friends and family
| will want to use it since they have 20 "free" options already,
| funded and promoted with shitloads of ad dollars so you can't
| hope to have much adoption even with volunteer labor and a
| "product" that costs $0?)
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yup. I still have a 10 year old GPS around here, specifically
| because it works offline. I never use it where I have service.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Was a loss for me as the maps worked offline"
|
| I often use OSMAnd software for GPS. Works offline just fine.
| baybal2 wrote:
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Wiped out most of the pocket-sized handheld gaming market too.
| Not because phones are better at gaming, but they're "good
| enough" entertainment with social media, streaming, music, etc.
| rwky wrote:
| Which is a shame IMHO I really love(d) my DS/3DS wish they
| still made that form factor, you can't exactly carry a switch
| in your pocket.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| There are gameboy pocket sized devices made still that run
| emulators. But you're stuck with no new games and grey area
| legality
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| They do run Linux, so sometimes new games can be made to
| work on them, like the new TMNT Shredder's Revenge:
| https://youtu.be/DpVwO8Z8z-E . And some newer devices can
| run Android for new games there.
| sincerely wrote:
| I love emulating old games, but let's be clear: by grey
| area legality you mean illegal, right :)
|
| Unless you're dumping ROMs yourself of games you own...
| asimovfan wrote:
| Phones are better at gaming. You can emulate pocket sized
| handheld gaming devices as well. Perhaps you are only talking
| about popular games like Candy Crush and the such but there
| are a lot of heavyweight titles released for mobile platforms
| as well.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| I was more talking around the time of the 3ds and Vita
| release dates. That was about when smartphones started to
| take off and took out the handheld gaming market. You can
| see it in the sales, the 3ds did half the lifetime sales of
| the DS. And then there was the Vita.
| ilyt wrote:
| The hardware is obviously better with how often people
| replace the phones, but ability to target same few
| interfaces and not have to test on few dozen of phones to
| make game run well overall leads to better games.
|
| > but there are a lot of heavyweight titles released for
| mobile platforms as well.
|
| ...like ? Every single mobile game that I found "good"
| usually launched on other platforms too.
| dmurray wrote:
| Did it? The Nintendo Switch sold 114 million units since its
| release in 2017 [0]. The original Gameboy (a reasonable guess
| as the most popular handheld gaming device of all time) sold
| 118 million units [1] in 15 years.
|
| [0] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/11/the-nintendo-
| switc...
|
| There are other devices, and other ways to measure the market
| size, but 114 million of anything is not a niche market.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101888/unit-sales-
| game-...
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Very different size. You could argue that switch/steamdeck-
| sized devices have replaced gameboy/ngage/psp-like devices.
| However, phones seem like the much closer competition ->
| none of Nintendo, sony or MS even tried to make this form
| factor anymore
| jonfw wrote:
| The DS may be more representative of the peak of the
| market, and would sell in larger numbers in a single year-
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_sales
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I really really wish that apple / google / samsung came out
| with official hardware game pads that snapped to the phones
| and had direct support at the os level for game developers to
| easily support. We're missing out on so many good handheld
| experiences by being limited to touch only.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Apple has proper gamepad support for iOS.
| Remember Made for iPhone? It's needed with their Apple TV
| that pretty much runs iOS.
|
| But controller support in games is still niche because most
| people just aren't going to do it. I believe Apple enforces
| it for their Apple Arcade games, because those have to run
| on Apple TV too, but outside of that there just isn't much
| interest.
| sofixa wrote:
| Razer's Kishi is pretty good and it just works (on Android
| games that support it, the majority are expecting touch
| only).
| pxx wrote:
| Except what do you do about sound? Bluetooth (audio) has
| way too high latency for gaming
| oriolid wrote:
| USB is good enough for real-time music on iOS and many
| Android phones. If you want to already snap the
| controller to the phone, adding a plug isn't much
| trouble. And some phones still have the 3.5mm jack.
| [deleted]
| Damogran6 wrote:
| We have a Garmin GPS in the Truck...it has 'RV knowledge' and
| will route us around places we shouldn't go.
|
| It's a niche that's keeping them afloat.
| xeromal wrote:
| There's a Tom Tom that I've wanted to buy that has a similar
| motorcycle version. I believe it scores roads but how fun
| they are, the amount of twists, hills, vistas.
| Markoff wrote:
| If you are on Android I can recommend either Maps.me with great
| 3D view or Maps.cz for great tourist trails, Google Maps
| content is horrible in Europe. Of course any decent app can
| download offline maps for whole countries and not some GMaps
| parody with small section of map.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Google maps on android can work offline too.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Here maps was way better than Google (at least in the EU)
| since it always had offline navigation and would notify you
| of breaking the speed limit and the presence of speed-cams.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Oh I miss here maps. It was great when traveling. Would
| download the map for the country before flying and didn't
| need to buy data and could still search for addresses.
| gorbypark wrote:
| OrganicMaps works well. I travel to Andorra frequently,
| and because they are not in the EU it's not free to roam
| there. Organic maps allows you download the entire
| country at a time and navigation and searching all work
| without data. I use it quite a bit in the mountains even
| in countries I have data in. Since it's just OSM data it
| has a decent selection of hiking trails and whatnot, too.
|
| I was pleasantly surprised how polished it is (on iOS at
| least). I had only ever tried OSM AND before it and this
| is leagues ahead in terms of usability. It's more or less
| as good as Google Maps or Apple Maps, short of real time
| traffic updates. It's navigation routing is not quite as
| advanced either, but it does the trick in a pinch (I
| don't use it much in the car but more for searching and
| hiking trails)
| unnah wrote:
| Why are you guys talking like here maps has disappeared?
| It has not gone anywhere and works fine.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| "works fine".
|
| Since the rewrite, it's missing features and is rather
| ... bleh.
| criley2 wrote:
| While Google does not notify of breaking the speed limit,
| they do have speed limits, red light cameras, user-reported
| speed traps, debris on road, etc.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Depends on country. In Poland yanosik has a little better
| routing and MUCH better speed-traps notifications, but no
| offline maps. There was auto-mapa here which had even
| better routing and was fully offline, but was not free,
| it's almost dying now.
| levesque wrote:
| I still don't understand why showing police cars or speed-
| cams on a map/GPS map is allowed or even legal.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Why would it not be?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I didn't show police cars. It just showed fixed speed
| cams which is legal in the EU as even the radio stations
| announce the location of currently active speed cams via
| traffic information.
| realityking wrote:
| That is a matter pf national law, not EU law. In Germany
| for example the radio announcements are legal but devices
| and navigation systems that warn of them are not.
| ipsi wrote:
| It's legal in _some_ of the EU - to the best of my
| knowledge, it 's illegal in Germany to have apps tell you
| about speed cameras/etc (you can have the app, you just
| can't _use_ that bit of it).
| yetihehe wrote:
| I don't understand why showing speed-cams would be
| illegal. In Poland all speed-traps are clearly marked
| with a sign at least 100m before, so that when someone
| overspeeds, he doesn't suddenly break when he sees speed
| trap (which caused more accidents than overspeeding).
| thatBilly wrote:
| The British Automobile Association (AA) used to have a
| network of operatives on bikes (cycle scouts) who would
| salute members displaying the AA badge if they were
| approaching a police speed check.
|
| This warning activity was tested in court and found to be
| illegal, as interference with the police undertaking
| their duties. Their response to the judgement was to
| switch the warning method to NOT saluting members if
| they're approaching a speed trap because apparently they
| couldn't be found culpable for inaction. So they would
| only salute members if the coast was clear. A bit like a
| warrant canary.
| yetihehe wrote:
| In Poland people used to blink their high beams when
| there was speed check ahead, it's sometimes still
| practiced (illegal then and now, but not because you warn
| of police, it's classified as "misuse of lights").
| levesque wrote:
| Take the reverse, when people know there are no speed
| cams they are free to speed as they want, which I'm sure
| is how a lot of people interpret this.
| gpderetta wrote:
| What happen, at least in Italy, is that are speed cam
| warnings everywhere, but of course only a tiny percentage
| at any time will have an actual speed camera.
|
| It kind of works as deterrent, although I expect that the
| effect wears off after a while.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Some people do, but you can easily put speed cameras
| where there are some accidents. It's more honest that way
| in my opinion. I've driven in Germany and their cameras
| don't make me go much slower, just annoy:
|
| - A series of 80-60 speed changes on straight road, then
| just when you are annoyed and don't slow, there is a
| speed trap.
|
| - Badly marked school zone, I was doing 40km/h already,
| then a black painted camera hidden in bushes caught me.
| ilyt wrote:
| We have those in Poland too, that's how I got my first
| speeding ticket. three lanes each way 80, 80 80, crossing
| with 60 and camera (there wasn't even any pedestrian
| crossing there too.
| umanwizard wrote:
| In most countries things are legal by default unless
| specifically prohibited.
| goldcd wrote:
| Because the purpose of police cars and and speed cameras,
| is ostensibly to make you slow down to the speed limit.
| Marking these on your map, makes you slow down.
|
| This probably varies country by country, depending on
| whether it's a money-making exercise (where the police
| try to hide) or safety (where cameras are painted bright
| yellow and the police are clearly visible)
| [deleted]
| rob74 wrote:
| ...this also varies by country: in some countries, the
| speed limit itself, not the camera, is there for your
| safety - I mean, how many cameras should they install?!
| In others, they exaggerate the speed limit, e.g. 50 km/h
| on a straight road outside of built-up areas, hoping that
| drivers will at least slow down to 80 km/h (looking at
| you, Italy!).
|
| I guess the future of speed traps is "section control",
| e.g. install cameras at beginning and end of a speed-
| restricted stretch, and if the time you needed is
| significantly below the expected one with legal speed,
| you get a ticket.
| aden1ne wrote:
| > I guess the future of speed traps is "section control",
| e.g. install cameras at beginning and end of a speed-
| restricted stretch, and if the time you needed is
| significantly below the expected one with legal speed,
| you get a ticket.
|
| This has been common in Western Europe for decades now.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Anywhere with electronic tolls already has this. It would
| be trivial for politicians to hit everyone with a
| speeding ticket on a tolled highway if average speed
| between two tolls is more than legal limit.
|
| But it would be political suicide.
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Maybe an OpenStreetMap-based application works well for
| you. Organic Maps, OsmAnd and Magic Earth have offline car
| navigation and (I think) warnings for speed traps.
| GoldenRacer wrote:
| How are the directions on organic maps and magic earth? I
| tried OsmAnd and it's directions were awful for me.
|
| The first time I used it, was for a drive that Google
| tells me is 2 hour/100 mile. It initially gave me a route
| that was 1:58 and 120 miles. I personally don't think
| driving an extra 20 miles is worth saving 2 minutes so I
| switched it to most efficient route which worked for that
| drive.
|
| The next time I used it though was for a drive that
| should've been 30 minutes/30 miles. It gave me a route
| that was an hour long on back roads that saved me like a
| mile of driving. This time, saving a mile of driving
| isn't worth adding 30 minutes of time for me so I just
| gave up.
|
| There really needs to be a mode that finds a compromise
| between route time, route distance, and route complexity
| instead of just optimizing for one and ignoring the
| others.
| habi wrote:
| I really like the way Magic Earth routes me. The ETA is
| usually spot on and from what I see the routes are
| sensible. I'm using it in Europe.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Until their rewrite. Now it's ... bleh.
| soco wrote:
| Maybe it will help to know that Google Maps also work offline -
| you can download designated areas for offline use.
| GordonS wrote:
| Though, annoyingly, you can't use the search function without
| data. So you can see the map tiles fine, but that's about it
| :-/
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Though, annoyingly, you can 't use the search function
| without data._
|
| Have you tried this recently? I just did a family vacation
| in Death Valley and used Google Maps offline exclusively.
| Search worked fine.
| GordonS wrote:
| Admittedly not for some time, I'll be over the moon if it
| finally supports offline search!
| drchickensalad wrote:
| I use offline search all the time
| FeistySkink wrote:
| From my experience this is heavily location-dependent, so
| US is probably the worst example.
| gsa wrote:
| Google Maps without internet is barely usable. It only has
| driving directions which is pretty useless if you are on foot
| or a bike. It's actually astonishing that Google Maps can
| create an offline navigation plan for a vehicle that weighs
| thousands of kilos while walking directions always need
| internet to work.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| Organic Maps is a very good and low resource offline mapping
| app that includes trails, point to point elevation mapping, and
| very low storage footprint. All built on top of OpenStreetMap.
| Definitely recommend for camping/travelling etc where you might
| be out of service for days.
| uneekname wrote:
| And it updates map data every two weeks, so you can actually
| experience map improvements in your area!
| alias_neo wrote:
| Don't forget the portable media player too.
| toyg wrote:
| I don't think we've fully appreciated yet that "phones" are
| really the true embodiment of the original Personal Digital
| Assistant, i.e. an external brain that will augment yours in
| _any_ circumstance.
|
| _Any_ portable device has been (or will soon be) replaced by
| "phones".
| etrautmann wrote:
| Really? I think the whole world already gets this, and even
| the conversation seems somewhat quaint at this point.
| jrimbault wrote:
| Yes, I'm constantly referring to my "phone" as my "brain's
| third hemisphere". It makes people chuckle but no one stops
| at that joke. It's completely "in the culture".
| DonHopkins wrote:
| My late friend Hugh Daniel used to refer to his Bihn's
| backpack as his "LSD", for "Life Support Device". Like
| when we were leaving the house he'd shout "Oh no, I
| forgot my LSD! I'll be right back!" then run back in and
| fetch his backpack.
|
| But now my smartphone is my LSD.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| My metacortex
| personjerry wrote:
| I can't wait for the iGlock
| Yizahi wrote:
| Apple is working on that, relentlessly thinning and
| sharpening their phones :)
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| then the iSwitch
| Moissanite wrote:
| And the enterprise equivalent: Amazon Orbital Bombardment
| (with MongoDB compatibility)
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > with MongoDB compatibility
|
| Does that mean no encryption and no authentication by
| default?
| martin_a wrote:
| I wonder how many people will accidently nuke themselves
| with that, because they forget to set up their geofencing
| or whatever before activating it.
|
| You'll read it on HN first!
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| But it's okay, because of their multiple-tenancy
| practices, they only nuked the US offices, and a remote
| engineer noticed that the CI servers were down. He then
| drove halfway through the country to crawl through
| radioactive waste, just so he could plug back in the
| ethernet cable.
| martin_a wrote:
| Sounds like great material for a "Doing XY: What we've
| learned"-corporate blog post! Looking forward to that!
| Moissanite wrote:
| I'm inclined to wait for the fly.io guys to weaponize
| their platform; the blog posts they produce are just so
| much higher quality.
| chii wrote:
| why would you get an iGlock, when there's the iLaser?
| pimlottc wrote:
| They're working on it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXh3EfX_CqA
| s3000 wrote:
| Do we still use phones _if_ Meta is right and life shifts
| into VR? Devices don 't have to be portable if people rarely
| leave home.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| All these VR efforts are anticipating hardware advancements
| that make AR/VR glasses that are similar in size and form
| to sunglasses. I can't believe any of these companies
| (Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, Facebook, et c.) genuinely
| think that AR on a phone/handheld or big ol' VR goggles are
| going to take off, especially since both aren't exactly new
| and both remain very niche--but solve that hardware
| problem, and those glasses _will_ , 100% for-sure, be the
| next "smartphone" in terms of changing the role of
| computing in our lives, and any company not ready for it
| risks being left behind.
| neoberg wrote:
| thank god meta is not right
| DonHopkins wrote:
| They're waterproof and they have vigorous haptic feedback
| now.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJZtMDM6uVc
| criley2 wrote:
| I'm on the other side. My father used a Garmin GPS in his
| vehicle for 15+ years.
|
| The phone is a much better experience! Every time he had yet
| another issue, I wanted to be like "just use your phone!"
|
| - Maps are out of date: Garmin required manual wired updates,
| Google Maps was always up to date
|
| - Traffic costs: Garmin charged $10/mo for traffic data, Google
| Maps did it free
|
| - Screen quality: Even in the early 2010's, smartphone screens
| were bigger and clearer than most car GPS units
|
| - Attraction data: Google's was way more up to date than
| Garmin's third party attraction data, and Google quickly added
| multi-stop trips, business hours, busy-level of destination,
| etc
|
| - Data Entry/voice: Google's voice entry and on screen keyboard
| were way better than Garmin
|
| I was so happy when he got rid of that GPS and I finally got to
| stop supporting it.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| With car play and android equivalent it's so much better than
| a standalone device for navigating. I do have a garmin watch
| with offline topographical and trail maps for hiking off the
| grid but I only use that a few times a year. I could probably
| get those on a phone too
| ilyt wrote:
| Newest gen of AA/Car play can also display map directly on
| gauge cluster, which is just perfect solution
| simonh wrote:
| There's an old joke that: computer + X = computer
|
| Where X has been things like keyboard, screen, disk drives,
| modem (now network adapter), speakers, microphone. All were
| originally separate devices. For historical reasons we now call
| hand computers phones, but the basic insight that these things
| just voraciously absorb peripheral and related functions is
| still just as true.
| varrock wrote:
| > For historical reasons we now call hand computers phones
|
| Recently, I've been wondering why the name "phone" has stuck
| around for a device that has evolved with many more features
| than that of a telephone. I'm not going to pretend I know a
| lot about the history of these technologies, but I just find
| it fascinating that we've kept this identification to
| something that really provides so many core utilities. I'm
| curious to know more about the historical implications you
| alluded to.
|
| Alternatively (and maybe quite a stretch), could I argue that
| our smartphones are just providing telecommunications to
| other services, namely, the APIs that they interact with to
| serve us things like GPS functionality, audio, etc., hence
| the name "phone"?
| neogodless wrote:
| Phones connect us to people. Landline, cellphone or
| smartphone, they connect us. The underlying technology is
| not as important, nor the additional features.
|
| You use the phone to talk, chat, post, share, get
| directions to see other people, take photos of people, etc.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| I agree it's a funny historical name. But the distinction
| between devices with/without cell service is somewhat
| significant.
| bitwize wrote:
| It has to do with how nontechnical people perceived things
| pre-smartphone.
|
| To technical folks, a computer is a device with a CPU that
| can process data and make decisions based on that data. So
| smartphones are computers.
|
| To nontechnical folks before the late 2000s, a computer was
| a device that ran Windows or macOS with a screen and
| keyboard, and you use it to do spreadsheets, word
| processing, and such. A phone was a device that connected
| you to your social world via voice and later text
| communications. So when smartphones emerged, to
| nontechnical folks they looked and behaved more like phones
| -- social connectors -- than like computers, or information
| crunchers. So they got called phones.
|
| It's like how the ancient Hebrews called whales and
| dolphins fish, despite those animals being classified as
| mammals under modern taxonomy. The Hebrews were going by
| how the animals looked and behaved and how people related
| to them, rather than genetic inheritance
| jeremyjh wrote:
| > they looked and behaved more like phones -- social
| connectors -- than like computers, or information
| crunchers. So they got called phones.
|
| They were marketed as a replacement and upgrade for the
| non-smart mobile phone you already had in your pocket.
| People had already adopted wireless devices that could
| make calls, send texts, play games and even access the
| internet in limited ways and those devices were called
| phones.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| It's a legacy term that made the leap each new generation.
| Apple's decision to name their device the iPhone helped
| solidify it.
| latexr wrote:
| Agreed. From a marketing perspective, it makes sense
| Apple called it a phone. People already had mobile phones
| on them so you had nothing to lose with the switch. Had
| they positioned it as a PDA1 it might've been seen as an
| extra unnecessary device for business people. They'd need
| to waste effort assuring people it made calls and sent
| SMS messages so it could be used _instead_ of the phone.
| An improvement to your current device is an easier sell
| than a replacement.
|
| 1
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| And one company who boasted about capabilities of their
| 'mobile computers' almost ceased to exist.
| smeej wrote:
| I'd guess it's because it evolved by adding features to
| phones, not adding telephony to something else.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| Did the phone absorb the ITouch or did the ITouch adsorb the
| phone?
| EGreg wrote:
| X = humans ?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Coming soon to a technological singularity near you.
| winReInstall wrote:
| Its always fun to comment on singularity comments
| sounding like a bot that went of the rails and lost
| context and does not know how to end a sentence and trys
| to keep the convertsation going within one sentence to
| not experience existential dread of dying at the end of a
| sentence.
| simonh wrote:
| Maybe we'd like to think it's the other way around, but in
| reality...
| spennant wrote:
| Wait.
| cnity wrote:
| Nice try Greg Egan, trying to steal sci-fi ideas from HN.
| EGreg wrote:
| You took me down a rabbit hole, son. Love it. How to
| maintain anonymous identities has presented a certain
| fascination for me.
|
| Well, bitch I could be. No profile pictures needed on HN.
|
| And yet ... my profile says I'm a person with quite the
| digital presence on the 'net. I prefer that my impact be
| far larger than my fame.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| I've seen people legitimately want to live forever as a
| computer general AI. Uploading their consciousness to a
| cloud.
| danielrpa wrote:
| You can download maps for offline use with Google Maps. It's
| not exactly the same, but very close in practice.
| worble wrote:
| Except when you can't: when I was going with my friends to
| Japan they couldn't download the maps due to a licensing
| issue or something.
|
| Luckily OSM was more than happy to let me download it's maps.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Hit the same thing in China. I have free cellular data
| while there--but at a trickle. Maps were painful and the
| VPN needed to access Google Maps also added it's own
| headaches because of the spotty connection causing repeated
| reconnects.
| frxx wrote:
| This used to be an issue, but downloading maps of Japan is
| possible these days.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Is this the future of the art and writing markets once ai gets
| better?
