Telephoto was an interesting choice - in my day to day photographs though I'm rarely missing zoom capability that's not covered by digital zoom. What is missing though often enough is even better low-light capability. Honestly, I think most competitors did it right to include a second same-angle monochrome CCD for better luma SNR. Apple obviously couldn't do this to not look like followers of the herd. Really interested how it pans out in real life...
I don't think Apple is afraid to follow the herd. They have long experience in following the herd and then telling everybody why they're the ones who finally did it right.
So basically better zoom, which is nice, and more snapchat filters.
Not seeing a reason to upgrade from the 6 yet (other than Apple gracing those of us who want to actually be able to hold their phones in 1 hand with OIS).
1. The camera is much nicer. Besides being newer technology the 7 now has Optical Image Stabilization which is good for 1-3 stops and should help a ton in low light.
2. The phone is at least 2x as fast as the chip in the 6 and you can feel it
3. It is supposed to get about 2 hours more battery life than a new 6s, so (especially if your battery is wearing out) there is a good difference there.
4. Waterproofing is nice for some people.
I'm not saying there is a need but it's a very good upgrade.
Yeah, as much as this article whines about bloggers "underpromising", there's not a whole lot of substance to the claim that Apple "over delivered". There's nothing revolutionary, and the only evolutionary thing is the camera update (and the removal of 3.5mm jacks...). Processor bump? Yawn.
Yeah, I'm not going to get the iPhone 7, but I'd much rather have the second camera give me 2-3x optical zoom than "black and white mode," which Huawei implemented first, and now Qualcomm is going to support it in its latest high-end chips by default. That means Android competitors won't have an answer to Apple's dual-camera zoom feature for at least another year.
That said, this may be the first year in which a competitor clearly beat Apple in image quality, with the past two years, the competitors being "more or less equal", but not surpassing Apple.
Pretty much all of the high end and midrange chipsets support multi-cameras, iirc the 820 supports 3 cameras with up to 25 gpixel @ 30 fps recording.
iPhone didn't had the crown of having the best camera since the iPhone 3G/3Gs and even then you had options that could match the camera.
Tom's Hardware is a pretty poor site when it comes to photography not only for mobile it tends to have the complete conclusion of virtually any other photography related website (e.g. Samsung's low light performance with the S5 which were considerably better than the 5/5S based on virtually every professional photography website out there).
If you only cared about the camera you had plenty of options, however if you cared about the overall package then the iPhone tended to be the better device overall on many occasions.
However if you go for pure photo quality then the problem aren't the 800$ flagships, but are the 200$ phones which most of them can product near or better in some cases quality photos simply because high quality sensors are easily available and are actually affordable today.
A good source for actually mobile camera performance and benchmarks is probably DXO https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles you should check them out.
I'm not saying Apple products are bad, but I would still argue that what they do is sell things better, not necessarily execute better. So more profitable, for sure.
The original iPhone was so much better executed than the competition that it was ridiculous. The iPhone was the device that convinced everyone that they needed a smartphone. It took many generations of phones before Android really caught up. And none of the original competitors even survived.
So yes, Apple is better at selling. It's also at least sometimes better at executing.
I'll agree that the original iPhone was an exception, but not in the way you claim. The first iPhone was (basically) first at the smartphone market. But was it good? Hell no. It was extremely buggy, slow, no app store, could barely make phone calls. While I'll agree there was no worthwhile competitor until Nexus One came along and set the standard, Android surpassed iOS fairly quickly in features, and hasn't lossed the lead there yet, while speeds have been fairly equal for years.
The iPhone was not the first in the market. Smartphones had been around for years at that point. It's just that no one really bought them. The iPhone effectively created it's own market by expanding it so much, but it wasn't first by a long shot.
I'm sure the original iPhone had issues, but it was still better than the stuff it replaced. Especially a year or two later when the 3G and then 3GS landed. The 3GS was not buggy or slow. It made good phone calls and had an app store. Meanwhile Android was still trash and none of the original competitors were catching up.
Android did catch up on paper quickly. It took a much longer time before it caught up in reality. Android for a long time was very slow, the UI felt amateur, and all the hardware felt cheap. I remember several generations in, finding that Angry Birds still lagged and froze on brand new Android hardware.
I had an original iphone and I remember it a lot differently. Blackberry owned the world, if you had a business smartphone it was almost certainly a BB.
iPhone was a phenomenon. There was no app store because there were no apps. An unlimited-everything plan on AT&T (iphone's only carrier) was $120/month.
