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The points really boil down to:

1. Difference in focal length/ position.

2. Difference in color processing

But…the article is fairly weak on both points?

1. It’s unclear why the author is comparing different focal lengths without clarifying what they used. If I use the 24mm equivalent on either my full frame or my iPhone, the perspective will be largely the same modulo some lens correction. Same if I use the 70mm or whatever the focal length is.

2. Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone and the other camera. It’s again, no different between the two.

It’s a poor article because it doesn’t focus on the actual material differences.

The phone will have a smaller sensor. It will have more noise and need to do more to combat it. It won’t have as shallow a depth of field.

The phone will also of course have different ergonomics.

But the things the post focuses on are kind of poor understandings of the differences in what they’re shooting and how their cameras work.

I disagree, I thought the article highlighted the differences beautifully. I'm on a professionally color calibrated 27" monitor that came with one of those color calibration "certificates" at the time of purchase. The second I loaded the article, the differences were just stark. The skin tones alone were a dead giveaway.

It is no secret that Apple does a lot of post processing on their mediocre photos to make them look good - more so than most other Androids - because, it's all software. But, from the article, it is understood that the author is trying to point out that Apple could've done a better job to represent skin tones more accurately atleast. The fish-eye defense for Apple is totally understandeable, but, why are we defending the weak skin tones? Every year, they keep launching and claiming grandoise statements "This is the best smartphone camera out there is".

And no, this is not a limitation of smartphone sensors. In fact, if you look at the latest Xperia series from Sony, they have the same software from their DSLRs translated into the smartphones that addresses the skintones perfectly well.

I hope we can skip past the biases and personal preferences we have towards Apple and treat them neutrally like any other manufacturer. This "Apple can do no wrong" narrative and attacking anyone who points out their flaws is just tired and boring at this point.

The biggest real differences between iPhone and whatever ye-olde-good-standalone-digital-camera are sharpening/edge enhancements and flattening of lighting.

If you take a lot of landscapes with detailed textures in high-contrast lighting you'll see the differences pretty quickly.

The iPhone photos will look better at first glance because they have a lot of tricks to deal with lighting that would otherwise give a photographer difficulty. For instance, that shot of the child could easily have a completely blown-out background in slightly different circumstances for a typical use of a digital camera's auto-exposure mode. But it results in a certain look that this article really doesn't show well, in terms of the more fake-looking aspects of it. The gravel in the shot of the child hints at it, and you can start to see it more if you view the image full-size vs the scaled down presentation. The asphalt under the car, too - there's something very harsh and fake about the iPhone texture rendering approach that gets worse the larger you display the image. This started around the iPhone 11, IIRC, with it's ML processing.

Both things can be avoided with Halide's raw mode (more "raw" than Apple's) if you want side by side comparisons on your own device. Though IIRC it doesn't support full-res on the newer phones.

The trick, though, is that if you want images that look better in tough conditions, there's a learning curve for using a standalone camera or to shooting in RAW with Halide. In terms of lighting it's not even "more realistic" right out of the gate, necessarily, because your eye has more dynamic range and your brain has more tricks than most any straight-out-of-camera non-ML-enhanced image.

But if you want images you can print out at 8x10+ you'll benefit from the investment.

(Samsung cameras are even wilder in their over-enhancement of photos.)

Agreed, in particular the distortion of the players on the ends, the smaller shoulders and chest, as well as the lean can all be attributed to the wider lens used on the iPhone (and as such that the photo was taken closer to players). I'd guess the author was using the "1x" lens on the iPhone, a lot of these issues go away if they use the "3x" or "5x" lens. I'd even consider that most of the jawline change of the player is simply the angle of their chin/face as well as expression.
I'll kindly disagree with you. Like the other commenter, I'm on a 27" HP business monitor comes with color calibration certificate, and the differences are very visible. Moreover, I'm taking photos as a hobby for some time.

The angle, different focal lengths doesn't matter in rendering of the images. The issue is, cameras on phones are not for taking a photo of what you see, but a way to share your life, and sharing your life in a more glamorous way is to get liked around people. Moreover, we want to be liked as human beings, it's in our nature.

So, phone companies driven by both smaller sensors (that thing is way noisier when compared to a full frame sensor) and market pressure to reduce processing needed to be done by end users (because it inconveniences them), started to add more and more complicated post-processing in their cameras.

The result is this very article. People with their natural complications reduced, skin tones boosted on red parts, sharpened but flatter photos, without much perspective correction and sometimes looking very artificial.

