Resolved Serious question… Sony camera (a6400&18-135) vs upcoming iPhone

[ignatius345]

1. The lenses are utter crap. It's three very compromised lenses with some digital trickery to bridge the gaps. This consists of some abhorrent distortion correction, digital zoom using possibly the worst interpolation algorithm they could muster plus some AI smeared over the top.
2. The noise and digital artifacts are visible if you print to 10x8".
3. ProRAW doesn't give you anything. There is still a lot of digital post processing. Perhaps not colour but there's a lot of weird digital looking noise and distortion correction
4. White balance makes me want to cry if there's anything wood or orange in the image. Completely shoots the thing.
5. Some of the colour reproduction is insane. Like Krusty the ****ing clown insane.
6. Everything is oversharpened to bits.
7. The phone shoots in HDR and the dynamic range presentation on non HDR displays is completely ****ed up regardless of what you do to it.
8. Damn iPhone won't focus on what you want to half of the time.

1000% agree. I still take like 99% of my photos with my 15 Pro simply because it's what I have on me at a given point. I love my Olympus OM-D EM1 and the 25mm 1.8 prime (=50mm in micro 4/3) I generally use -- but the simple fact is, I'm just not toting it when I take my kid to swim lessons or see a weird bird on the way to work.

Don't get me wrong, in a lot of lighting conditions the iPhone will turn out a very clear and fairly natural looking image. But at night it goes ape**** brightening everything up so it doesn't look like night anymore, and at dusk you might as well be telling an AI to generate the image for you, it's so overcooked. I have photos of my kid in gorgeous sunset light that I had to delete because her skin looked so irradiated by the HDR processing attempt to capture it.

I get that they have to do a bunch of processing to get a usable image out of the tiny sensors and tiny lenses, but I really wish they could dial everything down like 75% to a more natural look. I don't want to deal with iPhone RAW files and I would prefer to just use the native Camera app if I can, but if anyone has any tips on getting less cooked photos out of an iPhone, I'm all ears.

 

[uacd]

Ooooh this one is a little close to my heart. Whole thread here https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-i-can-be-bothered-to-take-my-camera.2447112/ (worth reading through the whole thing)

So I went down that path a few years back and again recently. I took a trip to Pompei this year and my 15 pro was so bad I burned the credit card and went back a couple of months later with a new Nikon Z50ii and 18-140mm lens because what came back was garbage.

Even the best phones are, how shall we say, pretty awful compared to even an ass end 2013 DLSR (I had a D3100). My problems with them:

1. The lenses are utter crap. It's three very compromised lenses with some digital trickery to bridge the gaps. This consists of some abhorrent distortion correction, digital zoom using possibly the worst interpolation algorithm they could muster plus some AI smeared over the top.
2. The noise and digital artifacts are visible if you print to 10x8".
3. ProRAW doesn't give you anything. There is still a lot of digital post processing. Perhaps not colour but there's a lot of weird digital looking noise and distortion correction
4. White balance makes me want to cry if there's anything wood or orange in the image. Completely shoots the thing.
5. Some of the colour reproduction is insane. Like Krusty the ****ing clown insane.
6. Everything is oversharpened to bits.
7. The phone shoots in HDR and the dynamic range presentation on non HDR displays is completely ****ed up regardless of what you do to it.
8. Damn iPhone won't focus on what you want to half of the time.

Really it crushed my soul a few times when I got back and looked at the photos on a proper monitor (Studio Display).

If you can be bothered to carry a cheap mirrorless around you won't use the phone. That's the deciding factor.

My carry is a Nikon Z50ii + 18-140mm Z DX + peak designs strap + USB-C cable. That's it. Don't even need a case. Just throw it in your bag.

I will buy a standard 128 gig iPhone when this 15 Pro goes out of cycle.

Zero edit - D3100 entry level junk with kit lens shot I took in 2012. Show me an iPhone that can do this. That's 13 years ago....

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At this point I think we are sold a lie.

Thank you so much for such a great response!

I had also used D3100 for a while, it wasn’t mine but I liked this camera so much that I bought D5100 (which seemingly isn’t too different from this one). I mean I love Nikon colors and had been looking at Z50II for quite a long time but then saw some (probably poor) examples on dpreview and thought that it is quite far from what I had with D5100. Might think again about Z50.

Totally agree, the colors in your photo are outstanding! And that’s exactly what I mean: great color science SOOC.

Great points about iPhone “computating” everything nowadays. Though I loved my older iPhones for having almost untouched colors and no excessive noise reduction.

My gf has iPhone 16 Pro and I had tried shooting with it for a while. JPEG/HEIF is quite processed, too oversharpened/defined to my liking. But gotta be honest ProRAW wasn’t bad! But to say that it is very far away from something like iPhone 11 Pro – I wouldn’t, just much more sharpness and better night shots (thanks to computations mostly).

With my current 11 Pro I quite often try to use some hacks to make image less processed, such as burst mode and also RAW at times: it is quirky and often would overexpose image in bright sunlight. ProRAW seems to be like a step in right direction, more or less.

Probably will end up buying both iPhone and camera anyway😆 Maybe just in different order. Phone is still unbeatable when it comes to capturing something fast, especially in harsh conditions like aboventioned snow, dust, rain. I just hope they won’t push the colors to something unnatural

 

[uacd]

brightening everything up so it doesn't look like night anymore, and at dusk you might as well be telling an AI to generate the image for you, it's so overcooked. I have photos of my kid in gorgeous sunset light that I had to delete because her skin looked so irradiated by the HDR processing attempt to capture it.

Yeah, those are unfortunately unbearable truths of owning an iPhone😃 I really don’t understand why they had done this to image processing.
Back in the days when I wanted to shoot pink sky sunset I always did it with iPhone and got literally what I saw, minus the high noise floor ofc. But nowadays when I do the same thing it strangely changes sky color from pink to yellow and I am like “bruh, what are you doing??🤦‍♂️”

 

[uacd]

I have used Halide and Lightroom Mobile's built in camera for ref.

Still the issues persist...

As for your shots, no offense but I can see the distortion in the first one and the third one, there is still oversharpening.

Quick comparison. One of the moggies hanging around at the Acropolis in Athens.

iPhone 15 Pro...

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Z50...

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Wow, brilliant comparison in same lighting conditions!
Actually, iPhone did a great job. I can already see it is far much sharper than my older iPhone. Seems like 48 megapixels are actually doing their job.

Nikon is surely unbeatable with its natural (obviously) bokeh and very slight processing so that it both looks softer and naturally sharper.

I wonder how would it compare face to face when portrait mode is used on iPhone. To be honest I am not a fan of portrait mode at all and never use it myself, just the sake of comparison it would probably had been fun😄

Both shots are so great that anyone not from the world of photography would probably have a hard time telling which one is which

 

[uacd]

If you have any interest in photography and are using an iPhone you should use an app other than just the built in camera app. I use Halide but there are others.

Here are some photos from my iPhone 15 Pro that I took a while ago while scouting areas to try some astro photography. These are all raw photos taken using the app Halide. I have just done some basic edits to these in Adobe Camera Raw. No sharpening has been applied.

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Awesome shots! Very natural colors. This is why I prefer iPhone to other smartphones: the colors. I also have Halide but I guess very first version that has no subscription, it would often take very slightly processed shots comparing to Apple camera app that always flattens the noise and sharpens too much