I remember phone calls working just fine - it was my main/only phone while I was doing a lot of remote consulting and I don't remember problems at all. "Slow" is relative - I came from a blackberry and never looked back.
There were a ton of apps for the original iPhone if you jailbroke. There was no App Store because Apple didn't originally plan on supporting any third-party apps. Jobs stood up in front of five thousand developers and pitched his "sweet solution" of building HTML5 "apps" that ran in Safari. Then everybody pitched a fit and Apple hastily threw together an SDK, then released the App Store in iPhone OS 2 the next year.
Monetizing was Apple's success, but in the early iPhones, I'd argue it was a lot of carry over from iTunes. Apple forced you to have an Apple ID, and associated with the Apple ID meant they could seamlessly sell you things and charge you for it. At the time, no one else had this position and it made a huge impact for the iPhone as a successful device in a rapidly changing landscape (phone as phone -> phone as device to buy from carrier/provider -> phone as device to buy from marketplace).
Also: "none of the original competitors even survived"? Are you talking about tech like Sidekick here? Samsung/LG were big players in early Android, and they're obviously still around. There's a huge amount of discussion around BlackBerry, Nokia (Symbian), and Windows - but to say that none of the original competitors even survived feels hyperbolic.
> Monetizing was Apple's success, but in the early iPhones, I'd argue it was a lot of carry over from iTunes. Apple forced you to have an Apple ID, and associated with the Apple ID meant they could seamlessly sell you things and charge you for it.
I'm not clear what you mean with this. Apple made you create an Apple ID in order to use an iPhone. Whether you had an existing one because of iTunes didn't matter, because you absolutely had one if you were using an iPhone.
> Also: "none of the original competitors even survived"? Are you talking about tech like Sidekick here? Samsung/LG were big players in early Android, and they're obviously still around. There's a huge amount of discussion around BlackBerry, Nokia (Symbian), and Windows - but to say that none of the original competitors even survived feels hyperbolic.
Android didn't exist when the iPhone launched. Nokia is dead. Blackberry is basically dead. Windows Mobile died and was replaced with Windows Phone which is also nearly dead. There's no hyperbole here.
If you did have an iTunes account, you were prime for an iPhone purchase. That demographic had a clean experience of buying a mobile device that was super-capable (someone could pretty much out-of-the-box sell you things, without having ask for information - like a cc #). None of the existing devices had this, and it would be a long time until anyone was even close. I don't think this is a point of disconnect, I was highlighting one of the sometimes overlooked (imo) aspects of Apple's longer-term execution that I think made an impact.
Fair point on the competitors. It's hard to ignore Android as a competitor, and I might disagree with saying that Android wasn't an "original" competitor. But if you mean original as "existing at launch time", I'll happily agree (But by that definition, iPhone isn't a [original] competitor to Nokia/Blackberry/Windows, it just happened to destroy them - EDIT - it's a fair distinction).
> If you did have an iTunes account, you were prime for an iPhone purchase. That demographic had a clean experience of buying a mobile device that was super-capable (someone could pretty much out-of-the-box sell you things, without having ask for information - like a cc #). None of the existing devices had this, and it would be a long time until anyone was even close. I don't think this is a point of disconnect, I was highlighting one of the sometimes overlooked (imo) aspects of Apple's longer-term execution that I think made an impact.
I'm not sure I see this as a significant factor. When the iPhone launched, there was no app store. There was no iCloud, no iBooks. The only thing you could buy with the CC# Apple had for you was music, which you were already buying with iTunes.
Maybe having a CC# associated with your account helped Apple later when they launched an app store, but by that time their competitors were doing the same.
> Fair point on the competitors. It's hard to ignore Android as a competitor, and I might disagree with saying that Android wasn't an "original" competitor. But if you mean original as "existing at launch time", I'll happily agree.
Well, the first Android device to ship was the HTC Dream, and that was over a year after the iPhone shipped, so by definition it was not an original competitor. Also, if you had tried a Dream, you'd likely not have thought it was very competitive with the iPhone 3G that was out by that time. (I tried one and was utterly unimpressed.)
> But by that definition, iPhone isn't a competitor to Nokia/Blackberry/Windows, it just happened to destroy them
In the same way that Google wasn't a competitor with Excite and Infoseek and Yahoo Search but just happened to utterly destroy them? I think if your product destroys the market for another product, that other product is the (obviously losing) competition.
