Smartphones will kill off DSLR's soon/

[KellenVancouver]

so i pop in at camera shop and see what good affordable lens they have ...

The idea of "affordable lens" is getting to be contradictory. Been pining for the Fujifilm GF 23mm, great prime lens, but that $2600 price is just hard to swallow. Rumors abound that Fuji will be releasing a GF 20-35mm F4 lens this fall, which may be hard to resist.

 

[Narnian]

What is killing off digital cameras is accelerated technology advancement. My Horseman 970, Mamiya C330 and Pentax Spotmatic still work fine and can take just as good a picture as they ever could. Film advancements was where technology improvements were and that would help any camera. Today I would need to be in a continuous upgrade process, getting a new body every few years. Instead people are putting that into a new phone with improved cameras, as will I.

I went digital for several years (Fuji all-in-ones, Micro Four-Thirds and then Sony APC) and loved the ease of use and quality. Even then I mostly used manual settings. But their real use was for printing and I did little of that as I have almost 50 years of prints on the wall and no space left. They are overkill for posting on the Internet.

Essentially that market will become strictly a professional and high end enthusiast one with some entry level to get people into it.

 

[Sal1950]

Essentially that market will become strictly a professional and high end enthusiast one with some entry level to get people into it

I don't know a dang thing about cameras but do you mean to say a phone with a lens the size of a pencil eraser can replace a good camera with a lense the size of a 2 liter pop bottle???
I'm very confused here.

 

[Rednaxela]

For the majority of people, for the majority of 2022 use cases - definitely.

I bet every counterexample you have in mind will be a niche and/or specialist case.

 

[Sal1950]

For the majority of people, for the majority of 2022 use cases - definitely.

I bet every counterexample you have in mind will be a niche and/or specialist case.

Me? Like I said I'm totally ignorant here and don't own anything even considered "decent" in either category..
I use a 6 yo flipphone to talk and a 15 yo Canon Power Shot A620 7.1 megapix for things more demanding. LOL
I was seriously just asking.

 

[Rednaxela]

Understood. Sorry for the argumentative tone.

What I meant to point out is that for every

phone with a lens the size of a pencil eraser

there is a

good camera with a lense the size of a 2 liter pop bottle

that beats it one way or another.

The question is however: for whom pursuing what?

 

[antcollinet]

I don't know a dang thing about cameras but do you mean to say a phone with a lens the size of a pencil eraser can replace a good camera with a lense the size of a 2 liter pop bottle???
I'm very confused here.

Not yet.

I have a camera with a 2l pop bottle sized lens. I need this camera/lens combination to get close-ups of birds flying (amongst other high magnification/high speed applications). No phone can do that - or come anywhere close.

However, I also own an iPhone 12 pro, and for the vast majority of photography using shorter focal lengths (up to about 50mm equivalent) the phone can do just as good a job as the rather large camera. (This covers the vast majority of social photography carried out by the "man in the street" for decades)

I'd never have believed this would be possible a few years ago - but computational photography is a game changer (basically using multiple lenses simultaneously and combining multiple shots automatically - instantly - in camera)

If you ask me now if a phone will ever replace my 200-800 (equivalent) lens on a good high speed camera, I'll tell you that I very much doubt it. I'll not be surprised in a few years time when I'm proven wrong.

 

[mansr]

Not yet.

Not until someone manages to defeat the laws of physics and eliminate diffraction.

 

[antcollinet]

Not until someone manages to defeat the laws of physics and eliminate diffraction.

Like I say - computational photography. It completely changes the game.

On1 is about to release their update with AI "unblur" - basically take an out of focus shot, and use trained AI to predict the sharp version. Not tried it yet, but I'm expecting it will take my i7 a significant number of seconds to process it. Next Nth generation smart phones will do this instantly.

And we can argue till we're blue in the face about whether the AI is creating real information or not (it isn't, if the info is not there it cannot be extracted) - but it doesn't really matter if the result is indistinguishable because the AI knows what a stooping kestral looks like, and applies that knowledge to your slightly not sharp bird image.

(And that is assuming that it is not possible to combine the image from multiple lenses and defeat diffraction that way - in a square kilometer array sort of way)

 

[mansr]

Like I say - computational photography. It completely changes the game.

You can't compute your way around physics. What computation can do is extract information that is present but not apparent at first glance. It's also possible to produce a convincing fake. The latter might be fine for artistic purposes, less so when the goal of the photograph is to find out what something actually looks like. Good luck getting a court to accept an AI-processed photo as evidence [1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...ad-pinch-to-zoom-read-the-bizarre-transcript/

 

[antcollinet]

You can't compute your way around physics. What computation can do is extract information that is present but not apparent at first glance. It's also possible to produce a convincing fake. The latter might be fine for artistic purposes, less so when the goal of the photograph is to find out what something actually looks like. Good luck getting a court to accept an AI-processed photo as evidence [1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...ad-pinch-to-zoom-read-the-bizarre-transcript/

What proportion of photos do you think are taken to court? Or even who's primary purpose is not - basically - art?

