Computerized phone photography is not for desktop viewing, printing, etc.
It appears to look "amazing" on phone displays - probably optimized for that.
Much of the criticism of the Iphone photos is the fisheye effect. This is exaggerated, because you took the photos from different distances. If the Iphone photos were taken at the same distance, a cropped version of the Iphone photo would have identical perspective.
I honestly can't see much of a difference that couldn't be explained by the photos not being taken simultaneously. I definitely can't tell enough of a difference that I wouldn't put the photo in a frame on the wall (which people almost certainly do, despite the author's assertion that "you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed")
Edit: Is this just a good bit of sarcasm/shitpost? If so, it's just a tad too subtle.
I'm always sad when I pull up holidays photos on my monitor. Even though Pixels make great photos, they're great only on small OLED screens.
Gonna clean the dust out of Nikon D3200 with proper lens and use that instead. Casual photos will be made byy wife anyway
Someone didn't try the power of Google pixels phones. Recently, many of my iPhone friends and family envy the pictures taken from Google Pixel 9 pro vs their latest iPhones. It's hands down the best camera and image processing.
The differences are subtle to me. I see them but it doesn’t prevent me or my family from printing and hanging iPhone photos. I want to hang fun photos from family vacation for the memories.
Absolutely. My DLSR almost never comes out which is a shame, but even on special trips I don't want to lug an extra camera around and have to worry about damaging that, so my phone has been my primary camera for 10+ years.
Most of the issues noted are because of the wide angle lens of the iPhone. The more expensive iPhones (the Pro models) have 3 lenses one of which can produce photos similar to a traditional camera.
I just started looking at photos and videos we took on vacation. I have an iPhone 16 Pro.
And when I use the Photos app on my Apple TV to review a couple videos I took, I'm surprised at the weird, wavy quality I'm seeing in them. It's really strange.
I will compare this to the videos I took with my Sony a6700. But until then, I'm surprised at how odd the videos looked on a large OLED TV. Might be compression from iCloud or something. Can't quite explain it otherwise.
I have no shortage of friends who asked me why I bothered to buy a real camera, but if you're a hobbyist photographer, it's nice to use a real camera and have full control. There are apps that do let you do this on a smartphone, and it's definitely more convenient.
But there's something about the real photos (with real Bokeh) that still look much better to me.
These are some good examples. I'd love more on this.
I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone.
I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc.
But I've come to the conclusion that once you start look closely there's absolutely no comparison.
One thing I've started doing is creating custom photo books from all my photos. It's really helped me focus my photography. When doing this though I've noticed how edited phone photos are, as well as how poor the quality actually is (particularly in low light).
The quality issue is understandable (it's physics). The editing issue is a bit more insidious I think.
All in all, if you just want to view phone photos on your phone, they look great. But if you're actually interested in photography and printing, you should get a dedicated camera.
My entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water.
Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.
However:
- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)
- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine
Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
Not only is the iPhone always in your pocket, but it’s easier to carry and deal with.
I remember hearing a story from a well known photographer about a trip he took with a few others, including his wife. They woke up early to head out on a small boat in a lake or something. He was lugging all this gear and having to put a lot of focus into tuning the settings on his camera, he was pretty miserable. Meanwhile, his wife was enjoying morning with no baggage and snapping pics with her phone. She ended up having the best picture of the day, while actually enjoying herself, by not being bogged down by the gear.
Dedicated cameras have their value, but it’s been decreasing for years, and requiring higher and higher levels of skill to make it worth it. Most people could improve their photos dramatically by learning about framing and light, while just using a phone. These things have a much bigger impact on the resulting photo. A professional with an iPhone will always take a better and more interesting picture than an amateur with a DSLR for this reason.
> Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
I got myself a Nikon D800 over a decade ago when they were first released, and left it in 14-bit RAW mode since then. Technically these are "SDR" photos, but the captured dynamic range is closer to 1000-nit HDR. For a decade, I had to crush these to fit into sRGB SDR JPGs, which is throwing away most of the goodness.