Yeah, that's really entirely tangential to the issue being discussed.
Since I know this is a polarizing topic, I feel compelled to note that neither myself nor my girlfriend own a single Samsung product other than a 40" TV.
For most of the iPhone camera comparison articles, I'm curious if the reviewers are disabling Live Photos before taking the shots. It's well documented that Live Photos increases noise in the still capture due to a faster shutter speed.
Maybe meant 1989? That's when the Fuji DS-X was on the market. Released in Japan with a high price tag, but it was available.
Alternately, the Dycam Model 1 was in the US in 1990, or the Apple QuickTake 100 in 1994.
The graph gets less compelling if all you mark is "introduction of digital cameras" in 1989, since those early models didn't have any impact on film camera sales. What this graph really needs is a second line for digital camera unit sales. Data wasn't available?
Maybe people didn't flip their shit about the dual camera because they don't really see what that adds, necessarily? They just know 'I need a camera to take a picture'. Maybe if they investigated it more they'd care, or seen pictures side by side, but for a lot of lay-people (with decent phones), their phone already takes good-enough pictures for their needs.
[Sigh, despite giving a description of how this works, meaning that aperture and sensor size are actually irrelevant, I'm being downvoted to hell, for the "crime" of pointing out how Apple has done something new. Most of the comments are ignorant, and obviously fanboy nonsense.
This site does not appreciate substantive and civil comments when said comments go against its biases (in this case, hatred of Apple and love of all things google.)
Further, because I am slow banned I cannot even reply to people.
Therefore, I have given a substantive and civil comment, it is being misrepresented and I can't respond.
Fuck this bullshit. You don't get to see what I said originally.]
F/1.8 on a tiny sensor still doesn't give you shallow depth of field. The sensor is just too small. What 20yrs_no_equity is referring to is the software-generated shallow depth field that the iPhone 7 Plus promises.
Of course it does (give shallow depth of field). You just have to be vert close to the subject.
I'm being a bit pedantic, but these conversations are mostly missing the third important variable. You need to know aperature, sensor/film size, and distance.
If you frame a person to fill the shot on an iPhone 7 plus, the background will not have the "destroyed" quality you'd get from an f/1.8 lens on a full frame. Yes, if you fill the frame with someone's fingertip, you'll get that look, but you will not get the look for typical scenarios.
Your pedantry is extremely misleading. For any subject with any framing, an f/1.8 on a tiny sensor will deliver far, far less background blur than an f/1.8 on a full frame. Probably less than even an f/5.6 on a full frame.
A big issue being glossed over is that depth of field and background blur are not actually the same thing. Focal length makes a big difference in how blurred the background looks but little difference in actual depth of field. When people talk about wanting shallow depth of field for portraiture or sports photography, they largely want heavy background blur.
My point was that you can't really talk about bokeh without considering subject distance relative to effective length. That shouldn't be controversial. You're right that background blur and DOF but even that is an oversimplification (circle of confusion comes in here, "sensor size" is a proxy for this but flawed). This wasn't intended to be misleading, just pointing out that the conversation was too superficial.
It's true (and I didn't deny it) that a phone sensor won't do this for typical portraiture.
It doesn't look like the iPhone 7+ will really do this either, but employ some software tricks and perhaps a rough depth map to do slightly better than a simple filter would. The examples seen so far were hardly compelling.
Fwiw, depth of blur for portraiture and sports photography are usually achieved through different mechanisms anyway, on being focal plane location and the other (mostly) motion relative to that plane.
The "portrait" look that most people actual want is achieved through foreshortening as well as blur, and you aren't going to achieve that with the (typically quite wide) optics on a smart phone. Even the 7+ "tele" is actually a normal, it seems.
> My point was that you can't really talk about bokeh without considering subject distance relative to effective length.
Sure. But that's frankly overcomplicating things. The people considering the iPhone 7 [Plus] as their camera don't need a detailed discussion of the factors that affect depth of field. Hell, Apple was calling this Bokeh. What the typical consumer needs to understand is that a large aperture on their phone won't make it take pictures that look like a DSLR.
> It doesn't look like the iPhone 7+ will really do this either, but employ some software tricks and perhaps a rough depth map to do slightly better than a simple filter would. The examples seen so far were hardly compelling.
Yeah, I don't have high hopes for this either.
