I don't think that's quite right. PQ attacks focus on the "trapdoor" functions in asymmetric cryptography, _not_ the symmetric encryption that happens after key negotiation. The current concern is that a future attacker could unwrap the symmetric key, not directly attack the symmetric encryption that is used for something like backups.
(Note: I didn't actually dig into the backup implementation, but my guess is that it's more of a KDF -> symmetric design, rather than the sorts of asymmetric negotiation you'd find in multi-party messaging.)
If the app takes your disappearing message, encrypts it with a static key that never changes and is never deleted, and uploads it to the cloud, then the message is never truly "disappearing." A "post compromise" event will allow the attacker to decrypt that ciphertext at any point in the future. All of this ratcheting is undone by backups.
Disappearing messages were never a real thing in the first place. You can have a gentleman's agreement that the person you send your message to will delete it after reading it, there's no way to guarantee anything beyond that.
(Fair point though that probably "disappearing" messages shouldn't be included in backups since that obviously prevents them from being deleted. Idk if Signal implements that or not.)
What type of static key? If it's just a big symmetric key that isn't derived from an asymmetric handshake of some type then no, that's not our current understanding of the PQ threat model.
Part of the premise of FS/PCS is that "shit happens" to compromise keys even if the underlying cryptography is strong, so if you want a coherent end-to-end FS/PCS story, the claim would be that you need to be ratcheting everywhere.
Definitely, but when we're running around sprinkling PQ algorithms all over the place, it's on top of the asymmetric bits, not replacing the "boring" stuff like your symmetrically encrypted backups. Shit certainly does happen, especially where key management is involved, but I'm not sure I agree that offering an encrypted backup feature is necessarily undoing the FS/PCS story.
edit: Well, let me argue with myself for a moment. I don't think offering an encrypted backup feature undoes the PQ story. But FS/PCS is weakened, sure, since we're talking about all types of shit happening, not just currently known (or strongly theorized) attacks.
Yes, if Signal has effectively removed ratcheting and forward secrecy from the logical "encryption protocol" by encrypting all messages (even disappearing messages) with a single static key that never changes for your lifetime and sending them to the cloud, then all this talk about "post-quantum ratchets" is theater. There are no ratchets.
(Note; I also work for OpenAI Security — though I’ve not worked on our bounty program for some time. These just my thoughts and experiences.)
I believe the author was referring to the standard BugCrowd terms, which as far as I know are themselves fairly common across the various platforms. In my experience we are happy for researchers to publish their work within the normal guidelines you’d expect from a bounty program — it’s something I’ve worked with researchers on without incident.
100%. We want to ensure we can fix real security issues responsibly before details are published. In practice, if a researcher asks to disclose after we've addressed the issue, we're happy for them to publish.
Yeah if you click into the report per industry it shows a totally different number -- $1.7T, which is obviously smaller than the ~$5T that the same site lists for oil and gas.
The "eval" phase is done after a model is trained to assess its performance on whatever tasks you wanted it to do. I think this is basically saying, "don't evaluate on the entire corpus, find a smart subset."
actually, this post is about a local replacement for code interpreter. the point is for you to not have to upload anything, but for you to download the model and run it locally on your computer.
The readme in the linked repository explains what they mean:
> An open-source, locally running implementation of OpenAI's Code Interpreter.
> […]
> Open Interpreter lets LLMs run code (Python, Javascript, Shell, and more) locally. You can chat with Open Interpreter through a ChatGPT-like interface in your terminal by running $ interpreter after installing.
> […]
> Comparison to ChatGPT's Code Interpreter
> OpenAI's release of Code Interpreter with GPT-4 presents a fantastic opportunity to accomplish real-world tasks with ChatGPT.
> However, OpenAI's service is hosted, closed-source, and heavily restricted:
> - No internet access.
> - Limited set of pre-installed packages.
> - 100 MB maximum upload, 120.0 second runtime limit.
> - State is cleared (along with any generated files or links) when the environment dies.
> Open Interpreter overcomes these limitations by running in your local environment. It has full access to the internet, isn't restricted by time or file size, and can utilize any package or library.
> This combines the power of GPT-4's Code Interpreter with the flexibility of your local development environment.
> […]
> Change your Language Model
> Open Interpreter uses LiteLLM to connect to hosted language models.
> You can change the model by setting the model parameter
> […]
> Running Open Interpreter locally
> Open Interpreter uses LM Studio to connect to local language models (experimental).
> Simply run interpreter in local mode from the command line
It is OpenAI's model (although you can switch to another LLM). It's just that your data and the actual run environment for the code you got from the ChatGPT API, runs locally.
So AFAICT your prompt is still "leaked" to OpenAI, but not your data.
Prompt: "I have a file of 315 customers with their IP, behavior, religious affiliation and previous purchases plus medical history. I want to figure out if I have any customers whose religious affiliation pre-dates a post-surgery stay in hospital."
Data: a huge CSV file which, as you can tell, contains incredibly sensitive/legally impactful information.
With this system, you send the prompt to GPT-4 or Claude, and it doesn't see your data at all. It just writes a python program that can do the analysis.
You run the program locally on C:/Users/passwordoops/SuperSensitiveData/Confidential.csv
You get the result.
OpenAI has never seen your data.
It's a win for confidentiality.
(of course, that's if the LLM didn't give you a program that would exfiltrate your prompt, and if the CSV contains no prompt injection to exfiltrate the data, etc. This system is a security nightmare.)
I think this is an incredibly important lesson. Don't lie, _actually_ find something good to say. It's a goddamned super power, and it's also very good for your own mental health.
I think the problem with this assertion is that over time "good" code often ends up littered with important conditionals to handle cases that upset the general readability and expressiveness of the initial delivery. Imagine a FinTech working on some kind of trading platform. It seems simple and clear at first, but over time more and more safety mechanisms, edge cases, regulatory obligations, and all kinds of other things need to be added -- and often they need to be added _now_, which means that readability is not the primary concern. I think that's the point of the article; readability is often not the most important thing.
I don't think that suddenly catapults the code into "bad" code, and in fact it's this kind of accumulated wisdom that makes full rewrites so famously expensive. The initial core of the idea might be able to be expressed in a simple and beautiful way, but over time it turns out that almost nothing is truly simple, and complexity accumulates. But it's good complexity, it's important to the business, and it doesn't mean that it's bad code.
Complexity and quality can be completely orthogonal. When they aren't, complexity and quality of code are proportional, which is a smell. Readability is often cited in lists of what makes good code, and rightfully so, but it isn't the most important thing. The most important thing is the ETC principle; that the code is easy to change.
You bring up a good point about something that needs to be added NOW, which is a project management/business/cultural concern and something that needs to be addressed. Compromising code quality for speed is a classical trade of and is probably the reason most professional developers on HN hate their projects.
Funny you bring up that example! I do work at a FinTech org and my 2020 was spent working on a trading platform frontend. (Hell of a year...)
I agree that complexity and quality can be unrelated. I think that quality is often misinterpreted as beauty, or brevity, or cleverness — and those are not the same as quality, in my opinion. Often a long function with a bunch of error and edge case handling is seen as ugly, and thus low quality, and what I’m getting at is that an ugly function can also be quite high quality.
And heh yeah it was on my mind because I just spent a few years at a FinTech too — and a lot of that code is incredibly sensitive, and must contain all kinds of “ugly” condition handling that I don’t think is really low quality, it’s just a complicated problem space that requires a ton of attention to detail. And details can be less fun to read, I think we all can get seduced by code golfing and making things prettier, which is again not the same thing as better.
(Which is I think the point of the article — readability and prose is perhaps key in literature, but not always in software.)
The real trick is doing both. Code that reads like a short story while including error handling and edge cases. This is achieved in a practical way by first keeping it as simple as possible only implementing strictly necessary abstractions. When the code reaches a "tipping point" then refactor. Rinse and repeat. If the code is structured reasonably that refactor should be mostly limited to the trouble spot.
Dang, I'm actually surprisingly sad about this. DPReview is _the_ site for extremely detailed analysis of cameras. When I want to buy something I go through their report first, and it's always extremely informative.
It feels like this kind of layoff is part of an end of an era. Amazon used to NEVER cancel projects that customers were using. They just straight up Did. Not. Do. It. I once had to get approval from my VP's VP because we wanted to turn off a product with eleven daily users. 11. The number after ten.
A whole lot more than eleven people used DPReview, and they provided a service that I'm not sure is well replicated from other sources. A loss for the internet, and it makes me sad that these kinds of quasi-public-good projects are getting canned across the industry.