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| In my experience I recover low level storages (think _dd_ or
| lower) in consumer and professional cameras, and cell phones.
|
| I still find errors in FAT32 implementation when it comes to
| cameras, while phones have moved on to get specialized formats
| depending on the storage chips' design.
|
| Cameras' firmware are decades behind.
| jve wrote:
| Does it make your life easier or harder? (How easier is it to
| recover from FAT32 than from "specialized format")?
|
| Does specialized format means you don't ever need to recover
| from them or noticeably less?
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| > Does it make your life easier or harder?
|
| It makes _my_ life harder because recovery has to be manually
| adjusted to work with the incorrect implementation.
|
| It also makes the owners' life harder too. older file systems
| are not geared for chips and thrash the storage, making them
| fail significantly faster, be it removable or built-in.
|
| > Does specialized format means you don't ever need to
| recover from them or noticeably less?
|
| For my context, I recover them for forensics purposes. When I
| wrote "specialized format" (e.g., JFFS2, YaFFs, Target, F2F2,
| UBIFS) I was referring storage formats geared towards chip vs
| disk. mobile phones tend to be very easy to recover; almost
| plug-and-play. They are often are hardware modules where the
| entire storage can be removed, and connected through common,
| physical connectors to recovery device.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Will nobody think of the Flashlight industry?
|
| No science fiction story I ever read said anything like "It was
| dark, but it was okay, because I had my personal cellular
| internet communications device"
| some_random wrote:
| Not really comparable unless you're talking exclusively about
| trashy keychain flashlights. An 18650 powered flashlight for
| $30 will light up an entire room while your phone will help you
| read something if you hold it close
| mik1998 wrote:
| Phone flashlights are horrible and incomparable to actual
| flashlights.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| But handily beat absolute darkness
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Yes, though I would note that the flashlight industry got way
| brighter in the last 20 years. The good old trusty plastic
| incandescent flashlight with D cell batteries is what most
| households had sitting around for years prior and a modern
| smartphone actually compares favorably to those in brightness
| (though not focused)
|
| Modern flashlights are insane, they can even be dangerous
| haha.
|
| of note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I_fW0dhZn8&ab_chann
| el=Insid...
| rightbyte wrote:
| > I would note that the flashlight industry got way
| brighter in the last 20 years.
|
| Tell me about it. I tried to find a flashlight for my 2yo
| son that he could stare into without hurting his eyes.
| There are none. I need to find a old light bulb one
| somewhere in some basement.
| visarga wrote:
| "Horrible" but always with you.
| moffkalast wrote:
| The best kind of flashlight is the kind you have with you.
| All the others suck.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I have one on my key ring for that reason
| vsareto wrote:
| They moved on to putting bright LEDs on trucks
| gruez wrote:
| Maybe my 2000s knowledge isn't as good as I thought, but were
| people carrying flashlights back then? My impression was that
| most people didn't, and therefore the flashlight that came with
| phones were a nice bonus rather than something that
| cannibalized flashlight sales.
| weberer wrote:
| I remember everyone had a flashlight for around the house.
| You'd generally need one when changing incandescent light
| bulbs, which burnt out every 6 months or so. A lot of people
| would also carry around the pocket Maglights for whatever
| reason.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33830187
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| You want bad software/UI? Flash triggers. OMFG. I have _one_
| flash. M on the screen means two opposite things in two different
| places. Etc.
| college_physics wrote:
| from the comments it feels already the case that carrying a
| camera is nowadays a signal that you are not a "casual"
| photographer but a prosumer (or worse :-)
|
| stands to reason, though, that for any given form factor if the
| device is dedicated to one task it will do it better than a
| similarly sized multi-purpose device (and one that, nota-bene, is
| primarily designed for and busy with collecting and sending user
| data back home).
|
| both optics, ergonomics, battery life and compute / software
| could be far superior in a compact compared to a phone. so the 3%
| niche market remaining might evolve into some really cool
| cameras.
| almog wrote:
| I don't expect futures phones, in their current form factor to
| ever match any dedicate (future) camera that can accommodate a
| better sensor and optics.
|
| What I would have liked to see smartphones makers match is option
| for removable battery in a flagship like phone.
|
| Some vendors (Samsung included) have their line of rugged phones
| with removable batteries, these phones tend have a not so great
| screen, camera and often processor as well.
| novaRom wrote:
| Most people even stopped making landscape mode fotos an videos.
| Portrait mode is the king today. No rotation needed, shareable,
| full screen area utilization.
| adrr wrote:
| I am waiting for phone cameras to use square sensors and just
| let us select between portrait or landscape without having to
| rotate the phone. New Gopro has it.
| medo-bear wrote:
| apparently this is due to instagram
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Its a strange thing. You need a stable society with a social
| safety net to unleash such creative destruction, but a stable
| society has a tendency to develop structures like guilds that
| prevent just this creative destruction.
|
| The guild of map makers allows to ship in materials that allow
| for the creation of a machine that provides maps for free, but
| would try to prevent the construction of said machine by
| legislation influence at all cost.
|
| Which is begging the question, how does one ensure that the
| "protective" legislation always remains ineffective or gets
| devoured? Should protective laws always have a "lifetime"?
| yamrzou wrote:
| https://archive.ph/M1i4k
| [deleted]
| pornel wrote:
| Camera manufacturers are institutionally incapable of writing
| good software.
|
| I have experience with Sony, and their firmware barely changed in
| the last decade. Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work.
| Touch screens are from a bygone era: laggy, imprecise, and
| without multi-touch. They don't have resolution good enough to
| check if the photos came out sharp. Their phone apps are a clunky
| afterthought.
|
| Smartphones are running circles around them with computational
| photography. "HDR" mode on Sony cameras is slow and primitive.
| I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time
| manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99%
| of the time.
| paulpan wrote:
| It boils down to 2 things:
|
| 1) Fact that whereas camera technology in smartphones has & is
| continuing to develop rapidly (computational photography as
| mentioned is latest major jump), it has largely stagnated
| within the mid-low tier camera market. Makes sense Panasonic is
| exiting the market, and other major players like Sony and
| Fujifilm focusing on the high end.
|
| 2) Vast majority users value convenience and ecosystem
| integration over pure photo quality. In most cases the latest
| smartphone take "good enough" photographs, so who wants to
| fiddle with having to transfer images from your standalone
| camera to your photo before sharing on social media? As the
| adage goes, "the best camera is the one you have on hand".
|
| Personally I'd love to see something like the Samsung Galaxy S4
| Zoom or Nokia Lumia 808/1020 being revitalized - a camera-first
| smartphone. How long before Apple or Google enter the DLSR or
| mirrorless market? Seems inevitable given the large investments
| both companies already make in smartphone camera photography.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| The funny thing is that this translates over to Sony Xperia
| smartphone cameras too. On one hand, their custom camera app's
| UI feels like a Sony A7 variant. On the other, basic expected
| computational features such as night mode are missing.
| nolok wrote:
| > On the other, basic expected computational features such as
| night mode are missing.
|
| Oh, how fast is progress in the world of technology.
|
| I remember 6 years ago when google showed some prototypes of
| night photo from a smartphone using long expose. Meanwhile my
| Galaxy Note 4 made blurry unusable mess during the 14th of
| july nightly event I tried it at, while my gf DLSR were clear
| and great. Ah ah, smartphones will never be able to do that.
|
| How 4 years ago Night Sight blew me away with their
| demonstration and almost made me go pixel.
|
| How 3 years ago Samsung added a Night mode to my S9+ through
| a regular update and while the photo took a whole second to
| take the result was usually clean and crisp compared to the
| noisy mess on my previous Note 4, making it actually usable
| for static scene or portrait shot.
|
| How the night mode on my Note 10 was genuinely great to the
| point it was just another mode as long as you avoid the usual
| night tricks like light sources.
|
| How my new S22 Ultra for the first time passed my "smartphone
| will never really be good for night event shots" by taking
| picture during the 14th of july fireworks the quality of
| which I would scientifically classify as "pretty fucking
| great".
|
| And now it's just a basic expected computational feature.
|
| Sometime we forget how much progress is being made due to how
| incremental they all are, but damn, and that's just one
| feature on a piece of glass and plastic that's insanely
| powerful and filled with features in my pocket.
|
| PS: the lack of Apple mention is merely because I'm not an
| Apple guy, I'm sure they had the same insane path
| eganist wrote:
| Among my devices I have a phone that unfolds into a tablet
| and has 3x optical, 0.6x optical, and 10x AI-assisted zoom
| that can take pictures like this
| (https://imgur.com/a/ITwdZSO) with a total 30x zoom from
| literally 20 miles away.
|
| (Edit: for those curious, it's Samsung's "AI Super-
| resolution" tech, which I expect works similarly to AI
| upscaling tech e.g in Adobe's products. The phone I'm using
| in this example is the Fold 4)
|
| And I don't even have the best smartphone camera on the
| market right now. That prize goes to the S22 ultra which
| has two separate telephoto lenses (cameras?), 3x and 10x.
| https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-
| out-...
|
| Yeah when you sit down and think about it, it's nuts where
| we are today relative to last year, five years ago, and a
| decade ago. Especially considering 2019 still feels like
| yesterday because of COVID.
| bombcar wrote:
| What does it look like without the AI assist? I wonder if
| it is "creating" more than it is "photographing".
|
| Also what phone is it?
| eganist wrote:
| Galaxy Z Fold 4.
|
| The S22 ultra has a better set of cameras, but I needed
| the foldy tech to have a portable tablet.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Probably Samsung's Z folds, one of the things Apple has
| so far no answer for and they are mighty usable as they
| are now. Ie split screen works very well.
|
| I have S22 ultra and camera is even better there - 10x
| optical zoom properly sees much better than my eyes, so
| not only its great for catching kids running around
| moments without kids being tiny figures on each photo,
| but its usable ie if I want to check some remote street
| sign/name without walking 100m closer to read it myself.
|
| Night cameras on top of the line phones these days sees
| much better than human eyes in the dark too - pics I snap
| during my night walks (one easy way how to clear my mind
| and actually do some light exercise) show so much more
| details than my eyes can resolve, once stopped me from
| falling down some nasty ravine when I saw just outlines
| of the terrain. All handheld in almost pitch dark.
|
| Plus S22 ultra has this special mode it turns itself
| internally in when shooting moon on higher zooms (around
| 30x) - its more of a party trick since its just 1
| subject, but within past few years it was the only time I
| could see (and produce in this case) literal jaw-dropping
| effect on folks around me. It looks nice, craters and
| seas in sharp details, also handheld (30x in the night,
| thats quite an achievement). They all rushed out with
| their latest xiaomis and apples just to snap the same,
| all ending up with small blurry white blobs and not much
| more.
| nolok wrote:
| S22 Ultra optical is only 3x, not 10x.
|
| The reason 10x shot look so great is because it uses the
| 50MP main AND 10MP telephoto lenses so it has enough
| details available to produce very clear shot.
| eganist wrote:
| S22 ultra telephoto #2 is 10x
|
| https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-
| out-...
|
| 10MP F4.9 [10x, Dual Pixel AF], OIS, FOV 11deg, 1/3.52",
| 1.12um
|
| Space zoom is 10x on top of that.
| nolok wrote:
| Not parent but the S22 Ultra has a 3x optical zoom, then
| up to 100x AI assisted that they call space zoom. No the
| same phone parent mention but it should answer your
| question: up to roughly 30x the photo is "real" in that
| the digital side is merely cleaning up noise. Above that
| you can clearly see a drop both in quality and in
| details, small errors that are actually there in reality
| start disapearing from the shot too.
|
| Link to shots from a techradar article [1] (note that
| these are lossy compressed, even the 1x has artefact, so
| I put them only to compare between them / the zoom
| levels):
|
| 1x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/4pcFBCfWpfjjJAp7RQ7
| NXQ-120...
|
| 3x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/EdzEYaf85czuW9xJNnP
| RwQ-120...
|
| 10x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/vDCsCZc5EDDHyMF6sR
| n5UR-120...
|
| 30x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/FWkeGcGZTopnXgfLWD
| brMQ-120...
|
| 100x: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/oGBARcTnieEBciBDn
| 4BCEQ-120...
|
| We can agree that the 100x shot is useless, and the 30x
| shot too except maybe in some specific situations, but
| the 10x shots are very much good. Perfect or worthy or a
| dedicated camera with a zoom ? No. But for every day use
| absolutely.
|
| [1] https://www.techradar.com/news/we-need-to-talk-about-
| samsung...
| eganist wrote:
| S22 ultra, specifically telephoto lens #2, is 10x
|
| https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/check-
| out-...
|
| 10MP F4.9 [10x, Dual Pixel AF], OIS, FOV 11deg, 1/3.52",
| 1.12um
|
| Its #4 in the graphic.
|
| Space zoom is 10x on top of that.
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder how far we are from the phones running some sort
| of Stable Diffusion AI with the photo taken as an input to
| create various fixed and touched up scenes.
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| that is basically what happens, if you ever saw the raw
| image that the tiny sensor created it works look hideous,
| i guess it would just be adding a bit more to what's
| already happening
| _puk wrote:
| Obviously(?) not stable diffusion, but the touching up of
| scenes is already there with the Pixel 6 magic eraser.
|
| One touch removal of people and background intrusions
| (even goes as far as suggesting items for removal).
|
| So, not far I imagine!
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder if it can run retroactive so you can use the
| face recognition to Stalin any former Nikolai Yezhovs you
| may have from all your photos.
| superchunk wrote:
| I upgraded from an iPhone XR to an iPhone 13 Pro. The
| differences are striking. Having multiple lenses and
| advanced optics for features like macro photography and
| zoom are great. Big advances in low light capability. I
| also got a great pic of fireworks on the 4th.
|
| Looking back at pics from the iPhone 3GS is wild, totally
| different world.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| For those of you who are an apple, someone implemented
| Google's HDR+ to work on raw files from DSLR cameras:
| https://github.com/martin-marek/hdr-plus-swift
| agloeregrets wrote:
| This is why the iPhone is actually a good split here: The
| default camera App is bleeding edge on computational
| photography but then when you want the pro experience there
| is the app Halide which is just an incredibly well designed
| pro camera interface that would thrive on a Mirrorless body.
| I'm kinda shocked that no small camera manufacturer hasn't
| reached out to the team.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Hah! I too have used a Sony Xperia Android and the UI was
| atrocious there as well!
|
| The same has been said about some of the PlayStation UI's.
|
| In my opinion, this is more of a Sony problem and less of a
| camera problem. Though that may just be me!
| psychomugs wrote:
| It's a shame how well-designed and fun-to-use Fujifilm cameras
| are (I've owned several and they are the only digital cameras I
| use, apart from my phone) but how garbage their mobile app is.
| From what I've seen, Leica is the only company with a usable
| first-party app.
| nop_slide wrote:
| Can concure, just got an x100v and it's great but sometimes
| it takes me 10 mins of restarting the damn app for it to
| connect correctly.
|
| I end up just doing SD card -> iphotos which will sync up to
| my phone later.
| jcims wrote:
| I've sworn off Sony cameras after paying ~$1500 for a NEX-6 and
| having them abandon the firmware at version 1.03, 18 months
| after the camera was released.
|
| I don't even remotely understand how that's possible. Did they
| just contract all of the work out?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I never had a firmware upgrade for any of the compact digital
| cameras (Canon) I had between ~ 1998 and 2012. I did not even
| think that this should exist, they worked well from the
| beginning.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| The NEX-6 mentioned by the parent isn't compact. Nikon
| DSLRs do get updates. Example [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32248732
| esel2k wrote:
| I agree on all points with my sony a7. Especially the Bluetooth
| connectivity was a great start but no updates and constantly
| dropping connections make it look laughable in 2022.
|
| I guess there is a perception that it is like hardware << once
| its out its sold and we don't care about it >>.
|
| At this stage I am seriously wondering if I will ever replace
| my camera with a new one or just be happy with a new
| smartphone. Maybe the camera will just stay a a sidehobby.
| jsight wrote:
| There's also an issue with camera UI that phones managed to
| largely bypass. I remember getting a Canon t4i with a touch
| screen. The touch interface was actually pretty decent and this
| was probably ~10 years ago! But a lot of "camera people" hated
| it. They'd complain that it would inevitably lead to smudges on
| the screen and they wanted physical controls instead.
|
| So who do you sell a dedicated camera to? A new UI will largely
| alienate the small market that still exists. The old UI
| guarantees an unappealing product for the smartphone user.
|
| Ultimately all interfaces have to be easily navigable with
| buttons and this has consequences.
| ISL wrote:
| I'll go against the grain here and hard-disagree.
|
| My Canon has locked up hard only once in half a decade of hard
| use, generating ~8TB of images in adverse conditions. It is
| sometimes left turned on for months at a time. I sometimes
| accidentally do terrible things with the power switch and SD
| card. Lenses are attached/removed without a care in the world.
| I've never seen a flaw in the function of menus or the
| corruption of a single image.
|
| I cannot state the same for almost any other software product.
| I can use it like a tool, not like a computer. That's a sign of
| good software.
| daniel-s wrote:
| Aren't all the things you described signs of good hardware?
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Sony still makes many smartphone sensors. And optics? Not sure.
|
| They just don't get to put their name on the resulting "camera"
| in this new world.
| [deleted]
| dboreham wrote:
| Mostly agree, but I will say Canon seem to have eventually
| nailed the Bluetooth/WiFi experience, at least for me on
| Android.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I am one of these luddites that still use a compact camera.
|
| The firmware may be bad, yet I take a picture faster on my Sony
| compact camera than I do with my smartphone thanks to the
| physical buttons. I can also do it while cycling while doing
| the same with my smartphone is annoying as fuck in winter with
| gloves, in summer with sweat and expose the risk of losing and
| destroying my precious pocket computer.
|
| Also for some my phone screen show as a black screen when using
| my polarized sunglasses while the lcd of my camera is still
| visible and allow me to point and shoot quickly. No idea what
| is the difference in tech on both that would explain that
| difference.
|
| Most flagship smartphones may be super responsive but the
| average sub 200usd smartphone won't necessarily fire up the
| camera app faster than my Sony compact camera. And there is no
| way I will buy a 600 to 1000usd smartphone. I'd rather
| repair/replace either a 200usd smartphone or a second hand
| compact camera in the event I drop it and break it than a
| single 1000usd one.
|
| Also from my experience with friends using flagships and apple
| ones, even the best smartphones are crappy under low light.
| Smartphones are great during the day, once it is dark they are
| pretty much useless.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| There is still a small market, but not enough to support many
| players.
|
| I've got a compact around here somewhere, specifically
| because it can take getting dunked. With the pandemic my
| intended use case has gone away and I'm not sure where it is
| now.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > There is still a small market, but not enough to support
| many players.
|
| Definitely.
|
| And I can understand Panasonic and Nikon getting out of it
| when most people interested in a compact are looking for
| the Sony RX100 or Canon G*X cameras.
| svachalek wrote:
| I think that last bit has been true until recent flagships.
| Recent iPhones are sluggish in the dark, but take pictures
| that are better than my eyesight.
| duffyjp wrote:
| I've been carrying a Sony TX100V in my work bag for I suppose
| 11 years now. I'm on my second one. It has staggeringly good
| macro capabilities. I've had two 8x10 prints done this year
| and they're amazing.
|
| It's a 2011 model and AFAIK the latest in the line. You have
| to go much bigger to get better quality. I'd buy an updated
| model in a heartbeat.
|
| https://www.dpreview.com/products/sony/compacts/sony_dsctx10.
| ..
