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Snaps are thought free.
Taking pictures requires a bit more effort.

But I doubt there is much difference between the iPhone 8 and X when it comes to camera. They both have the same issue. Minuscule tiny sensor. That's what holds them back.

If you want to produce better pictures, return the X (or sell the 8) and use the money to learn about photography.

“Ain’t nobody got time for that!” lol
 
Any advice for eBay?

I would never personally suggest selling a used iPhone on eBay. EBay has become a common ground for Apple products and fraud. There Are so many loopholes that the seller can be frauded by the buyer, and EBay/PayPal Mclee sides what the buyer based on what they claim and less the seller can prove that the buyers being dishonest. Used and new Apple products have an extreme popularity on the market, which there is someone always looking to keep your device and have their money returned leaving you nothing.

Any tips for Swappa? Never tried it

Swappa generally has a better reputation than eBay, because it’s more tech oriented, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t be subject to the same type of fraud that occurs on EBay, it’s just seems less likely on there and its a decent site to sell used Apple products.
 
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Wait a minute? Didn’t you already bought iPhone X few months ago (or were you lying at that time?)

Look at OP’s this thread :-

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...er-than-the-8-the-8-is-easier-to-use.2090652/

Returned
[doublepost=1524382794][/doublepost]
I would never personally suggest selling a used iPhone on eBay. EBay has become a common ground for Apple products and fraud. There Are so many loopholes that the seller can be frauded by the buyer, and EBay/PayPal Mclee sides what the buyer based on what they claim and less the seller can prove that the buyers being dishonest. Used and new Apple products have an extreme popularity on the market, which there is someone always looking to keep your device and have their money returned leaving you nothing.



Swappa generally has a better reputation than eBay, because it’s more tech oriented, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t be subject to the same type of fraud that occurs on EBay, it’s just seems less likely on there and its a decent site to sell used Apple products.

Thank you!
[doublepost=1524382934][/doublepost]
Anything in life that is worth doing requires some effort.
Anything that requires no effort isn't worth doing. ;)

True.

I just don’t want to have to learn photography tho.

I just want great pics with minimum effort.

The canon I bought, I turned it on, snapped photos, but it wasn’t too great imo. I don’t want to have to learn the settings And how to adjust.

With iPhone I just fired up the camera and snapped photos and they were nice!!!

And I could’ve sworn they were better than my 8’s photos but now I’m being told it’s the exact same camera.

I feel like a FOOL if it’s true
 
I buy stuff on ebay all the time and if there is any trouble, ebay now is so pro buyer that the seller always has to either refund the amount or replace the item! I really like this as a buyer. I use paypal to pay and bank credit card on top of that just in case. So I have three agents that can help me! The credit cards complaint is instant refund back into my account!

Ebay now considers individual and large sellers the same. Issues are just a cost of doing business from their perspective so they side more with buyers. Also, I suspect buyers generate the most revenue.
 
How much does GameStop give?
[doublepost=1524376518][/doublepost]

WHAT? Is this true?

I told the guy at the Apple store I was mainly buying the X and selling my 8 FOR THE BETTER CAMERA AND HE JUST ROLLED WITH IT!!!!! Talked about optical image stabilization or something.
[doublepost=1524376622][/doublepost]

I don’t know anything I couldn’t even set the date and time on the thing it kept going back to 00:00:00 or something like that.

I just want good photos don’t really want to have to figure out how tbh.

IMO taking photos should be trouble and thought free. You get a good moment and you whip out an awesome camera that captures the magic. Should come out perfect with minimal effort and thought.

But that’s just my opinion.

@Clix Pix

Unfortunately that’s almost never the way good photos are created. It’s a thought process by the photographer that defines if a moment is being captured well or not.

The X has dual lenses and image stabilisation so the quality might be slightly better than on a standard iPhone 8. However not by much.

Image quality is however being achieved by a combination of things like technique, lenses, lighting and the camera’s sensor.
 
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If you’re stuck you can send it to me. I’m happy with the SE but I don’t mind helping out a fellow macrumors subscriber.
PS if it’s Product Red l’ll pay the postage. That’s a sexy little ‘phone.
 
Sounds like you just want clear non blurry photos. The 8, 8 plus and x can all do that for you. Don’t waste money on a dedicated camera if you don’t have an interest in photography.
 
Looks u r wasting now more time on this forum and selling the iPhone than it would take to learn basic photography skills.

If the 8 wasn't good enough than the X won't help much. As the only difference is the 2x zoom with OIS
 
I don't know man, the camera on the 8 in full auto mode with no thinking other than a steady hand seems to yield great results for me personally:

40734425705_31c0de8dba_b.jpg


40915560824_0e6b22e909_b.jpg


41585999642_a5df91815c_b.jpg


26757897587_231947d1e0_b.jpg


26757897777_3cdc0c4778_b.jpg


Seems like a pretty good camera to me, and this is just a regular 8, not even 8+...
 
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Looks u r wasting now more time on this forum and selling the iPhone than it would take to learn basic photography skills.