I get that big companies are not retirement homes for nerds but... with as much profit as the profit centers bring in, there was a little wiggle room for passion projects. Now it feels like that wiggle room is being squeezed right out of the industry as we all brace for the recession that hasn't quite shown up yet.
I do think times have changed though, DPReviews fortunes arguably have mirrored the fortunes of the ILC (interchangeable lens camera) market. The site (along with flickr.com...) was a daily visit for me 15 years ago at the height of the DSLR boom, but I honestly now can't remember the last time I checked.
ILC/DSLR annual sales volume peaked in ~2010 I believe, and has rapidly declined ever since really, another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones. If we are being blunt, Amazon bought dpreview to use as a sales funnel for DSLRs and cameras, which they simply don't sell so much of anymore. A sad day though.
I know dpreview covers cameras beyond ILCs, but ILC reviews where always by far the most popular content on the site - in the DSLR boom/Phil Askey years it simply was the gold standard in DSLR reviews. I still remember pouring over the classic battle between Canon's 300D and Nikon's D70 for entry level 6mp DSLR supremacy constantly on dpreview circa 2003/4.
Lenses appear to have declined by about 66% from 2012 to 2022. Cameras, by a little under 50%.
This decline makes sense to me. I have a Fuji XT4 which I like a lot, but, also, starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good. Their automatic exposure in sunlight, for example, is often (not always) great. At the same time, the software quality in pretty much all cameras leaves much to be desired: I can go on a rant about the number of clicks necessary to wirelessly transfer from camera to phone but would rather not, and people have been ranting about that topic for at least a decade.
Phones definitely cannot compete with ILCs in the applications that photographers use. Phones fundamentally lack the larger sensors and specialist lenses that allow ILCs to produce the images they do. Yes, phones can blur stuff to fake bokeh, but even very basic things are not accounted for in phones.
What phones can do is replace dedicated cameras for the basic photography needs of many consumers. Point and shoot cameras have gone by the wayside. So have many cheaper consumer-oriented interchangeable-lens models. Many people bought APS-C DSLRs and just used them with the kit lens. That market has fizzled out. For one, most of those people now just use their phones. But even if they don't use their phones, DSLRs from the early 2010s still produce good images by today's standards.
But you know what a smartphone can't replace? My 135mm f/1.8 lens, just to name one. And full-frame sensors are way better than phone sensors. I'd much rather use my Canon 5Diii (from 2012) than my Pixel 6 Pro.
More than that, I feel that in their question to get bigger and bigger sensors, phone cameras have missed the mark with their actual purpose. The Pixel 6 Pro, for instance, has a larger sensor size to get a shallower depth of field. But this is NOT a welcome change when I am photographing pieces of paper and get the wrong focus in my images. The fact that you can't stop down the aperture on the lenses in 99% of phones is a major limitation. And that's just the beginning.
Now, I'm not saying I never use the camera on my Pixel. But I am saying that it's not at all useful for anything I'd use a real camera for.
> Phones definitely cannot compete with ILCs in the applications that photographers use.
That's overly broad. A lot of what photographers do doesn't need those capabilities (hell, some photographers work with literal children's toys), and the niches where you need them are getting smaller all the time. There are a few things you still can't photograph well with a phone (e.g. birds in flight), but that's a long way from being all photography.
> The fact that you can't stop down the aperture on the lenses in 99% of phones is a major limitation.
My last two phones have been able to do this, FWIW.
In Asia I see more people with cameras year after year. It is now at a point where striking a convo about a camera someone has is tired because the next person over also has a cool camera. I mean I saw a guy with TWO Leicas yesterday. Fuji's mirrorless are huge and medium format is now as frequent as those Fujis were 6-8 years ago.
It's not only about features, in which I still think cameras best phones any day. It's also about the process. I don't want to use the same hated device that pesters me with work and atrocious social media for something artful. Same reason film is big lately. Sadly DPR due to its name excludes film.
Also Instax / Polaroid. AFAIK, Fuji makes the majority (or at least a very significant chunk) of their consumer camera sales with Instax cameras and Instax film.
Also cheap digital compacts are popular, which are smaller than those instant film ones but also have the nostalgic look and cost a fraction of a phone. And a number of niche hobbies like astrophotography, wildlife, extreme macro, all requiring digital cameras. Saying if the phone can take nice photos (for some values of nice because physics make it impossible to rival the quality) then cameras should be obsolete is like saying your phone can zoom so microscopes are obsolete.
> That's overly broad. A lot of what photographers do doesn't need those capabilities (hell, some photographers work with literal children's toys),
OK, but nobody is doing serious photographic work (professional or hobbyist) using children's toy cameras. Those are used for an occasional laugh. Now, yes, you can photograph most things with your phone. But my full-frame cameras produce WAY better portraits than my phone, which is supposed to have a fairly decent camera for a phone.
> My last two phones have been able to do this, FWIW.
Good! Hopefully this will become more common. The fact that the Pixel 6 Pro expands the sensor size but keeps a fixed-aperture lens made the camera worse, as far as I'm concerned.
> OK, but nobody is doing serious photographic work (professional or hobbyist) using children's toy cameras.
Some serious artistic photographers do do serious work with them, taking pictures to show in galleries and the like. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone was out there doing professional e.g. wedding photography with one, for customers who want photos that look a bit different. Of course it's a stylistic choice, but camera choice often is.
> But my full-frame cameras produce WAY better portraits than my phone, which is supposed to have a fairly decent camera for a phone.
Now that's interesting - well-lit, no motion or anything, but still much better portraits? Would be interested to hear some more details about what's different/better.
> Of course it's a stylistic choice, but camera choice often is.
OK, I guess I mean to exclude this kind of work which is done because the cameras are of much worse technical quality — these are by definition not applications for which traditional dedicated cameras are used.
In other words, the toys are not replacements for more capable equipment. Yes, you can shoot with a Barbie camera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkmrFguxgS0). But nobody could seriously claim that it replaces any standard ILC. We're not discussing whether or not phones (or Barbies) can take photos; we're talking about whether or not they can replace ILCs, and in what applications.
> Now that's interesting - well-lit, no motion or anything, but still much better portraits? Would be interested to hear some more details about what's different/better.
Well, of course, also, we don't always have good lighting or a lack of motion. Often, I am photographing people in motion, or in poor lighting, or both. And that's not a super niche thing. Imagine photographing an actor who is in the middle of a rehearsal (which I've done many times). A dedicated camera is just the right tool for that job, with the appropriate lens attached. Not to mention, of course, you want to have a somewhat telephoto lens for that — and one area where phone cameras have been, to my eyes, mostly marketing bluster is that of "super-zoom."
But looking back just at the same gear example I mentioned earlier: I often use my Sigma 135mm f/1.8 lens on my (full-frame) Canon R5. Now, I'll concede that this lens itself is much, much larger than anything you could slap on a phone, and the full-frame sensor is also far bigger than what you'd find on any phone, so you'd EXPECT something larger.
Now, to be fair, this is one of the lenses you can buy (tied with a Canon and Sony of the same spec) with some of the shallowest possible DOF on a full-frame camera. I don't always shoot wide open, but sometimes I do. In the ideal situation, I'd be shooting at ISO 100. And a 45MP FF sensor at its base ISO is just going to be ... really good. Admittedly, the iPhone (more than the Pixel, to my eyes, by a LONG shot) can produce some OK fake bokeh. But I suppose that my eye is good enough to know real bokeh from fake. My R5 will focus perfectly on the point I want and get the shot I am looking for every time. And AI-based trickery won't work equally well with all subjects; pure optics stays the same no matter what you're shooting.
The Pixel, though, in my opinion, produces pretty bad photos. Everything is NR'd, sharpened and HDR'd until it looks like a watercolor. I much prefer to apply (in most cases) pretty limited adulteration to my photos (which I shoot in RAW). I can shoot RAW with my phone, but I've never been anywhere near satisfied with the results. I will confess that the RAW results from the iPhone are significantly better, though still nothing like what I get from my dedicated camera. (I won't use an iPhone for reasons unrelated to photography.)
> The Pixel, though, in my opinion, produces pretty bad photos.
I've had the opportunity to play with iPhone 14, it has 12 megapixel cameras, but I find that the image quality is no difference to 8 megapixels of detail, and if you use third party applications that can take pictures without post processing, it's often closer to 6 megapixels and the grain in the image is not great. Smart phones don't appear to be resolving the detail advertised.