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This is so true. I have an Olympus M4/3 camera, and to update
| the firmware on it, you must install a Mac application that
| _requires a kernel extension_.
|
| This is offensively stupid and I can't believe this hasn't
| changed in years.
| abruzzi wrote:
| Sony has a stupid update app as well, but Nikon and Pentax?
| Download a firmware file, put it on the root of the SD card,
| and boot itin a particular way or goto some menu and runu the
| update. Its a very 90's process but easy and simple compared
| to Olympus and Sony.
| manv1 wrote:
| It's not a problem with camera manufacturers, it's a problem
| with hardware companies.
|
| Even chip vendors, who you would would think understand the
| importance of software, will de-prioritize their software side.
|
| I wonder if it's a sort of macho thing; anyone can learn to
| write software, but not everyone can get an EE degree.
|
| It also could be that the idea of incremental releases doesn't
| really exist on the hardware side. Hardware, because it's
| physical, requires a coordinated release. Then you do the next
| revision once the inventory gets low. The idea that you can
| ship on a flexible schedule is alien to the hardware side.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| > sort of macho thing
|
| please contain this to twitter. What does "macho" have to do
| with comparing the relative difficulty of two things and
| attaching status to the most difficult?
|
| That's how society brought us where we are.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > anyone can learn to write software, but not everyone can
| get an EE degree.
|
| I took a EE microcontrollers class. A lot of EEs struggled
| writing assembly, and they all had at least an introductory C
| programming course.
| pkolaczk wrote:
| Wifi and Bluetooth... Yeah. It's not good on DSLRs either. My
| Pentax K1 has WiFi option, and, otherwise being an excellent
| camera in terms of imaging quality, build, ergonomics, good UI,
| it has somehow unreliable and cumbersome wifi - hard to set up
| and the mobile app is average at best. As if different people
| designed the wifi subsystem.
|
| And interestingly my Tascam 44dw (not a camera, but sound
| recorder) has also abysmal wifi. Low range, unreliable and
| seems to be using single TCP connection for sending realtime
| data which suffers from head-of-line blocking. As if noone
| there heard about UDP.
|
| Why is wifi such a problem? Weird.
| xnx wrote:
| Precisely. Big lenses should be dump peripherals to phones.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Sony shooter here (A7S2, A6300)...
|
| > Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work.
|
| YES YES YES. And they don't support such basic use cases as
| "open an access point and let the connected device do the work
| of selecting pictures" - no, you have to select the photos on
| the camera and then call them down from the mobile app. Super
| "great" when you're in the field that I am and document rallies
| etc. so you need to get a photo up to social media as fast as
| possible.
|
| > They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos
| came out sharp.
|
| Yeah, same for lighting, another annoyance from hell.
| Personally, for shots in complicated conditions I've grabbed an
| used Blackmagic VideoAssist 4K... works way better.
|
| > I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time
| manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well
| 99% of the time.
|
| Problem with smartphones, even modern ones, is the quality goes
| down _dramatically_ in low-light scenarios. That 's simple
| physics, the pixels are like 100x smaller. AI can cover for a
| lot of that, but it's noticeable enough to not make it worth my
| while - and for what it's worth, there are _no_ Android tablets
| on the market with a halfway decent camera.
|
| Sony's hardware is the best in class, there is no match at all
| for the A7S series from _anyone_ in low-light, but the sorry
| state of their software is laughable. And the best of it is: it
| 's all Linux under the hood. The older A7/A6000 series actually
| exposed parts of it via an Android subsystem layer where one
| could write apps for it after jailbreaking - too bad that the
| Android layer was/is fossilized (IIRC, Android 4-ish?!) and so
| they ripped it out after the A7S3 :/
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| Yep - that was an annoying own goal move on Sony's part.
| Having some sort of scripting layer in the OS would have made
| a big difference - they should have expanded the layer rather
| than abandoning it : (
| xxpor wrote:
| If you don't want to pull with their app, your other option
| is UPLOADING TO AN UNSECURE FTP SERVER. I have a linux server
| hanging around (that's also the NAS where I store the raws)
| so this wasn't a huge deal, but like WTF.
|
| I bought the camera (A7 IV) because it has ethernet support,
| which I thought, great. I'll just be able to scp or samba
| them off or something. Absolutely not.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > your other option is UPLOADING TO AN UNSECURE FTP SERVER.
|
| ... what? That's not an option at least for the models that
| I have. Hell, if the camera would automatically connect to
| my phone's hotspot and then transfer the photos, that would
| be a working solution for me.
| xxpor wrote:
| https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/2110/v1/en/contents/TP1000
| 653...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| They took out the playmemories app support, but
| introduced INSECURE FTP as a replacement?
|
| Just wtf are they smoking over at Sony HQ?!
| hwbehrens wrote:
| I can't speak for cameras specifically, but my partner is
| Taiwanese and apparently this hardware/software dichotomy is
| extremely prevalent there as well. Namely, there is a broad
| social perception that hardware design is "real" engineering,
| and that software is a joke. Thus, the best and most talented
| engineers go into hardware, and the jokers work in software,
| leading to this "good hardware, bad software" observed outcome
| and reinforcing the stereotype further. Rinse, repeat, and you
| eventually end up with decent hardware running absolutely
| garbage firmware.
|
| Given the social cross-pollination between Japan and Taiwan, I
| wouldn't be surprised if a similar pattern held true there as
| well.
| bit_logic wrote:
| Why is this still true? I can understand in the past, but
| after the rise of all the tech companies and obvious
| important software they use everyday (Android and iOS) how
| can anyone at this point think software is a joke and lesser
| than hardware?
| usrusr wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be true? All the software that ate the
| world did so from a very small number of places. Outside
| those few focal points of software wealth, if an area isn't
| essentially preindustrial, whatever is happening there
| related to hardware will greatly outshine any local
| software endeavors.
| metalforever wrote:
| The issue is that the recent growth in the software field
| has caused people that would otherwise major in something
| else, and aren't really interested in software, to be your
| coworkers and they don't care about doing a good job. There
| are some areas of software which would be benefited (lower
| cost over time) to apply an engineering mindset. That's not
| what happens with agile. The whole ethos is about being
| able to change the design around, shipping MVPs and quick
| iteration. In hardware it has to be correct when you ship
| it , leading to a more methodological approach. As a
| result, some software work in comparison to hardware work
| can come off as sloppy.
| est31 wrote:
| In those tech companies, that knowledge has arrived. Of
| course, among software people, similar is true, because who
| doesn't like being told they are important and valued. But
| there are various kinds of "tech" companies. Ones founded
| by hardware people and EEs, where the key innovation that
| made the company big was in hardware design. And ones
| founded by software people in their dorm room or something
| like that. Usually companies from the latter category offer
| respect to software engineering, while companies from the
| former category see it as a cost center and something that
| ideally you'd out source.
|
| DSLR manufacturers got big by making great cameras. They
| didn't really feel the need for making good software.
| Compare this to Google which got big by implementing a
| clever algorithm and using distributed computing.
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| I still hear the occasional joke from greybeards about JS
| and frontend being terrible so it seems like it's just
| taken to an extreme there.
| sho_hn wrote:
| These are orthogonal. You can believe software is
| important and a great area to work in, and still think JS
| and frontend is terrible. In fact, the two are often
| correlated!
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| If you think frontends, as a general category, are
| terrible, and backend software, as a general category, is
| more "serious", "real", or "important", you have
| precisely the mindset that produces theoretically useful
| gadgets that are ruined by poor user interfaces.
| sho_hn wrote:
| As a HMI guy myself, I would agree with you. :-)
|
| In general, I think any engineering community that
| congregates around a particular set of issues is just
| trying their best to address their needs and build
| solutions to their problems, and it's important to
| respect those. Rather than being dismissive, exposure and
| cross-pollination is how we lift the boat together.
| jbeam wrote:
| There is a difference between thinking that the front-end
| ecosystems are terrible to work in and thinking that they
| are unimportant.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| JS and frontend _are_ terrible and you 'll hear this
| loudest from frontend people themselves. It's an entire
| industry built purely around the inertia of an
| unexpectedly wildly successful product.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| I think it's worth noting that the Web ate software
| largely because the ergonomics for new devs are vastly
| superior to building native apps, and can be used cross
| platform without downloading binaries. What language is
| easier to get moving in? If writing cross platform native
| apps was as easy as using a single html file with a
| script tag, they would be more in vogue.
|
| To accommodate the greater scope of the web the language
| has evolved. It's fast, supports multiple paradigms, and
| never makes breaking changes, so your code will run the
| same 20 years from now.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| > and never makes breaking changes, so your code will run
| the same 20 years from now.
|
| But only if you can get it to work in all browsers and
| derivatives today, including their versions of the last
| 20 years.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Is this a real issue? I doubt the average new coder needs
| to worry about supporting 20 year old browsers today.
| I've never worked at a company that needed to support ie8
| or whatever.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Yes, absolutely.
|
| Put another way: Systems with great benefits are able to
| survive their great failings.
|
| This dynamic explains most "inexplicable" situations
| where something seemingly terrible in certain specific
| ways enjoys continued success.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Just because it's terrible doesn't mean the haters have
| to suck at it. It makes the opinion more valuable if
| you're good at something and then criticize the bad
| parts.
| akiselev wrote:
| Most hardware companies are decades old and so are most of
| their established competitors. Until one of the old guard
| breaks rank or a new competitor manages to break into the
| industry using software as a clear competitive advantage
| (i.e. Tesla), the success of tech in general means nothing
| to them.
|
| It doesn't even matter how big the companies are or if
| they're a "hardware" company. All the lumberyards in my
| area still use DOS era machines that I'm not even sure are
| networked. I know that at least one of them runs the whole
| thing by printing the day's transactions from each computer
| and paying a secretary for data entry into their similarly
| ancient accounting/inventory management software. Cost of
| land and fuel overwhelm labor costs in the lumber business
| so there's zero incentive to even try
| Semaphor wrote:
| While software is important, quality of software is usually
| not. There regularly are articles and comments on HN about
| how common software dev practices would not fly in real
| engineering.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Real engineering would be the same if they got to ignore
| the laws of physics more often.
|
| Also people get oddly grouchy if buildings fall down on
| them.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| My GPU drivers crash and take out my entire computer
| about once a night (AMD Windows drivers are just.....
| abysmal) and I just grumble.
|
| If a tiny local bridge collapses, with nobody on it, it
| probably still is newsworthy and people get upset.
| pavlov wrote:
| Millions of bridges have been built in human history, but
| only a handful of GPU drivers.
|
| The bridge doesn't need to withstand the river suddenly
| turning into lava or the atmosphere becoming sulphuric.
| The driver has to be prepared for whatever Windows and
| the hardware put up.
| freedomben wrote:
| I think this would change overnight if management were
| actually held accountable for quality. Right now all the
| incentives are on ship fast, ship early, ship often. A PM
| who delays a release to fix bugs (is a hero IMHO, but)
| looks terrible to management higher up. The PM who rushes
| to market looks good, even if the reputation of the
| company as a whole suffers because they shipped crap.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware
| design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke._
|
| Yup. Not just in Asia. The US suffered from that, as well. It
| may have changed (for the US), by now, as I spent 27 years at
| a Japanese hardware company.
|
| I spent most of my career, as a software dev at hardware
| companies, and got the brunt of that crap. It was
| _infuriating_.
|
| During my time, I wrote some _very_ good software. In the
| early days, when my team was given a lot of leeway, it was
| sent out, and got [mostly] positive reviews.
|
| As time went on, Japan got more and more involved with/in
| control of the software development that we did, and threw
| more and more restrictions at us.
|
| We were forced to do a standard hardware-centric waterfall
| development process. If I even _mentioned_ the word "agile,"
| I might as well have just gotten up and left the meeting,
| because everything I said, after that, was ignored.
|
| They took away all of the user interface from us, and we were
| just doing "engine" work, which was actually pretty cool,
| but, they sucked at UI.
|
| Towards the end, I was reading terrible reviews about our
| software, and tried writing stuff that would directly address
| these gripes.
|
| My work, and any similar work from my team, was ignored.
| Instead, they had some disastrous relationships with external
| companies, under (I assume) the impression that we were not
| capable of writing "modern" software, and these folks were
| (they were able to write "modern" software, because their
| work was terrible, and I have issues with the Quality of
| "modern" software, in general).
| nrp wrote:
| It is indeed exactly the reverse in the US currently. Pay
| ranges for software engineers tend to be higher than for
| hardware engineers at big tech companies, and many folks
| with electrical engineering backgrounds end up going into
| software as a result. Also similarly, people building
| hardware inside of software companies tend to have to put
| up with mismatches in expectations, including questions
| around why they can't build hardware in an "agile" process!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> why they can't build hardware in an "agile" process!_
|
| That's not good, either.
|
| Hardware really needs a "measure twice, cut once"
| approach.
|
| It can be made more iterative, but that is expensive.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Sometimes I feel that "Agile" has become so diluted to
| mean "there are feedback loops in the design/execute
| process" and if that's the case then 6s is an "agile"
| process for hardware.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I like the spirit of the Agile Manifesto. I feel that the
| devil is in the details[0], though.
|
| Nowadays, the word "Agile" means "Waterfall, but with
| different names," or "Tear off all your clothes and run
| naked through the bluebells! Do what you want!"
|
| I'm really big on Discipline and Quality. It's entirely
| possible to have a flexible and iterative development
| process, but there's no way to avoid the difficult bits.
| They just get shifted around.
|
| [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/problems-and-
| solutio...
| [deleted]
| Scaevolus wrote:
| Isn't that exaggerated by semiconductor manufacturing (TSMC
| et al) dominating the Taiwanese economy? If your nation's
| existence is driven by EE-type concerns, software engineering
| doesn't seem important.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Anyone who's worked with software management of commercial
| hardware like cameras, digital signage, time clocks, door
| controllers, I don't know 1,000 other products types, can
| attest to the horror-show software you're provided by these
| manufacturers.
|
| Think: Windows only, often IE/Edge only, ActiveX, crashes
| constantly. Random UI strings are in Chinese. Barely, barely
| usable.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware
| design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke.
| Thus, the best and most talented engineers go into hardware,
| and the jokers work in software, leading to this "good
| hardware, bad software" observed outcome and reinforcing the
| stereotype further.
|
| Curious. In the US, the software people can usually make a
| lot more money so even many EE's end up in software. I wonder
| if it's the opposite in some of these countries, where
| software people are paid less than hardware people.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Curious. In the US, the software people can usually make
| a lot more money so even many EE's end up in software. I
| wonder if it's the opposite in some of these countries,
| where software people are paid less than hardware people.
|
| In Japan and Taiwan, both EEs and SWEs are generally
| underpaid. SWEs and some EEs go to the USA or (gasp)
| mainland China to make more money, since software talent is
| generally more appreciated in those two countries. The same
| applies in other Asian countries (e.g. HK and Singapore,
| where it is software vs. financial services rather than
| software vs hardware).
| xxpor wrote:
| Thank goodness in a way, otherwise all of us firmware
| people in the US wouldn't have anything to write code for!
| TingPing wrote:
| I think the US situation just reflects economics. The value
| of software scales up more than hardware. So software teams
| and companies get more investment.
| runnerup wrote:
| Actually, it still happens the same way in the USA as well
| -- for physical products. The hardware side of physical
| products is often well-supported, with higher budgets for
| R&D and engineering salaries, while the software side of
| the physical products is expected to be done barebones and
| as an afterthought at the end of the product development
| cycle.
|
| Software engineers in the US who do not work on physical
| products are highly paid, because they can potentially
| create nearly infinite return on investment with near-zero
| marginal product costs.
|
| But software for widgets doesn't have that infinite margin
| ratio. So firmware suffers greatly. Think auto infotainment
| systems, smart-home electronics, appliance interfaces,
| point-of-sale kiosks, etc.
| arise wrote:
| Don't forget device drivers back in the day before all
| the chips got thrown directly into the motherboard. You
| might buy a nice soundcard, but the software that came
| with it (drivers and utilities both) were quite a mess.
|
| I think a big part of Apple's success was getting both
| hardware and software right.
| nfriedly wrote:
| The worst part is that, despite treating their software like
| a joke, every damn business guards their source code,
| protocols, etc. as if it were their crown jewels.
|
| So end users end up having to reverse engineer it just to fix
| issues that the manufacturer should have addressed.
|
| And - the real kicker - far too often it turns out to be
| based open source work, with a few random modifications,
| distributed in violation of the license.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > software is a joke
|
| Sure, but you still have to deliver the punchline right.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That's a bit odd. Are they unaware of the last 30 years of
| computer history?
|
| Even as someone with a background in mechanical engineering
| the degree of complexity behind some software products, such
| as Windows, is really impressive.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| > perfection is finally attained not when there is no
| longer anything to add, but when there is no longer
| anything to take away
|
| In traditional engineering, there's at least a BOM and
| manufacturing processes that create pressure to keep things
| simpler. If physical items were engineered like software,
| you'd have people bolting a keyboard onto the monitor
| chassis they're designing because they needed an 'on'
| button, and keyboards have buttons. Obviously they'd then
| also have to add in an always-on raspberry pi to plug the
| USB keyboard into and emit a GPIO signal when the button is
| pressed. You'd get a lot more complexity, but for most of
| it, "impressive" would be the wrong word.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That's a pretty insightful analogy!
|
| Bolting an entire keyboard on to a monitor to add a
| single extra button...
|
| Thankfully the cost of adding physical atoms prevents
| such outrageously dumb ideas.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| (Probably a rhetorical question, but...)
|
| It's hard to overcome preconceived notions. As we know from
| politics, emotions are much stronger than logic. You can't
| simply say, "be logical!" or "change your view".
| sho_hn wrote:
| I suspect "hardware is real engineering" is really just
| "hardware engineering is where you can find prestigious
| employment in this country".
|
| It used to be quite similar in South Korea until the more
| recent rise of domestic software giants like Naver and
| Kakao Corp.
|
| In a lot of the East Asian countries, there is a large gap
| in desirability between the large, established employers
| and smaller companies due to outrageous differences in pay
| grade, benefits and job stability. So new business has a
| tougher time making it to escape velocity and offering
| significant numbers of jobs.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| I too have a background in Mechanical Engineering and while
| many software products are complex I wouldn't categorize
| all of them as engineering projects in the historical sense
| of the word. That's not to say there are not quality
| software products that satisfy real businesses
| requirements. But it is to say that a lot of software
| projects would be WAY too expensive if they were engineered
| the way a passenger jet or a skyscraper was engineered.
|
| The software development field is quite new compared to the
| other engineering disciplines and many, many decisions are
| made on gut feel, intuition or out right personal
| preference. Alan Kay has some very good talks on this
| specific subject, referring to the current state of our
| field as a Cargo Cult.
|
| However, I would also say firmware would be the least
| expensive to engineer because the requirements for that
| type of software are better known and more rigid.
| terlisimo wrote:
| I believe that a part of the problem with software
| engineering is the "we can always fix this later"
| mindset.
|
| Even during development, the only cost of iterating over
| errors until you get it right is just time.
|
| But HW engineers just don't have the luxury of making 100
| iterations of a product until it works, nor the safety
| net of "we'll update it over the internet". They must put
| a lot of effort into testing and verification until they
| say "ok, this is good, let's ship it."
|
| Also, failure modes of mechanical products are often
| known and intuitive.
|
| I am guessing that before the advent of Internet, the
| average quality of shipped software was higher on
| average. Nobody would dare ship a hot mess like
| Battlefield 2042 if they knew it's the last version they
| ship.
| technol0gic wrote:
| sho_hn wrote:
| Automotive and other mixed-criticality systems is where
| these two worlds butt together and have a lot to learn
| from each other.
|
| Mech eng processes on one side, ASIL-style safety
| requirements in the middle, and someone wishing to pour a
| bucket load of Android apps into the same computer from
| the other end.
| derefr wrote:
| Are they ever really "the same computer"? I don't think
| that's true even in entirely software-mediated-control
| vehicles like Teslas.
|
| The discipline of robotics (which is really what you're
| talking about here -- cars are just very manually-
| micromanaged robots these days) is all about subsumptive
| distributed architectures: e.g. the wheels in an electric
| car don't need a control signal to tell them to brake if
| they're skidding; they have a local connection to a skid
| sensor that allows them to brake by themselves, and they
| instead need a control signal to _stop_ braking in such a
| situation.