A few months ago I took all of my 5-star pictures in Lightroom and used its new HDR processing mode to export them as 16-bit PNG files. I then turned those into a 2160p HDR video and played it on an OLED 75" television.
It blew my tiny mind!
The quality was simply jawdropping. It was like travelling back in time to all of those holidays and looking out through a window at reality itself.
This is why I go on regular online rants about how frustrating it is that the only way to share the full output quality of a modern digital full-frame camera is by uploading a HDR "movie" of the pictures to YouTube.
iPhone's picture quality has degraded substantially in recent models. Photos with a newer model look cooler, but fake and unrealistic. There's so much post-processing that photos looks completely artificial.
For example, take a photo of someone standing in front of a landscape. It looks like you took a photo on a green-screen and photoshopped the landscape behind the subject.
> and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
Well, you don't need to teach photography to passerby, just to tell them to look there and push this button. It's not more complicated than on a phone, maybe even less. But it may look more intimidating to old a camera, it's true
>> The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
This is why my Canon 80D sits and gathers dust. Too many family moments fluffed, vs my Android's basically 100% hit rate. Yes this is largely a skill issue on my part, which is sad, but modern phone photos are more than adequate these days.
1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or whatever the focal length is.
2. Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone and the other camera. It’s again, no different between the two.
It’s a poor article because it doesn’t focus on the actual material differences.
The phone will have a smaller sensor. It will have more noise and need to do more to combat it. It won’t have as shallow a depth of field.
The phone will also of course have different ergonomics.
But the things the post focuses on are kind of poor understandings of the differences in what they’re shooting and how their cameras work.
The biggest real differences between iPhone and whatever ye-olde-good-standalone-digital-camera are sharpening/edge enhancements and flattening of lighting.
If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly.
The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing.
Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones.
The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image.
But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment.
(Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.)
I disagree, I thought the article highlighted the differences beautifully. I'm on a professionally color calibrated 27" monitor that came with one of those color calibration "certificates" at the time of purchase. The second I loaded the article, the differences were just stark. The skin tones alone were a dead giveaway.
It is no secret that Apple does a lot of post processing on their mediocre photos to make them look good - more so than most other Androids - because, it's all software. But, from the article, it is understood that the author is trying to point out that Apple could've done a better job to represent skin tones more accurately atleast. The fish-eye defense for Apple is totally understandeable, but, why are we defending the weak skin tones? Every year, they keep launching and claiming grandoise statements "This is the best smartphone camera out there is".
And no, this is not a limitation of smartphone sensors. In fact, if you look at the latest Xperia series from Sony, they have the same software from their DSLRs translated into the smartphones that addresses the skintones perfectly well.
I hope we can skip past the biases and personal preferences we have towards Apple and treat them neutrally like any other manufacturer. This "Apple can do no wrong" narrative and attacking anyone who points out their flaws is just tired and boring at this point.
You're completely off base on the focal length argument.
A traditional camera has the choice and can choose the most appropriate length; an Iphone is locked in to a fish-eye clearly put in there to overcome its inherent limitations.
So it doesn't really matter "if it's fair" or not, because it's not about a fair comparison, it's a demonstration that a traditional camera is just better. Why should the traditional camera use an inappropriate focal length just because the Iphone is forced to?
I'll kindly disagree with you. Like the other commenter, I'm on a 27" HP business monitor comes with color calibration certificate, and the differences are very visible. Moreover, I'm taking photos as a hobby for some time.
The angle, different focal lengths doesn't matter in rendering of the images. The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people. Moreover, we want to be liked as human beings, it's in our nature.
So, phone companies driven by both smaller sensors (that thing is way noisier when compared to a full frame sensor) and market pressure to reduce processing needed to be done by end users (because it inconveniences them), started to add more and more complicated post-processing in their cameras.
The result is this very article. People with their natural complications reduced, skin tones boosted on red parts, sharpened but flatter photos, without much perspective correction and sometimes looking very artificial.