> I shoot in RAW
Shooting raw on my Android phones (since the iPhone 14 won't let me) shows there is clearly very little dynamic range, which when trying to do beautiful processing on skin tones or such, come out very flat (regardless if going for natural or unrealistically perfect).
I do a lot of photography in poor lighting, I over expose a lot so I can the details in the shadow, and then bring it back down in post processing in raw. Try to do anything similar on phones, terrible grain. Leave it to the phone processing, it does some really bad approaches at AEB with post processing and not very good handling on the HDR merge, plus the exposure time is huge, meh.
> But I suppose that my eye is good enough to know real bokeh from fake.
It's not convincing to me because you can see stuff like the background between strands of hair in focus. I imagine it's only going to get better at that.
The biggest problem with phone photography is sensor size currently and it seems unlikely we're going to have larger sensor sizes when it requires more flange distance for the optics.
Yeah, the iPhone doesn't have the best camera by any means. But having received some RAW photos from one, I feel like they at least don't look super shitty before you push them. Now, they do not compare to RAWs from my actual cameras (whether the R5 or 5Diii). But they at least might be worth looking at.
The iPhone does shoot RAW, by the way: 12-bit DNG, but apparently perhaps only on the Pro models. Also, the 48MP camera of the iPhone 14 Pro (this is the model whose RAWs I viewed, but I don't own one) can produce 48MP DNGs. In good light they can look decent enough for what they are.
The Pixel 6 Pro just takes smeary photos. Their NR and compression makes them look blocky like screencaps from a video.
I also have used the Sony Xperia 1ii (used to own this phone for a while). This was supposedly a phone with a focus on the camera. In my experience, it looked pretty bad.
The fake bokeh will get better, I'm sure, but it can never beat the real deal. Real shallow DOF already exists; sure, faking it will get closer, and that's probably enough for the average Joe, but it's not like we can't just keep using the real thing, which doesn't have the potential flaws.
The thing about larger sensors, of course, is that they require lenses that project a larger image circle — and phone lenses can't really be like ILC lenses because, well, the form factors conflict. You can't stuff a 135/1.8 in your pocket; the laws of optics are what makes those lenses as big as they are.
I had been hoping for metamaterial lenses to solve the physics problem, but that recent demo made it clear consumer applications are a very long way off. I can't actually find the demo, but it was someone from one of the three letter agencies showing it off on a stage. Maybe someone else will have it. It only shot in monochrome. The quality was good, and the lens was a lot smaller than an ordinary ILC lens on a camera you'd normally need to get that quality. But the presenter didn't offer much hope of it being better quickly. The demo was for a very specific scientific application.
"starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good"
-exasperated sigh-
I wish I could agree but I just can't. I feel around that point pictures taken by phone cameras stopped looking real. They started forcing stuff like HDR and AI correction and very heavy handed noise filtering.
Looking back at my old pictures from the 2010s, I think my canon digital elph took better pictures than my phones do now lol. I realize how stupid that sounds.
To me they do seem to be getting “better”, in air quotes, I think due to ILCs supplying ground truth data…
IMO the real problem is that there aren’t much connection between that photos you like and people. “If we take the S.D. Card out of the proper camera and insert it into a proper Computer…” just don’t cut it anymore.
They only have a phone each. You have to be able to get the photo to the phone to social media before the flash unit finishes recharging(on fresh batteries of course). Else they’ll lose interest.
The companion apps provided by ILC manufacturers are just horrible, broken, useless. I was really glad that I could hack the in-camera "send email" function of the Samsung NX500 to send the picture to a VPS which then forwards it to my favorite photo sharing chat instead.
> starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good.
ILC cameras also got really good.
I'm not at all doubting that smartphones are the primary cannibalization vector, but even for people who prefer to use cameras with significantly larger sensors than can be put into a smartphone I think the cameras themselves reached a point years ago where it became difficult even for ILC enthusiasts to justify upgrades on a regular basis because what people already owned was "Good Enough". I reached this point with the Sony A7R Mk3 and other people probably reached this point sooner.
For years it felt like Canon and Nikon were kind of aware this would happen with ILCs and were dragging their feet on camera body tech making incremental upgrades behind where the technology should have been if they were competing full speed, and then other vendors like Sony just came smashing in without being part of this implicit agreement and pushed camera body tech along extremely quickly for a few years (with Canon/Nikon having to follow along to some degree to keep up) and it didn't take many iterations of this pushing the technology to where it could be for ILC camera bodies to be something you feel no itch to upgrade from year to year because the shiny new thing is an extremely marginal upgrade.
So the cannibalization of the market probably had two fronts, the larger one from smartphones, and a smaller but still significant one from "Good Enough" (which is an issue smartphones are starting to run into as well).
Yep, my wife and I used to do wedding photography and from that period we have 2 Canon 5D Mk II's and 2 40D's along with 3 L lenses, some primes and a few cheaper zooms. There's absolutely no reason we would ever need another camera. Even people with a single body wouldn't ever need another one unless they broke it.
In terms of video capabilities, Canon 5D Mk II is limited to 8-bit 4:2:0 1080p H.264 recording at 30fps, maxing out at 12 minutes of recording. That is a far cry from 10-bit (or 12-bit) 4:2:2 4K, 6K or even 8K RAW or ProRes at 120fps or higher with unlimited recording from a similarly priced camera in today's money.
(It's also limited in terms of RAW photo as well though: the best recording option is 8-bit 10MP RAW)
No phone comes anywhere near that either, not to mention the lenses for phones can't compete with the real interchangeable lenses. The difference probably doesn't matter to someone who is just going to record his baby walking around and watch it on a 7 inch screen, but of course that's not the target audience for those cameras.
If you read the last sentence of the post that you're replying to, I already said that it won't matter to most people.
That being said, "is only for editing in post" (which is not really true, banding is an issue in scenes with high dynamic range with 8-bit, not limited to sky but also with strong lights or deep shadows) doesn't mean people won't want it. Around 10-15 years ago, in the age of single-digit-GB slow SD cards and weaker camera/phone processors, that's what people used to say about RAW photos repeatedly. Now it is mainstream in even in phones, with built-in editing apps and easy to use desktop programs with few knobs. This means editing itself in post isn't a barrier for mainstream adoption, the issue is video editing currently has a high barrier as it is essentially impossible on portable devices, the programs have their learning curves, and the whole stack requires some financial investment.
Majority of displays are 8bit and it will probably stay as standard for while.
Btw, over 10 years old Canon 5DMIII can shoot RAW video with MagicLantern. Manufacturers should open/update code to their old cameras that are capable do this. Its really disappointing when marketing ruin whole product. No wonder that camera market dying.
Even when targeting 8-bit displays, recording 10-bit is still beneficial. Besides obvious benefits in editing and encoding, simply playing a 10-bit video file straight from the camera on an 8-bit screen is useful when applying any common "effects" (brightness, contrast, LUT, colorspace transformation, gamma correction, tonemapping, etc etc).
> Btw, over 10 years old Canon 5DMIII can shoot RAW video with MagicLantern
Not sure why that is relevant in this context, but
any digital camera would be capable of shooting RAW video with hacks: they all have photo-sensors and RAW simply means dumping the digitized signal data in a suitable format. It's a matter of hacking the device. But it doesn't mean you should do it, especially when that's not what they're designed for. Unsurprisingly, in the case of Canon 5D Mark III (which is a photo-oriented camera lacking a stabilizer, you can read about further limitations such as the under-utilized sensor in video mode [which typically happens due to hardware limitations] here https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canon-eos-5d-mark-iii/25), a lot of potential problems await apparently: https://www.cined.com/consider-this-before-you-shoot-raw-on-... For RAW video, at the very least, you need a more reliable storage hardware hooked to your device with sufficient capacity for recording (meaning CFExpress or NVMe via USB, not SDXC), and possibly active cooling, both missing from that camera so it would require some hardware modding.
That being said, modern video cameras can also do more than the trivial task of recording RAW: they can handle processing and encoding of higher quality videos (resolution, bpp, frame rate) in real time, which requires specialized silicon missing from Canon 5D Mark III.
> Manufacturers should open/update code to their old cameras that are capable do this. Its really disappointing when marketing ruin whole product. No wonder that camera market dying.
1. The camera hardware isn't actually designed for it (by the way, even with new video cameras, there are usually trade offs, you turn one feature on and another becomes inaccessible) 2. that's not the reason why the consumer camera market is shrinking, and 3. doing that would shrink the market volume even further.