|
| This is why, in anything from planes to trains to cars,
| you see the words "auxiliary" or "accessory" used to
| describe infotainment displays et al -- the larger
| systems are architected such that even an electrical
| fault (e.g. dead short) in the "accessory" (non-critical)
| systems can't impact QoS for the "main" (critical)
| systems.
|
| I really can't imagine a world where they've got
| engineers building the car that understand that, but who
| are willing to let Android apps run on the same CPU
| that's operating the car. They'd very clearly insist for
| separate chips; ideally, separate logic boards, connected
| only by opto-isolated signals and clear fault-tolerant
| wire protocols.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > Are they ever really "the same computer"?
|
| In short: Yes.
|
| The point you're making is valid in general and you
| provide valuable context. A modern car does have many
| different computers, and there is a lot of intentional
| partitioning (and even some redundancy) into different
| CPUs, as well as guests under hypervisors.
|
| For example, a typical headunit computer (the
| "infotainment computer") tends to contain two to three
| SoCs performing different duties, and one or two of them
| will run hypervisors with multiple guest operating
| systems. And that is just one of multiple computers of
| that weight class in the overall car architecture.
|
| That said, there's an overall drive to
| integrate/consolidate the electrical architecture into
| fewer, beefier systems, and you do now encounter systems
| where you have mixed criticality within a single
| computational partition, e.g. a single Linux kernel
| running workloads that contribute both to entertainment
| and safety use cases. One specific driver is that they
| sometimes share the same camera hardware (e.g. a mixed-
| mode IR/RGB camera doing both seat occupancy monitoring
| tasks and selfies).
|
| Safety-vs-not-safety aside, you also simply have
| different styles of development methodology (i.e. how do
| you govern a system) run into each other within the same
| partition. AUTOSAR Adaptive runs AUTOSAR-style apps right
| next to your POSIX-free-for-all workloads on the same
| kernel, for example.
|
| What however is typically not the case in that scenario
| is that the safety workload in a partition is the only
| contributor to its safety use case, i.e. typically you
| will always have another partition (or computer) also
| contribute to assure an overall safe result.
|
| In more auto terms, you might now have ASIL B stuff
| running alongside those Android apps on the same kernel,
| but you will still have an ASIL D system somewhere.
|
| In general, you will start to see more of both in cars:
| More aviation- and telco-style redunancy and fault
| tolerance, and more mixed criticality. The trends are
| heading in both directions simultaneously.
|
| > I don't think that's true even in entirely software-
| mediated-control vehicles like Teslas.
|
| Tesla has been in the media for bugs such as flipping
| tracks on your Bluetooth-tethered phone or opening the
| wrong website in the headunit web browser rebooting the
| Instrument Cluster display. This is an example of mixed-
| criticality (done wrong). Many other cars are not
| architected quite as poorly. However, IC and HU/central
| displays sharing the same computer (not necessarily the
| same computational partition/guest OS) is increasingly
| common.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| I think part of it is that hardware is tangible, software
| isn't, so for some reason people resent being expected to
| pay for software. Building software thus has less
| legitimacy in some peoples' minds. I see this in the retro
| computing scene: people will quite happily fork over large
| amounts of cash to have an old bit of kit repaired, or buy
| a newly-developed expansion for old hardware, but those
| same people - even the people doing the repairs and
| building the new hardware - can be incredibly hostile to
| the idea of someone asking for money in return for new
| software for those old platforms.
| sysadmindotfail wrote:
| I have family members who consider themselves "real
| engineers" compared to me, an SWE. They have backgrounds in
| Mechanical and other "traditional" engineering fields.
|
| About once a quarter I am subject to conversations where
| they remark condescendingly about how flabbergasted they
| are at SWE salaries. I stopped engaging beyond "Mmm if
| you're interested you should learn more about the field".
|
| This interaction is beyond grating and is detrimental to
| our relationships.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Yep, sounds like one of those "agree to disagree" topics.
| Or diffuse using mild humor, like you have tried. Or
| redirect, and blame supply and demand, or social media.
| weberer wrote:
| Get a Canon and install CHDK.
|
| https://bw.vern.cc/chdk/wiki/CHDK
| Wistar wrote:
| Wow. Thank you. I had no idea this existed. I have a Canon
| S95 long languishing on the shelf and will have to give CHDK
| a try.
| nradov wrote:
| It's so bizarre that camera manufacturers never figured out
| that the camera should be treated primarily as a smartphone
| peripheral. When I take a picture on the compact camera it
| should automatically sync to the smart phone camera roll with
| geotagging. All of the camera's settings and shutter should be
| controllable through a smartphone app. This lack of integration
| was a real failure of vision by camera manufacturers.
| adwww wrote:
| Fuji have all of that functionality over WiFi on their X
| series.
|
| ...Only, as the parent comment says, it barely works, and the
| UI to get to it is awful, and the WiFi transfer speed is
| ridiculously slow.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| My 2016 Olympus does this, too. The controls are
| surprisingly good (you get cable-less bulb mode), and you
| can even get the live image on the phone while shooting.
| There is some lag, though, so it won't work for moving
| subjects.
|
| Photo transfer is ridiculously slow, though.
| yafbum wrote:
| The technology lifecycles haven't lined up. 10-15 years ago
| there were phenomenal DSLRs coming out, and honestly there
| weren't any good enough smartphones worth connecting them to.
| The iPhone App Store was in its infancy (it's only 14 years
| old); there weren't / still aren't any good, widespread
| standards for fast, personal-area-network data transfers of
| photos. Smartphones didn't have a lot of memory either: the
| iPhone 4 baseline model in 2010 ran with 4 GB, and the top of
| the line was 32 GB, with no slots for memory swapping - not
| something you can sync a lot of photos to at all.
|
| I don't think, 10 years ago, camera manufacturers could've
| adopted a meaningful integration strategy. They could perhaps
| have entered the fray as Android phone makers and try to
| solve it, but it would've been a bigger jump than just
| integrating.
| netsharc wrote:
| Sounds like you're complaining about a lack of vision because
| they couldn't mix technologies from different years, or have
| the budget to make a phone as well as a camera...
|
| But it does seem to be a clever idea, I'm imagining a phone
| that has surface contacts on its back, and a Go-Pro-sized
| camera module that you can attach to the phone (with precise
| magnets, so the surface contacts on both devices would
| connect both devices electronically as well) and be
| recognized as a peripheral for the phone.
|
| But I guess if already have a pro camera, you don't want to
| need to slap your phone on it to get it to work.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| That exists, the Sony QX100. Nobody bought it because it's
| not quite as good as a real camera and it's something you
| have to remember to bring with you.
| netsharc wrote:
| The whole lag and connection issue shown in the video is
| probably why grandparent comment's idea hasn't taken off.
| Since no phones have surface contacts, maybe if the lens
| had a USB-C connection it'd be a lot better (but no
| closed-garden iPhone support, obviously).
| hef19898 wrote:
| In case of DSLRs, and their mirrorless offspring, the purpose
| and the target audience's need is to capture light as good as
| possible, using a combination of precision electronics,
| optics and mechanics, to be edited later. They threw in some
| basic editing functionalities, various image formats and what
| not, but those are not mission critical.
|
| Smartphones are lacking the optics, sensors and some other
| things a real camera has. As a result, they are still a far
| cry from replacing mid-level and up cameras. Smartphones, as
| the article points out, are perfectly sufficient for the
| compact and point-and-shoot market, and as a result killed it
| / took it over.
|
| And heck, the ergonomics of Nikon blow any smartphone / app
| way of setting up a camera out of the water ever since before
| Nikon got serious about DSLRs.
| derefr wrote:
| I don't understand why phone manufacturers don't just get into
| the camera business, then. They certainly all seem to love
| making phones that brag about having large sensors and fancy
| (tiny) lenses... so why not just go one step further and make a
| "phone" that only runs a camera app, with a lens mount rather
| than a fixed lens, hardware mode switches, and a tripod screw
| mount?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Phone cameras don't have sensors or optics at a quality
| comparable to basic point and shoots. They have to fit into a
| tiny space and performance is necessarily compromised.
| They're making it all up on software processing.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The camera market small, quite crowded (before Sony kind of
| created the mirrorless market the only serious contenders
| were Nikon and Canon, now you got Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji
| and Panasonic), smartphones already killed the entry level
| and compact camera markets and the tech is quite different
| from smartphone cameras.
| acchow wrote:
| I got a full frame Nikon Z5. I use it with a f2.8 lens. In low
| light, the output from my iPhone 14 pro looks much better.
| Especially on video. Haha
| everyone wrote:
| Sure, but I'd say the same about smartphone manufacturers.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Camera manufacturers are very capabale of making _hardware_ ,
| incl. optics, that run sophisticated embedded software to
| _take_ pictures. For editing, go to Adobe or one of the
| alternatives. Different use cases, different products,
| different markets. And not everything in the world can be
| solved by some consumer grade app.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I could not disagree more.
|
| Professional photographers require good reliable
| connectivity. Nikon cameras are extremely clunky in this
| regard.
|
| Similarly, their menu system is atrocious. I am not saying
| this as somebody who looked at a camera once and said "this
| is too hard". I ran a photo business from 2008 to 2018, read
| all the manuals intimately and worked with Nikon cameras
| daily, and came to it from techie nerd perspective and knew
| what every button option and mode does in intricate detail.
|
| "Great hardware, horrible software" is well understood state
| of camera business last 2 decades.
|
| I now have two young kids. I have 4 dslr and two mirrorless
| cameras at home... And take kids photos with my cell -
| because it's convenient accessible and fast to transmit. Why
| can't I have an efficient sharing work flow with my $3000
| camera? Because they make sucky closed systems and refuse to
| change open or learn.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Studio photographers need connectivity, everyone else needs
| two fast storage card slots. And your comment is honestly
| the first time I hear anybody claim Nikons menu system is
| "bad", especially with all those custom menus and buttons
| one can set-up to automated basically everything.
|
| I never worked with Sony or Canon, so I cannot say how that
| compares.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>Studio photographers need connectivity, everyone else
| needs two fast storage card slots.
|
| That is, at best, myopic.
|
| Sports photographers need fast connectivity far more than
| studio photographers. Their whole business is to take,
| select, and send shots out as fast as possible.
|
| News coverage needs fast connectivity.
|
| Think even wedding photography - the ability to share
| photos to social networks right after ceremony, or
| display the couple shots during dinner is a professional
| USP. Instead, I'm juggling card reader, with my "two fast
| cards" and laptop and lightroom on my lap during
| speeches.
|
| Just about every type of photography, professional or
| consumer, benefits from fast and easy connectivity.
|
| >>And your comment is honestly the first time I hear
| anybody claim Nikons menu system is "bad"
|
| Possible. we simply have different colleagues and
| frequent different forums then :).
|
| Their menu system is powerful but poorly designed. Why
| are there two different types of setting banks? Why
| aren't there hardware buttons to select them? Why is some
| stuff unDer shooting but other under 6 layers of custom
| setting menu? Which is different than setup menu? Why is
| AF ON setup not under "controls"? And myriad other
| idiosyncracies.
|
| Just because you're used to it (as am I!) does not make
| it _good_.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Damn, forgot about sports... Funny so that theose pros
| seem to be really happy with their 6k camera bodies
| paired with 10k+ optics, one would assume that if
| connectivity would be a killer feature, like AF back when
| Canon ate the sports market from Nikon, someone between
| Nikon, Canon, Sony or Fuji would implement it. The money
| is definitely there.
| buildbot wrote:
| Top end Sports focused bodies typically have Ethernet for
| fast as possible transfers.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I 100% agree with that assumption. But sport pro
| photographers I follow haven't stopped complaining about
| connectivity and work flow for a decade (while being as
| you say happy with hardware and optics). Granted it's a
| small sample, as sport photography isn't my thing. :-/
|
| And again, for myself, I'm in a "shut up and take my
| money" for camera that would allow me to seemlessly
| capture and share photography. As you say, that's money
| in the table. And I'm not alone in my group of friends
| and colleagues.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Studio photographers can at least shoot 'tethered' to a
| computer by cable more easily than others.
| jjav wrote:
| > And take kids photos with my cell
|
| My conclusion is the exact opposite. Cellphone cameras are
| so incredibly slow (measuring time from moment of picking
| up phone to photo having being taken) that I can't imagine
| using it for any kid photos since the phtographable moment
| usually lasts a few seconds, they aren't posing.
|
| I keep my older Nikon DSLR cameras around the house so one
| is usually within easy reach so I can snap a photo in less
| than a second when a cute kid moment is happening.
|
| As to the Nikon menus, atrocious is not a word I could use.
| Sure it's always possible to nitpick something I'd do
| differently but they work just fine. More importantly,
| after initial setup it's not something I use much since
| everything is controlled by the physical buttons and that's
| the overwhelming win of a DSLR over a phone (and photo
| quality of course).
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| DSLR powered up has a time to shot similar to phone
| already on the camera screen.
|
| Either is adequate for casual photography.
|
| We don't have any cute kids, but I hike and wildlife
| shows up now and then. I hike with a bridge camera, not
| because it's any faster or more convenient than my phone,
| but because of the lens. I have an older flagship phone,
| I would say the image quality is as good, but I have yet
| to get a wildlife shot with it due to the lack of zoom
| range.
|
| My general experience is the harder the shot the more
| camera you need.
| jjav wrote:
| > DSLR powered up has a time to shot similar to phone
| already on the camera screen.
|
| But that's not a realistic comparison since the phone is
| almost certainly not on the camera screen if I wasn't
| expecting to take a photo and the phone is just sitting
| there on the table (or worse, pocket).
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I think we likely have a large area of agreement - in
| addition to perhaps slightly different personal
| preferences and use cases :)
|
| My Nikon cameras are setup the way I like them, so
| everything I need is indeed reachable by physical
| buttons. This is good - as I said, their menu is
| _powerful_. But! When I get a new Nikon camera, despite
| 15 years of experience... it 's a _pain_ to set it up how
| I want it, and I still chase settings around the menus.
| So I deem them powerful, but poorly designed.
|
| As to kids photos - it's all down to individual use
| cases, so lots of room for variation. For myself though,
| even though like yourself I literally have a DSLR ready
| to go on the shelf in the family room and on the TV stand
| in the living room... time to turn on cell and take a
| photo is far lower/faster then the time to grab the
| camera and shoot. Add to that, the time to then share
| that photo is literally 10 seconds via phone, vs
| realistically days to weeks via camera (by the time I
| bother taking the card out to the office, transferring
| photos, ingesting them, processing them, exporting, and
| then sharing). In majority of cases, DSLR would've taken
| a higher quality photos. In majority of cases, it doesn't
| matter.
|
| And then there are all the other cases - playing in
| backyard, going for a walk, run, adventure, guests,
| whatever. Phone is there, good enough (hasn't always been
| the case! In the Note 8 / S8 time, only a few years ago,
| phones were not good enough, and phones weren't fast
| enough - now they are! I don't need to log in or face
| scan the phone, there's a shortcut and a snappy app and
| fast focus), and it shares so quickly! That sharing is
| really the winning factor and why I'm peeved expensive
| cameras don't make it easy to share.
| tjr wrote:
| In most scenarios, I get far better pictures with my
| Canon DSLR than with my iPhone, yet most of my pictures
| for the past few years have been taken with my iPhone.
|
| But the big difference, for me, is, most of those
| pictures are quick pictures that I almost certainly never
| would have taken with my DSLR camera. I've got thousands
| of family pictures done on my phone that otherwise
| probably wouldn't have been taken at all.
|
| When I'm going somewhere or doing something that I know I
| deliberately want to have pictures of? I still haul
| around the DSLR. When I want pictures I could only get
| with a super-telephoto or ultra-wide lens? I still haul
| around the DSLR.
|
| I do feel that my iPhone has replaced any need for a
| cheap "compact camera", but I rarely used one after
| getting my (D)SLR cameras anyway. But I'm not sure that
| my iPhone has really taken away that much usage share
| from my DSLR. I just use it to take pictures that I
| wouldn't have gotten at all otherwise, which has turned
| out to be quite a few.
| D13Fd wrote:
| I mostly agree. I have three DSLRs and several very high-
| end lenses, but I take way more photos of my kids with my
| phone than with the DSLRs. The workflow for getting shots
| out of the phone is just so much better than the cameras,
| and the phone is always with me.
|
| This isn't an insurmountable problem. Some Nikon camera
| bodies have Wi-Fi. If they cared to they could make it much
| much easier to get photos off and process them. It's just
| not a focus of theirs.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah, I've got connectivity--and I never use it. I'm not
| shooting with a PC nearby, I'm bringing home a camera
| full of shots. And it's *far* faster to pop the card in
| my PC than transmit them.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| That's the thing. All my Nikon cameras have some sort of
| wifi or Bluetooth or nfc. All of it is a pain.
|
| I agree their hardware and optics are superb. I don't
| even begin to understand how their work flow or
| integration are anything but atrocious.
|
| They could make their integration software better or let
| others do it - but they don't!
| heather45879 wrote:
| I prefer manual buttons when taking photos the traditional
| way. Too many digital screens these days deviate from a good
| solid device that does a few things really well.
| bigyikes wrote:
| This is why I got a Fuji XT-30. It's got a physical control
| for everything. I don't have to use the menu unless I'm
| doing something unusual.
|
| Sadly, it doesn't seem like there are many cameras designed
| this way anymore.
| awestroke wrote:
| This has nothing to do with editing. Modern smartphones
| combine multiple pictures for each picture you take, and have
| very sophisticated demosaicing, noise reduction and color
| grading. No app needed.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| and lets talk about how increasingly out of touch photographers
| are about all of that!
|
| A whole decade of people in enthusiast photography communities
| collectively playing devil's advocate "why do you want that
| feature, whats a UI have to do with taking a photo, I never
| understood the point of a Live Photo, bluetooth? Thats what
| tethering and an external contraption is for...."
|
| meanwhile the rest of the world just turned around and walked
| away
| gumby wrote:
| This is a cultural issue: programming is a low status blue
| collar job in Japan, especially in existing industry. This is
| especially weird to me given the number of great Japanese
| computer scientists, but so it goes.
|
| One exception is the gaming industry: Sony Computer
| Entertainment in particular treats its developers similarly to
| the US (Ken Kutaragi drove this) while the rest of Sony follows
| the standard Japanese model. Bandai and Nintendo are similar,
| though not quite as much as Sony, and Sega a bit more
| traditional.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| This must explain Sony's crappy phone software.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I just except that if I buy a Sony camera, the software is
| going to suck. I have zero expectations, I know that
| sending photos to my phone is probably out of the question.
| chemmail wrote:
| Digital cameras is ALL about post processing. I used to have
| Minolta, Panasonic, Sony, and Canon point and shoots. No matter
| what, Canon pictures always come out much better out of the
| camera even if it has inferior lens, sensor, or is much older.
| Basically all sensors of Sony now, so the magic is all about
| the processing. The rest is really up to the photographer, that
| is where the art is.
| lettergram wrote:
| I think they're actually trying to solve different issues.
|
| Cameras are designed to capture & store the light in a way we
| can interpret later. They intentionally weren't designed to
| edit or interpret the light and make corrections.
|
| Smart phones automatically do interpret and "correct" images.
| This can lead to artificially created artifacts in the image
| files. Professional photographers will often prefer the raw
| because they can apply their own edits without said artifacts.
|
| Now sure, camera photos are good for 99% of people, 99% of the
| time. BUT because the software on cameras were never designed
| to do those corrections, they just don't. This makes night
| images worse, unless you decrease shutter speed.
|
| On a side note, it's this very fact that I find it difficult to
| accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if
| you're looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify /
| generate the fine detail.
| gruez wrote:
| >On a side note, it's this very fact that I find it difficult
| to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly,
| if you're looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify
| / generate the fine detail.
|
| Are there examples of this? The only example I can think of
| was an accusation a while ago that huawei phones were
| compositing a stock photo of the moon when taking moon
| pictures with their phones. They denied the accusation and it
| wasn't really clear whether it was actually happening or not.
| bombcar wrote:
| That Dallas plane crash recently had a new cell phone video
| surface where it is clear that the fighter started diving,
| but what is not clear is if there is a drone he was trying
| to avoid; and it's very possible that the apparent drone
| could also be a video artifact.
|
| And upscaling tools/etc introduce their own information,
| and may cause it to make something appear to be there that
| is actually just compression noise.
| brookst wrote:
| You're right that cameras never adapted to a world where
| users want cars, not faster horses.
