Phones as Camera... what's yours?

[sev7en]

Hello,

I know it is an hot topic but... I would just have your about as it is one of the killer point of the "camera market". Yesterday I had time to walk around Sydney and I did various shoots with my P40 Pro. I would start that thread pointing you out the result of the 50mpx AI Clarity Mode of that phone, totally amazing. The phone is untouched.

I uploaded it here too: https://ibb.co/bP0fkCL

Totally crazy!

[Andrew Reid]

P40 Pro is the best smartphone camera out there in 2020.

The dilemma is this...

Google Services hack works, but is flakey. I have it working, but for how long? First time I tried, took me 5 hours to get it working and then reset itself after I restarted the handset!

Phone overall is not as nice in the hand as the Samsung S20 Ultra. A sharp metal edge at bottom digs into skin. Speaker is mediocre. Screen is smaller than I'd like (I am a Note 10+ / iPhone XS Max guy). But yes, the camera especially 5x zoom and ultra wide is in different league to the Samsung S20 Ultra 5x and ultra wide, especially in low light. The main camera is better to pixel peep than the S20 Ultra as well, but I prefer the colours sometimes on the S20 Ultra. P40 Pro dynamic range in the Leica colour modes is limited, and the HDR is laid on too much in the normal mode. The RAW files are amazing. The S20 Ultra RAW files are noisier and not as sharp.

So thumbs up for the P40 Pro camera in terms of hardware. Best sensor, best lenses, best zoom and best ultra wide sensor and lens.

However in reality, as an all-round phone the S20 Ultra feels more premium. Just another level up in terms of build, design, overall experience. That is not to say the P40 Pro is not also very good in these areas. These are all top end phones.

Next up the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro has a very good main sensor. But it is let down by the processing with dreadful skin tones and poor quality lenses. The zoom isn't as good, nether is ultra wide camera. The biggest problem however is how susceptible it is to slight finger prints on lens. Even almost unnoticeable amounts of greese will cause huge vertical or horizontal flares on the image whereas an iPhone doesn't do this.

But the kicker is the Mi 10 Pro main sensor images are better than S20 Ultra with same sensor!! So Xiaomi got more out of the Samsung sensor than Samsung's own engineers. Xiaomi went for resolution with 2x2 binning from the 108MP. Whereas Samsung went for... I don't know what... 12MP 3x3 binning with over sharpening ramped up! But I has good dynamic range and colour, satisfying skin tones.

All in all...

I wish I could transplant the P40 Pro camera hardware into the S20 Ultra.

My iPhone XS Max still has the most natural looking images of all of them straight out of camera with no additional processing, but it feels dated in technical terms and dreadful zoom ability in comparison to the folded periscope optics of the S20 Ultra and P40 Pro.

By the way the 8K video on Mi 10 Pro and S20 Ultra is interesting. I'm comparing both at the moment.

The P40 Pro video is good too in 4K/60p, but it lacks 8K.

I feel like keeping the P40 Pro for the camera and using S20 Ultra as daily driver.

It is an extraordinary street photography camera, is the P40 Pro, with amazingly deep depth of field on the 125mm 5x zoom end. This is unique. Everything is in focus in a telephoto frame! It's not so bad in dim light either! It nails focus every time in fact, whereas the S20 Ultra can sometimes be a bit hesitant.

[Emanuel]

 

 

Both shot on Mi 10 Pro.

 

Here's more from mobile photography (same Xiaomi tag but could be some other):

source

[UncleBobsPhotography]

Nice bike. I am stunned by the picture quality of my Samsung S20+ as well. The slow motion and HDR video works surprisingly well. The telephoto camera is useless as a telephoto camera, but excellent for macro shots. The wideangle lens can give some great shots at angles hard to catch with a DSLR (but will distort the edges a LOT), and the main camera is solid. Pixel peeping will often show some flaws in my S20+ shots, but your bike even looks great close up.

[kye]

Back in 2018 (remember that there were times you were allowed to travel??) we took the kids to Japan, and I shot it with my GH5 and the wife shot it with her iPhone 8 Plus, and as a lot of the landmarks have pretty obvious places for a good composition we took many shots from the same location, often only moments apart.

One thing that I was stunned about was how good the iPhone colour science was.  Later on I struggled to replicate it from the GH5 HLG files I had, as the iPhone managed to get a clean, high contrast / high saturation look, while also not pushing things over the edge in terms of contrast or sat.  So finely tuned was the colour science I pulled some of them into Resolve and if you even nudged them slightly the magic disappeared and they looked like images from a poor quality consumer camera.

I'm very skeptical of higher resolution sensors in phones - you're very unlikely to print the images and decent size and if you're consuming them electronically it's not that common to have a high resolution display device for that purpose.  Better to get the DR and colour science right and let the rest be as it may.

[Marcio Kabke Pinheiro]

How these phones are working with other camera  / movie apps? And the stills raw modes?

Would love to see how they work using Filmic Pro.

