Comment by josephg
13 days ago
I think I disagree on every point you've raised here.
First, my sony camera (and all sony cameras released in the last ~3+ years) support USB video streaming out of the box, with no drivers. I suspect other brands are the same. It looks like canon is just stuck in the dark ages on this one. They also support remote camera control over USB, and all sorts of other things. Mostly - but not entirely - in an open ecosystem. I have several devices which can control the camera over the USB connection - so it can't be that hard.
Second, are you sure your android phone takes better photos? What camera & lens do you have on your digital camera? Have you upgraded from the kit lens it came with?
I got a sony a7iv last year. If I take the same photo with my a7 and my iphone, the photos are wildly different. The iphone's photos are lovely, but they have this very slightly AI generated gloss about them. Everything is slightly too clean somehow. Its like I'm looking at reality plus. In comparison, The photos from my sony camera feel like real photos. Dark things are dark. Light things are light. If I crank the ISO at night, the photos are noisy. If I blow out the aperature, the depth of field hits you like a truck made of clouds. The photos look like what I pointed my camera at.
In short, I massively prefer the photos I get from my dedicated camera. I suspect if I showed you, you'd prefer them too.
> I suspect other brands are the same.
My research shows Sony is the outlier here. Fuji, Canon, Nikon and Panasonic all require software or drivers to be used as a USB camera (or at least did as of a year ago or so).
Also, the camera control software these companies put out, for a computer or a phone, is almost always awful.
Buggy, slow, unreliable.. It's a real problem.
> Also, the camera control software these companies put out, for a computer or a phone, is almost always awful.
That’s definitely true of Sony too. Just - thankfully - you don’t need to install any of it to do most stuff. (With the one exception of sony’s gyro based image stablisation).
There’s also several apps in the App Store which let you remotely control Sony cameras. I assume people have reverse engineered the protocol Sony’s offical app uses.
> Second, are you sure your android phone takes better photos? What camera & lens do you have on your digital camera? Have you upgraded from the kit lens it came with?
That wasn't actually my statement. My statement was that it's a better camera.
My Android will actually take dramatically better photos than a u43 camera with kit lens, especially in low-light. It's not even in the same ballpark. My full frame with a Zeiss f/1.4 lens will take better photos than my cell phone. My cell phone also won't reasonably zoom (although it does have a telephoto of sorts and a wide angle, it can't compete with a 200mm let alone a 500mm on my full frame).
However, holistically, it's a better camera. If I take a photo with my cell phone, I can be editing it on my computer in a few minutes. If I'd like a different display -- for example for framing -- I switch apps. That's not to mention panoramas, photospheres, and other computational photography features. Computational stacking for low light can give pretty impressive results too. The list goes on and on. This paragraph could be an essay.
With the exception of sensor size, zoom, and clicky buttons, my cell phone does so much more. Those are important, mind you, but something like a 50 MP, f/1.7, 1/1.31" sensor on a Pixel 9 Pro is about equivalent to an APS camera with a kit lens for equivalent aperture. Under most conditions, the photo quality from a good cell phone is indistinguishable from a big camera. So all the other stuff does become more important.
I did pick a cell phone for its photography features. It's not a random Android phone.