I remember when the original iPhone came out - the nokia heads were dismissing it because of the camera.
Apple is right though, to continue to justify it's premiums it needs to add to the hardware. This can of incremental update year after year will see it way ahead of the pack in a few years. Haptic feedback. Maybe extend the touchID sensors for health sensors.
Despite the worsening of quality in the OS, the foundations are rock solid and will always be ahead of Android. When Apple gets around to a > 4G Ram and 4-8 cores nothing will compete.
Who says the S cycle is the preferred cycle? I prefer to get the newly designed iPhones because after about 2 years of looking at them I want a new one. Plus both versions have kinks that are fixed from the previous year. The 6 has a 2nd generation 64-bit processor and Touch ID just to name two. You think those are better in the 5S? Apple does a good job of offering revised hardware along with new hardware every year so it's hard to restrain from buying a whole new phone every time.
The 5S is already very fast and the speed gain is negligible for normal use not worth and upgrading as the 6's body is hideous IMO. The differences in iterations is getting smaller and smaller as the product ages. It's nowhere like when you changed from a 3 to a 3S or a 3S to a 4.
And the 5S has Touch ID just not Apple Pay which is not something I can't live without. The 5S also takes fantastic photos.
You are simply on the wrong 2 year cycle. I wait 2 years between S cycles. My 6S will be much, much better than the 5S and 6 as previous S bumps have suggested.
Who says the S cycle is the preferred cycle? I prefer to get the newly designed iPhones because after about 2 years of looking at them I want a new one. Plus both versions have kinks that are fixed from the previous year. The 6 has a 2nd generation 64-bit processor and Touch ID just to name two. You think those are better in the 5S? Apple does a good job of offering revised hardware along with new hardware every year so it's hard to restrain from buying a whole new phone every time.
The 5S is already very fast and the speed gain is negligible for normal use not worth and upgrading as the 6's body is hideous IMO. The differences in iterations is getting smaller and smaller as the product ages. It's nowhere like when you changed from a 3 to a 3S or a 3S to a 4.
And the 5S has Touch ID just not Apple Pay which is not something I can't live without. The 5S also takes fantastic photos.
You are simply on the wrong 2 year cycle. I wait 2 years between S cycles. My 6S will be much, much better than the 5S and 6 as previous S bumps have suggested.
I used to be on the 2-year cycle, like everyone else, but have now gone to 3. If there's no 4" iPhone 6s with a flush lens, it will be 4.
No way phone cameras will ever be as good as DSLR cameras. It's impossible due to the small size of the sensor. When you look at top of the line cameras from Nikon and Canon, they run over 4k. Phones will never have that type of expensive technology. Photography is a big hobby of mine and I do use my iPhone camera a lot, but it will never replace my DSLR. I'm all for new technology in smart phone cameras, but it's impossible for a phone to ever compare to a top of the line DSLR.
One should recall that DSLR's had very humble beginnings as well when film was king, and many SLR users were looking down on digital.
What is known and what is accurate, is that smartphones are in fact impacting the industry in a big way, replacing many classes of digital cameras for a great many people. But yes, current technology will leave your DSLR king, at least until MILC's surpass them.
I used to be on the 2-year cycle, like everyone else, but have now gone to 3. If there's no 4" iPhone 6s with a flush lens, it will be 4.
If the 6S' body remains like the 6 then I too may pass. If I were in a blinded test I wouldn't be able to tell the difference in it's feel between it and a Samsung- it's that naff. The curved bezel and plasticky feel really turn me off.
I'm hoping Apple returns to a squared off bezel.
And yet, I suspect that the most important parts of the iPhone's design to Ive are those parts which we can't see.
Considering that his take on proper design is that the entire device perform properly, and that design doesn't stop at the outer shell, then yes. Everything that I've designed was designed for best performance and ease of use. The outer attractiveness is an important part, but just a part.
The "problem" of the slight projection of the camera is the requirement of a certain minimum thickness for the module. If Apple cared less about the quality of the camera, they could have used a thinner module. If the camera was in the middle of the end, rather than at the corner, then it would seem more balanced. But even the thinnest phone cases take care of this. Apple needs the middle for the ear speaker, so they couldn't move the camera.