> Fwiw, depth of blur for portraiture and sports photography are usually achieved through different mechanisms anyway, on being focal plane location and the other (mostly) motion relative to that plane
I'm not sure what mean here. I'm not aware of anyone doing lots of portraiture that involves any motion at all. And sports photography is typically shot with a fast enough shutter to largely freeze any action. The obliterated backgrounds in portraiture and sports photography is mostly achieved by using long lenses wide open.
> The "portrait" look that most people actual want is achieved through foreshortening as well as blur, and you aren't going to achieve that with the (typically quite wide) optics on a smart phone. Even the 7+ "tele" is actually a normal, it seems.
I agree, though I think more people are conscious of the blur than the perspective difference.
Wrt sports photography, sure you shoot long and open like portraiture, but for sports you are trying to freeze motion. You usually do this by getting a fast enough exposure and also tracking the subject. As a result in many/most situations the background is moving faster relative to the subject than the subjects motions are (in this frame of reference). Hence blurring, even if the optics alone wouldn't give you much...
The depth of field is also dependent of the lens diameter.
The small lens diameter in mobile phones yields larger depth of fields than DSLRs with large lenses, so the drop to 1.8 might be more than just "slightly more shallow" (haven't done calculations, if somebody has a link, it would be appreciated).
Using 2 cameras, the new iphone still relies on simulating shallow depth of field by blurring the background from the calculated depth information and fakes the bokeh with blur. The result could be a differentiator for the new iphone, or it could not be.
Looks a bit too fake for my taste in some situations.
Google has had extremely impressive _software_ capabilities for this for awhile [0], and the results in person are extremely impressive. The field can even be chosen by the user. Given the camera quality, I doubt much (any?) of a difference could be detected.
It is definitely NOT the first smartphone that can simulate artificial shallow depth of field. I had an app that could do that in 2009 (using burst mode and changing the focal point).
And it doesn't work like a DSLR (since a DSLR doesn't simulate DoF, it accomplishes it optically). Apple is just using its two cameras to focus on two different points then using software to intersplice those two pictures into one, that isn't real shallow DoF, that is just a software trick (least of all because bokeh will have to be simulated, since it doesn't exist optically).
I'd also like to add that the samples Apple have released to the press look REALLY bad.
No, you only ban accounts for people who don't toe the line to your ideology. IF you followed your own rules, there would be no problem. Why don't you follow your own guidelines?
Why isn't dang banned for his abuse and harassment of people?
You force me to edit my comment because you slow banned me. which means I can't respond to the people who are being abuseive.
Your moderation policy favors and encourages abuse...which is shown by the abuse that dang heaped on someone earlier (Which I identified to you.)
Again, why isn't dang banned?
You don't get to pretend like I did something wrong when you're being completely dishonest and hypocritical.
You set up the rules that prevent me from responding, you have carefully cultivated a culture where those who agree with you ideologically know they can be abusive without risk, and you hellban people for, for instance, the crime of linking to scientific articles that disagree with your ideology.
Literally, I once created an account that had one and only one submission before it was hellbanned-- a comment link in to an article that undermined the global warming hypothesis, the "article" as published in a peer reviewed scientific paper. The link was the totality of the comment and it was relevant to the discussion. You cannot justify that, it is proof positive that the moderation policy of this site is ideological, and has nothing to do with civility or being substantive.
Of course you're going to ban me- this site cannot tolerate anyone who disagrees with your hardcore leftist ideology, and technology views, no matter how civil. You harass them, as you have harassed me, you abuse them as I caught dang abusing someone before, and then you ban them.
You insist on an echo chamber. Enjoy it. But don't for a second pretend like you have any moral high ground, you lying piece of shit.
Do you even realize you're an anti-intellectual?
--------------------
The censored comment was:
[Sigh, despite giving a description of how this works, meaning that aperture and sensor size are actually irrelevant, I'm being downvoted to hell, for the "crime" of pointing out how Apple has done something new. Most of the comments are ignorant, and obviously fanboy nonsense.
This site does not appreciate substantive and civil comments when said comments go against its biases (in this case, hatred of Apple and love of all things google.)
Further, because I am slow banned I cannot even reply to people.
Therefore, I have given a substantive and civil comment, it is being misrepresented and I can't respond.
Fuck this bullshit. You don't get to see what I said originally.]
Proof hacker news does not give a fuck about substantive and civil discussion, but only about agreeing with the moderators ideology.
Enjoy your echo chamber!