[MrSMW]

I like my iPhone 8 Plus and it was a big upgrade from the 7.

The stabilisation is really good.

I never use it for anything but day to day holiday snaps or video though, but if everything got destroyed in a freak accident, I’d whip it out at a wedding for sure.

[Andrew Reid]

I reckon the camera industry will see erosion into the enthusiast market

The P40 Pro and S20 Ultra are simply too good not to use them for street photos.

I can get stealthy shots with these that are simply not possible with a dedicated camera.

Would take one of these over GR III or X100 any day.

Everybody thinks I am taking a selfie. Nobody thinks people take photos with the rear facing camera any more 😂

In fact these highly detailed telephoto cameras like on the P40 Pro+ (10x!) are a bit of a privacy concern!

The video is coming along a long way as well and live shallow DOF will improve in the future along with low light.

[Phil A]

I'm using my phone (iPhone 11 Pro Max) mainly for pictures but I have to say it has really eaten into the amount of use my camera sees. I leave my GH5 behind more and more.

With fake bokeh thanks to the Focos app followed by editing the colors with Adobe Lightroom Mobile, I get results pretty close to what my camera gives me... unless the phone screws up the background detection and makes everything wrong. For social media use, there is only limited advantage lugging around my camera and that kinda makes me sad because I enjoy the process of using it way more.

Slowly but surely I wonder if I should just sell my camera equipment and downgrade on image quality and performance to focus on portability. If phone cameras and computational photography progress another 5+ years, I doubt I'll still need a camera for private use.

[BenEricson]

I use the iPhone XS. Looks great in the right settings. You need to use a third party app like "Halide" or the color can look weird.

If I am actually going out to shoot photos, I'll bring a medium format or 35mm film camera. The phone is good enough for snaps.

[UncleBobsPhotography]

4 hours ago, Márcio Kabke Pinheiro said:

And the stills raw modes?

The processing is what makes the cell phone pictures good, which I believe you lose a lot of if youre shooting RAW. Many of the new phones take both pictures and videos in 10 bit, which makes up for some of the shortcomings of jpeg

[Andrew Reid]

The RAWs are useful in some situations, where you want a finer grain, or to bypass image processing, over sharpening, but yeah its a softer and much noisier image with less dynamic range in RAW than in the JPEGs in most cases! Crazy!

[Video Hummus]

4 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

I reckon the camera industry will see erosion into the enthusiast market

The P40 Pro and S20 Ultra are simply too good not to use them for street photos.

I can get stealthy shots with these that are simply not possible with a dedicated camera.

Would take one of these over GR III or X100 any day.

Everybody thinks I am taking a selfie. Nobody thinks people take photos with the rear facing camera any more 😂

In fact these highly detailed telephoto cameras like on the P40 Pro+ (10x!) are a bit of a privacy concern!

The video is coming along a long way as well and live shallow DOF will improve in the future along with low light.

I agree.

I wonder how far it will go...maybe no more mirrorless cameras for less than 5,000. It's just a matter of time before they get smarter and smarter about faking DoF and HDR and all of that.

Video is still safe...for the moment because the human eye can spot the bullshit pretty quick...well for now anyway.

[Andrew Reid]

It is going to go far.

Phone apps already mimic the bokeh of specific old lenses.

Sensor size is has gone up to nearly 1" in the thinnest handsets and dynamic range has surpassed many full frame DSLRs.

But when you need manual controls, the lack of physical buttons and dials let a smartphone down and I can't see that changing much.

[ntblowz]

I get a lot people praising from the photos i shot on the s10, i think Samsung's processing definitely please a lot of ppl's eye, unlike the iphone 7 plus i used to have which no one ever said anything about the photos.

Wish me thinking Samsung should really continue their NX development, imagine NX2 with the software of their smartphone.. autoHDR etc will definitely taking over those Japanese camera maker and their much prehistoric thinking software.

[Andrew Reid]

Note 10+ and S10 camera does have nice colours and dynamic range.

But it's nowhere near the P40 Pro in low light or if you pixel peep it.

The S20 Ultra is also pretty far behind too with most shots.

[Video Hummus]

Time to take the leap @Andrew Reid and develop Phone4K.com.

Stick with 4K as it’s in the spirit of EOSHD.

We want professional cinema features in our DSL...I mean phones!

[Andrew Reid]

Stranger things have happened.

[kye]

I love that people don't remember the rear-facing camera any more....

What people think a street photographer looks like:

What modern street photographers actually look like:

Just remember to strike a pose when you hit the shutter button!

[noone]

While I am sure that phones will be all 90% need in five years time and by ten years probably (almost) everyone, I am still a luddite.

I only just upgraded my phone to one that I might actually use to make phone calls (flip with big old fart numbers for fat fingers), I doubt I will ever use its pathetic little camera.

I guess I use my RX100 iv as many would use a phone camera (it is often in my pocket when my phone is left at home).

GX7 was a brilliant camera for stealthy street shooting thanks to the tilting EVF so no one knows you are taking a shot since you are looking down when it is tilted.