[ioulian]

The pictures do look good, the colors are nice and the small image on the page is nice. But I haven't seen any 100% crops or full images. it's there that you'll see that the image is worse than a DSLR or another camera with a big lens and sensor.

I can get nice pictures (= vibrant and nice colors) with any camera, what I can't get is a sharp image, with sharp edges.

I went to a trip with my Android Phone and DSLR, and my GF has an iPhone 6.

We took pictures with all 3 devices. When I looked at jpg photos from Android phone on my PC, they had all "perfect" (=vibrant and catchy) colors, but when you zoom in, it's all a blurry mess with no detail. The iPhone was nice and sharp (at least much sharper than the android pics). The DSLR was of course the sharpest one.

Now on the android phone, I have a "pro" settings that captures RAW image. And it's incredibly sharp, the colors are bland of course, but the data is there and we can add/process the colors in post. But why is the image so much worse when using JPG.

My idea it that normal jpg has HDR enabled and is being processed too much, thus losing a lot of detail. You don't get that loss when capturing RAW.

What I'm afraid is that the new iPhone dark mode (or even the P30 Pro and other phones with post processing) will also process the images too much and stack them thus losing a lot of detail. When put on instagram or made smaller for Facebook/websites, you won't see the missing details, but the colors will be vibrant and that's "good enough" for most people.

When I take a picture I rather have the real RAW data in the picture instead of processed jpg that I can't control. What do you guys think about the automatic post processing done by your device, that when done incorrectly, you'll lose a perfect picture because the implementation just lost you a lot of detail...

I guess the post processing trend is there because you just can't make a good lens and sensor that small and still have nice results. The phone makers are just trying to fix this with post processing...

[lm28469]

I mostly thought the same but came to the realisation that the target of these devices are people using instagram, reddit, snapchat, &c. or taking quick snapshots to send to their friends/family. These pictures are made to be consumed and discarded in < 5s by the average viewer so it's not really a big deal. They'll scroll, say "oh wow" internally, click the like button and continue on scrolling.

No one will ever print those in 20x30in and frame them, hence no one cares about edge to edge sharpness or raw files. The "auto" post processing and night mode are the important parts.

> When I take a picture I rather have the real RAW data in the picture instead of processed jpg that I can't control.

afaik you can do that on most smartphones worth taking pictures with.

[TeMPOraL]

> No one will ever print those in 20x30in and frame them, hence no one cares about edge to edge sharpness or raw files.

People still want to hang pictures on the walls and have family albums. Maybe it's a diminishing use case, but the sad thing is, it's not this that makes camera optimized for quick, ephemeral snapshots. It's the optimization for quick snapshots that's pushing out the more permanent use of photos.

[kalleboo]

Most people don't zoom in on their photos. They look at them on their phones, full screen on their computers, or at best on a TV (1080p or maybe 4K, but sitting far away).

This is what manufacturers optimize for. Getting great pictures for the 95%.

Who cares if the hairs on the dog are blurry when you zoom in so much you can't see the rest of the picture? Well, Pros who might want to crop the photo later. And for them, DSLRs will still exist.

[beezle]

And that's why Apple and Samsung are still using 1/2.5 (5.8mm by 4.3mm) 12MP sensors, typical of generic point and shoot cameras. Compare to lower end 'prosumer' type fourthirds cams that use a 17mmx13mm sensor and 15-18MP. That's almost 9 times the area for 25-50% more pixels.

[TeMPOraL]

Except those few times when they e.g. want a new profile picture for their Facebook/Instagram, find that photo on which they look really good but are only part of the whole shot, try to crop it (e.g. with the cropping tool that's available on most social media platforms when uploading a profile picture) and then they discover the result is a blurry mess.

Or, they want to print the photos they made on their phones into a family album, and the result again comes back as blurry mess that looks nowhere near as nice as it did on the phone.

So I'd add: manufacturers optimize for great pictures for the 95% that look great when shot, not when later used.

[ioulian]

That's what I thought, and indeed, the full res is useful when you want to post crop and to print them out.

[la_barba]

>What I'm afraid is that the new iPhone dark mode (or even the P30 Pro and other phones with post processing) will also process the images too much and stack them thus losing a lot of detail. When put on instagram or made smaller for Facebook/websites, you won't see the missing details, but the colors will be vibrant and that's "good enough" for most people.

BTW - one nitpick, stacking images will _improve_ image quality. Specifically - averaging images (after aligning them) taken sequentially is a common way to reduce noise artifacts. Photon noise follows a Poisson distribution and so if you take multiple images and average them you will generally get a cleaner image. The caveat being that you must be on a tripod and your subject must be still for those shots.. (ideally landscape kinda shots)

[pentae]

An iPhone 6 has a dxomark score of 73, last years iPhone XS Max was 106.. the 11 pro will see an even higher score than last years model so comparing the current lineup to an iPhone 6 isn't a fair comparison anymore imho

[wrboyce]

FWIW there are multiple links to reviews with full-size images in these comments.

[ioulian]

Ok, just looked at these images: https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/the_iphone_11_and_iphones... in full res and indeed, they are very blurry and the detail loss is still there:

look at the hairs of the dog: https://daringfireball.net/misc/2019/09/iphones-11-review/mo... They are all blurry

Is it possible to shoot RAW with iPhone?

[kalleboo]

> Is it possible to shoot RAW with iPhone?

Yes but with third party apps only.

[ascagnel_]

Yes -- the default camera app doesn't support it, but there are a bunch of third-party apps that can shoot RAW.