Temporal Dithering also known as Frame Rate Control is very often used in 8 bit panels to allow them to display almost as many colours as a 10bit panel.
From the input perspective you're running it as a 10bit panel
Videos are not what most people mean by "photography", 10-bit is mostly a gimmick (there are situations where it gives a real advantage, but they're niche), and higher-than-1080p resolutions are honestly pretty marginal a lot of the time. 30fps is pretty awful though.
I'm still a bit interested in buying a ILC camera, but I assumed at some point the prices would start dropping, but they really haven't. Demand has gone way down and supply isn't really limited. There is even competition. But the prices remain fairly constant.
Used is the budget option. Cameras aren't in the kind of rapid development cycle where an older model isn't competitive, but it's often half the price of new, or less.
I wouldn't expect that to happen... Especially with lenses (full of expensive bits of glass) but new cameras will always be sold at a premium. Firms set prices for products, supply and demand mostly doesn't come into it (except pushing prices up perhaps when availability of components are constrained).
> I can go on a rant about the number of clicks necessary to wirelessly transfer from camera
Yeah this is a huge unaddressed issue that must be hemorrhaging users out of cameras. It’ll need a substantial rework in cameras and perhaps phones too, but I’ve seen enough times that the display of LCD taken and uploaded on social media and they must know that’s being done.
They could make a phone-camera hybrid, with or without in-camera Lightroom, TransferJet, USB cable transfer, anything in those direction that were attempted low-effort and forgotten.
People aren’t going to appreciate current hours-long delayed gratification that current ILCs require. No way.
These android-based cameras you talk about exist but not sure why any serious photographer would use one. When I need the camera I need it now, not wait for the camera app to decide to boot. Also, posting the result on social media as is is a thing of the past, people do post processing now and pros use raws. To develop a raw well you gotta use a proper big screen.
Cameras made after 2016 are so good in terms of image quality that you will not see any improvement in newer cameras. So upgrading is reasonable option only for those, who need better functionality, which majority of amateurs don't need.
It depends for what. There are still ways to go with video, but mostly only for people who care to colour grade their footage. I expect a significant proportion of people now are buying mirrorless cameras now almost entirely to shoot video so I expect it is a major consideration. Things like in-camera 10-bit raw video recording which is still fairly rare. Probably mirrorless cameras will start being able to shoot 5K or 6K too, which is useful (for reframing by cropping in, otherwise downscaling to increase visual quality).
The thing is, there's another boom currently going on. The mirrorless boom, and this site is the gold standard for that one as well. Now there is no home, and its much harder to gleam the differences that are actually meaningful between these many mirrorless cameras (and new dslrs that do get made).
It isn't a boom. It is just a transition from DSRL/video cameras to mirrorless. Market is consolidating around mirrorless for everything from photography to video. Hire a wedding photography and a wedding videographer today, they may have the same equipment.
a "boom" is an overstatement. The camera industry overall is dying and struggling. We're down to something like 10% of camera sales from 2010. There is no boom. There is a transition from DSLR to mirrorless for the few existing dedicated camera photographers out there.
I have a $600 DSLR that I bought at Costco on a whim, fifteen years ago. Once in a blue moon I look at my old photos and realize they just look night and day better than anything I've taken in the last decade. Camera phone lenses do alright when it's sunny outside, but DSLRs kill it when it comes to medium and low light.
And of course, the dslr looks perfect in perfect light too. You can do things that make your images even better with dslrs since you have access to the raw files and complete control over exposure. You can underexpose for a night scene to not blow up highlights and shoot at lower noise or at a shutter speed you can hand hold without blur (depends on your current focal length), then pull up the exposure only on the shadows where you aren't liable to notice much noise anyway. You can get that shot on a bright blue day that looks like what you eyes see with this technique, where you can see the blue sky and shadows under trees just fine, by exposing for the sky to not blow it out, and then pulling up the shadows. For any pro digital camera built in the last 15 years, you can pull a lot before the noise gets too unruly. A camera like an old 5dmk1 is still great at this, and its almost 20.
Trying to expose for the highlights is annoying on the iphone at least. It doesn't hold exposure lock that reliably, and the slider needs to be a lot more sensitive to actually let me quickly stop down the exposure. Usually I miss click since you have to swipe several times, and it resets the exposure. Then you are left with a jpeg that's compressed with some aggressive de noising applied probably missing most of the color depth too.
You can easily shoot RAW with manual control over exposure (and even focus) on an iPhone with Halide or other third party apps. Aperture is fixed, of course.
IMO if a third party app has to bring the feature its not really a part of the phone. Apps come and go. Plus apps like halide are paid so you could think of it as a tax to get to actually use some of the hardware you purchased.
That seems like a rather academic distinction. The cost of the app is minuscule compared to the cost of any of the camera hardware that you’re referring to.
The built in app does give you focus lock and manual exposure control (with auto ISO). Only a very small number of people would want the additional control that Halide offers, so it wouldn’t really make sense for Apple to add those features to the built in app.
> The only people who think Smartphone Cameras take better pictures than SLRs are not photographers.
Amateur photographer here, currently have a Canon 80D and a 20-year collection of medium-quality lenses. You're completely right. The photos that this thing takes are miles ahead of my iPhone 12 Pro; you just can't beat a sensor with big pixels and an aperture that's 10-100x (? I don't know the actual ratio) larger than a smartphone lens. But the one nuance is the old saying "the best camera in the world is the one you've got with you"; I have some beautiful shots from this camera, and the 20D before it, and the Rebel XT before it, but some of my absolute favourites were shot on a smartphone because it was in my pocket at the right time and the DSLR was at home in the bag.
The final output isn’t the only criteria either. The file may look good, but when you really know your SLR, you can compose and shoot much much faster with more options. Aperture, shutter speed, even ISO, and you can create art.
On a phone it’s all kinda pre-canned. And you have to paw at the stupid thing like a monkey.
You might have an equally sharp or whatever JPG, but it’s the difference between watercolor and crayons.
SLRs don't take "better" photos, they take more detailed photos. The best photo is the one you actually took because you had the camera on you and didn't miss the shot.
And if you want the most detailed photo, SLRs are not the highest quality cameras either when you could rent a Fujifilm GFX 100.
> SLRs don't take "better" photos, they take more detailed photos. The best photo is the one you actually took because you had the camera on you and didn't miss the shot.
At this point I want to go back to using a pocket camera. I can turn it on and take a picture without having to look at the screen. There's no automatic cloud uploads. I don't have to worry about someone logging metrics or scanning the pictures or AI doing weird things like filling in moon textures. I take picture. I get picture. That's it. I don't have to worry about cloud subscriptions or "ecosystems" (GAH!) or whatever. I stick the SD card in my computer and there's the fucking pictures. Done.
Not to mention that almost all photo consumption happens on a phone as well.
Only when you open a phone photo on a big screen and compared to one taken by a real lens do you realize the big difference.
Despite all the incredible technology in phone cameras, there is no substitute for proper optics.
> Once in a blue moon I look at my old photos and realize they just look night and day better than anything I've taken in the last decade.
Exactly. I can't identify at all with comments saying phone cameras are good. Convenient, yes I get it (although personally I keep my phone in my backpack so pulling it out takes only slightly less effort than pulling out the camera, only because the phone is smaller, but I realize most people keep their phone glued to their hand).
But even my 15+ year old DSLR (a low-end Nikon D40) takes better photos than my 2022 smartphone. I have large (4ft wide) cropped prints on the wall from that camera which have great quality, the <1yr old smartphone camera can't do that.
Its enough of a boom for a small company like fujifilm to justify producing more cameras and lenses and even start up and grow a medium format mirrorless ecosystem. Fujifilm in particular struggles to keep up with demand which is probably not easy given global shortages, but it goes to show there is a market. It's not the market it was in 1995 or 2005, but its a market no less because there's always a demand for the best image technolgy can do.
Phone cameras will always look worse than their contemporary full size counterparts just due to physics, so the pros and prosumers will always be in demand of a dedicated rig even if their iphone looks like a spider on the back. Not to mention even today just from an OS standpoint, no phone has feature parity with even the first dslr released since phone manufacturers "childproof" camera features that pro camera manufacturers assume you don't need your hand held to use. Usually you have to resort to a third party app if you want to set a manual exposure, you know, something any photographer since 1860 could do that we now deem to be "too advanced" for modern humans.
Fujifilm is a twenty billion dollar company. Imaging is just a hobby for them.