(and yes, I expect to be banned. I knew creating an account I would be banned because this site is run by assholes who will not follow their own rules and when caught breaking them, they delete the comments exposing their hypocrisy.)
By the way, have you noticed how dramatically down usage is of this site? How participation has fallen off a cliff in the past couple years?
Ever think that might be because you harassed and banned everyone who thought differently?
That you've created a monoculture, as a result of your crusade against diversity, and thus there's not much to talk about when everyone is exactly like you and agrees on everything?
Maybe that's why. At any rate, your ideological based moderation and anti-intellectualism is not working.
50 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadMost day to day phone photography is portraits (friends etc).
And for them the added 56mm (equiv) lens makes more sense that a 28mm (equiv) one in regular iPones cameras.
Digital zoom is never a good solution.
Not seeing a reason to upgrade from the 6 yet (other than Apple gracing those of us who want to actually be able to hold their phones in 1 hand with OIS).
1. The camera is much nicer. Besides being newer technology the 7 now has Optical Image Stabilization which is good for 1-3 stops and should help a ton in low light.
2. The phone is at least 2x as fast as the chip in the 6 and you can feel it
3. It is supposed to get about 2 hours more battery life than a new 6s, so (especially if your battery is wearing out) there is a good difference there.
4. Waterproofing is nice for some people.
I'm not saying there is a need but it's a very good upgrade.
That said, this may be the first year in which a competitor clearly beat Apple in image quality, with the past two years, the competitors being "more or less equal", but not surpassing Apple.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-7-vs-galaxy-s7-camera,rev...
iPhone didn't had the crown of having the best camera since the iPhone 3G/3Gs and even then you had options that could match the camera. Tom's Hardware is a pretty poor site when it comes to photography not only for mobile it tends to have the complete conclusion of virtually any other photography related website (e.g. Samsung's low light performance with the S5 which were considerably better than the 5/5S based on virtually every professional photography website out there).
If you only cared about the camera you had plenty of options, however if you cared about the overall package then the iPhone tended to be the better device overall on many occasions.
However if you go for pure photo quality then the problem aren't the 800$ flagships, but are the 200$ phones which most of them can product near or better in some cases quality photos simply because high quality sensors are easily available and are actually affordable today. A good source for actually mobile camera performance and benchmarks is probably DXO https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles you should check them out.
So yes, Apple is better at selling. It's also at least sometimes better at executing.
I'm sure the original iPhone had issues, but it was still better than the stuff it replaced. Especially a year or two later when the 3G and then 3GS landed. The 3GS was not buggy or slow. It made good phone calls and had an app store. Meanwhile Android was still trash and none of the original competitors were catching up.
Android did catch up on paper quickly. It took a much longer time before it caught up in reality. Android for a long time was very slow, the UI felt amateur, and all the hardware felt cheap. I remember several generations in, finding that Angry Birds still lagged and froze on brand new Android hardware.
iPhone was a phenomenon. There was no app store because there were no apps. An unlimited-everything plan on AT&T (iphone's only carrier) was $120/month.
I remember phone calls working just fine - it was my main/only phone while I was doing a lot of remote consulting and I don't remember problems at all. "Slow" is relative - I came from a blackberry and never looked back.
Also: "none of the original competitors even survived"? Are you talking about tech like Sidekick here? Samsung/LG were big players in early Android, and they're obviously still around. There's a huge amount of discussion around BlackBerry, Nokia (Symbian), and Windows - but to say that none of the original competitors even survived feels hyperbolic.
I'm not clear what you mean with this. Apple made you create an Apple ID in order to use an iPhone. Whether you had an existing one because of iTunes didn't matter, because you absolutely had one if you were using an iPhone.
> Also: "none of the original competitors even survived"? Are you talking about tech like Sidekick here? Samsung/LG were big players in early Android, and they're obviously still around. There's a huge amount of discussion around BlackBerry, Nokia (Symbian), and Windows - but to say that none of the original competitors even survived feels hyperbolic.
Android didn't exist when the iPhone launched. Nokia is dead. Blackberry is basically dead. Windows Mobile died and was replaced with Windows Phone which is also nearly dead. There's no hyperbole here.
Fair point on the competitors. It's hard to ignore Android as a competitor, and I might disagree with saying that Android wasn't an "original" competitor. But if you mean original as "existing at launch time", I'll happily agree (But by that definition, iPhone isn't a [original] competitor to Nokia/Blackberry/Windows, it just happened to destroy them - EDIT - it's a fair distinction).
