iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King?
The article alludes to something I&#x27;ve noticed since upgrading from the 5c to an 11 pro last year - The computational aspect and&#x2F;or current hardware limitations mean these phones can shoot images that look great <i>on the phone</i>.<p>I mean, you scroll past images on Instagram, look at your own photos on the phone you took them with, look at your images on your Instagram feed on other people&#x27;s phones or on the Instagram web app, and yeah they look pretty good.<p>Get them on something bigger though? Look a little closer? Use decent resolution monitor? A reasonable sized print? They look bad. I&#x27;m not even talking about pixel peeping here, which is bullshit. I mean they look overprocessed. Like the machine took a course in photoshop on YouTube and didn&#x27;t finish it.<p>The examples in the article show this, they&#x27;re full of little mistakes that don&#x27;t happen when you have proper hardware - larger aperture lenses on larger sensors. Proper graduated neutral density filters to prevent halos. Sensors with large enough area&#x2F;photosites to give better dynamic range or better high ISO performance. Real camera movements to tilt&#x2F;shift&#x2F;rise&#x2F;fall&#x2F;swing.<p>I mean, most of this is boring technicality stuff that doesn&#x27;t really matter in the grand scheme of &quot;is this an interesting photo&quot; type considerations. It&#x27;s more a case of computational photography is currently trying to climb out of its uncanny valley. It&#x27;ll get there eventually.<p>For now we&#x27;re still at the point of &quot;Eventually, anyone that values photos will carry a standalone camera.&quot; I say this as someone who shoots mostly with an iPhone, but still carries around a 4x5 camera when it matters.<p>Edit: to expand on this a bit I&#x27;ve just uploaded some images I shot with the 11 pro a couple of weeks after I bought it back in October: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leejo.github.io&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;off_season_ibiza&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leejo.github.io&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;off_season_ibiza&#x2F;</a> # the caveat is that I was still figuring the phone&#x2F;camera out but wanted to see &quot;what it could do out of the box&quot; - and yeah, the images look good on the screen with very minor lens corrections and levels in lightroom, but look overprocessed even with my attempts to pull that back: the sky in the photos looks added in, there are halos around parts of the images where HDR is trying and failing, the sharpening is too aggresive (real life doesn&#x27;t have &quot;sharp&quot; edges), and so on. When you view these at larger sizes than seen in the blog post they look much worse.