So this is a design decision was was necessary in light of the ever decreasing thickness. Now Samsung has that new middle line phone with a metal case that's just 6.3mm thick. I don't know if the camera protrudes. I couldn't tell in the images I saw.
I'm sure I'm not explaining it well, but I get the concept of a dual lens camera. There are different variations so I'm only speculating at which route Apple could go. Here is a quote about one dual lens camera:
"The Corephotonics camera has one wide-angle lens and one telephoto lens, each with its own sensor. Data from those two sensors is "fused" by onboard software, to produce one composite image. More weight is given to one of the lenses or the other, depending on the zoom level chosen by the user – a maximum 3x zoom is possible when shooting stills, or 5x for 1080p HD video."
I totally get what you are saying. Why the need for 2 cameras and not just one with an optical zoom. I just haven't read enough and don't know much about the dual lens cameras coming out this year. Is one just actually for depth of field and metering the scene, are both cameras 2 different focal lengths, etc; I just don't know. One thing I do understand is having 2 lenses with 2 different sensors would allow you to capture more light for a better quality low light photograph.
EDIT: I wanted to add I'm guessing another reason for the dual lens is to prevent a protruding camera lens while using optical zoom. With 2 lenses and 2 different focal points, I would assume that would prevent a protruding lens when you are using zoom. With the iPhone being so thin, I wonder if you could even fit a single lens optical zoom camera in there. Having two cameras would make it possible.
I've read about that module as well. But most of my career was in commercial photography and running a commercial photo lab, and I'm pretty familliar with cameras, lenses and optics in general having taken a year of optics while minoring in physics. What I can say is that first of all, the only camera that I know of that does use this module, the HTC One, doesn't use it for zoom. I doubt it would give a high quality image merging the two images like that.
And think about it, merging two differently sized images from two cameras with two different focal lengths. How well do you think that will work out? Adobe has had, for a number of years, a way of merging two, or more images that are taken at different focuses, and giving a greater depth of field. That actually works pretty well. But it's not perfect, and the images are the same size, theoretically. I say theoretically, because when refocusing, the image size changes slightly. So the software needs to measure that slight change, and resize the image to compensate, which means a mathematically incorrect adjustment, which slightly lowers resolution quality. Ya don't get something for nothing.
So using two fixed focal length lenses with two imagers doesn't give " zoom". It gives some sort of reinterpolated image that you might as well do in a photo app. Yes, you do have images on both sides of the magnification range, and so that should give a better quality image. But just how good is that camera CPU at doing the intropolation? I'm betting that it's not very good at all. And, remember, the HTC One was criticized heavily for its poor image quality from that low 4mp sensor. Moving to higher Rez would just expose (heh, clever word there) the flaws of the technique even more than at a lower resolution.
This is a long way of saying that it wouldn't work well at all.
Who says the S cycle is the preferred cycle? I prefer to get the newly designed iPhones because after about 2 years of looking at them I want a new one. Plus both versions have kinks that are fixed from the previous year. The 6 has a 2nd generation 64-bit processor and Touch ID just to name two. You think those are better in the 5S? Apple does a good job of offering revised hardware along with new hardware every year so it's hard to restrain from buying a whole new phone every time.
Yeah, I don't agree either. When buying the first part of the new generation, you at least are assured that you have the newest design for two years. When buying the S version, you still have all of the flaws of that model to deal with, major or minor, as it may be for that newer version model, but you now also know that in one year, your phone will be succeeded by a major transition. I find that more frustrating.
I agree with you. However it's worth noting that the number of pictures with Apple's cameras have just surpassed those of Nikon on Flicker so I'd say that pfisher is most likely right when he says that "phone camera will be our cameras"... in a broad sense.
What I always tell people, when advising them on product purchases, particularly cameras, is what is good enough? If you shoot for Flickr, Facebook, email, etc, then a smartphone camera is more than good enough, as long as it's a good camera, that is, good dynamic range, sharp across the field, doesn't require too many corrections as far as color goes or exposure, etc. after all no one really needs 8MP for those purposes.
Even for an 8x12 print, the iPhone camera is pretty good, though not as good in the shadows or highlights.