If the 8 wasn't good enough than the X won't help much. As the only difference is the 2x zoom with OIS

It’s not that the 8 wasn’t good enough tbh.

I just wanted to buy the best.

Well I still love my X so idk. I’ll just try to sell the 8
 
WHAT? Is this true?

I told the guy at the Apple store I was mainly buying the X and selling my 8 FOR THE BETTER CAMERA AND HE JUST ROLLED WITH IT!!!!! Talked about optical image stabilization or something.

He’s not wrong, the iPhone X does have OIS on the telephoto camera, but since you said you’re shooting stills it won’t help you. And even if you are shooting video, it won’t help $300 worth...
 
Since you seem to prefer the quick-and-easy way of doing things, just take the phone to Gamestop. They'll give you cash on the spot. You can get an idea of how much they'll give you by looking at their website, which explains their trade-in program.
 
Throwing money at the equipment won’t get you “the best” if you don’t make the effort to learn the basics of what elements separate a good photo from a great one. You just won’t know what to look for and won’t know when one camera is falling short in key areas of performance. And you won’t be able to tweak your own technique to compensate for shortcomings in the hardware or the circumstances.

We had a forum member who could take incredible photos with some very cheap Android phone cameras because he understood how to position himself and his subject in relation to available lighting. He wasn’t even necessarily messing around with advanced settings.

Leaving the skills of the photographer aside for a moment, all of the current flagship phones all have their respective strengths and weaknesses and those come into play under different lighting conditions so that no single choice can be the absolute best in all circumstances and to all tastes.

What these respective strengths and weaknesses are can easily be discovered researching various written reviews and You Tube reviews.

Offhand I can say from personal experience that a Pixel 2 will give you excellent results under the most widely varied situations with the least amount of effort on your part. But right now in true low light conditions without flash, the Samsung S9|S9+ is kicking butt. However, do you really want to go to Android?

I don’t think that’s necessary. Your iPhone 8 should be fine. Your X should be fine.

That being said, my personal frustration with iPhones right now: the 2017 iPhones and to a lesser degree the 2016 iPhones have a propensity to blow out highlights. I’m finding that extremely challenging to compensate for when snapping a spontaneous moment with kids or pets.

What this means is that in a scene or subject the lighter areas will be shown exceedingly lighter than everything else around them, making them almost glow and sadly lose detail. It’s this loss of detail that annoys me. I’ve seen other phone cameras do better so now I know what my iPhones are causing me to miss.

For example, in the photos of the dog kindly provided in the previous posts, the lighter fur around the muzzle is so bright it glows compared to the other areas of the dog’s face. This is not how the human eye would see that scene. The eye would see a brighter area but still be able to make out the texture of the fur. It wouldn’t be a brilliant light glow that obscures all detail.

The same shot taken with a Samsung S9 or S9+ would likely have a similar glow, but you would be able to make out the texture of the fur except in the brightest of the areas.

With a Pixel 2, likely all of the texture would remain visible and the lighter patches would still look like fur, but reflecting some of the light shining off of them. (The Pixel 2 cameras and software play with light in such a gentle, beautiful way).

That’s my best estimate of the likely outcomes based on many hours of testing and comparisons in various lighting situations using those cameras.

In the late part of 2015 into 2016 I had very little idea of the differences that could exist between different phone cameras. A little bit of intellectual curiosity was sparked by reading comments on this forum from truly experienced photographers and I set about researching and then trying out different phones and seeing the results firsthand. I am still a very basically skilled photographer myself, and rarely venture out of auto mode. Lol, basically what my research has done for me so far is make me a better shopper and better able to appreciate the artistry of others.

But I am finally finished with the shopping and the upgrading. I have the phones I intend to settle down with for the next few years and I’m now working on improving my skills on the tools I’ve chosen.

One last thing I wanted to clear up...about the iPhone X being a terrible low light camera. Well, I found it to be excellent in situations where I had no intention of using the flash. It’s the flash photography that is problematic on the X. Someone at Apple placed the flash in a bad position relative to the lenses so that photos of people and animals are plagued with glowing eyes for animals and red eyes for people. In videos, eyes are white and glowing. The flash also doesn’t illuminate a scene as pleasantly overall as flash did on the iPhone 7 Plus and on the 8 Plus. I never owned the smaller variants so I can’t speak to the quality of their flash photos.

It’s an unfortunate step back for the iPhone camera. Even some Android manufacturers who copied the look of the X’s camera bump did not copy the placement of the flash.

By the way, my observations pertain only to still photography. The comparisons of video capability is a whole other topic. iPhones are fine for that, but the audio could use a boost from an external mic.

(Edited, sorry for my many typos. I hope I’ve caught and fixed them all.)
 
Last edited:
Throwing money at the equipment won’t get you “the best” if you don’t make the effort to learn the basics of what elements separate a good photo from a great one. You just won’t know what to look for and won’t know when one camera is falling short in key areas of performance. And you won’t be able to tweak your own technique to compensate for shortcomings in the hardware or the circumstances.

