Comment by giantrobot
3 years ago
> 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...
That's why I used the a6000 as an example. Even that is significantly better than what phones we're seeing today, where even the "RAW" is entirely artificial
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.