 

[Narnian]

I don't know a dang thing about cameras but do you mean to say a phone with a lens the size of a pencil eraser can replace a good camera with a lense the size of a 2 liter pop bottle???
I'm very confused here.

Not in the least. But phones are good enough they have killed the low end market and are nibbling away at the middle.Telephoto is the weakest point for phones followed closely by light gathering ability.

I used cameras up to 4x5 and for shear quality a 35 mm could not come close. Larger sensors will always be better because they can gather more photons. But smaller sensors will always be more portable and hence more used. I took my 4x5 backpacking, but took the 35mm a lot more.

The old adage the best camera is the one you have with you is even more true today as exhibited by the ubiquity of phones.

 

[mansr]

What proportion of photos do you think are taken to court? Or even who's primary purpose is not - basically - art?

Court, not so many, but news and sports account for a sizeable chunk of all photography.

 

[Narnian]

Court, not so many, but news and sports account for a sizeable chunk of all photography.

I would add nature/wildlife photography. All of those use telephotos heavily which is the weakest point of phone cameras and unless there is a major breakthrough in lens design likely will always be the case.

As for court the proportion may be low but I believe the number may be up. Everybody snaps accidents they are in now and any newsworthy incident they see. I have contested two parking tickets using my cell phone photos (won one, lost one). Throw in body cam footage and a lot of it may not make it to court proper but makes its way into other legal and public proceedings.

 

[theREALdotnet]

You can't compute your way around physics.

You can, for many physics problems. For example, you can capture the same frame at a dozen different exposure levels and compute a perfect overall exposure from that while preserving the overall mood (like a night-time shot). You can undo (“deconvolve”) lens aberrations like distortion or chromatic (both lateral and longitudinal), motion blur and more. Just like you can compute your way around physics with (causality violating) FIR filters.

What computation can do is extract information that is present but not apparent at first glance. It's also possible to produce a convincing fake.

I’m not sure that’s the point of computational photography, and more the domain of “photoshopping”. Computational depth-of-field blur may look fake now, because it is predicated on accurate distance information about picture elements in the frame. This information might be coarse on occasion leading to obvious image defects, but that’s merely a technologically limitation of the depth sensors. It will get better with every generation of smartphones. Once you’ve got high-res depth information you can apply mathematically precise Gaussian blur that will put any Leica lens to shame.

 

[mansr]

You can, for many physics problems.

We must be using different definitions of physics.

For example, you can capture the same frame at a dozen different exposure levels and compute a perfect overall exposure from that while preserving the overall mood (like a night-time shot).

That works only for static scenes.

You can undo (“deconvolve”) lens aberrations like distortion or chromatic (both lateral and longitudinal), motion blur and more.

Undoing distortions is an example of what I said is possible.

Just like you can compute your way around physics with (causality violating) FIR filters.

There's nothing physics-violating about introducing a delay.

Every optical system has a resolution limit, and there's nothing you can compute to get around that. It's similar to bandwidth in an audio system. If your microphone doesn't respond to frequencies above 20 kHz, you won't be recording bats no matter how much you compute.

I’m not sure that’s the point of computational photography, and more the domain of “photoshopping”. Computational depth-of-field blur may look fake now, because it is predicated on accurate distance information about picture elements in the frame. This information might be coarse on occasion leading to obvious image defects, but that’s merely a technologically limitation of the depth sensors. It will get better with every generation of smartphones. Once you’ve got high-res depth information you can apply mathematically precise Gaussian blur that will put any Leica lens to shame.

I was thinking more of things like advanced upscaling algorithms that usually produce a more pleasing result than simple interpolation, e.g. by preserving sharp edges. The larger image may look OK, but it won't actually contain the information that would have been present in a higher resolution capture.

 

[NTK]

Every optical system has a resolution limit, and there's nothing you can compute to get around that. It's similar to bandwidth in an audio system. If your microphone doesn't respond to frequencies above 20 kHz, you won't be recording bats no matter how much you compute.

Curious if or when they will use synthetic aperture with cell phone cameras.

 

[antcollinet]

Curious if or when they will use synthetic aperture with cell phone cameras.

In spite of my comment above about the kilometer array - your linked article suggests it is unlikely (or impossible) due to the need for phase measurement requireing incredibly precise optics. I don't think we are able to hold our phones with lenses aligned to within a fraction of a wavelength of light

 

[Prana Ferox]

There's a psychological boundary between computational methods that discard data that was there, like fake bokeh, or things like combining multiple shots to form a single higher-res or panoramic image - and software that generates data that was not collected like you would need to counteract diffraction. Sharpening is a touchy subject and look at the hostility over HDR imagery (admittedly, in both cases that's partly because people abuse those methods.)

At some point you just AI-generate the whole image and bypass the camera step entirely.

 

[pseudoid]

@Ron Texas' thread topic was:

"Smartphones will kill off DSLR's soon/"

Smartphones have killed off so much that they could be taken to UN for Crimes Against Humanity (Article7-1.(k)).