We had a forum member who could take incredible photos with some very cheap Android phone cameras because he understood how to position himself and his subject in relation to available lighting. He wasn’t even necessarily messing around with advanced settings.

Leaving the skills of the photographer aside for a moment, all of the current flagship phones all have their respective strengths and weaknesses and those come into play under different lighting conditions so that no single choice can be the absolute best in all circumstances and to all tastes.

What these respective strengths and weaknesses are can easily be discovered researching various written reviews and You Tube reviews.

Offhand I can say from personal experience that a Pixel 2 will give you excellent results under the most widely varied situations with the least amount of effort on your part. But right now in true low light conditions without flash, the Samsung S9|S9+ is kicking butt. However, do you really want to go to Android?

I don’t think that’s necessary. Your iPhone 8 should be fine. Your X should be fine.

That being said, my personal frustration with iPhones right now: the 2017 iPhones and to a lesser degree the 2016 iPhones have a propensity to blow out highlights. I’m finding that extremely challenging to compensate for when snapping a spontaneous moment with kids or pets.

What this means is that in a scene or subject the lighter areas will be shown exceedingly lighter than everything else around them, making them almost glow and sadly lose detail. It’s this loss of detail that annoys me. I’ve seen other phone cameras do better so now I know what my iPhones are causing me to miss.

For example, in the photos of the dog kindly provided in the previous posts, the lighter fur around the muzzle is so bright it glows compared to the other areas of the dog’s face. This is not how the human eye would see that scene. The eye would see a brighter area but still be able to make out the texture of the fur. It wouldn’t be a brilliant light glow that obscures all detail.

The same shot taken with a Samsung S9 or S9+ would likely have a similar glow, but you would be able to make out the texture of the fur except in the brightest of the areas.

With a Pixel 2, likely all of the texture would remain visible and the lighter patches would still look like fur, but reflecting some of the light shining off of them. (The Pixel 2 cameras and software play with light in such a gentle, beautiful way).

That’s my best estimate of the likely outcomes based on many hours of testing and comparisons in various lighting situations using those cameras.

In the late part of 2015 into 2016 I had very little idea of the differences that could exist between different phone cameras. A little bit of intellectual curiosity was sparked by reading comments on this forum from truly experienced photographers and I set about researching and then trying out different phones and seeing the results firsthand. I am still a very basically skilled photographer myself, and rarely venture out of auto mode. Lol, basically what my research has done for me so far is make me a better shopper and better able to appreciate the artistry of others.

But I am finally finished with the shopping and the upgrading. I have the phones I intend to settle down with for the next few years and I’m now working on improving my skills on the tools I’ve chosen.

One last thing I wanted to clear up...about the iPhone X being a terrible low light camera. Well, I found it to be excellent in situations where I had no intention of using the flash. It’s the flash photography that is problematic on the X. Someone at Apple placed the flash in a bad position relative to the lenses so that photos of people and animals are plagued with glowing eyes for animals and red eyes for people. In videos, eyes are white and glowing. The flash also doesn’t illuminate a scene as pleasantly overall as flash did on the iPhone 7 Plus and on the 8 Plus. I never owned the smaller variants so I can’t speak to the quality of their flash photos.

It’s an unfortunate step back for the iPhone camera. Even some Android manufacturers who copied the look of the X’s camera bump did not copy the placement of the flash.

By the way, my observations pertain only to still photography. The comparisons of video capability is a whole other topic. iPhones are fine for that, but the audio could use a boost from an external mic.

(Edited, sorry for my many typos. I hope I’ve caught and fixed them all.)
Excellent post.
Lack of dynamic range is your problem. Try to under expose a bit then bring up the shadows in editing.
 
Not true - the 8+ has a similar camera to the X, not the 8
The 8 and 8+ have the same cameras. The only difference is the dual camera. The X has the same cameras as the 8+ but the second camera also has image stabilization. They all have the same exact main camera.
 
Ebay now considers individual and large sellers the same. Issues are just a cost of doing business from their perspective so they side more with buyers. Also, I suspect buyers generate the most revenue.

Personally, I just don’t prefer taking the risk selling on eBay, and my opinion is that I would rather take a price cut by either trading in locally to an Apple store or selling locally to someone I know for a lesser amount of money, even it means I may have made more with on eBay, but I would rather not be without my phone and my money altogether buy some devious buyer. Its just a safer bet.
 
Personally, I just don’t prefer taking the risk selling on eBay, and my opinion is that I would rather take a price cut by either trading in locally to an Apple store or selling locally to someone I know for a lesser amount of money, even it means I may have made more with on eBay, but I would rather not be without my phone and my money altogether buy some devious buyer. Its just a safer bet.
I always check the best price I'm offered by trade in sites, then offer it to people I know for the same. They're happy and I'm happy.
 
He’s not wrong, the iPhone X does have OIS on the telephoto camera, but since you said you’re shooting stills it won’t help you. And even if you are shooting video, it won’t help $300 worth...

Of course OIS can be useful for still images. While it cannot help with subject movement it greatly improves low light results against camera shake.
 
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