[ama5322]

The tiny sensors are a marvel of technology but have absurd levels of noise though. They're essentially unusable as traditional single-shot readout sensors in anything but exceptional light conditions. Internally phones take multiple shots and do an enormous amount of postprocessing for each shot. It's a completely different technique.

You can get a feel by how much post-processing is done by installing something like "opencamera" on a flagship phone, disable all filters and look at the raw file (if your phone allows it) and compare the results.

[okasaki]

OpenCamera is great if you want natural looking photos.

I went out with my android shitphone and someone brought their iphone 12 pro max. Here's a comparison (opencamera + rawtherapee vs iphone camera jpeg):

https://i.imgur.com/0E3KoBq.jpg

The iphone looks awful. It overbrightened/hdr-ed everything and made the sky blue (it was grey).

[coder543]

I mean, you can take raw photos on iPhone too, if you disagree with their heif/jpeg engine. The default camera app will generate raws with some interesting multi-frame fusion, and 3rd party apps can take direct, single frame raw photos. Plenty of choice to go around.

But, most people are happy with the default output from iPhone in most circumstances.

[Ancapistani]

This is awesome, thanks for posting it!

I have an iPhone and won’t likely switch to Android again any time soon, but it’s good to know that there are such flexible options now.