The biggest problem is the lack of optical zoom. If Apple could somehow come out with a 3x optical zoom without needing that high bulge in the case that a few other smartphones have had over the years, then that would be great. I still think my idea for a 90 degree camera would work, as I've had similar cameras over the years for special purposes that used mirrors for that purpose.
But there will never become a time when a tiny sensor is equal to a large sensor. It's why I use full frame cameras, and occasionally, a medium 2 1/4 model. You simply can't beat an 80MP sensor with superb lenses. At least, not until the 100MP sensor model comes out.
You both make good points. However the Apple Distortion Field is in full control, so each release outsells the previous one. It just keeps getting better and better!
I wish I could remember his name, and I've got the article bookmarked somewhere, but a writer wrote a few years ago wrote that Jobs didn't have a reality distortion field. That instead, he had a reality creation field.
I really liked that description, and I will never forget it. Many people have reality distortion fields, it's really not hard. But Jobs did make his reality our reality. With others, you walk out of the room, and you go back to the way things were. But with Jobs, you walk out of the room into the new reality.
Apple still has much of that mojo, but he was the best at presenting it to the masses.
A dual lens with optical zoom sounds nice, and certainly if anyone can do it, Apple can. After all, Apple revolutionized photography, ushering it into the digital age over 20 years ago with Kodak and the QuickTake camera. Apple flourished; may Kodak RIP. Even Time Magazine proclaimed it one of the 100 greatest from 1923 to 2010.
Nevertheless, I am more intrigued by the potential for a TWIN lens camera, which could produce stereoscopic images, viewable (via software) through multiple of the several technologies. Such a camera, in consumer hands, could finally bring 3D home displays into acceptance. At the very least, the iPhone has the motion sensors to utilize the sort of "virtual" 3D achieved by tilting and rotating the screen while viewing (I forget what that's called).
No way phone cameras will ever be as good as DSLR cameras. It's impossible due to the small size of the sensor. When you look at top of the line cameras from Nikon and Canon, they run over 4k. Phones will never have that type of expensive technology. Photography is a big hobby of mine and I do use my iPhone camera a lot, but it will never replace my DSLR. I'm all for new technology in smart phone cameras, but it's impossible for a phone to ever compare to a top of the line DSLR.
I meant for all intent and purposes. Phones in the future will match a regular DSLR "for all intents and purposes". Close enough to be able to reproduce what a DLSR, like a T3i can do today.
Why not have the camera lens on the side or top of the phone? Bend light.
If there is a will, there is a way and cameras will match DSLR. Of course, in the future, you may have a much nicer DSLR and a phone that matches what you have today.
Who says the S cycle is the preferred cycle? I prefer to get the newly designed iPhones because after about 2 years of looking at them I want a new one. Plus both versions have kinks that are fixed from the previous year. The 6 has a 2nd generation 64-bit processor and Touch ID just to name two. You think those are better in the 5S? Apple does a good job of offering revised hardware along with new hardware every year so it's hard to restrain from buying a whole new phone every time.
Yeah, I don't agree either. When buying the first part of the new generation, you at least are assured that you have the newest design for two years. When buying the S version, you still have all of the flaws of that model to deal with, major or minor, as it may be for that newer version model, but you now also know that in one year, your phone will be succeeded by a major transition. I find that more frustrating.
Question is: are Apple bound to use the same design this year for the 6s?
No. They're not bound at all. The original iPhone was superseded after a year by the new design of the 3G. It was only then that they fell into the habit of a bi-annual design. And considering their limitless resources, who is to say that they couldn't buck the trend? What's more, they have tweaked physical aspects on the s models, even when the overall shape has remained the same.
The DSLR-defenders are going to be up in arms about a "REAL" camera and how a phone CANT compare. And a phone will never be as good as a DSLR.
Not sure why that group of people gets so worked up when they hear about a phone getting a new camera.
Here is my prediction: Within 6 years, our phone cameras WILL be as good as today's DLSRs in most every way - for all intent and purposes. We will have great depth of field and quality and all of that business. People will continue to say it can't happen, but maybe they are defensive about how much they have spent on equipment.
We shall see. DSLRs will be super niche-y. Phones will be our cameras.
The difference right now, is astronomically huge to my eyes... Yet many people don't see a significant difference.... For those people, your singularity event has occured already...
