Comment by wakeupcall
3 years ago
I don't already fully trust the images, audio and videos I take with the phone.
I'm working close to HW and I actively use the camera/picture and videos for future reference and debugging. It's small, fits in your pocket, and the bloody thing can record at 240fps to booth!
Until you realize there's so much post-processing done on the images, video and audio you can't really trust and can't really know if you can turn it all off. The reality is that if you could, you'd realize there's no free lunch. It's a small sensor, and while we had huge improvements in sensor and small lenses, it's still a small sensor.
Did the smoothing/compression remove details? Did the multi-shot remove or add motion artifacts you wanted to see? Has noise-cancelling removed or altered frequencies? Is the high-frame rate real, interpolated, or anything inbetween depending on light just to make it look nice?
In the end, they're consumer devices. "Does it look good -> yes" is what thrums everything in this market. Expect the worst.
> Did the smoothing/compression remove details? Did the multi-shot remove or add motion artifacts you wanted to see? Has noise-cancelling removed or altered frequencies? Is the high-frame rate real, interpolated, or anything inbetween depending on light just to make it look nice?
This has been true of consumer digital cameras for 25 years. It's not new to or exclusive to smartphone cameras. It's not even exclusive to consumer cameras as professional ones costing many times more also do a bunch of image processing before anything is committed to disk.
With even an a6000 (you can get it used for about 200 bucks) you can get high quality RAW images without any postprocessing.
And they actually look good!
No phone can deliver that, even today.
Granted, there isn't the ridiculous amount of postprocessing we see in phones, but even many dedicated cameras these days don't give you an actual raw sensor dump in their so-called RAW files.
Sony is probably the worst offender here actually. The a6x00 series applies lossy (!) compression to every RAW file without any option to disable, and there's an additional noise filter on long exposures that wreaks havoc on astrophotography:
https://stephenbayphotography.com/blog/sony-raw-compression-...
http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/SonyA7S/sonystareater...
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A bit offtopic, but — a5100 is even cheaper, more compact (!) and has exact same imaging hardware, just with a slight artificial fps limitation. I've long ago upgraded to a6400 and still use the a5100 all the time when I don't plan any serious shooting.
I don’t know about android, but at least with my iPhone I’m pretty sure there are apps that can capture raw sensor data. Additionally I do have the ability capture Apple ProRAW format at of the photos. I don’t actually know if these images are still processed though.
Raw format? That means without any debayering applied? That would mean every pixel has only either r, g or b information and not combined. Be aware that there exist different debayering algorithms, sometimes applied depending on the context. Also, without any correction for sensor calibration? That would mean every sensor has a different raw image for the same input. My point being, without application of algorithms, the info captured by the sensor does not really look like an image.