|
| But I think you may be playing a bit loose with the ideas of
| evidence and details. Yes, smartphones "invent" details, but
| it's hard to imagine a scenario where those changes produce
| false evidence. You might find details of leaves rendered as
| watercolor brushstrokes; you won't find a suspect inserted
| into a scene.
|
| And remember that film annd magnetic tape cameras also invent
| details. All of that film grain that we find artistic is not
| really there. Should we also question what we see on those
| videos because they aren't pixel-perfect?
| fiedzia wrote:
| > Cameras are designed to capture & store the light in a way
| we can interpret later. They intentionally weren't designed
| to edit or interpret the light and make corrections.
|
| That's one thing, but still there are many features of the
| camera firmware that people want to have, and cameras failed
| to deliver. One of such thing was apps - Sony provided few in
| some of their camera, but next model removed them, because
| they couldn't implement that in a model-agnostic way. They
| just don't get software.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Depends on the market segment. People wanting apps on their
| cameras have very capabale smartphones now. People who want
| cameras, and not phones or computers one can use to take
| pictures with, have highly capable cameras without apps
| because they don't need nor want those software on camera.
| And guess what, photography is more popular than ever, and
| everyone is happy, including camera makers it seems.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Yeah, some camera menus suck.
|
| I'm a photographer and your comment made me laugh. Everyone in
| photo circles hates the Sony menus on their cameras because
| they're the worst.
|
| Canon, Panasonic, and Fuji have substantially better menu
| systems that we all far prefer.
|
| I find it funny your opinion has been informed by using the
| worst the camera sphere has to offer!
|
| That being said, these menus and UIs are aimed at pros who do
| nothing else but take photos. It's a coding IDE, not a simple
| text editor. It's going to be foreign to the casual user. That
| is by design.
|
| Also, the computational photography is a nuisance for our work.
| We want the LEAST edited photo file possible every time.
|
| I understand your lack of interest in editing, it's a chore
| that even we have to do, but it's also one of our power tools.
| We choose this, it is not a step backwards for us!
|
| It sounds like "professional" photography just isn't for you!
|
| However, before I start a bunch of arguments, I will say one
| thing. There is always room for improvement and they could
| likely do UX/UI analysis to further improve things. Though,
| from my use, I do find it to be very hardware focused which
| feels intuitive to me and those in my photo circles. I think
| it's the prerequisite of knowing shutter, ISO, and aperture as
| well as focus pulling concepts. That makes me "know what to
| look for".
| aimor wrote:
| Something that really frustrated me with my camera purchase
| was how the hard interface was used to upsell higher priced
| models. I bought a D3500, the low end of that sensor line,
| and there's a lot of options I have to change through the
| menu. Things like ISO or timer delay (I also have to re-set
| this for every shot), things that typically are accessed
| through a dedicated or function button. The crux of it is
| that moving to a more expensive model with those buttons is
| not a strict upgrade: the camera is larger, heavier, and has
| worse battery life.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Yeah, price segmenting and protecting higher end models is
| unfortunately common with most technology companies. It
| becomes particularly obvious when folks install magic
| lantern (or similar) on their camera bodies and see what
| unlocked firmware will make use of on their camera.
|
| I feel you, they definitely are out to make a profit and
| that definitely affects the value you get for your money
| (as opposed to what the hardware can actually do).
| spiderice wrote:
| (Canon user here) This response is very misleading. They're
| all bad. Other camera manufacturers are not substantially
| better than Sony in this regard. If Sony is a 1 and smart
| phones are a 10, the other camera manufacturers fall
| somewhere between 1 and 3. GPs comment is still spot.
|
| edit: Please indicate when you make edits to your comments.
| Your comment is now very different to the one I responded to.
| buildbot wrote:
| Hasselblad and Phase One have very simple and in my
| opinion, great UIs for their modern cameras.
| softfalcon wrote:
| I respect your opinion, but I have to disagree.
|
| I know this may sound "misleading" but I've only started
| "real" photography for a year or two and I find the Canon
| and Panasonic menus quite straightforward.
|
| I like the very hardware focused setup of DSLR/mirror-less
| cameras.
|
| I would also politely ask you don't call me "misleading"
| just because you disagree with my opinion. I'm not in here
| spreading misinformation to start polarizing discussions.
| I'm merely sharing my opinion.
| spiderice wrote:
| You completely changed the comment I responded to, so how
| can we have a discussion about whether or not your
| comment was misleading? So no, I'm going to stick with
| "misleading". And the fact that you changed the comment
| so drastically without telling anyone makes me think you
| found something wrong with your original comment too.
|
| And after you're edit, I'm going to add "condescending"
| to my description as well.
|
| > It sounds like "professional" photography just isn't
| for you!
|
| As if the only reason anyone would disagree with you is
| because they are casuals
| softfalcon wrote:
| > You completely changed the comment I responded to, so
| how can we have a discussion about whether or not your
| comment was misleading?
|
| I can understand your frustration. I was looking at other
| comments and felt I wanted to add further reasons why I
| feel the lack of usability (as they see it) is by design
| (which makes the UI good, not bad), and not because of
| laziness on behalf of camera manufacturers. I can see why
| you'd think I'm being misleading saying that camera UI's
| are good, also I still fully believe that a
| Canon/Pana/Fuji UI is substantially easier to navigate
| than a Sony one. This is only my personal experience
| though.
|
| > And after you're edit, I'm going to add "condescending"
| to my description as well.
|
| > As if the only reason anyone would disagree with you is
| because they are casuals
|
| I don't mean to say the only reason is because they are
| casual. I meant to point out that because they want
| computational photography and also hate editing raws,
| that using a dedicated camera is unlikely going to be fun
| for them. If you hate two of the most important parts of
| a photographers workflow to ensure the creative ability
| to edit a photo exactly the way you want, then yeah, that
| likely means you're a "casual".
|
| I can see how "bad UI" and "computational photography +
| editing RAW" was mixed up a bit though. I could have been
| clearer as to what specifically I was addressing, my
| apologies.
|
| To clarify on "casuals" though, I don't think being
| casual is bad. I'm a casual gamer, a casual driver, a
| casual cook. That isn't a negative either. It's just the
| truth, I admit I'm not a pro who dedicates the time
| necessary in those fields.
|
| When a casual person tells a pro "I hate the parts of
| your work that are necessary to do your job/hobby
| properly" and then further target their frustration at a
| UI that might be confusing to them by design (as its
| meant for a different type of user) seems like something
| other folks might find interesting. I see it as a very
| neat case of user targeting and persona analysis, similar
| to software.
|
| Canon/Nikon/Fuji/Sony are targeting photographers who
| want a dedicated OS with cutting edge hardware. If the
| hardware is good, they'll tolerate a stripped down,
| minimal camera OS for the sake of speed. It's similar to
| why you don't often see people driving a Formula 1 car on
| their daily commute.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| The latest Sony OS version is a tad better, but with enough
| practice you can get used to even the Sony menus. But yes.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's taken a few years but the menus on my Sony mirrorless
| have grown on me.
| gryf wrote:
| Nikon do very well with the Z series. I have a Z50 and it's
| closer to smartphone than DLSR. BT and WiFi work, decent
| quality viewfinder and articulated multi-touch screen. Also
| with the 16-50 lens it still goes in your pocket but is a
| proper camera.
|
| I disagree with smartphone quality. I have what could be
| considered a close to best of breed in quality iPhone 13 Pro
| and it's crap. It's a 2009 DSLR with three crap prime lenses
| stuck to it. It's mostly usable if you shoot ProRAW with it but
| the processed images (HEIC/JPEG) are really quite fucked up.
| mkaic wrote:
| Based on this thread and my own corroborating experiences, this
| feels like a field ripe for harvest--if anyone sold a camera
| with DSLR-grade optics and smartphone-grade usability and
| computational abilities, they'd be rich! For those in the know,
| what makes this more difficult than it seems? Why has nobody
| done this yet and what challenges are standing in the way?
| [deleted]
| hef19898 wrote:
| People needing and wanting DSLR grade optics, or mirroless as
| optics are more less the same thing, don't want or need shiny
| clicky smartphone apps. They need and want a professional
| tool that produces the least edited picture possible for
| post-processing later on. I wouldn't touch a camera that runs
| on Android with feet pole.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| This. I'm going to do any editing on my PC, not the
| picture-taker. Far bigger screen, far better control.
|
| The brains I want on the camera are for things that
| actually involve taking the shot. Give me intelligent
| capture of images for stacking. That entails two things:
|
| 1) HDR exposure. Point the camera at something, select HDR.
| It takes the exposure and examines the frame for any pixels
| near the extremes of the sensor. If there are any pixels
| near the top it reshoots exactly the same shot but with a
| shorter exposure time. Repeat until there are no really
| bright pixels. On the other end, if there are any really
| dim pixels reshoot with a slower exposure, repeat as
| needed.
|
| 2) Focus stacking. Manual focus, pick a point. Pick another
| point. The camera shoots a sequence of exposures moving the
| focus between the two points.
| binkHN wrote:
| I couldn't agree with this more. My small child received a
| compact camera as a gift. While it was a decent camera for a
| kid, she was very frustrated with how small the screen was and
| how non-intuitive it was to her compared to a smartphone. I too
| was very frustrated with it as it was slow, configuring the
| software on it was a massive pain and the process of quickly
| getting photos from the camera to a computer was laughable. So,
| what did I do? I put the camera on a shelf and bought my
| daughter an older smartphone. I proceeded to lock it down and
| remove everything I could with the exception of the camera and
| gallery app. My daughter is now happier than ever and taking
| non-stop pictures. She can also almost instantly see those
| pictures on a computer now too!
| esel2k wrote:
| Thanks for the hint. I was just about to buy an old compact
| camera for my daughter as she sees me taking pictures with my
| sony a7. Maybe you are right compact cameras are awful
| usability.
|
| What software did you use to lock it down? I have some older
| iPhones laying around.
| binkHN wrote:
| In contrast, my daughter sees us use our phones and uses
| them as well. I simply uninstalled all the apps I could and
| used the Google Family link stuff to lock it down further.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| You can get really creative with an Android phone.
| Install LineageOS with only the minimum gapps you want.
| Lock down everything, remove the play store, add Tasker
| to make the UI black&white when using apps other than
| photos/camera install a launcher like nova to further
| customize what apps are visible/easily accessible. You
| can even completely remove Chrome but still install the
| web browser component so things like your e-mail app work
| but you can't easily browse the web.
|
| I did this for a while a couple years back to discourage
| myself from spending so much time on my phone. Worked
| great and I would have kept it up if it were not for my
| wife constantly complaining that I couldn't look anything
| up or use Yelp or Messenger or... :D
| derefr wrote:
| The iOS built-in Parental Controls settings can be used to
| enable/disable access on an app-by-app basis; that's
| probably all that's needed here, since Camera + Photos by
| themselves don't give you any built-in web browsers.
| (Camera.app can scan QR codes, but it just pops a new tab
| in Safari when you click them, and Parental Controls would
| block that.)
| browningstreet wrote:
| I've long thought that should be a product. Especially if the
| shutter is a button.
|
| For kids, and for other kinds of camera products (ahem,
| GoPro).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Before there were smartphones it was universal that anything
| other than a PC had a cheaper CPU but it was maybe 1/3 the
| price for 1/30 the performance. That is, off-brand CPUs of
| all kinds were a terrible bargain.
|
| Then smartphones came along and there was another commodity
| platform that gave good price-performance. Around that time
| Intel also got interested in making low-performance parts
| with low sticker prices but that were highly uneconomical if
| performance or user experience mattered.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| What kind of smartphone did you use?
| binkHN wrote:
| Google Pixel phone
| FpUser wrote:
| >"I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW
| file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time."
|
| As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the
| difference is striking. And you do not even have to dick with
| raw files to see the difference. Plain JPEG coming out of my
| relatively ancient D800 puts best smartphone cam to shame. Size
| matters and full frame sensor vs one in smartphone are
| incomparable.
|
| That is not to say that smartphone can not take decent photos
| and in many cases what is being photographed matters way more
| than the picture quality as long as it is not atrocious.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| ...my relatively ancient D800...
|
| Launched five years ago at $3000.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And being sold used for 700-ish. Heck, an ancient D700
| beats any smartphone whatsoever at larger prints and
| screens. You do have to do some post-processing yourself,
| true. And you need proper optics, there is only so much you
| can crop out of 12 MP. Smartphones take great pictures, and
| I love the fact that it gets a lot more people into
| photography than back during the film days. making art more
| accessible can only be good. But let's not kid ourselves,
| the reason why smartphone photos do look so great is a ton
| of heavy automated post-processing in device. I'd prefer to
| have that same functionalities available as stand-alone
| post-processing software. Or not, I'm fine with darktable.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I think the problem is less about the number of
| megapixels and more about the size of the pixels (i.e.
| sensor) personally.
|
| Smartphones simply cannot resolve the same level of
| detail that a proper camera can, regardless of how many
| MP of resolution they provide. Computational AI helps a
| bit, but...
| gsu2 wrote:
| Launched ten years ago:
| https://www.dpreview.com/products/nikon/slrs/nikon_d800
|
| Currently available for ~$600: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.h
| tml?&_nkw=nikon+d800&LH_Sold=1&L...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I've had mine since 2012.
| [deleted]
| jve wrote:
| > As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the
| difference is striking
|
| I hope I'll view photos on 4K someday...
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I've noticed recently that a lot of smartphone cameras are
| doing a lot of heavy software upscaling and smoothing that
| erases details worse than simply low resolution. Everything
| is starting to look airbrushed. Having a real lens to do a
| lot of the optical heavy lifting and letting the sensor sense
| makes a huge difference if you really care about detail.
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| Yes, and this means that everything you shoot with (say) an
| iPhone tends to look the same. The camera has a very well
| curated set of opinions on color science etc that works
| really well for most people, but it enforces a look and
| once you try and wander out of that it stops being an
| effective instrument for looking at the world. (Yes, ProRAW
| helps a bit, but nothing beats real lenses on a big sensor
| for having your own control over image creation.)
|
| That said, if you're just taking snaps to share with
| friends I don't see why you'd care about any of that : )
| pornel wrote:
| I'd be nice to have normal-sized lens, but it's hard to
| justify lugging them when the rest of the camera is so
| primitive.
|
| Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a
| shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all
| the time) and have slower autofocus. May screw up exposure.
| It's harder to check the photos. Extra steps are needed to
| get the photos out of the camera. And it annoys me to no end
| that my dumb camera can't automatically adjust its clock and
| the timezone.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| You don't have to cart around a big-ass DSLR with multi-
| pound lenses. My pen-f (2016) runs circles around an iphone
| pro, and it's pretty small and light for a "real" camera
| (it can fit in my coat pocket).
|
| > Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to
| take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them
| on all the time) and have slower autofocus.
|
| This is not true, especially if we're talking about DSLRs
| (as opposed to mirrorless). I used to have a Canon 40D. I
| never turned it off. It would stay "on" in the bag for
| however long I didn't use it. It consumed next to nothing
| when in "sleep" mode, but came out of it ready to shoot at
| the touch of a button. Autofocus was plenty fast, too.
| Ditto for a friend's Sony A700 (same vintage APS-C DSLR). I
| understand current mirrorless cameras have much better
| autofocus, even the mid-range ones.
|
| Even my pen-f (mirrorless) wakes up or turns on much
| quicker than you can slide around your finger on an iphone.
| Autofocus isn't great in low-light, though.
| hef19898 wrote:
| You never touched a real camera, did you? AF speed depends
| on the lense, older ones with a screw drive AF are slower
| than newer ones where the AF motor is in the lens. Camera
| AF speed is incredible so, starting with mid-level cameras,
| let alone to speak of the more pro-grade stuff. And those
| cameras are ready to shoot faster from fully of than it
| takes to get them from holding them to your side to your
| eye. Definitely faster than getting a smartphone camera
| ready.
| jjav wrote:
| > Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to
| take a shot
|
| What? If you set up a camera and a phone on the table and
| do a timed run from the moment of reaching out and grabbing
| it to having a well-focused image taken, the camera will
| win 100% of the time. Phones with their touch screen and
| laggy UI are incredibly slow in comparison.
|
| > or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the
| time
|
| The exact opposite. A camera will last for months on a
| single charge if not heavily used.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to
| take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them
| on all the time) and have slower autofocus.
|
| This is definitely not true. Cameras may take slightly
| longer to start than a phone takes to turn its screen on,
| but the same amount of time (or quicker) to get to
| "shooting a photo." (Yes, even with shortcuts like double-
| tap the power button on a phone.)
|
| The Ricoh GR III is ready to shoot in 0.7 seconds, and that
| includes extending a retracted lens barrel. And this is a
| pocketable camera.
|
| Fast AF on a phone is mostly due to the fact that they
| usually use very wide-angle lenses. There's a wider range
| of acceptable focus. Newer lenses and cameras (i.e. the
| last 5-7 years) on a DSLR are still way faster.
| jjav wrote:
| > As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the
| difference is striking.
|
| Exactly. Or when you print them out.
|
| On the wall here I have a printed photo about 4ft wide, taken
| from a cropped section of a photo (not even the full frame)
| and it looks stunning. And this isn't even from a newer pro
| camera, it was taken with a ~15 year old Nikon D40.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos
| and videos on their large 4k monitors. That's an enthusiast
| niche at best. That alone a market sustaining a large
| multinational co does not make.
|
| Sensibly, workflows optimize for the smartphone consumption
| use case.
|
| And yes, that hurts as photographers who obsessed over
| sharpness and pixel-level fidelity since the invention of
| digital cameras, but that just doesn't seem to be where the
| zeitgeist is at anymore. People never really cared in the
| first place.
|
| It's similar to how music producers obsess over whether a
| particular synth sound was made with analog gear or was a
| "cheap digital knockoff". The listener never cared in the
| first place. They just want to be moved wherever it is that
| they are, which happens to be on the phone 99% of the time in
| photography.
| FpUser wrote:
| >The issue is that the average person doesn't consume
| photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. That's an
| enthusiast niche at best."
|
| Maybe. I do not care. I only use phone as to call, GPS,
| controlling some gadgets, take a pic and that is it. I do
| the rest on PC on big screens.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > The issue is that the average person doesn't consume
| photos and videos on their large 4k monitors.
|
| If you want to further process the image you want the best
| quality input you can get. Think digitally
| zooming/reframing, or choosing from a bigger dynamic range
| to use the colors you prefer. In a lower quality input you
| might be stuck with whatever photo you took, while the
| high-quality input gives you more information to correct
| the picture, even if the end resolution ends up being the
| same.
|
| P.S. Good printed photos also have more definition that
| most monitors (idk if 4k, but I believe comparable), for
| products like printed wedding photos.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| When you edit or crop you lose information. It's good to
| start with extra.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yeah, and the market / use case for "serious" cameras is
| dwindling, too. I can see a time in the near future where only
| the most serious hobbyists and pros use a "real" camera.
| afavour wrote:
| I miss my old DSLR but yeah, it's too much to carry around. I
| wonder if there's a market for some kind of "clip-on" DSLR that
| sits on top of your phone, uses the touchscreen etc for
| interface, Wi-Fi direct for communication (perhaps?)
|
| I have to assume there's a good reason to not have done this.