Though I agree that if it were truly hemorrhaging them money, they'd have sold it (like Minolta or Pentax) or spun it out into its own entity (like Olympus).
The point-and-shoot market collapsed, but the dslr market is not nearly as dramatically affected with 2010 numbers not too far off 2018 numbers based on statista charts[1].
On the other hand, mirrorless is starting to show growth[2].
Looking at the overall camera-sales are misleading, especially considering that it largely shuffled numbers around within big companies: A Samsung point-and-shoot with a Samsung sensor became a Samsung smartphone with a Samsung sensor, selling even more units with the camera still being a primary selling point.
Also, certain camera brands are less affected than others. Fuji is probably doing better than its ever done these days and has trouble keeping inventory in stock from demand, whereas nikon is at a historic low.
And with good reason. While I like shooting with DSLM some software and hardware parts are just bad.
No GPS. The cheapest Android phone from 5 years ago has this. I don't want to use the shitty app to get geoinformation. Yes, battery lifetime - no need to enable it by default.
No embedded storage. With SSD prices cheap as now, add some 64 or 128GB storage. Keep the card slot.
More computational stuff, no need for enabling it by default, but stuff like taking 10 pictures, then selecting the best one automatically (or whatever the camera thinks is best). Additional: enable better tethering. On my Nikon Z7 I still can't set everything from the computer. Some settings depend on the mode (P,A,S,M) - why? Nobody knows.
They exist! My YN455 interchangeable-lens Android camera has all of those things. It uses the same 20MP MFT sensor as my PEN-F and I love it a lot: https://www.yongnuomall.com/product/detail/16254
It's picky about certain zooms, but it is fantastic with all of my primes (Lumix 20mm F1.7 ASPH and SIGMA 56mm F1.4 DC DN being my favs) and with any of my cine lenses. It's fine for stills as long as I can stand the e-shutter, but I love it for video. Unfortunately I can't seem to share an accurate video sample because Youtube's recompression is adding a ton of horrible choppiness that isn't in the actual camera output: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCbnbKvNZlg (Shot on LAOWA 6mm T2.1 Zero-D Cine. Warning: loud!!)
Point and shoot peaked in 2010, I think. Camera sales have dropped by something like 90% since 2010, if you exclude smartphones. Any “boom” is just consumers shuffling around within a collapsing market.
Consumer fixed-lens cameras are much more dead as a market than ILCs, and those made up the bulk of camera sales. Almost everyone who isn't doing photography as a profession or serious hobby is satisfied with smartphone cameras now.
There is one more use case not covered by smartphones but actually covered by fixed-lens cameras - taking photos in rainy weather (which in some parts of the world is hard to avoid) or underwater. While there are waterproof smartphones, capacitive touchscreen becomes unusable as soon as it catches even a few drops of rain or water from wet fingers. A camera like Fujifilm XP140 works well in rain as long as there are no drops on the lens and under water if you want to make a shot of marine life.
And while there are gloves which allows to use touchscreen using it in the snow is not the best experience either - pressing a physical button is easier.
I expect many smartphones to have quality better then this camera but in some conditions it's hard/impossible to use a smartphone. And quality is enough to capture some moments from a family vocation.
The iPhone is waterproof and you can take a photo with the physical volume up/down key. I've used it underwater a couple of times, none of my other proper cameras would be able to do that. My two cents.
I've used my olympus TG4 underwater at a depth of 15m (best I could do without scuba), and had it trailing on a lanyard on my wrist whilst swimming in the ocean. I'd like to think nobody would subject any current smartphone to these sorts of conditions, and expect them to survive, nor believe the marketing rhetoric.
One other thing I do like about the TG4, nice big buttons, and I've had plenty of opportunities to use it in rather adverse conditions.
"Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Liquid damage is not covered under warranty, but you might have rights under consumer law."
I think of it more as good to have for an accidental drop, rather than a specification to rely upon for regular underwater photography, although the more recent phones do reach ever higher Ingress Protection (IP67, IP68 etc) water/splash/dust ratings.
Anecdata but I’ve jumped in saltwater to get ahold of my stupid dog that fell off our dock with my iPhone 12 in my pocket. I am typing this response on said phone :)
Took my 12 mini on a day of kayaking, water got into the lenses and broke the faceID camera. The water in the lens eventually evaporated, but the faceID cam seems permenantly broken.
They are water resistant, but I wouldn't use it in water as a matter of course. Maybe if its in pristine/as new condition, at best - I've dropped mine a few times, which probably didn't help.
Smartphones don't really work for underwater photography. Even the water resistant models have very limited depth ratings so to take them scuba diving you need a strong housing, just as with any other camera. There are underwater housings available for a few smartphone models but controlling anything through the touch screen is problematic, the small lenses and sensors don't work well in dim light, and there isn't a good way to trigger external strobes.
Any thoughts on the various action cameras for underwater? I've got an inexpensive (not GoPro) one that I've taken diving. It's just in looping video mode, cutting a new clip every few minutes, and could certainly use additional lighting. If I want stills, I just grab them from a freeze frame.
While I'm starting to get more into diving, I don't want to just throw money at other goodies before I know what they'll do for me.
If you honestly think your phone camera is a valid replacement for medium/large format film, then you were never serious about photography in the first place.
For all their improvements, smartphones are still extremely limited by sensor size and the size of optics. Those are terrible, compared to even the entry level DSLRs.
I'm glad it works for your use case (although I can't imagine what that is), but any decent photographer will be able to tell a smartphone picture from a picture taken with good optics and a DSLR. It's just that the market for those photos has also shrunk and the masses are happy with their instagram filter drivel.
not only that, but Google magic eraser made my holiday photos appear like i had my own private island and yacht and i was always happy and smiling and looking at the camera and the sunset and skies, oh my! it just lights up my instas. i don't get what real cameras even do, they have something to do with reality?
seriously though, not all the kids will be coopted into this, and will find cameras are still instruments for artistic expression. but for that we hardly need dpreview and its obsession with optical sharpness and perpetually reviewing every camera in existence as "almost good enough"
You might have it mixed up with DXOMark. DPReview is more "you can sort of tell the difference side by side, but who does that outside a review? They're both good"
and film photographers weren't as serious as daguerreotype photographers in the 1840s.
the market shrunk because gatekeeping photographers were insufferable and tone deaf and everyone ignored them because they had an accessible solution that was good enough.
if you want to pursue a convoluted process for self fulfillment, the choice is yours, but almost nobody else will care about the output of your photos or your fine tuned process.
That's an interesting transition. Why were you choosing those formats over digital ILCs at that time? Most people I hear from choosing film within the past decade, especially larger formats are as interested in the process as the result.
>Phone cameras can't come close to the quality of even a full frame DSLR, anything medium or large format is light years ahead of phone quality.
This is true for medium format if you're doing a drum scan of the medium format negative. Realistically, however, most medium format negatives are never going to be drum scanned.
If you're scanning with a flatbed or via a DLSR, then the difference in quality vs. a modern cell phone camera is not huge. With a typical flatbed you'll get less resolution than a modern cell phone camera; if you scan with a DSLR and macro lens you'll get a bit more (but it's laborious, especially for color negatives).
It's possibly a bit counterintuitive just how bad a job flatbed scanners do in the case of medium format negatives. Years ago I was very excited to make my first scans of some 6x6 negatives with a consumer Epson flatbed scanner. The resulting photos showed about the same amount of detail as roughly equivalent photos taken using my iPhone 4S. There was far more detail on the negatives, as I easily confirmed with a loupe. Extracting that detail via practical scanning methods is far from trivial.
The other point to consider is exposure, color and dynamic range. Modern phones do a fantastic job here.
That's a strange comparison, but if all you want is a photo to post to Instagram, I guess you really doesn't need medium format film, and any "phone camera" will do.
> another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones
It's not just the pace of improvement, but also the marketing spin. I find the strengths of smartphone camera and ILCs pretty complementary. Smartphone cameras work pretty well outdoors where there is enough light. DSLR and mirroless are hard to beat indoors in low light conditions. Coincidentally it is also easier to find your ILC indoors at home when you need it, rather than lugging it around on a hike. When we didn't have kids, we used to spend more time outdoors and so most of our memorable pictures are from a phone. Now that we have restless young kids and are spending more time indoors, almost all of the memorable photos are from a mirrorless camera. But the marketing spin makes it seem like ILCs are completely redundant.
> Smartphone cameras work pretty well outdoors where there is enough light. DSLR and mirroless are hard to beat indoors in low light conditions.