I'm not sure I see this as a significant factor. When the iPhone launched, there was no app store. There was no iCloud, no iBooks. The only thing you could buy with the CC# Apple had for you was music, which you were already buying with iTunes.
Maybe having a CC# associated with your account helped Apple later when they launched an app store, but by that time their competitors were doing the same.
> Fair point on the competitors. It's hard to ignore Android as a competitor, and I might disagree with saying that Android wasn't an "original" competitor. But if you mean original as "existing at launch time", I'll happily agree.
Well, the first Android device to ship was the HTC Dream, and that was over a year after the iPhone shipped, so by definition it was not an original competitor. Also, if you had tried a Dream, you'd likely not have thought it was very competitive with the iPhone 3G that was out by that time. (I tried one and was utterly unimpressed.)
> But by that definition, iPhone isn't a competitor to Nokia/Blackberry/Windows, it just happened to destroy them
In the same way that Google wasn't a competitor with Excite and Infoseek and Yahoo Search but just happened to utterly destroy them? I think if your product destroys the market for another product, that other product is the (obviously losing) competition.
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-7-plus-galaxy-s7...
We'll see. My girlfriend got the iPhone 7 on launch day but hasn't done much with the camera as yet.
Since I know this is a polarizing topic, I feel compelled to note that neither myself nor my girlfriend own a single Samsung product other than a 40" TV.
Why does it say digital cameras were introduced in 1999? I remember seeing the first consumer cameras at least a couple of years earlier.
Alternately, the Dycam Model 1 was in the US in 1990, or the Apple QuickTake 100 in 1994.
The graph gets less compelling if all you mark is "introduction of digital cameras" in 1989, since those early models didn't have any impact on film camera sales. What this graph really needs is a second line for digital camera unit sales. Data wasn't available?
http://petapixel.com/2015/04/09/this-is-what-the-history-of-...
This site does not appreciate substantive and civil comments when said comments go against its biases (in this case, hatred of Apple and love of all things google.)
Further, because I am slow banned I cannot even reply to people.
Therefore, I have given a substantive and civil comment, it is being misrepresented and I can't respond.
Fuck this bullshit. You don't get to see what I said originally.]
I'm being a bit pedantic, but these conversations are mostly missing the third important variable. You need to know aperature, sensor/film size, and distance.
Your pedantry is extremely misleading. For any subject with any framing, an f/1.8 on a tiny sensor will deliver far, far less background blur than an f/1.8 on a full frame. Probably less than even an f/5.6 on a full frame.
A big issue being glossed over is that depth of field and background blur are not actually the same thing. Focal length makes a big difference in how blurred the background looks but little difference in actual depth of field. When people talk about wanting shallow depth of field for portraiture or sports photography, they largely want heavy background blur.
My point was that you can't really talk about bokeh without considering subject distance relative to effective length. That shouldn't be controversial. You're right that background blur and DOF but even that is an oversimplification (circle of confusion comes in here, "sensor size" is a proxy for this but flawed). This wasn't intended to be misleading, just pointing out that the conversation was too superficial.
It's true (and I didn't deny it) that a phone sensor won't do this for typical portraiture.
It doesn't look like the iPhone 7+ will really do this either, but employ some software tricks and perhaps a rough depth map to do slightly better than a simple filter would. The examples seen so far were hardly compelling.
Fwiw, depth of blur for portraiture and sports photography are usually achieved through different mechanisms anyway, on being focal plane location and the other (mostly) motion relative to that plane.
The "portrait" look that most people actual want is achieved through foreshortening as well as blur, and you aren't going to achieve that with the (typically quite wide) optics on a smart phone. Even the 7+ "tele" is actually a normal, it seems.
Sure. But that's frankly overcomplicating things. The people considering the iPhone 7 [Plus] as their camera don't need a detailed discussion of the factors that affect depth of field. Hell, Apple was calling this Bokeh. What the typical consumer needs to understand is that a large aperture on their phone won't make it take pictures that look like a DSLR.
> It doesn't look like the iPhone 7+ will really do this either, but employ some software tricks and perhaps a rough depth map to do slightly better than a simple filter would. The examples seen so far were hardly compelling.
Yeah, I don't have high hopes for this either.