Make no mistake, "professional" cameras also post process, but you can both see this processing and turn it off if you want, and the professional cameras corrects what lens fails at, but smartphones, incl. iPhone makes "happy, social media ready" photos by default.
As, again other commenter said, it's not a limitation of the sensor (sans the noise). Sony supplies most of the higher end sensors in the market, and their cameras or other cameras sporting sensors produced by them got the "best color" awards over and over again, and XPeria smartphones comes with professional camera pipelines after that small sensor, so they can take photos like what you see.
I personally prefer iPhone as my smartphone of my choice, but the moment I want to take a photo I want to spend time composing, I ditch default camera app and use Halide, because that thing can bypass Apple's post-processing, and even can apply none if you want.
I think the physical parameters of the lenses are negligible compared to the distortions caused by "computational computing" and the colour changes iPhones tend to add to make photos more instagramable by default.
Um, I'm pretty sure a 24mm shot on a full frame camera will look the same as an iPhone shot, but only if you crop the full frame shot (ignoring pixels counts).
Yes, you could get the same photo of the guy in the centre on the iPhone, but only by zooming in and cropping out everything else. I guess if you REALLY wanted you could run back, and zoom in. Better get a tripod to hold it steady since you're zooming in then.
So anyone but an expert will shoot with a much shorter lens when using the iPhone.
This is how crop factors work unless I'm really mistaken.
Yup, that was the thing that jumped out at me too: in the photos with the golf players, the trees in the background appear much smaller in the iPhone photo than in the "real camera" photo, which means the "real camera" photo was taken from further away and zoomed in, so it obviously will have less distortion. Same for the building and car pictures, but the article doesn't mention that at all (except for writing that "the fish eye iPhone lens creates distortion" - of course it does, that's why the iPhone has other lenses as well)!
"in the iPhone photo, the player is "leaning". His (long) feet are on the left and his head is on the right of the image. In the right image, the image accurately portays his balanced and confident stance. "
The subject seems to have moved. His expression is different, how he holds the stick is different. Hard to believe that the stance remained the same meanwhile.
I've been a Nikon user for decades, once I purchased a digital Nikon SLR, I was in heaven. Now, with my cell phone camera taking really nice pics, I don't carry the SLR as much. If I want to print and hang a photo, if it's a close up shot, I use my phone. If it's a larger view pic, I use my SLR.
In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible.
It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.
iPhones have wide angle lenses but they are NOT fish eye lenses as stated a couple times in the article. They definitely distort things but a fish eye lens distorts things in a very different curved way rather than keeping lines straight like a regular wide angle lens.
That's not a particularly great test, because every camera will be great outside in the sunlight, and those photos are some of the least technically challenging ones you can take. Even a phone from 15 years ago won't be that bad at it.
Modern computational photography does a great job of dealing with tricky conditions though.
Framing is different because of bad lens choice on the photo part (why always shoot wide angle??) and this skews the results immensely and unfairly (composition is the most important thing in a photo).
Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.
They're still over saturated. Skin tones always have a cosmetic/tanned look compared to real life. Mirrorless camera photos have a lot better output. You can see that even in the first sample comparison. If you look at the photo on the iPhone right when you took it, it doesn't look like the subject you just took a photo of. It's always over saturated compared to real life.
But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject.
But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects).
Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground.
BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)
Sometimes I compare photos I've taken over 10 years ago with Sony NEX-5 with photos I take today with an iPhone. There's no competition, APS-C from 15 years ago is still solid.
Anyway, the best camera is the one you have with you, so in that sense iPhone is great.
I was waiting for someone to say that ("The best camera is the one in your pocket"). Well.. I've always agreed with that. But maybe it's time to dig out that old DSLR again. It can always be in a camera bag in the car, ready for action.
I have an opposite experience. Most old photos are made with cheap compact auto focus cameras and always somehow blurry and pale, at that time that was the camera "you have in your pocket". Photos with modern smartphone are always superior.
I also think there’s something special about looking through a viewfinder.
Even in new cameras (where the viewfinder itself is a tiny screen) something happens when you frame a photo this way, that doesn’t happen when you use the back display (or a phone).