Make no mistake, "professional" cameras also post process, but you can both see this processing and turn it off if you want, and the professional cameras corrects what lens fails at, but smartphones, incl. iPhone makes "happy, social media ready" photos by default.

As, again other commenter said, it's not a limitation of the sensor (sans the noise). Sony supplies most of the higher end sensors in the market, and their cameras or other cameras sporting sensors produced by them got the "best color" awards over and over again, and XPeria smartphones comes with professional camera pipelines after that small sensor, so they can take photos like what you see.

I personally prefer iPhone as my smartphone of my choice, but the moment I want to take a photo I want to spend time composing, I ditch default camera app and use Halide, because that thing can bypass Apple's post-processing, and even can apply none if you want.

Yup, that was the thing that jumped out at me too: in the photos with the golf players, the trees in the background appear much smaller in the iPhone photo than in the "real camera" photo, which means the "real camera" photo was taken from further away and zoomed in, so it obviously will have less distortion. Same for the building and car pictures, but the article doesn't mention that at all (except for writing that "the fish eye iPhone lens creates distortion" - of course it does, that's why the iPhone has other lenses as well)!
You're completely off base on the focal length argument.

A traditional camera has the choice and can choose the most appropriate length; an Iphone is locked in to a fish-eye clearly put in there to overcome its inherent limitations.

So it doesn't really matter "if it's fair" or not, because it's not about a fair comparison, it's a demonstration that a traditional camera is just better. Why should the traditional camera use an inappropriate focal length just because the Iphone is forced to?

This does not address the detrimental parts of computational photography.
>Color processing is both highly subjective but also completely something you can disable on the phone

How do I disable Colour processing?

Can you really have a 70mm focal length on a phone that is less than 10mm thick? I thought it was simulated by cropping the image from the actual very short focal length.
A decade of "the best smartphone camera competitions" by mkbhd have clearly highlighted what is happening here.

1: In a/b testing, nearly everyone including pixel peepers prefer a more vibrant photo.

2: the traditional perspective of "a photo should look as close as possible to what my eyes see if I drop the viewfinder" is increasingly uncommon and not pursued in the digital age by nearly anyone.

3: phone companies know the above, and basically all of them engage in varrying degrees of "crank vibrance until people start to look like clowns, apply a skin correction so you can keep the rest mega vibrant" with an extra dash of "if culturally accepted to the primary audience, add additional face filtering to improve how people look, including air-brushing and thinning of the face"

This is rightfully compared to the loudness wars and I think that's accurate. It really became a race to the bottom once we collectively decided that "accurate" photos were not interesting and we want "best" photos.

My entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water.

Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.

However:

- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)

- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us

- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine

Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.

I got interested in photography during my travels, and my wife is very interested in it.

I bought a decent camera. I really enjoyed playing with it, and spent some happy hours learning about it. I even took some decent photos (well, I liked them anyway).

But in the end, carrying it became a chore and trying to take off-the-cuff photos during adventures took too long. I found that we needed to go for specific "photography adventures" with the camera, with the intent of taking photographs with the camera, in order to use it. If we were going for a trip without the specific aim of taking photographs it was just easier to use the phone cameras.

Also the camera photos were stuck on the camera, while the phone photos were instantly usable in social media, and shareable from the Google/Apple Photos. I have a portable drive folder somewhere with all the camera photos, but I never see them. The phone photos are a search away.

I think it's the difference between "being a photographer" and "taking photos". I am not a photographer, I just want to take some photos and share them with my friends. They're going to look at the photo for approximately 5 seconds max, on their phone, and never again. All the comments in the article are accurate but meaningless in this context.

On the other had, if you're a photographer and want to take a photograph that someone will hang on their wall, all the comments in the article are accurate and relevant.

This is post fails to disclose an important detail, which is that the photographer was not standing in the same spot for all photos.

For iPhone golf player shot, they were standing closer to the players and using a wide-angle lens. For the “beginner photographer” shot they were standing farther away and using a longer focal length lens. You can tell by the size of the trees in the background. This difference in positioning, not “because iPhone,” is why the player’s faces are distorted on the left.

These details might not matter to random folks grabbing snapshots. But I expect something posted to HN to actually contain useable detailed information, rather than vague “looks worse” comparisons with an obvious thumb on the scale.

To me, the "hotdog skin complexion" aspect is a dead giveaway for when a photo was taken on an iPhone. It's so over the top and unrefined that I wonder how not only Apple let it happen, but seemingly entertain it/make it worse over generations of devices? Certainly such photos won't "age well"? And it's not like it has to be this way because of technological limitations, take Pixel photos, for instance, they get their colors much more balanced and faithful.
These are some good examples. I'd love more on this.