. So, not sure why phone makers would even strive to get to DSLR when most people don't give a crap; that's why I'm betting that you'll be wrong. There is no incentive to spend the big money to get there. Smart phones will destroy everything that's left of the low to lower mid ranger market, but there's lot of things they won't be able to do because of the phone's size and upper mid ranger to high market will survive.
The DSLR-defenders are going to be up in arms about a "REAL" camera and how a phone CANT compare. And a phone will never be as good as a DSLR.
Not sure why that group of people gets so worked up when they hear about a phone getting a new camera.
Here is my prediction: Within 6 years, our phone cameras WILL be as good as today's DLSRs in most every way - for all intent and purposes. We will have great depth of field and quality and all of that business. People will continue to say it can't happen, but maybe they are defensive about how much they have spent on equipment.
We shall see. DSLRs will be super niche-y. Phones will be our cameras.
The difference right now, is astronomically huge to my eyes... Yet many people don't see a significant difference.... For those people, your singularity event has occured already...
. So, not sure why phone makers would even strive to get to DSLR when most people don't give a crap; that's why I'm betting that you'll be wrong. There is no incentive to spend the big money to get there. Smart phones will destroy everything that's left of the low to lower mid ranger market, but there's lot of things they won't be able to do because of the phone's size and upper mid ranger to high market will survive.
Astutely put.
It's like music. The great unwashed are content with highly compressed bits, and there's no Moore's law that will entice them to better sound.
We reached great recorded sound decades ago, but most don't care, because the music they listen to doesn't warrant good equipment.
Question is: are Apple bound to use the same design this year for the 6s?
No. They're not bound at all. The original iPhone was superseded after a year by the new design of the 3G. It was only then that they fell into the habit of a bi-annual design. And considering their limitless resources, who is to say that they couldn't buck the trend? What's more, they have tweaked physical aspects on the s models, even when the overall shape has remained the same.
Apple has made it very clear that they are on a biannual schedule with their phones. You can't look at the first year as being meaningful. But, even then most of the 3G, the first iPhone we bought, was the same as the original model.
But, the addition of 3G, GPS and some other minor features was a major upgrade. It also required that the back go from metal to plastic, something that was discussed almost endlessly. It was also the beginning of the biannual cycle.
Does Apple HAVE to stick to that? No, of course not. Will they stick to it! It's very likely they will. At least they will for the foreseeable future.
They do tweak features on the S models. Of course. But those are minor tweaks. The case remains the same, the screen remains the sale, and other major changes aren't made.
When Jobs held the 3GS up, he said that "The S stands for speed"." Otherwise, it was mostly the same inside.
Nobody could mistake the biannual sameness, not could they mistake the newness of the models succeeding, nor the oldness of the ones proceeding.
The difference right now, is astronomically huge to my eyes... Yet many people don't see a significant difference.... For those people, your singularity event has occured already...
. So, not sure why phone makers would even strive to get to DSLR when most people don't give a crap; that's why I'm betting that you'll be wrong. There is no incentive to spend the big money to get there. Smart phones will destroy everything that's left of the low to lower mid ranger market, but there's lot of things they won't be able to do because of the phone's size and upper mid ranger to high market will survive.
I use a Canon 5D mkIII and "L" lenses. I also use my iPhone's. Can I see a difference? Sure I can. But for most photo uses, my iPhone is just dandy. My new 6+ is great! The stabilization is about as good as my best lenses. While the density range isn't as good, with HDR, it's pretty good. The only thing we need is a good optical zoom. Seriously, 8MP is good enough for most photos. I remember when Canon sent me the 6D to test in my lab (I ran a commercial photo lab for almost three decades). With 6MP I got great prints out of my Fuji Pictography 4000 at 8 x 12. To go to 12 x 18, I interpolated up 100%, and it looked great. I still have those prints.
The truth is that the new iPhone takes pictures that are as good, if not better than that $3,000 camera (priced without lens), and about as good as the 8MP model that succeeded it.
Yes, those cameras are old, but the point is that those cameras were used by a lot of pros, and you've seen lots of photos taken with them over the years in newspapers, magazines, books, the web, etc, and likely never thought anything negative about the quality.
