iPhone SE: The One-Eyed King?
The article alludes to something I've noticed since upgrading from the 5c to an 11 pro last year - The computational aspect and/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'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'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't finish it.<p>The examples in the article show this, they're full of little mistakes that don'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/photosites to give better dynamic range or better high ISO performance. Real camera movements to tilt/shift/rise/fall/swing.<p>I mean, most of this is boring technicality stuff that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of "is this an interesting photo" type considerations. It's more a case of computational photography is currently trying to climb out of its uncanny valley. It'll get there eventually.<p>For now we're still at the point of "Eventually, anyone that values photos will carry a standalone camera." 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'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://leejo.github.io/2020/04/28/off_season_ibiza/" rel="nofollow">https://leejo.github.io/2020/04/28/off_season_ibiza/</a> # the caveat is that I was still figuring the phone/camera out but wanted to see "what it could do out of the box" - 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't have "sharp" edges), and so on. When you view these at larger sizes than seen in the blog post they look much worse.