[xster]

Another department I doubt these traditional Japanese companies can catch up on is computational photography. I can take 5s handheld night time photos with adequate quality on a bunch of phones these days. There's still no way of getting anything useful out of DSLRs longer than 1/15s without tripods.

[brokenmachine]

I'm not smart enough to do exact calculations with aperture, etc, but I think the amount of light taken in with a 1/15s exposure with a DSLR would be more than a 5s cameraphone image.

Just taking the area of the lens, say a 5mm diameter cameraphone lens is pi x 5^2=79mm^2 vs a DSLR, conservatively 60mm diameter is pi x 60^2=11309mm^2.

So 143 times the lens area, while your example exposure time is only 75 times more. So your example of a 5s exposure would be similar to a 1/30s DSLR exposure only based on lens area.

With the advantage of bigger sensor pixels and thus much better sensitivity, larger aperture, usually stabilization in the lens, and much, much less motion of the subject during that exposure as well, the DSLR still wins on absolutely everything except weight to lug around.

[xster]

Ummm that's a really good point. Though numerically, the numbers are probably debatable.

Taking for instance a full-frame Canon 5D II and something like a Huawei P30 Pro on the back of a napkin. A full-frame sensor is 864mm2 and a 1/1.7in sensor is 43mm2. Huawei with a RYYB sensor has an ISO of 409,600 vs 6,400. The phone aperture is /1.6. Realistically, /1.6 glass would be too heavy, so let's call it /2.8.

The ratio would then be 20 (sensor size) * 0.0156 (ISO) * 0.57 (aperture) = 0.178x before AI kicks in for, say, another 75x more exposure time ~= 421x more usable light on the phone.

Based on super unscientific anecdotal experience between the 2 (since the human eye is logarithmic), it seems about right.