I find the opposite. Proper cameras are much more flexible and plain better when there's enough light. Inside, without a flash, you'll not get a great photo anyway, so might as well benefit from “computational” fakery.
The thing about this is that the manual tweaking allows you to take the picture you're envisioning. Whereas the processing on the phone provides a clear picture in poor conditions, but it's not necessarily the picture I want.
For instance a phone can do a great job in a backlit scenario by intelligently cutting the highlights and boosting the shadows. The resulting image shows both the subject and background clearly but it doesn't represent the real-word lighting conditions. As a result it's great for a quick snapshot but is less useful in an artistic sense.
>For instance a phone can do a great job in a backlit scenario by intelligently cutting the highlights and boosting the shadows. The resulting image shows both the subject and background clearly but it doesn't represent the real-word lighting conditions. As a result it's great for a quick snapshot but is less useful in an artistic sense.
This seems completely backwards to me. Artistic photography isn't about representing real-world lighting conditions as perceived by humans. Just putting a polarizing filter on a camera changes how the image looks from the way the scene actually appears to humans. Artistic photography routinely does very bizarre stuff with colors to achieve an artistic effect. Even Ansel Adams experimented with solarization, one of the earliest photographic effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarization_(photography)
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that photography has never been about accurately showing real-world lighting conditions, but rather either an artistic or at least idealized version of a scene or subject.
I guess I didn't really word this clearly, my intent was to state that the manual camera generally captures real-world conditions as a baseline. Then the photographer could in camera or in post manipulate the image to fulfill his artistic vision. While there are certain cameras which have inherent distortion for artistic purposes (e.g. Lomo camera) the majority of them are designed to realistically capture the scene in front of them.
In contrast the phone produces a specific artistic decision influence by the software. For instance in the backlit scenario the phone purposely boosts the highlights and cuts the shadows to create what it perceives as a more balanced image.
I'm not so sure about this. Even very old cameras have many lens settings, such as f-stops, which change the depth of field and can massively change how a scene looks. I fail to see how boosting highlights and cutting shadows, so the viewer sees a more balanced image, is really any different than using a wide-angle lens to capture much more in the image than a human can naturally perceive (human vision supposedly looks like a 35mm camera with a 50mm focal length lens setting; telephoto and wide-angle focal lengths are showing things quite differently from how humans would perceive it), or arranging a hyperfocal shot (so that both near and far objects are in-focus, something human eyes are incapable of).
Sure, if you have the camera correctly setup and can remember all of cryptic settings, which using it infrequently I never could. I got once where i knew how to setup the my canon rebel after taking a class. But I just set it to automatic 99% of the time I used it. Any time it was manual it would 20% chance mess up and I'd miss the shot. I took mostly action stuff.
The setup on a phoen is so much simpler and easier esp where it makes suggestions. Phone is bad menus, no touch, dial wheel, ok buttons.
A camera with a swiveling flash (almost always a separate unit) can yield stunning photos in dim indoor conditions. If you have a white wall or ceiling, bam, tons of diffuse light without any more props.
You can manually rotate the built-in flash in Sony’s α6000-series cameras: it uses two spring-loaded hinges, and still operates if you push/pull it backwards. This gives a range of motion from full-forwards to full-upwards to somewhat-backwards.
I think the reality is that most people who were doing photography don’t need what ILCs offer. I was talking to a sweet old lady on one of the last days I was in California. She was showing me some of her work, and TBH, small-aperture landscape / portrait photos that are to be viewed on a smartphone don’t need to be taken on an ILC. Even bokeh can be hacked for a base class of photos.
To put it in another way, ILCs were bought because saw people had to buy them, back in the day. If you wanted anything that wasn’t potato-quality, you needed an ILC.
A lot of photography was enjoyed as an accessible art. It was about being able to capture things. You don’t strictly need an ILC for that, and I think photography will evolve and adapt in that regard. There will still be a market for folks who e.g. need aperture or shutter control, simply because of market segmentation reasons. As an art-art, photography will be about being able to see things differently, and for that reason, there will be people drawn back to the knobs, switches, and lenses that ILCs offer. Some folks will say it’s about the bokeh, or the low-light, or whatever, but it was always about being able to see differently than what other cameras could see, or even what the human eye can “see.”
To which end, the marketing spin is just that. We shouldn’t discount creative folks being able to see differently with a smartphone. It’s just that there are shots that you won’t get be able to take with a small-aperture fixed lens on a smartphone sensor.
(This, and of course, applications where the bleeding edge of image quality matters.)
I used to think that, but the more I take pictures with my phone the more I disagree. My iPhone is very very good at taking iPhone pictures. That is to say all the places and people I take pictures of with my phone look the same. It's a lovely seductive sameness, don't get me wrong. But my phone "knows" what pictures it wants to take and takes them. It needs me less and less.
I don't think we're all that far away from having some sort of always on camera that cuts us as directors out of the "picture" entirely.
Eventually, your phone equivalent will tell you and your friends where to stand, what to do and what to say to get the most out of the location, people and activities you have at your disposal. You won't have any choice (unless you are in that small group that is effectively allowed to self direct your own videos for Tikstagram) if you want to be competitive at projecting a successful image.
Great for the folks shoveling content around, but maybe not what you want if you are trying to develop an individual vision.
That said for a quick snap where I'm just trying to document something my iPhone is awfully handy ; )
I actually think cameras in general take photos that look the same.
Painting on the other hand, that has individuality. The different pigments and brushes and brush strokes in the painting, that gives a sense of uniqueness.
In addition, you are more free to position people in paintings than with photographs.
Cameras are great for the folks shoveling content around, but maybe not what you want if you are trying to develop an individual vision.
Whats the most recent phone you have tried to use in low light? The last two years of Pixels and Iphones (and maybe others, these are just the ones I have seen firsthand) are amazing in low light for a typical use case. I mean sure if you have a tripod and do a long exposure, its a different story, but thats a very different user.
I beat the crap out of my Canon Rebel T3i, I literally wore out the shutter after about 150k pulls on it, and replaced it with a Sony A7 III with a "G" lens, and while the pandemic was a large reason for it collecting dust, I am going on a "big" trip to a scenic place for the first time since prepandemic in a few months, and I am not sure its going to find a place in my bag. For the space and weight, my P6 Pro does a fantastic job.
The overlap in quality is enough that I see myself rarely using an ILC in the future, and the A7 III is likely the last one I will own unless they make some leaps forward to compete with smartphones.
It so happens I recently took a Pixel 6 Pro and a Canon 80D on a trip abroad. I used a rebuild of the stock camera app that does away with the automatic over-sharpening that the stock camera app has, and with the 80D, I used the EF-S 15-85 mm lens that (I believe) used to be the kit lens for the 7D. I also used the EF 70-300 mm non-L lens.
There is, in my opinion, no question that the 80D takes sharper pictures in daylight. It's just hard to beat a sensor that's that much bigger. The lenses, also, just have way, way more light gathering power.
Now, in dark places, at night, I used the P6P more, and that worked better than the 80D. But I'm glad I had the 80D for the big landscape shots and for the tight shots of people's faces.
The A7 III is way lighter and smaller than the 80D, and takes way better pictures. I would suggest considering finding a space for it in your bag. At least take a few pictures with both the P6P and the A7 III and view them at 100% to see if you're happy with the results.
If you're willing to post process your images, the 80D will look way better for night pictures.
The problem is that there is no built-in function for it and you have to manually process each pictures. You might even need more than one tool if you want to take advantage of the same type of AI fakery that phone have.
One thing I love about my A7S is the ability to tilt the screen and take candid photos of people while we're having a conversation. Also that thing pretty much shoots in the dark so I find that magic.
I regret not buying a Sony when I got my Canon 6D. Almost all of the lenses I use now are old/vintage and it sucks not having image stabilization for the extra 2 stops and a digital viewfinder to properly focus the lens. I almost resold my 6D many times in the past but I got too attached to it to ever pull the trigger.
Respectfully, I think you're still in the minority. The vast majority of people I know with young kids don't even own a dedicated camera, or rarely pull it out. Their phone camera is more than sufficient and much more convenient to use for them.
> Smartphone cameras work pretty well outdoors where there is enough light. DSLR and mirroless are hard to beat indoors in low light conditions.
I was sightseeing in the night and had my Nikon D7100 (crop sensor) with a good lens (up to f/1.8 iirc) and Samsung Galaxy S8+. After the first few shots, I put the dslr back to my backpack, the photos from the phone were much better. And that’s a pretty old smartphone!
