[jlarocco]

I love my big, heavy Nikon DSLR, and there's really no comparing the images it takes with the ones from my iPhone. Especially in "tricky" lighting situations they're not even in the same ballpark.

That said, there can be just as much (or more) "computational photography" going on with a digital camera as there is with a modern phone, the difference is that cameras and processing software give control to the user, and phones typically do not.

[wombat_trouble]

"Real" cameras do a lot of postprocessing too, but it's generally oriented at producing faithful results. They might remove unambiguous and correctable issues such as vignetting or lens distortion, but they don't cross the line of inventing new details to make the photo look good.

Computational photography techniques on smartphones, on the other hand, were always designed around squishy "user perception" goals to make photos look impressive, details be damned.

[jlarocco]

I didn't see any invented "new details" in the article's iPhone photos. Phones have small sensors and crap lenses, so they ramp up noise reduction and sharpness to make up for it. Turn up the ISO and max out the NR on the Fujifilm and the results would be nearly as bad.

[wyager]

The text looks qualitatively very little like the true text. Almost all details of the text (including shape of strokes!) are hallucinated by the iPhone.

I could import the X-T5 photo into lightroom or whatever and crank NR all the way up, and I don't think it would look anything like the iPhone image. Also, the less-processed image on the iPhone (which you see for a split second) looked fine, so there wasn't enough noise to justify this level of "correction".

My guess is the iPhone got confused by the texture of the anodized aluminum.

[wombat_trouble]

I see invented texture and layering here: https://yager.io/comp/mi.jpeg

[jefftk]

It's pretty hard to tell without knowing what sort of image was input to the computational photography process

[MichaelZuo]

The actual image is right below it in the post.

[jefftk]

That's the image captured by a different camera (it's labeled "Fujifilm X-T5" and is from a different angle). The input I'm interested here is what the phone camera's sensor received prior to processing.

[kaba0]

That seems just like edge sharpening.

[wonnage]

At the end of the day you're always "inventing new details" to turn sensor data into an image. Most algorithms involve edge detection and predicting color correlations, and you'll also run into cases where false details are added and reality is changed to fit the priors.

One can find pathological cases for traditional cameras too - moire is a common problem, Fuji X-Trans sensors historically had a watercolor/worms effect particularly in greenery, etc.

[kaba0]

Do digital cameras really do anywhere near the same computations? Like, they usually have like some low-end shitty microprocessor at most, while for example an iphone has an insanely powerful CPU. Sure, plenty part of this processing happens in the ISP, but surely not everything.

[donkeyd]

No, they don't. It's not just the CPU, it's also that phones will often take bracketed exposures and use sensor data to align them correctly and automatically create an HDR image, for example. Either that or taking lots of short exposures and stacking them. It's not just in post processing, the magic already happens while taking the image itself.

People who think digital cameras do anything close to what modern phones do don't have a clue. They're the opposite of 'Phones can do anything a DSLR can' people and they are just as wrong.

[jlarocco]

Well somebody doesn't have a clue...

In camera HDR: https://www.slrlounge.com/in-camera-hdr-intro/

In camera focus stacking: https://www.youtube.com/embed/E5zX1E5wAiE

Sometimes high end "pro" cameras will skip those features because they expect people to process those image on a computer anyway, but in general a modern camera will beat a phone hands down.

[softfalcon]

I also love my big heavy Canon DSLR. Can’t quite describe why it gives me so much joy, but I keep it around me at all times. I just love taking photos.

The quality difference is also very obvious compared to my phone even though my camera is easily 8 years old.

[rimliu]

I liked my not that big Nikons. Then I realised that I do not take as much photos as I could because I cannot be bothered to take camera and quite heavy 70-200/2.8 and 24-70/2.8 with me. And then I sold all my Nikon gear and instead of getting my dram D850 got myself Olympus. So happy I did this. Turns out you don't need FF and M4/3 has a gazzilion of excellent, small, and light-weight lenses available.

[matwood]

Nikon is finally releasing some lightweight Z primes. The 28mm and 40mm are great and make my z5 a very portable FF solution.