> Fwiw, depth of blur for portraiture and sports photography are usually achieved through different mechanisms anyway, on being focal plane location and the other (mostly) motion relative to that plane
I'm not sure what mean here. I'm not aware of anyone doing lots of portraiture that involves any motion at all. And sports photography is typically shot with a fast enough shutter to largely freeze any action. The obliterated backgrounds in portraiture and sports photography is mostly achieved by using long lenses wide open.
> The "portrait" look that most people actual want is achieved through foreshortening as well as blur, and you aren't going to achieve that with the (typically quite wide) optics on a smart phone. Even the 7+ "tele" is actually a normal, it seems.
I agree, though I think more people are conscious of the blur than the perspective difference.
Wrt sports photography, sure you shoot long and open like portraiture, but for sports you are trying to freeze motion. You usually do this by getting a fast enough exposure and also tracking the subject. As a result in many/most situations the background is moving faster relative to the subject than the subjects motions are (in this frame of reference). Hence blurring, even if the optics alone wouldn't give you much...
http://sportsflashtech.com/
The small lens diameter in mobile phones yields larger depth of fields than DSLRs with large lenses, so the drop to 1.8 might be more than just "slightly more shallow" (haven't done calculations, if somebody has a link, it would be appreciated).
Using 2 cameras, the new iphone still relies on simulating shallow depth of field by blurring the background from the calculated depth information and fakes the bokeh with blur. The result could be a differentiator for the new iphone, or it could not be.
Looks a bit too fake for my taste in some situations.
[0] https://research.googleblog.com/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-goo...
And it doesn't work like a DSLR (since a DSLR doesn't simulate DoF, it accomplishes it optically). Apple is just using its two cameras to focus on two different points then using software to intersplice those two pictures into one, that isn't real shallow DoF, that is just a software trick (least of all because bokeh will have to be simulated, since it doesn't exist optically).
I'd also like to add that the samples Apple have released to the press look REALLY bad.
We've already asked you to please not do this! We do ban accounts that continue to violate the guidelines in this way.
Why isn't dang banned for his abuse and harassment of people?
You force me to edit my comment because you slow banned me. which means I can't respond to the people who are being abuseive.
Your moderation policy favors and encourages abuse...which is shown by the abuse that dang heaped on someone earlier (Which I identified to you.)
Again, why isn't dang banned?
You don't get to pretend like I did something wrong when you're being completely dishonest and hypocritical.
You set up the rules that prevent me from responding, you have carefully cultivated a culture where those who agree with you ideologically know they can be abusive without risk, and you hellban people for, for instance, the crime of linking to scientific articles that disagree with your ideology.
Literally, I once created an account that had one and only one submission before it was hellbanned-- a comment link in to an article that undermined the global warming hypothesis, the "article" as published in a peer reviewed scientific paper. The link was the totality of the comment and it was relevant to the discussion. You cannot justify that, it is proof positive that the moderation policy of this site is ideological, and has nothing to do with civility or being substantive.
Of course you're going to ban me- this site cannot tolerate anyone who disagrees with your hardcore leftist ideology, and technology views, no matter how civil. You harass them, as you have harassed me, you abuse them as I caught dang abusing someone before, and then you ban them.
You insist on an echo chamber. Enjoy it. But don't for a second pretend like you have any moral high ground, you lying piece of shit.
Do you even realize you're an anti-intellectual?
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The censored comment was: [Sigh, despite giving a description of how this works, meaning that aperture and sensor size are actually irrelevant, I'm being downvoted to hell, for the "crime" of pointing out how Apple has done something new. Most of the comments are ignorant, and obviously fanboy nonsense. This site does not appreciate substantive and civil comments when said comments go against its biases (in this case, hatred of Apple and love of all things google.) Further, because I am slow banned I cannot even reply to people. Therefore, I have given a substantive and civil comment, it is being misrepresented and I can't respond. Fuck this bullshit. You don't get to see what I said originally.]
Proof hacker news does not give a fuck about substantive and civil discussion, but only about agreeing with the moderators ideology.
Enjoy your echo chamber!
(and yes, I expect to be banned. I knew creating an account I would be banned because this site is run by assholes who will not follow their own rules and when caught breaking them, they delete the comments exposing their hypocrisy.)
Ever think that might be because you harassed and banned everyone who thought differently?
That you've created a monoculture, as a result of your crusade against diversity, and thus there's not much to talk about when everyone is exactly like you and agrees on everything?
Maybe that's why. At any rate, your ideological based moderation and anti-intellectualism is not working.