[SpicyLemonZest]

I think you're multiple steps ahead of the curve here. Most people think that an ideal camera captures things the same way you see them with your eyes, and any differences reflect a flaw in the camera. (I personally thought that was true until yesterday!)

[blahblah4332]

Yeah, I can agree with that. Before I got into photography I believed the same thing. In fact I was driven to it by the disparities in my own images when compared to professional examples.

The reason this article is so frustrating to me is that instead of the author highlighting what has been true since the dawn of photography - that cameras never truly capture the scene as we view it - they chose to baselessly attack a specific set of devices which happen to have cameras attached to them.

If this were to happen 10 years ago to someone using a Nikon Coolpix 1234Whatever, they would be equally disappointed, and someone using an Olympus Stylus somethingorotherD may have been very pleased. The color representation in images has always been the property of the medium's manufacturer, from Kodak to Polaroid and so on.

It would have been nice to see the author share information instead of just ignorant disappointment

[Leherenn]

Could you please explain for those not in the know?

I realise that why I see is just one "interpretation" of the reality, but it seems sensible that one possible ideal for cameras would be to perfectly match my perception of the world. Is it just impossible because the difference in perception is just so big between individuals that what would be perfect for me would be way off for someone else?

You can also create (at least theoretically, no idea how they compare currently) cameras that are better than human eyes at things like resolution, contrasts and so on, and that seems like another possible ideal; but which one is more relevant seems very context dependant.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The challenge here is that your perception of the world itself performs contextual color correction. If you've ever seen those optical illusions where you see two different colors but they're actually the same (https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/another-brain-frying-optical-i... is my favorite recent example), that's a demonstration of the effect. So a camera that's trying to match your perception of the world can't just identify the "true" color; it has to identify what color it should print on your screen to generate the same perception as if the contents of the picture were outside your window.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's a bad ideal, though. Smartphone cameras do a very good job at automatically performing all the right corrections in most circumstances. It's just nontrivial, and thus unsurprising that the normal algorithms fail in weird edge cases like "the entire sky is deep red".