The question is what a photo is being purposed for, and whether the IQ is good enough for that. For most pictures, the IQ is good enough, and a good DSLR isn't going to make much of a difference for those pictures. In theory, yes, but practically, no.
One thing that Apple must absolutely do now, particularly as Android 5 supports it, is RAW output. I just don't understand why Apple hasn't supported that yet. Yes, the image files are large, but those who want them understand that. It totally eliminates any problems with incorrect lighting compensation, which is something that you can't do with any lossy compressed picture format.
If I print on my Canon IPF5100 printer at 17 x 25.5, it doesn't hold up, but how many cameras and lenses would?
I have also the latest 6s model of i-phone. It is very good by all its feature. But there is no dual camera on front or at back. These are just rumors before the launch of the phone.
Comments
I remember when the original iPhone came out - the nokia heads were dismissing it because of the camera.
Apple is right though, to continue to justify it's premiums it needs to add to the hardware. This can of incremental update year after year will see it way ahead of the pack in a few years. Haptic feedback. Maybe extend the touchID sensors for health sensors.
Despite the worsening of quality in the OS, the foundations are rock solid and will always be ahead of Android. When Apple gets around to a > 4G Ram and 4-8 cores nothing will compete.
Who says the S cycle is the preferred cycle? I prefer to get the newly designed iPhones because after about 2 years of looking at them I want a new one. Plus both versions have kinks that are fixed from the previous year. The 6 has a 2nd generation 64-bit processor and Touch ID just to name two. You think those are better in the 5S? Apple does a good job of offering revised hardware along with new hardware every year so it's hard to restrain from buying a whole new phone every time.
The 5S is already very fast and the speed gain is negligible for normal use not worth and upgrading as the 6's body is hideous IMO. The differences in iterations is getting smaller and smaller as the product ages. It's nowhere like when you changed from a 3 to a 3S or a 3S to a 4.
And the 5S has Touch ID just not Apple Pay which is not something I can't live without. The 5S also takes fantastic photos.
You are simply on the wrong 2 year cycle. I wait 2 years between S cycles. My 6S will be much, much better than the 5S and 6 as previous S bumps have suggested.
I used to be on the 2-year cycle, like everyone else, but have now gone to 3. If there's no 4" iPhone 6s with a flush lens, it will be 4.
No way phone cameras will ever be as good as DSLR cameras. It's impossible due to the small size of the sensor. When you look at top of the line cameras from Nikon and Canon, they run over 4k. Phones will never have that type of expensive technology. Photography is a big hobby of mine and I do use my iPhone camera a lot, but it will never replace my DSLR. I'm all for new technology in smart phone cameras, but it's impossible for a phone to ever compare to a top of the line DSLR.
One should recall that DSLR's had very humble beginnings as well when film was king, and many SLR users were looking down on digital.
What is known and what is accurate, is that smartphones are in fact impacting the industry in a big way, replacing many classes of digital cameras for a great many people. But yes, current technology will leave your DSLR king, at least until MILC's surpass them.
If the 6S' body remains like the 6 then I too may pass. If I were in a blinded test I wouldn't be able to tell the difference in it's feel between it and a Samsung- it's that naff. The curved bezel and plasticky feel really turn me off.
I'm hoping Apple returns to a squared off bezel.
Considering that his take on proper design is that the entire device perform properly, and that design doesn't stop at the outer shell, then yes. Everything that I've designed was designed for best performance and ease of use. The outer attractiveness is an important part, but just a part.
The "problem" of the slight projection of the camera is the requirement of a certain minimum thickness for the module. If Apple cared less about the quality of the camera, they could have used a thinner module. If the camera was in the middle of the end, rather than at the corner, then it would seem more balanced. But even the thinnest phone cases take care of this. Apple needs the middle for the ear speaker, so they couldn't move the camera.
So this is a design decision was was necessary in light of the ever decreasing thickness. Now Samsung has that new middle line phone with a metal case that's just 6.3mm thick. I don't know if the camera protrudes. I couldn't tell in the images I saw.
I've read about that module as well. But most of my career was in commercial photography and running a commercial photo lab, and I'm pretty familliar with cameras, lenses and optics in general having taken a year of optics while minoring in physics. What I can say is that first of all, the only camera that I know of that does use this module, the HTC One, doesn't use it for zoom. I doubt it would give a high quality image merging the two images like that.