I don’t know if it’s down to physically using one eye, or the psychology of bringing your eye to the camera’s eye, but it feels different (and I like it)
I've struggled with this too. I want to only use my phone but the quiet focus that a view finder gives me allows better attention to detail, the edges of the photo, and subtle alignments of parallax objects. I find it much harder on a phone or with live view on a proper camera. It's like -- for a moment, I am the camera and I'm about to make a record of a moment. I don't get nearly that feeling with a phone despite years of trying to convince myself its the same
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 93.8 ms ] threadEdit: Is this just a good bit of sarcasm/shitpost? If so, it's just a tad too subtle.
And when I use the Photos app on my Apple TV to review a couple videos I took, I'm surprised at the weird, wavy quality I'm seeing in them. It's really strange.
I will compare this to the videos I took with my Sony a6700. But until then, I'm surprised at how odd the videos looked on a large OLED TV. Might be compression from iCloud or something. Can't quite explain it otherwise.
I have no shortage of friends who asked me why I bothered to buy a real camera, but if you're a hobbyist photographer, it's nice to use a real camera and have full control. There are apps that do let you do this on a smartphone, and it's definitely more convenient.
But there's something about the real photos (with real Bokeh) that still look much better to me.
I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone.
I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc.
But I've come to the conclusion that once you start look closely there's absolutely no comparison.
One thing I've started doing is creating custom photo books from all my photos. It's really helped me focus my photography. When doing this though I've noticed how edited phone photos are, as well as how poor the quality actually is (particularly in low light).
The quality issue is understandable (it's physics). The editing issue is a bit more insidious I think.
All in all, if you just want to view phone photos on your phone, they look great. But if you're actually interested in photography and printing, you should get a dedicated camera.
Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.
However:
- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)
- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine
Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
I remember hearing a story from a well known photographer about a trip he took with a few others, including his wife. They woke up early to head out on a small boat in a lake or something. He was lugging all this gear and having to put a lot of focus into tuning the settings on his camera, he was pretty miserable. Meanwhile, his wife was enjoying morning with no baggage and snapping pics with her phone. She ended up having the best picture of the day, while actually enjoying herself, by not being bogged down by the gear.
Dedicated cameras have their value, but it’s been decreasing for years, and requiring higher and higher levels of skill to make it worth it. Most people could improve their photos dramatically by learning about framing and light, while just using a phone. These things have a much bigger impact on the resulting photo. A professional with an iPhone will always take a better and more interesting picture than an amateur with a DSLR for this reason.
I got myself a Nikon D800 over a decade ago when they were first released, and left it in 14-bit RAW mode since then. Technically these are "SDR" photos, but the captured dynamic range is closer to 1000-nit HDR. For a decade, I had to crush these to fit into sRGB SDR JPGs, which is throwing away most of the goodness.
A few months ago I took all of my 5-star pictures in Lightroom and used its new HDR processing mode to export them as 16-bit PNG files. I then turned those into a 2160p HDR video and played it on an OLED 75" television.
It blew my tiny mind!
The quality was simply jawdropping. It was like travelling back in time to all of those holidays and looking out through a window at reality itself.
This is why I go on regular online rants about how frustrating it is that the only way to share the full output quality of a modern digital full-frame camera is by uploading a HDR "movie" of the pictures to YouTube.
For example, take a photo of someone standing in front of a landscape. It looks like you took a photo on a green-screen and photoshopped the landscape behind the subject.
Well, you don't need to teach photography to passerby, just to tell them to look there and push this button. It's not more complicated than on a phone, maybe even less. But it may look more intimidating to old a camera, it's true
This is why my Canon 80D sits and gathers dust. Too many family moments fluffed, vs my Android's basically 100% hit rate. Yes this is largely a skill issue on my part, which is sad, but modern phone photos are more than adequate these days.
1. Difference in focal length/ position.
2. Difference in color processing
But…the article is fairly weak on both points?
1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or whatever the focal length is.
2. Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone and the other camera. It’s again, no different between the two.
