Posted by excerionsforte 5 days ago
Either too wide (1x) or too narrow (4x), as seen in the live stream video, which was recorded with the iPhone 17 Pro.
I am currently on the 13 Pro, I find the 3x mode ideal for portrait photos and videos.
Is it only me with this impression? Could someone help me to jump back into Apple's reality distortion field?
That said, I too like a 70 mm lens, but I long ago got used to just moving closer to or further away from subjects to take photos with dedicated cameras depending on what lens I had on.
Maybe if the Larrin Thomas came up with some catchy new stainless formulation and called it AppleCut or something...
Maybe the recent introduction of foldable phones indicates the opposite. Is it the final blip, or will something similarly disruptive happen every 5-7 years?
Discuss.
Anything else on the hardware side is mostly noise.
If I had to futurism bet, it'd be on eyeglass AR + pocket device being the next major change. With input method for that still tbd.
Apple switched iPhone 17 Pro from Titanium (used in earlier versions) to aerospace-grade Aluminium for Superior Heat Dissipation.
But for the iPhone Air, they are using Titanium because it's lightweight, strong, and durable.
Aluminum is definitely a softer metal, so using aerospace-grade aluminum makes sense. So, is Titanium not a good thermal conductor? If it is not, then why is it used in the iPhone Air?
Sorry! Their choice is not clear to me. Can someone throw light on it?
Phone material choices come down to which compromises you will settle for.
There are similar compromises with types of glass chosen. One type is more scratch resistance, but more prone to shatter from falls, and vice versa.
I think I could probably squeeze more life out of my phone, but the 17 has a nicer camera, me and my wife are noticing our relatives with newer iPhones have photographs that look slightly (I meant to write NOTICEABLY here) better. As we raise our first child, having a quality camera is definitely important to us.
I was really tempted by the iPhone Air, but the Pro has better camera features. I am actually really excited to see what they will do for the iPads. If they release a thin iPac Mini similar to the iPhone Air, I would immediately buy it. I am not usually a fan of thin, but something in me has always wanted a thin iPad Mini, not sure why, but I'm waiting for it still.
Great demo, the most impressive demo had to have been the Airpod Pros translation piece.
Edit: Needed to annotate that I wrote 'slightly better' but its not just slightly, we both visually noticed a different in quality.
One last note, the 12 Pro was my first iPhone ever. I was on Android since 2009, every Android I had lasted about 2 years. My last one probably would have lasted me 5 years but I was tired and wanted a change at my 2 year mark. I have not regretted my decision to date.
If you want reference tier photos for documenting family history, modern mirrorless is better. DSLR from 10-15 years ago is also still great in all but the most challenging light conditions, where you could simply use a flash.
If you are considering an expensive phone upgrade based off of the camera alone, consider buying a dedicated camera first, I say. I know the best camera is the one you have on you, etc...
Difference is especially startling for HDR and portraits, particularly backlight ones where the stock app does some hideous segmentation-based “enhancements”.
Just be mindful that those extra megapixels will need some extra storage.
Something about iOS and macOS just feels right. Any time I boot up my old Android phones they feel like a convoluted mess.
A phone camera isn't really a camera, it's a digitally-airbrushed impression of reality. There just isn't enough light hitting the tiny sensor through the tiny lens.
I have 20 year old 5MP DLSR portrait photos that are still better than what a 120MP phone can produce, because it's the lens that counts.
However.... it's really hard to overstate the workflow and convenience aspects of shooting with a phone. (Particularly as a parent, and even moreso when I was a new parent of a small child.) The phone has the twin benefits of 1) being present almost always and 2) being immediately able to process and transmit an image to the people you might want to see it. For the 99% case, that's far more useful than even a very significant improvement in image quality. For the 1% where it matters, I can and do either hire a professional (with better equipment than my own) or make the production of dragging out my DSLR and all that it entails. This is like so many other cases where inarguable technical excellence of a sort gives way to convenience and cost issues. IOW, "Better" is not just about Image Quality.
But, I never have my Canon and it's too bulky to carry around everyday. I do carry my iPhone everywhere I go. And so, the capabilities of my iPhone camera are more important.
I imagine this is the same for the overwhelming majority of people.
I tried a Sony RX100 (1" sensor) when they first came out, optimistic about the possibility of using it for 'general purpose' photography. After all, it's small enough.
The problem was, it's a second device to carry around and keep charged. Then once you capture the image, it's largely stuck on the device until you find a way to offload your images. I briefly experimented with cables that would let me do things like transfer images from the RX100 to my (Android at the time) mobile phone, for archiving and sending to family and friends. That turned the whole thing into the sort of science fair project that I didn't have time for as the parent of a very young child. (Although in fairness, I can't think of a single time in my life when I'd have had the patience, kids or not.)
This is why, for all the arguments you can make against them as cameras, I've come to be very thankful for the amount of effort that Apple and others have made to get appealing images out of devices I always carry around anyway. I can take a set of pictures, edit them, have them automatically archived to cloud storage, and send them to whoever I want.. all with a single device I was carrying around anyway.
This leaves open the fact that the 'real' camera workflow is still an option when there's the need for higher image quality and the time (or money to hire a photographer) to take advantage of what a DSLR or the like can do.