I returned to amateur photography a few years ago (Fuji XT-4). I previously used a DSLR when I was younger (10+ years ago) but my camera was stolen at some point so I was left with just the phone.

I had started to think phone photography was catching up with amateur photography, as I saw friends getting great results with their phones on Instagram etc.

But I've come to the conclusion that once you start look closely there's absolutely no comparison.

One thing I've started doing is creating custom photo books from all my photos. It's really helped me focus my photography. When doing this though I've noticed how edited phone photos are, as well as how poor the quality actually is (particularly in low light).

The quality issue is understandable (it's physics). The editing issue is a bit more insidious I think.

All in all, if you just want to view phone photos on your phone, they look great. But if you're actually interested in photography and printing, you should get a dedicated camera.

Photos taken on an iPhone are good, unless you:

* zoom in

* print them

* watch them on a bigger screen

Sometimes I compare photos I've taken over 10 years ago with Sony NEX-5 with photos I take today with an iPhone. There's no competition, APS-C from 15 years ago is still solid.

Anyway, the best camera is the one you have with you, so in that sense iPhone is great.

My only significant gripe with phone cameras is that they oversharpen everything. Sharpening can subjectively make things look better as long as you don't zoom in too much, but has one significant problem: desaturation. In high-detail high-contras areas, e.g. the foreground grass, the sharpening pushes many of the pixels towards black or white, which are, notably, not green. This has the overall effect of desaturating these textures, and is the impetus for

Also, unless I am mistaken, the iphone camera doesn't have a fisheye lens, it has a wide angle rectilinear lens. This doesn't "create distortion that doesn't exist with the real camera", it simply amplifies the natural distortions that you get from projecting the 3D world onto a 2d plane. As others point out, this can be easily remedied by moving further away and zooming in.

I just started looking at photos and videos we took on vacation. I have an iPhone 16 Pro.

And when I use the Photos app on my Apple TV to review a couple videos I took, I'm surprised at the weird, wavy quality I'm seeing in them. It's really strange.

I will compare this to the videos I took with my Sony a6700. But until then, I'm surprised at how odd the videos looked on a large OLED TV. Might be compression from iCloud or something. Can't quite explain it otherwise.

I have no shortage of friends who asked me why I bothered to buy a real camera, but if you're a hobbyist photographer, it's nice to use a real camera and have full control. There are apps that do let you do this on a smartphone, and it's definitely more convenient.

But there's something about the real photos (with real Bokeh) that still look much better to me.

The colour corrections are also annoying when you're trying to take photos of things like cuts and bruises as you want an accurate record (eg to show a doctor) but instead it effectively says "let me clean that up for you" and you're left with the blemishes you wanted diminished!
The distortion of faces near the edges of iPhone photos is, in my opinion, the biggest issue with iPhone photos. So much so that I avoid being at the edges of group photos specifically for this reason. And it gets worse as you approach the edge of the frame. If you are barely in-frame, you will look like you've gained 30lbs and you've just had a stroke.
They are good until they aren't.

In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible.

It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.

The amount of people who get really defensive when people actually point out that, no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera is kinda crazy.
I'm always sad when I pull up holidays photos on my monitor. Even though Pixels make great photos, they're great only on small OLED screens. Gonna clean the dust out of Nikon D3200 with proper lens and use that instead. Casual photos will be made byy wife anyway
This is why I enjoy analog camera - aside from the fact that any 100$ camera can take crisp photos, they don't try to be perfect and add creative and artistic aspects to photography. Each film has its own color balance and sensitivity, each lens will render light differently, you can choose between them to create the aesthetics you want. I enjoy it more, and take really good family pictures with it!
It was a nice analysis of wide angle lenses, what processing is needed to adjust for the physical limitations, and on processing picture.

From there:

> Real cameras capture shadow more accurately.

> professional cameras

That's saying that real cameras don't use wide angle lenses nor have an image processing pipeline, and professionals of the field have adequately labeled cameras.

This kinda makes the whole piece so shallow and weirdly ideological, when it doesn't need to be. People interested enough in the craft will spend time knowing their gear, the strength and limitations, and work with it.

Phone cameras now give more and more access to the underlying mechanisms and RAW formats. There's of course tons of photos I'd want to put in my wall coming from my phone, they're just really great for subjects that properly match the lenses strengths. iPhones or Pixel phones aren't perfect or ideal in all conditions, but what camera is ?