And think about it, merging two differently sized images from two cameras with two different focal lengths. How well do you think that will work out? Adobe has had, for a number of years, a way of merging two, or more images that are taken at different focuses, and giving a greater depth of field. That actually works pretty well. But it's not perfect, and the images are the same size, theoretically. I say theoretically, because when refocusing, the image size changes slightly. So the software needs to measure that slight change, and resize the image to compensate, which means a mathematically incorrect adjustment, which slightly lowers resolution quality. Ya don't get something for nothing.
So using two fixed focal length lenses with two imagers doesn't give " zoom". It gives some sort of reinterpolated image that you might as well do in a photo app. Yes, you do have images on both sides of the magnification range, and so that should give a better quality image. But just how good is that camera CPU at doing the intropolation? I'm betting that it's not very good at all. And, remember, the HTC One was criticized heavily for its poor image quality from that low 4mp sensor. Moving to higher Rez would just expose (heh, clever word there) the flaws of the technique even more than at a lower resolution.
This is a long way of saying that it wouldn't work well at all.
Yeah, I don't agree either. When buying the first part of the new generation, you at least are assured that you have the newest design for two years. When buying the S version, you still have all of the flaws of that model to deal with, major or minor, as it may be for that newer version model, but you now also know that in one year, your phone will be succeeded by a major transition. I find that more frustrating.
What I always tell people, when advising them on product purchases, particularly cameras, is what is good enough? If you shoot for Flickr, Facebook, email, etc, then a smartphone camera is more than good enough, as long as it's a good camera, that is, good dynamic range, sharp across the field, doesn't require too many corrections as far as color goes or exposure, etc. after all no one really needs 8MP for those purposes.
Even for an 8x12 print, the iPhone camera is pretty good, though not as good in the shadows or highlights.
The biggest problem is the lack of optical zoom. If Apple could somehow come out with a 3x optical zoom without needing that high bulge in the case that a few other smartphones have had over the years, then that would be great. I still think my idea for a 90 degree camera would work, as I've had similar cameras over the years for special purposes that used mirrors for that purpose.
But there will never become a time when a tiny sensor is equal to a large sensor. It's why I use full frame cameras, and occasionally, a medium 2 1/4 model. You simply can't beat an 80MP sensor with superb lenses. At least, not until the 100MP sensor model comes out.
I wish I could remember his name, and I've got the article bookmarked somewhere, but a writer wrote a few years ago wrote that Jobs didn't have a reality distortion field. That instead, he had a reality creation field.
I really liked that description, and I will never forget it. Many people have reality distortion fields, it's really not hard. But Jobs did make his reality our reality. With others, you walk out of the room, and you go back to the way things were. But with Jobs, you walk out of the room into the new reality.
Apple still has much of that mojo, but he was the best at presenting it to the masses.
A dual lens with optical zoom sounds nice, and certainly if anyone can do it, Apple can. After all, Apple revolutionized photography, ushering it into the digital age over 20 years ago with Kodak and the QuickTake camera. Apple flourished; may Kodak RIP. Even Time Magazine proclaimed it one of the 100 greatest from 1923 to 2010.
Nevertheless, I am more intrigued by the potential for a TWIN lens camera, which could produce stereoscopic images, viewable (via software) through multiple of the several technologies. Such a camera, in consumer hands, could finally bring 3D home displays into acceptance. At the very least, the iPhone has the motion sensors to utilize the sort of "virtual" 3D achieved by tilting and rotating the screen while viewing (I forget what that's called).
No way phone cameras will ever be as good as DSLR cameras. It's impossible due to the small size of the sensor. When you look at top of the line cameras from Nikon and Canon, they run over 4k. Phones will never have that type of expensive technology. Photography is a big hobby of mine and I do use my iPhone camera a lot, but it will never replace my DSLR. I'm all for new technology in smart phone cameras, but it's impossible for a phone to ever compare to a top of the line DSLR.
I meant for all intent and purposes. Phones in the future will match a regular DSLR "for all intents and purposes". Close enough to be able to reproduce what a DLSR, like a T3i can do today.
Why not have the camera lens on the side or top of the phone? Bend light.