(When I compare what I can do with my iPhone to what my parents had available to them (a 110 format camera and 35mm Nikons), I like the tradeoffs a lot better. the image quality available now is definitely better than the 110. Some of those 35mm exposures are probably better quality than what I can get out of an iPhone, but they're all stuck in albums and slides, and nobody ever looks at them. )
Most modern cameras now have a WiFi-based photo transfer system that works pretty well. It's not instantaneous, but it is quick enough to copy the photo you want to share with a friend or partner while you finish a meal or drink your coffee.
Waiting until I can plug in the 2TB memory card to my Mac and use a huge screen to review all the photos is far more efficient even if it has much higher startup latency.
Honestly this is a good reason to choose the iPhone Pro over the Air or Standard: 10gbps USB port. Plug the Nikon in to the phone for cloud upload. This would be the fastest path of all. Most people are only focused on the USB bandwidth in the iPhones for download from the phone.
I understand the "second device to carry around" but it isn't a real point for baby pics you might take at home. A ridiculous number of times I have no idea where I last put my phone anyway and sometimes have to make it ring from kde connect on my laptop so it is not like a smartphone is necessarily readily available at all time anyway.
I also know a number of people who don't leave home with their smartphone amyway for short errands since they have an apple watch, that leave one pocket available for those that would prefer having a camera.
On an iPhone, I can take the picture and I'm immediately a button press away from a photo editor and then whoever I want to send it to.
(A camera that automatically tethered to a phone and dumped pictures into the phone's camera roll would mostly solve the workflow issues I'm mentioning here. Would not surprise me if this already exists.)
> I understand the "second device to carry around" but it isn't a real point for baby pics you might take at home.
Maybe. The camera still has to be charged and in mind and hand. (Then as soon as the kids leave the house you're back to where you were and having to carry something around that you might not otherwise.)
> I also know a number of people who don't leave home with their smartphone anyway
I see that... different people have different sorts of relationships with personal electronics. For me, it wound up being that I'd carry a cell phone and that was about it. Even in the pre-smartphone days, when I might have carried a PDA, I either wouldn't or couldn't.
People not gonna let their phone at home and carry the camera only. Having separate camera means you have to carry 2 devices at the same time.
I have a number of great videos with my baby that required me to have both hands in-use. Only have those videos because of the above devices.
Any suggestions for me while I shop around for "tier 2" carriers? I am primarily concerned with price, and then network coverage second (I am OK with sometimes being throttled, but would prefer to avoid large gaps in any coverage).
Wikipedia has a solid table of U.S. MVNO's, for a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...
I probably experience times with deprioritization. 5G service can go from getting several hundred megabits with pretty low latencies to only getting a few megabits with potentially up to 100ms or so latency, depending on crowds. I don't recall any times where I had good signal but couldn't get any data, but definitely been in places where it'll struggle to do video chats or something at a big live event that doesn't have the extra 5G infra deployed. For example, an extra large crowd at the park for some event will probably give poor network experience but I'll otherwise get good connectivity in a modern sports arena.
In the end it's just a value proposition. Is having really fast network everywhere, all the time really that worth it to you? For many the answer is yes. But for me, on my personal device, if I'm getting poor data rates that's probably a clue I should really be putting my phone down and get back into whatever is happening in the park so I don't mind and the savings are quite nice.
There is a list of all the prioritization tiers (aka QCI, or premium data) on all the three main US carriers here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/1mxogtx/data_pr...
1. Their international plan is garbage, and if you don’t use the international plan, you cannot usefully use them as a phone-and-SMS-over-WiFi only solution in conjunction with another carrier. Competitors like USMobile do not have this problem.
2. Their customer support and website are very bad.
I've seen all sorts of non-black (let alone matte black) iPhone rigs used for motion pictures, including white and natural titanium colors. Eg. 28 Years Later used a variety of iPhone configurations and colors.
But yeah, I'm surprised there's no black/space gray option this year. Some consumers won't buy any other color.
Try Halide with "Process Zero" if you want that, but I'm pretty sure the most popular 3p camera apps are Asian beauty apps that do far more and far worse quality processing.
Camera pixels are only one color at a time:
GGRR
BBGG
(quad-Bayer; Fujifilm uses a weirder one called X-Trans. And some of them will be missing because they're damaged or are focus pixels.)
And then you still have to do white balance and tone mapping, because your eyes do that and the camera sensor doesn't.
You need to do this if you want to see the image at all, and it involves a lot of subjective choices. The objective auto white balance algorithm usually described is objectively quite bad; for instance it's always described as a single transformation on the image, which doesn't make sense if there are multiple light sources.
The reason you'd want to render humans differently in the image is that a) if you don't get skin tones just right they'll look like corpses b) in real life you can choose to focus on a subject in a scene and this will cause them to appear brighter (because your eyes will adapt to them) but in an image there isn't that flexibility and so it helps to guess what the foreground of the image is and expose for that.
I forgot to say recent iPhone cameras let you turn off the sharpening effects anyway, just move the photographic style control down to Natural. It is true that the sharpening is kind of bad. This is because someone taught everyone that digital images are bandlimited so they use frequency-based sharpening algorithms, but they aren't, so those just give you ringing artifacts. For some reason nobody knows about warp-sharpen anymore.
Overall this year seemed much better than last year.