It’s a poor article because it doesn’t focus on the actual material differences.
The phone will have a smaller sensor. It will have more noise and need to do more to combat it. It won’t have as shallow a depth of field.
The phone will also of course have different ergonomics.
But the things the post focuses on are kind of poor understandings of the differences in what they’re shooting and how their cameras work.
If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly.
The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing.
Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones.
The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image.
But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment.
(Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.)
It is no secret that Apple does a lot of post processing on their mediocre photos to make them look good - more so than most other Androids - because, it's all software. But, from the article, it is understood that the author is trying to point out that Apple could've done a better job to represent skin tones more accurately atleast. The fish-eye defense for Apple is totally understandeable, but, why are we defending the weak skin tones? Every year, they keep launching and claiming grandoise statements "This is the best smartphone camera out there is".
And no, this is not a limitation of smartphone sensors. In fact, if you look at the latest Xperia series from Sony, they have the same software from their DSLRs translated into the smartphones that addresses the skintones perfectly well.
I hope we can skip past the biases and personal preferences we have towards Apple and treat them neutrally like any other manufacturer. This "Apple can do no wrong" narrative and attacking anyone who points out their flaws is just tired and boring at this point.
How do I disable Colour processing?
A traditional camera has the choice and can choose the most appropriate length; an Iphone is locked in to a fish-eye clearly put in there to overcome its inherent limitations.
So it doesn't really matter "if it's fair" or not, because it's not about a fair comparison, it's a demonstration that a traditional camera is just better. Why should the traditional camera use an inappropriate focal length just because the Iphone is forced to?
The angle, different focal lengths doesn't matter in rendering of the images. The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people. Moreover, we want to be liked as human beings, it's in our nature.
So, phone companies driven by both smaller sensors (that thing is way noisier when compared to a full frame sensor) and market pressure to reduce processing needed to be done by end users (because it inconveniences them), started to add more and more complicated post-processing in their cameras.
The result is this very article. People with their natural complications reduced, skin tones boosted on red parts, sharpened but flatter photos, without much perspective correction and sometimes looking very artificial.
Make no mistake, "professional" cameras also post process, but you can both see this processing and turn it off if you want, and the professional cameras corrects what lens fails at, but smartphones, incl. iPhone makes "happy, social media ready" photos by default.
As, again other commenter said, it's not a limitation of the sensor (sans the noise). Sony supplies most of the higher end sensors in the market, and their cameras or other cameras sporting sensors produced by them got the "best color" awards over and over again, and XPeria smartphones comes with professional camera pipelines after that small sensor, so they can take photos like what you see.
I personally prefer iPhone as my smartphone of my choice, but the moment I want to take a photo I want to spend time composing, I ditch default camera app and use Halide, because that thing can bypass Apple's post-processing, and even can apply none if you want.
Yes, you could get the same photo of the guy in the centre on the iPhone, but only by zooming in and cropping out everything else. I guess if you REALLY wanted you could run back, and zoom in. Better get a tripod to hold it steady since you're zooming in then.
So anyone but an expert will shoot with a much shorter lens when using the iPhone.
This is how crop factors work unless I'm really mistaken.
He has some good points, maybe, but in general it’s a pretty naive comparison.
The subject seems to have moved. His expression is different, how he holds the stick is different. Hard to believe that the stance remained the same meanwhile.
In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible.
It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.
Modern computational photography does a great job of dealing with tricky conditions though.
Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.
But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject.
But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects).
Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground.
BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)
* zoom in
* print them
* watch them on a bigger screen
Sometimes I compare photos I've taken over 10 years ago with Sony NEX-5 with photos I take today with an iPhone. There's no competition, APS-C from 15 years ago is still solid.
Anyway, the best camera is the one you have with you, so in that sense iPhone is great.
Even in new cameras (where the viewfinder itself is a tiny screen) something happens when you frame a photo this way, that doesn’t happen when you use the back display (or a phone).
I don’t know if it’s down to physically using one eye, or the psychology of bringing your eye to the camera’s eye, but it feels different (and I like it)