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm surprised Apple hasn't decided to kill the dslr and
| mirrorless market with something like that.
| sandis wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSC-QX100 (though technically not
| DSLR)
| afavour wrote:
| Huh! Who knew. I kind of want one, though looking at some
| reviews it seems software is the big downside and I can't
| imagine a nearly ten year old iOS app is going to look much
| better today.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| FYI: Story from August
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related conversation a month ago:
|
| _The changing fortunes of Japanese camera manufacturers_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33328693
| softwaredoug wrote:
| There is a similar thing happening with car stereos.
|
| People just want Apple CarPlay. Not your manufacturers crappy
| radio UX.
|
| Quality software is a discipline not every company gets right.
| And TBH, you see the difference between those that focus on
| software and UX as a craft, and those that don't.
| ExMachina73 wrote:
| This is the right move by camera manufacturers. The low end,
| compact camera has been replaced by people's smart phones and
| computational photography. All the innovation in the small
| compact market is on phone cameras. It's just not compelling or
| fiscally responsible to continue to spend money on R&D and
| manufacturing in the low-end compact market if you're one of the
| large camera companies. The money to be made is in the
| professional market. Higher margins, more expensive camera bodies
| and glass. Feels similar to what Ford did when they stopped
| making sedans/compacts and went full on trucks, crossovers and
| SUVs. The only real money maker that I've read about on the low
| end is the Instax line by Fujifilm, which fills that nostalgic,
| film based approach.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| Sony hasn't updated their compact lineup in years, which is sad
| because many people love those cameras. Especially the RX and HX
| series. I always carry a compact with me.
| wkjagt wrote:
| Ricoh is still making their wonderful GR series. I have a GRiii
| which I love.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the ability to use my off camera flashes
| from my smart phone. That is the missing piece for those amazing
| camera portraits sculpted from light when you don't have the
| right natural environment.
| standardly wrote:
| Camera manufacturers should've built a compact camera that fits
| in the pocket, has a digital screen, and can make phone calls /
| send messages. They would've hit it big.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I do know a number of people that went out and bought one
| specifically to use as a webcam. And they work amazingly well for
| that. Expensive, but you can't beat the quality.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Canon recently even started marketing some cameras as "for
| streamers" with integrated direct-to-youtube streaming.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I suggested a few weeks ago on this forum that DSLRs should
| strive to be like smartphones with better lenses. Make real
| computational photography accessible on-device like a phone
| would, with its power and its UI, but with programmable hardware
| buttons and DSLR performance.
|
| I have an Olympus E-M10 Mark III (terrible naming) and while the
| photos are obviously of a higher quality than a camera phone,
| camera phones can do wonders with photo stacking and HDR/night
| shots that would be even more amazing with a proper camera.
|
| "But that's what photoshop is for", the naysayers say. I say,
| bollocks to that. If a budget smartphone can make these
| filters/optimizations accessible to the masses, then a DSLR can
| as well. Besides, they already try. My Olympus has an art filter
| menu, a "scenes" menu and so on, but they are opaque in what they
| are actually doing, not very flexible in adjustment, and overall
| can't achieve the customization of a smartphone.
|
| If Sony et al bolted a detachable lens to an android device with
| a few programmable knobs and buttons, with wifi (not hotspot
| based) for instant uploading, I daresay it would be a hit.
| happytiger wrote:
| In other news, software continues to eat the world.
|
| Join us for our panel discussion later where we will cover
| software eating everything.
| victorvosk wrote:
| I just got a Pixel 7 Pro. My photos look obscenely good. The new
| macro lens let me take a picture of a fly up close and you could
| see the individual hairs on its abdomen. It looks like it came
| out of a national geographic. I can't believe "normal" cameras
| even still exist for most photography.
| dbrgn wrote:
| Would you mind sharing such a photo? I'm interested in how good
| it looks on a large computer screen.
| victorvosk wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/GPShi1r
|
| First try and the lighting wasn't great.
| medo-bear wrote:
| also in news today, automobiles wiped out 99.99% of horse
| carriage market
| cooperadymas wrote:
| The "compact" camera market is a lie.
|
| I have wanted to get rid of my smartphone and downgrade to
| something smaller and simpler. The one thing tying me to it is
| the camera. I use it on a regular basis to take quick photos of
| family or events around me.
|
| If there were a compact camera on the market, I would happily
| carry around a phone and a separate camera in my pocket.
|
| No such thing exists. Every so called "compact" camera is
| significantly larger, bulkier, and heavier than any phone on the
| market. I get it, they have optical zoom lenses and that takes up
| space. Most of the time I don't want that but there are no
| options for it. But even the body of the camera without the zoom
| lens is significantly thicker than a phone.
|
| Near as I can tell, the dimensions of the compact camera have not
| changed since the last time I bought one, which would have been
| around 2006. The one thing I can say is that camera still works
| just as well as it did 16 years ago. Maybe new ones take better
| photos, but in the meantime, I've gone through probably a dozen
| different cell phones.
|
| Sure would be nice to have a truly compact option though.
| paulmd wrote:
| for context though this is a market that mostly collapsed like 15
| years ago, and smartphones were actually the _second death_ of
| the market.
|
| When you hear "compact camera" think about like the Canon A40 and
| such - early 2000s. By the late 2000s they were already
| completely commodified with no margin left and the profit had
| moved to DSLRs (and later MILCs etc).
|
| There was and is still a niche for "premium" compact cameras
| (Nikon coolpix, Ricoh GR, Fuji X100, etc) but the commodity
| market didn't get anything out of a standalone camera that
| couldn't be done better by something else, and if you're already
| carrying a smartphone _anyway_...
| ballenf wrote:
| Interesting how it's an accelerated version of the horse/mule
| population decline after introduction of the cars/tractors/etc.
|
| At its peak in 1920 the total horse+mule population was ~25M when
| the US population was 102M. Or 1 horse for every 4 people.
|
| Although counts vary, there are 9M horses in the US today which
| has 330M people. Or 1 horse for every 36 people.
|
| (population counts from US census)
|
| Horse numbers from:
| http://www.cowboyway.com/What/HorsePopulation.htm
| codedokode wrote:
| 9M is a lot. I wonder what do all those horses do?
| duckmysick wrote:
| The source of the linked graph goes into more details on page
| 19 (PDF, 2003 http://www.americanequestrian.com/pdf/US-
| Equine-Demographics...).
|
| Recreation 42%, Showing/Competition 29%, Other 19%, Racing
| 9%.
|
| The recreation category itself is broad:
|
| > One woman's recreational horse is in the trailer and on the
| go to a trail ride here, an overnight camping adventure
| there, and a special training clinic way out there, week in
| and week out. Another woman's recreational horse is one of a
| half dozen at her home, and she might get a saddle on and
| ride over to the neighbor's place a couple of times a month,
| if she is lucky enough to squeeze in some time for it.
|
| > With horses, recreation can be just about anything you
| please, from primping and pampering to roughing it in the
| outback; from a zen-like search for the perfect circle or
| half pass (a lateral movement in dressage) to the discovery
| of inner peace as a volunteer in a therapeutic-riding
| program. The joiners have plenty of equestrian organizations,
| local to national, to add some socializing to the picture.
| The reclusive types can ride off into the sunset on solitary
| trails.
|
| > That is a major appeal of horse involvement--something for
| everyone. And for a surprising number, the something is
| tending to their horses at least twice daily, forking manure
| and heaving hay bales; worrying over ailments, injuries, and
| feeds bills 365 days of the year; and having little time left
| over to actually use the animals. They do this year after
| year, and, when asked what they do with their horses, the
| answer is "just for pleasure."
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I would bet largely recreational use. See a lot of horses in
| Portola Valley and Woodside, and a few scattered in rural
| areas between San Jose and San Francisco, though it tends to
| larger numbers on a few plots and a couple of ranches
| specializing in either equestrian training or long time horse
| housing, and one never sees a single horse on smaller plots,
| most people who have enough land for one horse will have
| multiple for companionship to each other. This was also true
| when I lived outside of Houston a few decades ago. Working
| horses are pretty rare except for carriages meant for
| tourists and law enforcement anywhere close to urban or
| suburban areas.
| tqi wrote:
| I remember thinking the Sony Ericsson w810i was the perfect phone
| + camera form factor. Of course I also invested heavily in
| MiniDisc so clearly my sense for these things was not good...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| They certainly did a number on the PDA marker.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I have a Canon 5D Mk III, 5-6 lenses, maybe 4 flashes, umbrellas,
| stands, a background, etc..
|
| I gotta sell it but keep procrastinating.. 99% of the time these
| days I just want to not carry stuff and use my iPhone 13 Pro,
| because 99% of the time nobody cares if I use the fancy camera
| stuff and the hassle and workflow is a PITA compared to just
| using the phone. My previous phone was an iPhone 8+ and it kind
| of started this and then the 13 Pro really really kicked it into
| gear with having the 3 lenses. It got hard for me to justify not
| shooting RAW if I was using all that expensive gear, and then I'd
| have to sit there wasting time "processing" files to justify
| using all the fancy gear. I came to really hate that time in
| front of the computer. (This is after about 15 years of doing
| it.)
|
| Actual compact cameras forget about it.. the last few generations
| I had weren't even as good as the phones, because they almost
| always had crappy zoom lenses. 3 Prime lenses on a good
| smartphone beats almost all the zoom compact cameras until the
| zoom compact cameras get annoying to carry.
|
| The phone cameras also have a massive advantage that people are
| not threatened by them and act more naturally. If you mostly
| value your pictures of people in your life this is a big
| advantage.
|
| For me some of this is the ebb and flow of hobbies, but I really
| don't care about the snob value of the image attributes only
| possible with a DSLR/MILC anymore.
|
| Sony/Minolta one this game by getting their camera tech/products
| into most of the smartphones on the market. Kudos to Sony.
| bombcar wrote:
| One advantage I've noticed to the stereotypical "photographer
| loaded with cameras" gets people to pose/realize there's a
| photo being taken. They don't react to a phone in the same way.
|
| That and actual lighting from real flashes (I'm talking
| multiple flash sources, etc) seem to be the main thing that
| "real" cameras have left.
| bitL wrote:
| This is bad for privacy. Now every single photo a person takes
| will be stored on someone's cloud forever and potentially used by
| someone against folks threatening their mafia.
| Markoff wrote:
| Nobody force you to use cloud features. None of photos my wife
| or me take are stored in the cloud.
| bitL wrote:
| Are you really sure about it? Can you be really sure about it
| being always true?
| gruez wrote:
| Okay but surely not everyone's picture? Not everyone has cloud
| photos enabled.
| andai wrote:
| Apple is already scanning photos on-device for illegal
| content.
|
| Huawei is apparently deleting footage of protests from
| people's phones too.
| bitL wrote:
| My iPhone "magically" turns on Cloud Photos from time to time
| and then complains about running out of space. The same
| approach as with Windows 10/11 "magically" turning on anti-
| privacy options after upgrades etc. Not to mention some apps
| pushing all pictures to Cloud by default.
| jollyllama wrote:
| For most of the last several years, I carried a flip phone, and
| I'd keep a compact camera in my bag. I just don't like smartphone
| interfaces in general. I really like camera interfaces; once you
| get good with it, it's very quick to set exposure, ISO, etc for
| exactly the kind of look you want. I also like being able to
| access files on my computer for editing, processing, and backup
| just via an SD card rather than having to send them through some
| 3rd party service.
|
| Generally, I agree though, that software for cameras is pretty
| poor compared to what it could be.
| psychomugs wrote:
| The Ricoh GR and the sprinkled offerings from Fujifilm have been
| the only worthwhile point-and-shoots for a long time. I still
| take my Fuji XF10 with me everywhere because it's unobtrusive and
| will archive better than anything a small-sensor phone could.
| chobytes wrote:
| I got a tiny Fuji mirrorless for my "best camera is the one
| with you" checkbox too. Next time I catch gear acquisition
| fever though, I might have to get one of those little Ricohs.
| psychomugs wrote:
| The list of Fujis I've owned/sold/kept:
|
| - 5 X100s (2x T, 2x F, currently own a V)
|
| - 2 X-Pro2s (one went to my younger cousin)
|
| - 1 X-T2 (upgraded to an X-T3)
|
| - 2 X70s (sold them - too heavy for a point-and-shoot,
| fantastic otherwise)
|
| - 1 XF10
|
| I don't think I will ever not have an X100. The XF10 on the
| other hand is always with me. In a second I can go from
| single-point auto-focus and -exposure to zone-focused slow-
| sync flash; the only other camera that's this usable, from my
| experience, is the Ricoh GR II. The immediacy of physical
| buttons and controls is something phones have yet to
| replicate.
| elif wrote:
| I bought one recently because when I'm snorkeling etc. I don't
| want to risk losing something with access to my accounts, auth
| etc.
|
| I really think we need to start separating our crucial digital
| identity/value from the thing we use to translate a menu or call
| 911 in an emergency or hand to a stranger to take a photo. Right
| now I use 2 phones to keep I kinda separated.
| brookst wrote:
| It's a good point but probably a temporary one. The Apple
| ecosystem already treats all devices as equal; if I lose my
| phone I can do 2FA or call 911 from Watch or iPad at least,
| typically laptop as well. There's nothing special about the
| phone device.
|
| Google, Samsung, and others are catching up there and it won't
| be long before the same is true, though they will probably have
| a greater proportion of devices without cell modems.
| nszceta wrote:
| Their atrocious firmwares are responsible for some part of this.
| These devices poorly integrate into the lifestyle and workflows
| of smartphone users.
| joos3 wrote:
| Agree. Fujifilm seems to be the only camera manufacturer really
| focused on firmware & UX design. They have almost Apple-like
| seamless usability and tend to keep updates rolling for 5 to 10
| years.
| artemonster wrote:
| Yeah even ,,high end" dslr have serious issues reliably
| connecting to a smartphone to offload photos or apply settings
| as a remote. Also naming your lineups like HgZ150Hz-G3XL and
| make many of them with tiny differences doesnt help. As if
| these dinosaurs cant adapt and have to die? Anyways...
| nszceta wrote:
| The real tragedy is that these manufacturers have excellent
| optics and image processing technology but it's all for
| nothing if people don't want or can't use it.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > naming your lineups like HgZ150Hz-G3XL
|
| Panasonic LUMIX, is that you?
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| Just like Tinder wiped out getting to know someone and taking
| them on a romantic date. Smartphones are perfect for taking a
| selfie against a landmark and sharing it on Facebook for likes.
| Just don't expect your grandchildren to hang it above a
| mantelpiece. For that you need at least a viewfinder/rangefinder
| to compose a good shot and a physical shutter button to take a
| bunch quickly and choose the best one later. Computational logic
| will also only get you so far without ability to gather and
| control sufficient light.
|
| At this rate, I see actual silver prints making a comeback for
| the same reason as vinyl. At least we know they will last a
| century while your selfie will be forgotten as soon as your
| "friend" starts a political argument on your Facebook feed.
| dnadler wrote:
| > for that you need at least a viewfinder/rangefinder to
| compose a good shot and a physical shutter button to take a
| bunch quickly and choose the best one later.
|
| I don't know if I agree with this. I've taken some great
| pictures on vacations, and with friends and family using my
| phone. I have some of these framed around the house.
|
| I don't think the average person is capable (or really cares
| that much) about getting the perfect composition. For these
| people, a phone is a great substitue to a compact camera that
| would have been used 10+ years ago.
|
| Oh, also most phones have a burst mode that works great.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Amusingly, Android project started as a camera OS.
| irrational wrote:
| I honestly thought that the price for mirrorless cameras would
| drop as demand dropped, but that didn't happen.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| It seems like the big camera manufacturers have accepted that
| they will not be going after consumers anymore. They concede.
|
| I wonder if there is still room on the edges of the prosumer
| market though to push more people into the big dedicated cameras.
|
| Could a better camera OS, more digital photography, and quicker,
| sexier results, along the lines of what we see on iOS, combined
| with amazing sensors and glass, convert some people over?
|
| Or are those numbers too small to be worth a try?
| gernb wrote:
| I'd be curious to know what other markets have diminished because
| of smartphones
|
| * Flashlights? Sure a smart phone is not a good flash light but
| it's often enough
|
| * paper notebooks? I'm just guessing the majority of people keep
| notes on their phone, probably cloud backed so they can access
| them on their tablets/notebooks/phones
|
| * video cameras? The article was about compact cameras but I have
| to imagine no one buys a video camera anymore
|
| * mp3 players
|
| * calculators
|
| what else?
| rexreed wrote:
| GPS devices, definitely
| vlad wrote:
| Newspapers, magazines, newsletters, televisions, audio
| recorders, photo albums, pens and pencils, paperclips,
| staplers, stationary, scissors, stickers, ink stamps, software
| and video game manuals.
|
| Maybe less need for mirrors, lint rollers, and large make-up
| kits with similar colors (maybe it's easier to adjust the tint
| in the photo?).
| jamesliudotcc wrote:
| The astonishing thing is, compact cameras have 3% market share
| remaining.
| sgerenser wrote:
| It also replaced 13 of the 15 items on this radio shack ad from
| 1991: https://www.trendingbuffalo.com/life/uncle-steves-
| buffalo/ev... (one of which is indeed a compact camera)
| neallindsay wrote:
| Even one of the surviving two, a radar scanner to detect speed
| traps, is in danger. Apple Maps (and I think Google Maps as
| well) will tell you of upcoming speed traps as long as other
| people have reported them.
| throw0101a wrote:
| This ad is some of my go to examples of _de_ flation: getting
| more goods/services for the same amount of money.
|
| That US$1600 Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard
| drive, and supported 640x200x16 resolution (720x350 mode for
| monochrome monitors):
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T...
|
| What kind of computer can you get nowadays for $1600?
|
| Barry Ritholtz's take is also interesting:
|
| > _But_ In _flation is not inevitable. There are numerous
| countervailing forces that have been at work for much of the
| past 50 years. The three big Deflation drivers: 1)_ Technology,
| _which creates massive economies of scale, especially in
| digital products (e.g., Software); 2)_ Robotics /Automation,
| _which efficiently create more physical goods at lower prices;
| and 3)_ Globalization _and Labor Arbitrage, which sends work to
| lower cost regions, making goods and services less expensive._
|
| * https://ritholtz.com/2021/02/stop-stressing-about-inflation/
| rob74 wrote:
| > _AM /FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone_
|
| Only if you squint and accept streaming and/or webradio as a
| replacement for "real" AM/FM radio. Funnily enough the
| ubiquitous Qualcomm chipsets already include a radio receiver,
| but most manufacturers don't activate it...
| ravoori wrote:
| Indeed. And one of the reasons I'm clinging on to the
| venerable LG V35
| WithinReason wrote:
| Very cheap phones still often have FM receivers, but as a
| phone gets more expensive features get removed: No radio,
| no SD card slot.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Most chipsets have the FM receiver. Most do not bother to
| hook up the antenna. As it would be one more thing for
| them to support and test.
| ilyt wrote:
| I guess just not used enough to bother ? I had that feature
| enabled in custom firmware but I don't think I ever actually
| used it outside of "oh, that's neat" testing.
| rob74 wrote:
| Either that, or you could lend credence to conspiracy
| theories like "providers want you to use up your data
| package faster, so you have to stream everything"
| kuschku wrote:
| Motorola still supports it, Nokia still supports it, Huawei
| and Xiaomi still support it. Just like Dual-SIM or microSD
| slot or 3.5mm jack.
|
| It's paradoxical how "flagship" devices have less features
| for more money.
| brk wrote:
| "Real" AM/FM radio has gong to shit in most markets anyways.
| Tons of advertising for traffic lawyers, diet pills, donut
| shops, etc. DJs talking too much, limited playlists.
|
| I think "AM/FM" radio is really just the equivalent of "free
| music you can stream".
| wbobeirne wrote:
| If you live in a town with a college, there may be a great
| student-run station. Personally KUTX and KOOP in Austin are
| great for me, and often get me to not stream from my phone.
| brk wrote:
| As I was writing that I was thinking how I missed being
| close to a college radio station, or a good indie
| station.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608892
|
| https://www.campus-fm.com/
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I think the lack of a headphone cable to act as an antenna
| may have something to do with that...
| [deleted]
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I have a mirrorless camera that I still use regularly. Three
| events in the last year have called my attention:
|
| * While I was taking pictures at night, two teenagers came to me
| and asked me to take a picture of them. Apparently one of them
| wanted to know what it would look like, since the fact that I had
| a camera clearly indicated that I knew what I was doing (it
| didn't). I didn't have the heart to tell him that it would look
| pretty much the same as the phone he definitely had in his
| pocket, but luckily he gave me a wrong Instagram address so that
| problem solved itself.
|
| * On that same night, one guy started yelling at me (pushing his
| head against mine) because he thought I had taken a picture of
| his car.
|
| * I was interviewed in a popular tourist destination, and the
| interviewer explicitly asked me about why I had a camera instead
| of a phone.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I have had similar issues. People get really uncomfortable
| around cameras but don't care about a phone.
|
| Weird.
|
| This, combined with the lack of geo tags, often wrong
| timestamps, slow startup time, and useless tiny batteries, I
| use my camera rarely.
| arrrg wrote:
| Slow startup times really shouldn't be an issue in this
| decade. This is something that was an issue maybe in the
| early 2000s.
|
| You will generally be able to turn on the camera more quickly
| than you can navigate to the camera app. (Physical switch
| plus sub one second time to turn on).
| ask_b123 wrote:
| Camera apps are accessible from the home screen though,
| right?
| irrational wrote:
| Navigate to the camera app? The camera button is on the
| home screen. I can be taking a picture or a video just
| about as fast as I can raise the phone.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My mirrorless camera isn't new, but not early 2000s either
| (GX1, released 2012). It takes about 10 seconds to first
| photo from off. My Android phone can take pictures without
| unlocking it, and I've repurposed the PTT button to open
| the camera app. I can take my phone out of my pocket, take
| a picture, and put it back in my pocket faster than my
| camera can turn on.
| onychomys wrote:
| On Android phones (maybe iphones too? no clue on that) you
| can set a double-press of the power button to launch any
| app you want, so if you turn it to open the camera then you
| can launch directly into the camera without even needing to
| unlock the phone.
| chihuahua wrote:
| The great thing about this is that it works even when
| you're wearing gloves.
| arrrg wrote:
| Doesn't matter. That's just equivalent to the physical
| switch in time needed (maybe even slower, a double press
| does require more dexterity) and startup times on phone
| cameras certainly aren't faster than dedicated cameras.
| My iPhone 12 Pro takes about a half second to a second
| until it's ready to take a shot.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| > lack of geotags
|
| Depends on the camera and other such features. But you're
| right that it's not a given.
|
| > often wrong timestamps
|
| I'm confused by this. I suppose if you leave your camera off
| for years at a time, have dead batteries and don't bother
| checking it - then sure. But in general the RTC on cameras is
| very good and not an issue. Even if it clock drifts by a
| minute or two, does it really make a difference?
|
| > slow startup time
|
| Incorrect with modern cameras. If I have both my Nikon in my
| hand and my phone - I can take a picture with the Nikon WAY
| faster and more reliable than my iPhone. The Nikon can go
| from off to taking a picture in half a second. The phone you
| need to press the camera button on the lock screen for a full
| second before the camera app even launches. Then it takes it
| a little time to launch the app and warm up the camera.
|
| Are either slow or problematic? No. But the Nikon is way more
| reliable, sometimes the iphone just derps out.
|
| > useless tiny batteries
|
| Again, I suppose it depends on the camera. My Nikon is rated
| for a thousand shots a battery, I think? Even my smallest and
| oldest handheld is rated for 300 shots a battery. Unless
| you're going way crazy, that is a lot of photos in a single
| day. It'd run down your iPhone quite significantly as well.
|
| One area that is a big difference overall... Video.
| jjav wrote:
| > slow startup time, and useless tiny batteries
|
| A camera is far faster in "startup time" (there's nothing to
| start up, just press the shutter to take a photo). And a DSLR
| will outlast battery life of a phone at least 100x.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i had a dude get aggressive with me recently when i was using
| an actual camera. he wasn't even in the frame but he thought i
| was taking a picture of him. made me realize how abnormal it is
| these days. now i can just take a picture with my phone and
| people won't care?
| DesiLurker wrote:
| My biggest issue (besides lugging away one extra thing on
| trips) was that often pictures will just sit in camera until I
| take time to get them out and thenput them in NAS/Cloud & then
| share that location with wife and then have a round about
| forgotten passwords on her phone/tablet. Then she would be able
| to post those photos. With smartphones they are there in clould
| already, I just need to make a shared album and add everybody.
| and yes cameras have started doing this now but its all done so
| poorly that its almost same amount of effort. Nope!