If there is a will, there is a way and cameras will match DSLR. Of course, in the future, you may have a much nicer DSLR and a phone that matches what you have today.
Question is: are Apple bound to use the same design this year for the 6s?
No. They're not bound at all. The original iPhone was superseded after a year by the new design of the 3G. It was only then that they fell into the habit of a bi-annual design. And considering their limitless resources, who is to say that they couldn't buck the trend? What's more, they have tweaked physical aspects on the s models, even when the overall shape has remained the same.
The DSLR-defenders are going to be up in arms about a "REAL" camera and how a phone CANT compare. And a phone will never be as good as a DSLR.
Not sure why that group of people gets so worked up when they hear about a phone getting a new camera.
Here is my prediction: Within 6 years, our phone cameras WILL be as good as today's DLSRs in most every way - for all intent and purposes. We will have great depth of field and quality and all of that business. People will continue to say it can't happen, but maybe they are defensive about how much they have spent on equipment.
We shall see. DSLRs will be super niche-y. Phones will be our cameras.
The difference right now, is astronomically huge to my eyes... Yet many people don't see a significant difference.... For those people, your singularity event has occured already...
. So, not sure why phone makers would even strive to get to DSLR when most people don't give a crap; that's why I'm betting that you'll be wrong. There is no incentive to spend the big money to get there. Smart phones will destroy everything that's left of the low to lower mid ranger market, but there's lot of things they won't be able to do because of the phone's size and upper mid ranger to high market will survive.
Astutely put.
It's like music. The great unwashed are content with highly compressed bits, and there's no Moore's law that will entice them to better sound.
We reached great recorded sound decades ago, but most don't care, because the music they listen to doesn't warrant good equipment.
Apple has made it very clear that they are on a biannual schedule with their phones. You can't look at the first year as being meaningful. But, even then most of the 3G, the first iPhone we bought, was the same as the original model.
But, the addition of 3G, GPS and some other minor features was a major upgrade. It also required that the back go from metal to plastic, something that was discussed almost endlessly. It was also the beginning of the biannual cycle.
Does Apple HAVE to stick to that? No, of course not. Will they stick to it! It's very likely they will. At least they will for the foreseeable future.
They do tweak features on the S models. Of course. But those are minor tweaks. The case remains the same, the screen remains the sale, and other major changes aren't made.
When Jobs held the 3GS up, he said that "The S stands for speed"." Otherwise, it was mostly the same inside.
Nobody could mistake the biannual sameness, not could they mistake the newness of the models succeeding, nor the oldness of the ones proceeding.
I use a Canon 5D mkIII and "L" lenses. I also use my iPhone's. Can I see a difference? Sure I can. But for most photo uses, my iPhone is just dandy. My new 6+ is great! The stabilization is about as good as my best lenses. While the density range isn't as good, with HDR, it's pretty good. The only thing we need is a good optical zoom. Seriously, 8MP is good enough for most photos. I remember when Canon sent me the 6D to test in my lab (I ran a commercial photo lab for almost three decades). With 6MP I got great prints out of my Fuji Pictography 4000 at 8 x 12. To go to 12 x 18, I interpolated up 100%, and it looked great. I still have those prints.
The truth is that the new iPhone takes pictures that are as good, if not better than that $3,000 camera (priced without lens), and about as good as the 8MP model that succeeded it.
Yes, those cameras are old, but the point is that those cameras were used by a lot of pros, and you've seen lots of photos taken with them over the years in newspapers, magazines, books, the web, etc, and likely never thought anything negative about the quality.
The question is what a photo is being purposed for, and whether the IQ is good enough for that. For most pictures, the IQ is good enough, and a good DSLR isn't going to make much of a difference for those pictures. In theory, yes, but practically, no.
One thing that Apple must absolutely do now, particularly as Android 5 supports it, is RAW output. I just don't understand why Apple hasn't supported that yet. Yes, the image files are large, but those who want them understand that. It totally eliminates any problems with incorrect lighting compensation, which is something that you can't do with any lossy compressed picture format.
If I print on my Canon IPF5100 printer at 17 x 25.5, it doesn't hold up, but how many cameras and lenses would?
I have also the latest 6s model of i-phone. It is very good by all its feature. But there is no dual camera on front or at back. These are just rumors before the launch of the phone.