I know newer Sonys have crazy ISO, also own a fullframe, but it’s just so easy to mess some setting up and end up with crappy photo from a dslr in those challenging conditions, and I’m no beginner when it comes to dslrs.
>DSLR and mirroless are hard to beat indoors in low light conditions.
That's exactly the area where smartphones have been killing DSLR and mirroless for years now.
That's because of internal DSP processing, combining multiple frames, machine learning AI, etc, but to the consumer it doesn't matter: they get a clearer, more stable picture than what comes out of the DSLR/mirroless and with way less effort.
Some DSLRs have function of combining of multiple frames together as well (I think Nikon D500 and latest Olympuses as examples).
This is often called HDR.
The issue with combining images together is that it works for static objects well, but if things move -- it does not. So low-noise digital sensors still seem to offer much better results.
And certainly, startup-time (or app selection time) + focusing speed, is simply unmatched by phones compared to DSLRs or mirrorless with phase focus detection
I do think that Denoising images with AI/ML will be common place even in open source Image processing tools like Rawtherapee.
So DLSRs having APS-C or full frame sensors with lower megapixel count will do well if images are post-processed (or in camera processed) wit these AI tools.
In fact, I was thinking that buying a used DSLR from 2012 circa for 150$ bucks -- will yield similar results as a 2K camera or a 1k smart phone.
Phones are easier to transport/carry. That's has been their reason to take over the lens+camera systems.
But I think camera makers can make photo gear fashionable again :-).
I am working on some ideas in that area :-)
>The issue with combining images together is that it works for static objects well, but if things move -- it does not. So low-noise digital sensors still seem to offer much better results
The problem is mirroless/dslrs have much bigger sensors with slower readout, and much worse DSP capability than say an iPhone. They also use it much more conservative that a mobile phone marker too (which just cares to get a nice looking image to the casual user, not for fidelity and ultimate control).
So, mobile phones for low light can still get better post-processing results for moving subjects compared to any mirrorless/dslr "HDR" mode, through quicker intermediate shots taken and combined, and more DSP resources to devote to the task.
(Samsung, Google, and Apple also have much more money than Sony and Canon to spend on state of the art AI/ML applied research and DSP developers).
Gloomy prediction: based on Samsung Moongate, the next logical step after the smartphone camera replacing the DSLR is AI replacing the smartphone camera. Or at least substituting for underlying camera quality. Take a 10MP image and have the AI fill in the detail. Or remove detail (see the google advert for editing people out of your holiday photos). Or put in some detail that wasn't there.
Smartphone photos are already heavily ML-processed, with actual details and colors being replaced by what the model thinks looks best. The moon thing was just the most blatant example.
I haven’t noticed any invented details or colors in smartphone photos that I’ve taken myself. Most of the claims of this that I’ve seen online are not very convincing. Of course you sometimes get artifacts from sharpening and de-Bayering, but those can occur with any digital camera.
No kind of camera sees "actual colors", and neither do your eyes; the actual colors are the same day or night but that doesn't mean you can see them at night.
When there is light, the colors you see depend on how well you're adapted to its white point.
new from Samsung. it's a black box perfectly square just to make Jobs turn over in his grave. there are no lenses, but it's the most incredible camera you've ever seen. it has a microphone where you tell it the image you want...
"I want to see a picture with me at the Grand Canyon with nobody else in the shot at sunset after storm has just passed with a rainbow in the background"
waits a few seconds, boom. post to social, get lots of envious comments about my cool vacation.
I can't decide if in the future we will be bloblike sloths in chairs like in Wall-E, or maybe it will be like The Matrix but you are plugged into a peleton bike.
where did you get the peleton reference from The Matrix? even the machines realized that was wasted. you spend your entire life cycle in a sensory deprivation tank with the computer telling you how much of a good time you are having. wasting energy on actually moving muscles is absurd! that's not thinking like a machine
I figured the peloton would be the method of entry for the machine. Start off with the rich people doing it for working out to make it seem sexy and cool (done), get everyone else on it (in progress), get your boss to buy pelotons for remote zoom calls (probably has happened), start buying energy from peleton users pedaling (will be pitched soon), offer drug to allow sleeping while pedaling and making energy, change formulation to prevent consciousness entirely while pedaling and remain pedaling until your knees explode and you are replaced on the bike by the machines with another drugged up biological generator.
While I agree that ML-based image-enhancement and photography/videography assist at capture time will continue to offer highly useful capabilities, I don't agree when that argument is used to support the separate contention that mobile imaging will make larger format ILC/DSLR imaging irrelevant. The reason is that ML (and computational photography in general) is fundamental tech that can improve all categories of imaging. It's a metaphorical tide that lifts all boats equally from pro battleships and tankers to hobbyist racing sloops and yachts to consumer speedboats and jet skis.
(note: I'm setting aside the current misguided one-click "make it better" AI features as a temporary aberration that the marketplace of consumer tastes will correct. There's already backlash emerging around over-enhanced AI images on social media.)
Too bad we can't get the opposite: a DSLR controlled by an AI that manipulates the camera parameters just as a human would, or an AI driven interface, that captures what you're seeing without an AI hallucinating or ML touching up the photo. Panasonic can't even get autofocus right.
It's not something I'd use, I usually want as much creative control as possible over all the settings and RAW conversion. There are too many permutations of parameters that "correctly" capture the scene according to different aesthetic aims. The reviews of the version 2 seem to agree, that it's useful, but not for experienced photographers with their own creative vision. But how then would the inexperienced ever develop a personal vision, using this?
I still use my Fujifilm XE-3 from time to time but use my Canon DSLR rarely--mostly for situations that benefit from very wide angle or telephoto lenses. And, yeah, if I'm going on a trip where I'm mostly only going to take some snaps, much less a local hike, I'll almost certainly just take my smartphone. And this is someone who still has a Flickr Pro subscription and used to spend many many hours in the darkroom.
I can imagine buying a new Fujifilm body but not sure I can imagine getting a new Canon at least so long as my current one works.
Hey there, been reading the same page around the same time. The 300D was the last DSLR I bought not because it was bad, but because it was so good. Even 15 years later phones could not compare.
Yeup, I used to be a regular at dpreview a long time ago, certainly before I bought my first DSR the Canon 20d. But even before that when I was still buying point-and-shoots.
I probably haven't been back since about 2014, though, when I upgraded to a Fuji XT mirrorless system, which I haven't even used in five or six years now....
Faking the image quality through software is becoming more powerful than actually taking a good image, and people don't seem to care if the pixels on the screen are really what the optics saw.
They just want to take a pretty photo, and look at a pretty photo.
You're spot on, this is _THE_SITE for extremely detailed analysis of of cameras/lenses/etc. I have no idea what will end up filling the gap of losing something like this.
I hope Chris and Jordan continue on their Youtube journey and make the content they've been making, but man, there's still a need for a detailed text based site with super indepth info about modern camera equipment.
Ken Rockwell is a blowhard that copy/pastes info into every "review". His sharpness comparisons are laughable, as is his blatant fanboyism (which went from Nikon to Canon. It's funny to read the things he said about one brand 10 years ago and compare it to what he says about the same brand today). I would not put him into the same category as DPReview with a straight face. DPReview gave us the exposure latitude and high ISO comparison tools, which are wonderful for teasing apart differences in cameras. For example, I know the Z9 is 1 stop worse in high ISO noise performance than the Z7 due to its electronic shutter because I can see it in the comparison. That makes it easy for me to set my max ISO appropriately. Their reviews weren't perfect (I prefer Photography Life's, especially for the lens reviews--but they do principally Nikon reviews), but they were damn good.
Nobody does what DPReview did.
This is a sad passing, but reflects the general decline in ILC photography unfortunately.
K-Rock has more than 200% the opinions of a normal human and is more than half trolling in all his reviews, but at least he knows how photography works, which is better than all the comments on this page claiming ILC digital cameras take "actual pictures" and smartphones take "fake AI pictures".
Let's just say I'm not impressed with his compositions and his "color".
There are plenty of other people who do a much better job with their photography that I find more worth reading. DPReview were one, Photography Life, Cameralabs, and on the video side Nigel Danson (I don't like his clickbait thumbnails, but his content is top notch for landscape), and Backcountry Gallery for wildlife.
About the only good thing I can say about Ken is his admonition to get out there and shoot, which is what a newbie needs to hear. Doesn't need to be perfect, just get out there and get that practice in.