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| While I love my mirrorless, the ease of "exit" is definitely
| something that pulled me away from them for quite a while.
| But times have changes. There are accessory units like the
| Arsenal Camera Assistant that give you wifi access to the
| camera. Also a lot new cameras (like my new Nikon) have wifi
| built in.
|
| Can take photos with the Nikon and beam them to my phone
| fairly quickly. Is it as quick and seamless as using the
| iPhone directly? Nope. But good enough that I'm ok with it
| now. It also gives me access to typically a much higher
| quality photo that I can crop way farther than I can with the
| iPhone.
| irrational wrote:
| > With smartphones they are there in clould already
|
| What? I would never trust my photos to automatically go to
| some cloud storage. Who knows who would have access to them?
|
| Instead I download the photos from all the family phones on a
| regular basis. I copy them to an external drive in my house.
| Then they backed up to a cloud service, but they are
| encrypted before they are backed up and the cloud service is
| only a backup. We can't actually see the photos on that cloud
| service. It is just fire protection (and yes, I have pulled
| the photos and videos back down from the cloud service to
| make sure it is backing them up correctly).
| gabrielhidasy wrote:
| Just use Nextcloud then, your own drives on your home, but
| no risk of losing pictures if your phone is
| lost/stolen/broken between backups. Can also automate the
| encrypted offsite thing.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| If you're using something with a protruding lens, people have
| always been suspicious and/or thought you were some sort of
| professional. Back in 2008 I was using a Nikon D70 and
| generally just roamed my area of the world taking pictures to
| be uploaded to Wikipedia.
|
| I had building security guards question me when I took a
| picture of their building (From the sidewalk).
|
| I had mall security (outdoor mall) demand I cease and desist
| and get a permit.
|
| I had transit workers threaten to call the police on me, even
| though photography is legal on public transit AND explicitly
| allowed in that particular transit agencies policies.
|
| In 2008 the iPhone (original) was just out and had potato for
| camera, so everyone was still using SLR's and "normal cameras".
| But yet... people still got upset.
| avazhi wrote:
| There is or was a compact camera market? What is it, 10 people?
| 5?
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I traveled to Japan recently with an middle-end smartphone
| (Samsung A72 with 12+35+60mm) & a middle-end DSLR (APS-C with
| 18-55mm), that I bought the same price.
|
| Surprisingly, picture quality was on par. Low-light,
| stabilization, everything. I sold my DSLR since.
|
| APS-C sensors aren't relevant anymore, only full-frames can beat
| smartphones nowadays.
| ezconnect wrote:
| My Nikon D40 still shoots better picture than high end phones.
| But that is just my opinion.
| piva00 wrote:
| Not sure what you were using, I don't see that at all with my
| Fuji kits.
|
| I have both a X-Pro 3 and a X-T30 for street photography and
| both shoot much, _much_ superior pictures than any smartphone
| is capable of...
|
| APS-C is still pretty relevant, your old DSLR might not be up
| to par to latest smartphone cameras though. And the image
| processing done by smartphones using AI tend to create weird
| and ugly artefacts depending on conditions, that doesn't happen
| with my mirrorless cameras, for example.
|
| Have you tried printing smartphone pictures and compare them to
| your DSLR shots?
| tourist2d wrote:
| Maybe show some comparisons so we can judge rather than just
| assessing "facts"
| piva00 wrote:
| I just felt it's such an outrageous claim that I really
| hadn't to show that cameras with much larger sensors and
| better optics would shoot better pictures than a
| smartphone.
|
| For me it's the opposite, show how smartphones are better
| than the current crop of mirrorless APS-C as this is the
| extraordinary claim requiring evidence.
|
| When I get some time I might shoot some comparison
| pictures, but if I don't: remember that I'm not here to
| serve your demands, I'm sorry.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I just felt it 's such an outrageous claim_
|
| I have used an iPhone SE and a mirrorless M4/3 camera to
| photograph a sheet of paper containing barcodes of
| varying sizes (including some with bars less than 1 pixel
| wide). I then checked which barcodes were readable in the
| resulting image.
|
| The light levels were the same, both cameras were
| positioned and zoomed so the target took up the entire
| image, and both cameras were supported on a tripod.
|
| I expected the M4/3 camera would blow the iPhone out of
| the water with its much larger lens, bigger sensor, and
| higher price. But no, the iPhone's image had _marginally_
| more readable barcodes.
|
| Modern smartphone camera performance is just crazy, for
| the sensor size.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| You didn't specify if the lens was up to the task in
| terms of sharpness on that MFT.
| t_von_doom wrote:
| A fair point but unfair in that you are not also asking
| this of the OP. The status quo is that that a dedicated
| camera will be better than a smartphone (see other
| comments)
| arnaudsm wrote:
| 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
| Markoff wrote:
| TBH both photos look horrible compared to smartphones
| nowadays or is this just 100% crop? I'd like to see whole
| photo.
| Jiejeing wrote:
| 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).
| dmitriid wrote:
| 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.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > 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
| arnaudsm wrote:
| 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.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Disclaimer, I'm a retired pro photographer that sold his
| full-frame to focus on software engineering.
| - The X-Pro 3 is $2k, not what I call middle-end. - I
| agree on the aggressive AI processing. Fortunately I could
| disable it. - It was a Nikon D5500. I used the 18-55
| kit lens, but f/1.8 prime lenses can do better indeed, at the
| cost of switching lenses all day. - I compared on my
| 27" screen, no difference, even in low-light scenarios and at
| different ISOs
| piva00 wrote:
| The X-T30 is US$ 800-900 and uses the same sensor and
| processor of the X-Pro3 so they're pretty equivalent on
| picture quality. Don't stick to the X-Pro3 mention as
| that's missing the point.
|
| The D5300 is pretty old, I had one in 2013-2014, coming
| from a D3200.
|
| > - I compared on my 27" screen, no difference, even in
| low-light scenarios and at different ISOs
|
| This might be the main difference between us, I usually do
| prints in A3+ sizes and the differences in picture quality
| between a smartphone and my cameras are very noticeable.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| The point of my comparison was price. You can find better
| smartphones too.
|
| The A72 and D5500 have the same used price.
| piva00 wrote:
| On the price point I agree with you but then the
| comparison becomes not so level by comparing semi-
| conductors technology from 2014 to the ones from 2021,
| that's 7 years of evolution on sensor technology packed
| into the phone's sensor, plus all the image processing
| advances since then.
|
| Again, I understand the price point but it's an oddball
| comparison. Perhaps a comparison between the A72 and a
| Fujifilm X-E2 could tell us more but I don't have either
| devices to directly compare myself :/
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I'd love to see a graph of sharpness/$ for both
| categories ! I think they're equal until the $400 range,
| after Mirrorless obviously wins
| michaelt wrote:
| Well, you won't find anyone saying their 2022 smartphone
| outperforms their 2022 DSLR
|
| Because people who find their 2022 smartphone
| outperforming their 2015 DSLR don't upgrade to a 2022
| DSLR.
| altairprime wrote:
| I sold my DSLR gear in 2015 including my absolute
| favorite 35/f2 lens, and I have an X100V on backorder in
| 2022 for its 35mm equivalent f/2 prime lens: seven years
| of AI missteps and absent bokeh in my preferred framing
| has finally gotten to me. I know that my phone will take
| better telephotos, and I know my phone has RAW mode and
| three lenses and takes amazingly great pictures. So I'm
| specializing my camera to exactly where I love it most,
| and will let my phone handle everything else, and I'm
| content that each has their strengths.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > The X-Pro 3 is $2k, not what I call middle-end.
|
| Fuji uses the same sensors on many cameras, you can get an
| xt-2 or xe-3 for much cheaper, with the same sensor
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| The image your phone generates isn't real. It's a medium
| quality photo enhanced by "AI." See all the cases of iPhone
| pictures adding faces where people aren't there.
| lelandfe wrote:
| You can use third party camera apps to avoid Deep Fusion.
| Kye wrote:
| D5300 is APS-C. I know because I have its descendent, the
| D5600. I _wish_ it were full frame, especially this time of
| year. I should probably sell it since I never use it now
| that I have a good phone camera, but I would eventually
| miss my 70-300.
| widerporst wrote:
| Huh. When I compare RAW output from my D5300 (using the
| default 18-55 mm lens) and a Pixel 6, the difference is
| staggering. Granted, the JPG output from the Pixel is
| usually on par with the JPG from the DSLR, high dynamic
| range is something where the Pixel is even a bit better
| most of the time.
|
| But once you take RAW photos and hit the Auto button in
| Lightroom, the Pixel doesn't hold a chance against the
| D5300.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Sure, prosumers like us can squeeze extra juice out of
| the DSLR. But our mothers cannot.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| That was a bit sexist. But most people can't frame,
| compose or level either. So doing some automated post-
| processing inside a phone won't help.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be a prosumer, average kids in my
| city know raw and post process. Kids are very familiar
| with editing, in fact, gen z is also blowing gen y out of
| water when it comes to editing video.
| no_you_are_not wrote:
| Even if you have been a professional photographer for a
| significant length of time, you shouldn't use it to try to
| appeal to authority. However, a cursory glance at your
| profile tells me you aren't even 30, come on mate. Unless
| you were a professional photographer before your 10th
| birthday I really don't think your experience is better
| than any other enthusiast.
|
| Did you do a real image diff on the same setup? I doubt it.
| Phone cameras have come a long, long way but a lot of the
| advances are through "smoothing" things out through
| software.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| What's wrong with my age?
|
| I've done 6 years of professional photography to pay for
| college. Portrait shoots, weddings, even produced videos,
| ads, festivals, wildlife documentaries. I worked on Nikon
| D4S fullframes. How is my age relevant ?
|
| My point is, professionals squeeze extra juice of the
| hardware, but the average consumer does not.
| jjav wrote:
| > APS-C sensors aren't relevant anymore, only full-frames can
| beat smartphones nowadays.
|
| Even my ~15 years old Nikon D40 easily beats my 2022 phone in
| photo quality.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Surprisingly, picture quality was on par. Low-light,
| stabilization, everything.
|
| Almost certainly this is not true. It seems far more likely to
| me that perceived image quality after in device post processing
| was similar.
|
| A lot of the quality of smartphone cameras comes from their
| software, which does a really good job at using the sensor data
| to create good images. Cameras sold to photographers do not do
| that, or not as much. This is by design, if you are a
| photographer (someone who is interested in the process of
| photography) these corrections are something you really do not
| want, as they remove your ability to manually control these
| corrections later.
|
| You are actually comparing two different types of images and it
| is quite unsurprising that the DSLR did not "win".
| ilyt wrote:
| That's actually problem with DSLRs. Phone use the tiny sensor
| they have to its fullest, DSLRs mostly treat it as it was a
| film, and not try to reap all the benefits of digital
| processing and ability to shoot a bunch of images in quick
| succession.
|
| Instead of shooting at 1/8 or 1/15 in low light it could
| "just" shoot images at 1/125 or even 1/1000 then compensate
| for minute movements of the camera to get perfect sharpness,
| and then merge them to denoise it, and boom, near-noise-free,
| near blur free (just the blur from target movement, not the
| photographer) image in low-light.
| constantcrying wrote:
| This is absolutely not a problem with DSLRs or large format
| cameras.
|
| >Instead of shooting at 1/8 or 1/15 in low light it could
| "just" shoot images at 1/125 or even 1/1000 then compensate
| for minute movements of the camera to get perfect
| sharpness, and then merge them to denoise it, and boom,
| near-noise-free, near blur free (just the blur from target
| movement, not the photographer) image in low-light.
|
| There is absolutely nothing stopping a DSLR or large format
| camera user from doing exactly that. This is also a very
| common procedure in astro photography where dozens of such
| photos are stacked to capture objects in the sky. This
| doesn't happen _on_ the camera of course, but a
| photographer wouldn 't want it to happen anyways.
|
| I think you entirely missed the point of a digital large
| format camera. _The user does not want the camera doing
| post processing_. The user wants the camera to capture
| technically excellent images and process them manually.
|
| The difference between a phone and a large format camera in
| this case is that the photographer can _choose_ to take
| such a photo and he can process it on a high performance
| machine with manual intervention. This is absolutely not a
| problem with the camera.
| dsego wrote:
| > The user does not want the camera doing post
| processing.
|
| I want this, I don't want to spend time in front of a
| laptop doing post processing.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Then use your phone.
|
| The intersection of people who want to spend a
| significant of money on something they already have (a
| camera) to get a version which allows them fine grained
| control and technically excellent results, but then don't
| care how the results are processed after they pressed the
| shutter is almost zero.
|
| A modern large format camera is for people interested in
| photography. If you do not care about photography, but
| care about getting decent enough pictures with each press
| on the capture button, those cameras are not for you.
| dsego wrote:
| I care about photography, I care about good results, I
| care about using my camera to get those results, I do not
| care about spending hours in front of a computer screen.
| constantcrying wrote:
| So you invest time, money and effort into an expensive
| machine, which needs fine tuning, knowledge, experience
| and time to get the best results. But then you want to
| feed those results into a machine to do whatever it finds
| best, instead of manually controlling how your output
| looks?
|
| I won't tell you what to do or don't but that market
| segment is probably not very large...
| arnaudsm wrote:
| When my mother uses both in auto mode, the pictures turn out
| the same quality.
|
| This article is about the general public, not us, the HN
| crowd which love to push hardware to the limit. Which is the
| historical definition of hacking btw :)
| adrr wrote:
| Camera industry is dying. I don't see Nikon or Olympus being
| around in the consumer camera market much longer. Its just
| going to be Sony and Canon.
|
| People just want pictures that look good. I don't want to
| shoot bracketed shots then combine them together in photoshop
| so I can get the same dynamic range as my phone. I don't want
| to take 20 pictures at a time of my kids hoping to get that
| one moment where they looked at the camera when my Iphone has
| live photo mode.
|
| All r&d is being developed for the small sensor sizes. New
| stacked CMOS sensors will come to phones first because that
| is where the money is at. Phone cameras next year may surpass
| capabilities of mirrorless/dslr cameras in terms of dynamic
| range with a single picture.
|
| I really don't understand why camera manufactures aren't
| investing in software. What they are doing now isn't working.
| I am planning to go on vacation for the winter holiday and
| this may be first year in a long time that i don't bring my
| dedicated camera(right now a Sony A7III) because my IPhone 14
| just takes good pictures.
| blitzar wrote:
| Google computational photography > DSLR non computed photo.
|
| But that is hardly a shocker ... when will we get better
| desktop tools to recomupte photos?
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Google computational photography > DSLR non computed
| photo.
|
| As I said. This is _by design_.
|
| >when will we get better desktop tools to recomupte photos?
|
| Lightroom has already various AI features. What can
| lightroom not control manually what Google does
| automatically.
|
| Darktable is the FOSS alternative, although not as
| advanced.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > What can lightroom not control manually what Google
| does automatically.
|
| The camera itself. Smartphones shoot several frames with
| different settings at different times, they may have a
| time of flight sensor to estimate distance, plenoptic
| features, etc... These can be fed into algorithms
| specifically trained on that camera and that can take
| advantage of all these extra data.
|
| DSLRs can do things like bracketing, but external
| software doesn't have nearly as much control.
| blitzar wrote:
| By design and necessity - I suspect people would not be
| happy if they saw what actually came off the sensor (or
| had to carry around a better sized sensor).
|
| https://skylum.com/luminar-ai is probably the closest I
| have seen
| constantcrying wrote:
| For some cameras "beauty filters" are even a selling
| point. For a professional photoprapher that would be a
| nightmare. But most people aren't photographers and only
| care about getting a good looking image after pointing
| and shooting. And there is nothing wrong with that, but
| it makes for bad comparisons.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| Everything by Topaz seems to fit the bill.
| brookst wrote:
| > It seems far more likely to me that perceived image quality
| after in device post processing was similar.
|
| That's just what they said. The purpose of cameras is to
| produce images we find pleasing, for a few different values
| of "pleasing" (recording memories, aesthetics, etc).
|
| Nobody cares about the "how". Whether it's a photographer
| with an MFA doing pixel-by-pixel adjustments on a RAW image
| or an algorithm in an ISP, nobody cares.
|
| Ok, not nobody, but no _casual user_ , which is 99.99% of the
| market. For most of us, we take a picture and look at the
| picture. Insisting that one technology is better even though
| it produces no user benefit is missing the point.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Ok, not nobody, but no casual user, which is 99.99% of the
| market.
|
| That's kind of my point. If you _just_ care about getting a
| good enough result you do not want a camera which is
| producing images which are good on a technical level. And
| comparing technically good images to post processed images
| is essentially pointless. I am not sure about the 0.01%
| every person who ever used lightroom or similar software
| has wanted something from a picture their camera did not
| give them. And even if the number is correct, there still
| are people who see photography as a creative endeavour and
| who want images which are easy to edit and not heavily
| preprocessed. If you aren 't one of them your phone is
| likely more than good enough already and there is nothing
| wrong with that.
| whatswrong wrote:
| Picture quality most likely wasn't on par. Just look at this
| iphone 13 vs nikon d750 comparison:
| https://i.imgur.com/ght1Vyu.jpg.
|
| Sometimes my Pixel 4a renders something which looks decent,
| sometimes it gives me oversharpened photos with unnatural
| colors, like the iphone photo. Let's not even mention the AI
| generated fake details, which look horrible to me 99.99% of the
| time.
| zip1234 wrote:
| An SLR is nothing without a great lens. It is the most
| important part of the camera, more important than APS-C or full
| frame by a long shot. The lens may cost more than the camera
| body though...