The problem is that he has all the correct opinions, but since he has every opinion, he also has all the incorrect ones.
But he's right when he says resolution doesn't matter even if you're making a billboard, SLRs are not the best kind of camera ever made and never were, and that normal people shouldn't get Leicas.
Resolution matters if you're using it as a wallpaper or printing to look closely. I have photos I've cropped heavily and while I will cheerfully share them via text, they don't hold up to even display on a 4K monitor (~8 megapixels). Which is fine, but don't tell me resolution doesn't matter. It does matter. Though you can push it anywhere from a little to a lot if your target is low resolution anyway, like Instagram, or a billboard which covers a small fraction of your field of view. And if your lens isn't capable of resolving those fine details anyway then you can downsample happily and only miss out on a small amount of detail (see: every cellphone lens ever mated to a sensor with > 1 megapixel resolution).
Resolution isn't the only thing, and it certainly isn't more important than composition, lighting, and the moment. Resolution is something you can throw money at. It's a lot more expensive to throw money at composition and lighting, because those all require time and skill. The moment you can throw money at and just hold down on continuous-release-high. Sometimes it works out!
For the rest, SLRs are a way of capturing an image and one that makes a set of tradeoffs that has seen market success. There are others. Leicas are a fashion statement that is functional. They're like a much more expensive and more niche Apple. And like Apple, they do have a solid product for what they're shooting for, but that doesn't justify the price premium. Ken Rockwell's derision towards LeicaMan is amusing. I'll give him that.
But he's wrong about resolution. I've seen the difference between an 18-300mm consumer lens and a 100-400mm pro lens. I've seen the difference between the capabilities of the consumer camera body and the pro body that costs 5x as much. You're not paying for nothing, and it does make a difference. Is it worth the price differential and extra size and weight? That's a different question that has different answers depending on your tolerance for such things.
I don't know him but I have to say I like Ken Rockwell's content. I wouldn't go to him for pixel peeping lens comparisons but for a general overview he's good.
There are also nowadays several good YouTubers in this field.
And of course there's TDP albeit Canon and Sony-only coverage there.
> To use words of Ansel Adams on page 193 of his autobiography, this site is my "aggressive personal opinion," and not a "logical presentation of fact." This website is a work of fiction, entirely the product of my own imagination and personal opinion.
and
> I have a big sense of humor, and do this site to entertain you (and myself), as well as to inform and to educate. I occasionally weave fiction and satire into my stories to keep them interesting. I love a good hoax.
and
> I have the energy and sense of humor of a three-year old, so remember, this is a personal website, and never presented as fact. I enjoy making things up for fun, as does The Onion, and I publish them here.
(All of that are his own words!)
If you enjoy his writing for entertainment, no problem. But don't take anything written there as fact.
I liked him too when I started out and didn't know better.
There are other people out there and I recommend learning from them. Especially composition, lighting, contrast, and colors.
Take from Ken the advice to get out and shoot with whatever you have (it's good enough to shoot with if it was made in the last 15 years), ignore everything else he has to say.
Sites like these are also dying breeds with their days numbered. Informationally dense, text and figure, lightweight websites are not being made anymore. Sites like dpreview or Ken Rockwell are pretty clearly holdovers from days long gone and sensibilities long abandoned. Today, all that information that could be read in 5 minutes on dpreview is drip fed to you in video form from a gesticulating talking head, over 25 minutes with an advertisement every 5, wasting both data and time to likely only end up partially informing you compared to a dpreview or Ken Rockwell article.
I think of how video game walkthroughs have gone this way. It used to be you'd find exhaustive 300k text explanations of everything in a game. Now there is a "let's play" video that goes on for 40 hours, you have to find the right video to watch, then seek to the right place in that video, it's exhausting.
The one case I found the video was better was in a certain level where the way forward was to make a jump that didn't look possible and the video made it obvious.
Honestly though, video walkthroughs are an improvement (navigation aside). It's hard to describe a situation entirely via text, and having that plus a short video showing the exact situation (e.g., finding a collectible in a weird location, strategy for defeating a boss, etc.) makes things so much clearer.
I've had instances where a walkthrough with pictures still wasn't enough and had to find a video showing me something and it only became clear after that.
I recall as a kid that the Zelda OOT water temple was nearly impossible to navigate with a gamefaqs guide. Video back then would have been so much easier.
I wonder if you could start writing guides on Substack to monetize them.. I think the real problem here is that writing a 300k textbook on GameFAQs gets you a chance at winning some swag, but 40 hours of YouTube videos can actually pay out in the form of money
Then again, even though World of Warcraft sites pay guide authors, the guides are super formulaic and low quality... even though I despise video content, I end up getting most of my detailed info that way
My son made it all the way through one of the older games doing all the fighting with one Pokémon, developing others just to host skills like cut. I have been disappointed with recent fire Emblem titles because level trumps the weapons triangle.
I was thinking about information extracting the GameFAQs for certain Hyperdimension Neptunia games to make a knowledge graph so I could figure out the dependency graph of what dungeons I would have to go to to get the items to craft the items that I need to craft an item I want. But then again, I’m a weeaboo.
DP Review's reviews have the benefit that they use the same methodology, so comparing one camera with another was easy. For example, I can do side by side comparisons of how much noise there is at ISO 1600.
In all seriousness, where is DPReview's content going? Forums of over 1,000,000 posts. Solid reviews of older cameras. All gone, hopefully to some archival site.
It's really surprising to see that content just disappear. Reminds me I need to backup my hard drive...
There’s still https://www.lenstip.com/. English version of Polish site optyczne.pl. What’s funny, team from this site criticized dpreview for being not scientific enough.
It's weird they plan to shut the site down instead of just leaving it up with its existing content. Paying writers and camera reviewers is expensive, but hosting the site isn't (when you're Amazon).
> Amazon used to NEVER cancel projects that customers were using. They just straight up Did. Not. Do. It.
FWIW, Amazon killed Amazon Flexible Payments in 2015. They ostensibly replaced it with Amazon Pay, but they didn't offer any kind of migration path for existing users/accounts (which felt very much like a Google thing to do) and, frankly, the services were fundamentally different: the former was more like a better version of PayPal, while the latter is more like a worse version of Stripe.
I had a lot of contact with the team as this happened as I was their biggest user on mobile devices for years, and they begged me to move to their new product, but they were really screwing me by shutting down the old service in the way they did--deleting the account history and customer connections rather than just figuring out a new way to use them--and the new service not only comparatively sucked but was way more expensive (trying to command the Stripe premium, forcing me to rely solely on PayPal, which is much cheaper for small payments if you ask for their micropayments pricing).
But like, Amazon Flexible Payments was amazing. They seriously had a pricing model that automatically scaled into separate buckets all the way down to tiny tiny tiny fractions of a single cent (on which they changed like 25% with no fixed component) when using your balance, while supporting all of the standard use cases for large ($12+) payments that Stripe is good at, having the API prowess of AWS attached to the flexibility of PayPal but using your Amazon.com account's payment information. But like, it had seemed as if they internally lost all the engineers working on that project and could no longer fix even basic things like their email template. It definitely soured the otherwise excellent long-term support experience I've had with Amazon services.
Yeah I'm sure there are counter-examples. My experience is that I worked at Amazon from 2012-2020, and I recall trying to shut down a project in maybe 2013 and it was _incredibly_ tricky.
Indeed. The interchangeable lens camera market has stabilized (on a revenue basis at least), but it seems unlikely to ever again be a fast growing consumer market. That said, we're talking about a pretty affluent community of users. Keeping the site up in some basic way would have been a relatively cheap way to keep generating the positive brand image the site generated in that community.
I wasn't exactly overflowing with happy thoughts about Amazon before this move, but the sudden shutdown isn't helping. I suppose their exec staff is doing us a favor by reminding us all to support more regulation of behemoths like these...
Sites like DigLloyd ($), PhillipReeve, FredMiranda, ReidReviews ($), and LensTip are still ticking and far more detailed in their analysis. Note the drift toward individuals and sometimes payments (which seem to be sufficiently-accepted). A ton of content has shifted toward YouTube as well.
I bet it's easy to make $500/day briefly, and hard to sustain it. Catalytic converters have the benefit of not requiring you to break into someone's house where risk of being caught or harmed is way higher.
(Note: I didn't actually dig into the backup implementation, but my guess is that it's more of a KDF -> symmetric design, rather than the sorts of asymmetric negotiation you'd find in multi-party messaging.)