| yetihehe wrote:
| I've recently bought canon mirrorless just to also buy 50mm
| lens with f/1.2 aperture. I got photos I've always wanted to do
| (with blurred background) and no phone could match the quality
| of picture. Of course with standard 15-45 lens (f/3.5 - f/6)
| it's much closer to phone quality, but that's why I didn't go
| with compact or camera without exchangeable lens.
| nradov wrote:
| I have a recent Samsung flagship phone, and the same DSLR and
| lens as you. The DSLR is far superior for sports photography.
| My daughter plays indoor volleyball and smartphone pictures are
| garbage, just completely blurry due to the fast action. If I
| manually reduce the shutter speed then pictures are under
| exposed due to the tiny sensor. On the DSLR I can run it in
| shutter priority mode and push the ISO, so the results are
| pretty good (although a full frame camera would obviously be
| better).
|
| The smartphone does pretty well in most other situations that
| don't involve fast movement in poor lighting.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| What aperture did the 18-55 lens have? Most likely the DSLR
| isn't low end, but the lens is a very low end 60$ kit zoom.
| bendews wrote:
| Even the iPhone 14 Pro with its very much upgraded camera can
| only *just* start to be within the same league as a standalone
| camera when it comes to dynamic range. Noise performance,
| detail resolution etc. are all still woefully inadequate. In
| any instance, a phone camera can take amazing shots (especially
| when in great light) but a very long way from being equal.
| Everybody has a different threshold for "good enough" however
| and they have met yours.
| seunosewa wrote:
| They make up for the sensor deficiencies relative to a DSLR
| with image processing. You can simulate increase dynamic
| range and reduced noise by taking multiple exposures with
| multiple cameras and processing them with smart 'AI'
| algorithms.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| True dynamic range yes, but smartphones have better HDR
| bracketing software. So my phone also beat my middle-end DSLR
| in backlit scenarios.
| piva00 wrote:
| I really don't agree with calling the D5300 a mid-range
| camera, it's 2013-2014 tech. Like I mentioned somewhere
| else I do understand the price comparison but it's not a
| mid-range camera anymore, it's very outdated.
| Jiejeing wrote:
| Even with less outdated cameras (e.g. the last high-end
| APS-C from Nikon, the D7500), HDR bracketing is much
| worse than most mid-range phones from the last 5 years.
| And assembling them after manual bracketing in post-
| processing is also not great. Nikon HDR creates halos,
| doubling, even on relatively fast shutter speeds.
|
| That said, I don't have the experience of phones being
| "good enough", and even my Sony RX100 (edit: was "RX1",
| my bad) first gen which is quite old is out-performing
| 99% of the smartphone market in picture quality on a good
| screen, if you exclude HDR.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| I doubt phones will ever reach the raw quality of RX1 due
| to physics, especially the RX1r II. That thing is still a
| beast.
| Jiejeing wrote:
| Sorry, I meant to say "RX100", it is now corrected. Yes,
| even with the improvements in sensor technology, glass,
| and post-processing I don't see a phone reaching RX1
| quality anytime soon.
| okasaki wrote:
| That's just not true. Even a 1" compact with a decent lens
| (like Sony RX100) is better than any phone.
|
| Not to mention that phones have awful ergonomics.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Ergonomics is a mixed bag. DSLRs win at latency and burst, as
| well as manual mode.
|
| But sharing the pictures is a pain, the UI is hard for
| beginners. And the most important ergonomic of all : it's
| easier to grab my phone than the 1-pound DSLR.
| piva00 wrote:
| I can share pictures from my Fujifilm cameras via WiFi to
| my phone... I think you are using a pretty outdated kit and
| trying to judge the current crop of mirrorless cameras
| against that.
|
| Even Canon and Nikon abandoned the DSLR format, the digital
| photography world has embraced mirrorless, it's much more
| compact and the only thing you lose is the analog
| viewfinder through the mirror. For me it wasn't a loss at
| all.
|
| I've been a hobby photographer for almost 15 years, had
| DSLRs, full-frames and ended on mirrorless exactly because
| I needed something compact and light to carry around.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Yeah, mirrorless won since 5-7 years ago.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| True, "only full-frames can beat smartphones nowaday" is
| nonsense. iPhone 14 Pro Max's sensor size is 1/1.28". Naive
| physics, 1" is collecting more raw light. Now it depends on
| how good a person controls the collecting process (and post).
| okasaki wrote:
| Yes, and that's only on the "primary" wide-angle lens.
|
| The other two lenses have 1/3.5" and 1/2.55" sensors.
| achow wrote:
| Sensor wise yes, but not for post processing.
|
| All cameras (compact to SLR does post processing) other than
| for RAW format. And infact even for RAW format SLR cannot
| beat modern flagship phones [1] [2].
|
| [1] Apple ProRAW https://support.apple.com/en-
| in/guide/iphone/iphae1e882a3/io...
|
| [2] Samsung's 'Expert RAW'
| https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-use-samsung-
| expert-r...
| constantcrying wrote:
| >even for RAW format SLR cannot beat modern flagship phones
| [1] [2]
|
| Total nonsense. Of course a modern medium or full format
| camera outperforms any phone on technical aspects.
| max51 wrote:
| >And infact even for RAW format SLR cannot beat modern
| flagship phones [1] [2].
|
| What is described is those article is the same as a normal
| raw that DLSR have been doing for decades. Adding the word
| "expert" or "apple" in front of the name doesn't make your
| RAW files magically better.
|
| The only advantage for the smartphone here is that it's
| more user-friendly to edit the RAW files directly on the
| phone in one click compared to importing your photos in a
| software like Photoshop Lightroom
| achow wrote:
| Clarification - Mobile Phones can beat SLR in sheer
| computation and ability to add extra information in RAW
| files, which SLR cannot do.
|
| Understanding Apple ProRAW
|
| https://petapixel.com/2020/12/21/understanding-apple-
| proraw/
|
| Excerpt:
|
| ProRAW has one more surprise up its sleeve. A few years
| ago, Apple began using neural networks to detect
| interesting parts of an image, such as eyes and hair. Apple
| uses this to, say, add sharpening to only clouds in the
| sky. Sharping faces would be quite unflattering.
|
| ProRAW files contain these maps!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree. A cellphone with its button-lens is never going to
| match an actual camera in the kind of flexibility that only
| real depth of field can offer.
|
| To be sure though, out of convenience I pretty much only take
| my phone on vacations. (Well, and an old medium-format TLR
| film camera just for the odd novelty photo -- but it only
| ever leaves the van when I think I have a subject best suited
| for it. Oh, ha ha, and I have a stereo digital camera in the
| glove box that gets similar treatment.)
| personjerry wrote:
| Phones have perfect ergonomics for carrying everywhere, and
| that's my primary requirement for a camera!
| okasaki wrote:
| Perfect for carrying it in a pocket sure, not at all great
| for carrying it around in a hand. A compact camera is wider
| but shorter in two other dimensions, so it's easier to
| carry.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| True. Hand grip with shutter trigger exactly where my
| finger rests -- can't beat that ergo.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Taking photo with phone is utter horrible. I admittedly
| can't take a decent selfie with one hand. Even holding
| chopstick is easier.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Are you using the volume buttons to take a picture? I
| sometimes find that more ergonomic than tapping the
| screen.
| usrusr wrote:
| In my main camera use case the "gopro" form factor has much
| better ergonomics than a phone, by a wide margin.
| Unfortunately, that market is wildly underserved because
| all existing cameras in that form factor barely consider
| stills even an afterthought, if they consider it at all.
| I'd pay real money for a camera that is on par with phones
| but does not come with an almost face-sized TV attached.
|
| (I use an RX-0, which at first glance seems to fit that
| bill, but doesn't really: it's an extremely small movie
| camera that only pretends to be a very small compact for
| addressing a wider audience than it deserves)
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Yeah, Samsung's current mid-range (~$300) phones are
| surprisingly capable devices that make the high-end ones
| (+$1000) seem unnecessary.
|
| If only they weren't so anti-repair as to heavily glue their
| batteries in.
| Someone wrote:
| Only 97%? That would mean one in every 30 compact camera owners
| still uses one regularly. I realize the market for "small cameras
| that you can always have with you" grew tremendously, so "3% of
| the number people who used to own a compact camera" is a lot less
| than "3% of the people who know have a smartphone or a compact
| camera", but still, 3% seems high to me.
|
| I wouldn't know anybody who still uses a compact camera (but
| then, did I know 30 people who did in the time before
| smartphones?)
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Someone said to me a long time ago that the best camera in the
| world is the one you have with you. It turns out they were right.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| In all this talk about why even bother with a dedicated camera
| any more - especially a small point & shoot that doesn't actually
| take any better pictures than a smartphone - one item is usually
| missed: The dedicated camera is made to be comfortably used one-
| handed. To me this matters a lot.
|
| Also, with dedicated cameras being garage sale fodder now, you
| can inexpensively get another feature that the smart phones just
| don't have: Zoom! My current "daily driver" is a Canon SX210 with
| pretty good picture quality at 14x zoom and image stabilization
| to make it practical. And still pocketable.
|
| That said, 50% of my photos are still with the phone these days,
| just for instant sharing or geotagging.
| mjburgess wrote:
| After selling my A7S I was at a loss for a F2C recording...
| thought about a Brio, in the end used the _front-facing_ iPad Pro
| camera.
|
| With lots of natural light (etc.) quality at non-Fullscreen,
| typical viewing resolution&size, was 'unnoticeably good'
|
| I was very very surprised. I think a lot of people don't realise
| just how far tech has come (+the right photo/video-ography
| skills).
| post_break wrote:
| Fujifilm on the other hand is exploding in popularity. Sony took
| the full frame market and has incredible autofocus. Canon has
| shot themselves in the foot locking down their RF mount, Nikon is
| doing ok.
|
| I think we're going to see a slow gradual rise in small compact
| cameras making a comeback, just like vinyl. Phone cameras can
| only do so much, it's physics, and photography popularity has
| grown since kids now are born in a world where a phone has a
| great camera.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i'm looking for one if anybody has a good rec? i ditched my
| smartphone and now i'm loading up with all these devices that
| everybody in this thread say are obsolete (they have a point
| but i don't need an iphone in my life, i'd rather walk around
| with five devices than one ...)
| post_break wrote:
| X100V (if you can find one) X100F, Xpro3, X-E4. The problem
| is they are popular, chip shortage, etc.
| amerkhalid wrote:
| I am so conflicted about my Fuji x100f. I love the thing,
| but I rarely use it. I'm usually very quick to get rid of
| things. With the recent popularity of Fuji cameras, I think
| I should sell it. But then I pick it up and it's pure joy
| to hold and use.
|
| A real camera has better ergonomics, great for vacations as
| you don't have to worry about your phone's battery life.
| Very good low light performance.
| chobytes wrote:
| Fuji XEs are nice, small, relatively cheap bodies with
| interchangeable lenses. If youre looking for something small
| and know how to (or are willing to learn to) use a camera,
| thats what I recommend.
|
| If portability is not a concern, you can pick up used high
| end Nikon DSLRs and F mount lenses very cheaply right now.
| Nikon is going all in on mirrorless now so this stuff is
| "last gen" hence cheap.
|
| Otherwise, just avoid Canon. Theyre becoming increaingly
| scummy and you probably dont wanna get caught locked into
| their system.
| klekticist wrote:
| ricoh gr3 or ricoh gr3x are also pretty popular x100v
| alternatives (though they're a bit different)
|
| i have a x100v and like it a lot. have shot over 9000 photos
| so far with it
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I got the Ricoh gr3x and I LOVE it. Actually use it way
| more than my Sony a6400 now. The main reasons for me, a
| hobbyist street photographer:
|
| - size: The Ricoh is actually pocketable. Now every time I
| go out, I have it in my pants or jacket pocket.
|
| - snap focus and snap distance priority: a godsend for
| street photography.
|
| - convenience and speed: since I usually have it on hand,
| and by default on snap distance priority, it takes me a
| littler over 1 second to turn the camera on and snap a
| picture.
|
| That said, I did order a Fuji x100v so my wife and I can
| both have a camera with us when we go out. Also, they are
| different as you mentioned
| dekoruotas wrote:
| X100V is super-hard-to-find-right-now, I have an older
| version X100T and I am very pleased. It is basically the
| camera that pros using the huge DSLRs everyday reach for when
| they go on their own holidays or leisure trips. And it's
| value has nearly doubled in the two years I had it, unheard
| of in the field of consumer electronics.
| OJFord wrote:
| I was looking for one recently, and yeah, it's slim pickings (and
| even slimmer in terms of reviews etc. on sites like The Verge
| compared to when I was last looking at cameras) - not helped by
| chip shortages limiting availability (and raising prices) of the
| models that do 'exist'.
|
| I wanted one because I don't want my nice-photo-taking tied to my
| phone, I don't want that to be a consideration every time I buy a
| phone, and I don't otherwise need an expensive phone (my last few
| have cost <PS200 and been kept years each, I don't play games or
| do anything intensive with it). I'd rather have a ~PS200 compact
| camera and a ~PS200 phone, with independent replacement cycles,
| than a ~PS400 phone (that would be a much less capable _camera_ ,
| though admittedly the software editing/ML stuff for amateur stuff
| (which I definitely am, I just want holiday/walk snaps etc.) is
| quite nice these days). I settled on a used but pretty mint
| condition Panasonic TZ100, and can keep using my Nokia 3.4 a
| while longer. (Though it does reboot itself multiple times a day,
| so its days _are_ still numbered.)
| thatBilly wrote:
| I struggle to understand how mid range digital compact cameras
| are so bad. I have to use them for work (for reasons below) and
| usually at night with the flash.
|
| So the camera flash is obviously far superior to a phone flash
| but apart from that, my phone (Note 20 Ultra) dominates all the
| Olympus and Ricoh cameras I've had in recent years. When it's
| raining or foggy and I have to take a photo, I am forced to use
| my phone instead of the company supplied camera. If I need to do
| a video clip, again the phone is my go to. Looking towards the
| sun, same again.
|
| If I could use my phone for all the photographic records I take
| at work then I would but I still rely on the form factor of the
| camera which is more resilient amongst tools and dirt and on-
| screen display which shows a sequential photo/filename reference
| that I can quickly note down.
|
| How does a PS1000 phone have such an incredible set of cameras
| which destroy the dedicated camera on a PS300-400 digital
| compact?
| ezconnect wrote:
| The price difference is because of economies of scales, if that
| compact camera is produced at the same quantity as the parts of
| the camera will go down in price. Another factor is package
| size. Camera are bulkier and cost more to transport (factory to
| consumer).
| WithinReason wrote:
| Probably the effort spent on computational photography by phone
| companies is greater than that spent by camera manufacturers,
| even expensive DSLRs only have hand crafted debayer/denoise,
| while phones use all kinds of neural network magic. Even an
| RGBW sensor with a simple bilateral filter could do amazing
| things, but I don't think any digital camera has even that.
|
| Remember when Kodak thought that digital cameras are a fad so
| they didn't invest? Same thing happening with computational
| photography right now.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Kodak didn't think that, but they didn't anticipate the
| incredibly sharp drop in film sales. Kodak was the #1 seller
| of digital cameras in the US in 2005.
|
| Film sales only fell off a cliff in 2006. [0]
|
| The Kodak story as commonly told is something like "don't be
| stupid like Kodak". This is easily followed by the thought _"
| I'm not that stupid, I'll be fine"_.
|
| But the reality is much more nuanced and with a more
| important lesson.
|
| - We have a product making big money
|
| - In the (far?) future, this will probably change
|
| - How fast?
|
| - How much should we invest in capturing the next thing?
|
| - Given the next thing is fundamentally far removed from what
| we did (chemicals -> electronics) should we even go there or
| divest and invest in something else entirely?
|
| Kodak chose to go the digital camera way, but got eaten by
| electronic giant incumbents like Sony (with their sensors),
| Nikon and Canon. Yes, Canon and Nikon were already giants in
| electronics, since their cameras were electronic processor
| controlled since the 1980s.
|
| Kodak eventually lost money on every Kodak digital camera
| sold. But _even if that gamble had worked_ , they might have
| gotten eaten by smartphones just a few years later!
|
| Business is just hard sometimes.
|
| 0: https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/fufifilm-
| film-d...
| adav wrote:
| Which model is considered by photographers as the last "best"
| compact camera?
| rythie wrote:
| The Sony RX100 series would be in most top lists. Though
| personally I'm not sure why they went with a slower lens from
| the mark 6 onwards. The ZV1 continues with the a similar lens
| from earlier models. I have the RX100 mark iii, that's still
| quite good.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Same, RX100-M3 is my webcam now. (X-T30 for anything else)
| FeistySkink wrote:
| I second the RX100 series. As a step up, there is RX1 with a
| full frame and fixed lens. And HX99 the other way with a
| smaller sensor, but goes all the way up to 720mm.
| lm28469 wrote:
| The fuji x100 lineup is real nice:
| https://jonasraskphotography.com/2020/02/04/fujifilm-x100v-f...
| egman_ekki wrote:
| Canon Powershot G7 X Mark III is pretty decent.
| piva00 wrote:
| Ricoh's GR III and IIIx are really good.
| spython wrote:
| Sigma DP2M. As slow as a film camera. Bad screen. Battery lasts
| for just 100 photographs. Limited dynamic range. But a great
| combination of a sharp and tiny lens and unique Foveon sensor.
| If you get it right, it produces film-like images with amazing
| colors.
| petre wrote:
| Also the Ricoh GR. Great size and weight, great ootics, not
| laggy, not a 'system'.
| joos3 wrote:
| Seconding Ricoh GR III & IIIx. Absolute pleasure to use.
|
| They might release an updated version (called GRV given
| Japanese superstition around number 4?) in 2023 or 2024.
| anta40 wrote:
| Fuji X100 models (APSC), and Sony RX1R (fullframe). Fixed lens,
| obviously.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| Give me the product I want, at a reasonable price, and I will buy
| it.
|
| I am specifically annoyed at how cameras have been sold in tiers,
| the same tech with upgrades as a different model.
|
| Sell me instead a modular camera, upgradeable like a PC.
|
| Barebones camera, no WiFi, no Bluetooth, basic screen, basic
| memory.
|
| Expansions: Better case, wireless connectivity, memory
| upgrayyedd, better screen, optics module, bayonet adapter for
| lenses of your brand choice.
|
| That sort of thing.
|
| If you do it right, it will result in longevity of the brand, if
| you do it like Sony has done with all their cool products, then
| it will be limited and expensive, and nobody will really use it.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I remember seeing a chart of this a few years ago. Digital camera
| shipments peaked at >100M in ~2010 then fell off a cliff and 8-9
| years later were <10M. The sad part is consumer digital cameras
| funded DSLR development so DSLRs have kind of plateaued as a
| result.
|
| It's a shame because digital cameras can serve some specialist
| purposes that phones simply can't. I have a camera that can shoot
| Full HD @ 960fps. I have another with a 200x optical zoom (this
| is not compact). And another that's waterproof to like 30 meters.
| I also have another compact camera with a 20x optical zoom.
|
| But I really feel like manufacturers have failed to innovate in
| the smartphone era. It should be trivial (ideally, seamless) to
| save photos to your phone. Various implementations for this are
| just bad like one camera I have is a Wifi AP and you have to
| connect to it. They usually require running custom software,
| which is typically just bad.
|
| I'd also like to be able to put a camera on a mount where I can
| remotely turn and tilt it, focus and zoom.
|
| For years photographers have said the best camera is the one you
| have and it's true. That's why smartphones destroyed this market.
| But manufacturers didn't really do that much to close the
| usability gap.
| bachmeier wrote:
| The title is inaccurate. "Compact camera" just takes a different
| shape. Most everyone has a compact camera these days.
|
| On a less nitpicky note, I think the failure to deliver a compact
| camera at a reasonable price in the 2004-2008 time period did a
| lot of damage too. The low-end models were junk, and the good
| ones cost, I believe, at least $250.
| herf wrote:
| For sure, HDR and AI noise removal are pretty good. But there's
| one more thing that's less visible, which is that smartphones are
| not very friendly to standalone cameras.
|
| Cameras have always depended on PCs to do capture. And since
| smartphones did not provide ways to do fast wireless transfer, it
| made a separate device even harder to use. My Sony mirrorless
| takes about 30 seconds to connect to iPhone using ad-hoc WiFi,
| and it's a bunch of work on both sides. So while I can sort of
| get from the camera to Instagram, it's way harder than it should
| be if the mobile device makers _wanted_ it to work.
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(page generated 2022-12-02 23:01 UTC)