I’m sure that Apple did tons of A/B testing, focus groups etc. with different image processing parameters to arrive at the settings that their phones use for photos, and from these comments it’s clear that a lot of people prefer the iPhone photos. When I was in grad school (in the pre-iPhone era) I photographed lots of weddings on the weekends, and one thing I noticed during the process was that people often have a set idea of what good photos look like. This idea of a “good” photo is often not tied to what the scene in front of them looks like. For example a “good” photo that includes a sunset will show a highly saturated orange/red sky, even if that’s not what the sky looks like at the moment the photo is taken.

Personally, I carry around a Ricoh GR3, and shoot random shots with the iPhone, but when it really matters I’ll use the Ricoh. The way the iPhone flattens the lighting is what bugs me the most. Recently I was at a kid’s birthday party and each kid had a cupcake with a candle in it. The room was a bit dark, and the Ricoh photo showed that each kids face was illuminated just a bit by the candle in their cupcake… The color temperature of the candle light is warmer than that of the room light. The photo makes you feel like you’re really there. My friend shot a photo on her iPhone at the same time and we compared afterwards. In her photo, every kid’s face is well lit and the candle effect is gone. She likes her shot better and I like mine. Some people want a shot that reflects what they saw, and some people want a shot that looks like what they think good photos look like.

I'm generally annoyed with the amount of processing going on in modern phone cameras, they often take pictures that "look fine" on the screen, until you zoom in to native resolution and discovered most of it is some fever-dream of approximations, it's amazing that we (people) are accepting this.. Lots of fine memories degraded by cheating cameras..

It's annoying especially because at a glance, the pictures taken by my S24+ look just fine, and it sometimes makes me not pull out the aging DSLR.. but then when I get the pictures onto my PC and want to actually look at them.. I always regret my mistake.. Even a 10 year old DSLR on automatic no-flash mode kicks its butt so bad it's not even a comparison..

My expectation is that in a few years from now, the raw photo taken by the mobile camera will merely serve as an input to some AI image generator which will then produce a top-quality pro photographer grade image at whatever resolution you like with whatever changes you command ("without all those 1000s of tourisms in front of the Louvre except my wife"). The photo will be fake but will capture the scene that you have in mind better than any pro photographer could.
Regarding the focal length difference, which is very well illustrated by the first two photographs, I would frame this point differently from what the article does.

Disclaimer: I don't have an iPhone 16, but my Poco X4 Pro 5G suffers from the same "fisheye" issue with its 25mm-equivalent lens. And I am not a professional photographer.

It is not a "bad camera" issue, but a composition issue forced by the short focal length second and the users' aversion to cropping the image first. You can easily avoid this issue by shooting at 2x digital zoom (or cropping) and going 2x further from the scene. And 2x zoom (with the corresponding decrease in the resolution of the resulting files) is how I shoot the majority of my photos.

So yes, I effectively have a 3MP camera, not 12MP (and not the hyper-marketed 108MP AI camera), and, for many purposes, it's still good enough.

P.S. Composition matters a lot. The right photo has the right proportions between the players and the trees in the background. The inclusion of the yellow golf flag in the "beginner photographer's" photo is also what makes the scene more complete artistically and worth hanging on the wall.

Computerized phone photography is not for desktop viewing, printing, etc. It appears to look "amazing" on phone displays - probably optimized for that.
woah I am the author. I don't even have analytics set up on this site, but hope everyone enjoys it!
The new(ish) Adobe Project Indigo attempts to rectify some of these - it generally captures pictures in a more SLR-ish manner, even when it outputs HDR. It does RAW capture and has decent control options if you want that.

However, it's a battery hog and can be a bit sluggish to get going, and there are some weird interactions with the built in photos app (if you crop the photo after the fact in the Photos app it pushes all the colour towards purple in the thumbnail, but not in the actual image).

I'm already happy enough with the image quality that I can overlook these flaws, which will hopefully get fixed over time. People should try it to see what they think.

I see iPhone pictures posted on walls all the time, because most people aren't pretentious.

The iPhone photo of the golf players is better than the "photographer" shot in every way that actually matters; the guys are more comfortable and they have natural smiles, whereas the other photo is full of grimaces and frowns. Why that might be is hard to guess, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the photographer forcing them to stand there and hold a pose while they fiddled with their weird little machine.

Don't underestimate the power of the subject's comfort and state of mind. Gramma is happy to get the picture, she doesn't care how it got taken.

My biggest gripe is with iPhone photos today is the way small details get mangled beyond recognition. Small text looks like it was sent through a hallucinating LLM (which it probably was!)
This article is mediocre because smartphone is perfectly happy to take pictures that look like the "beginner photographer" pictures. You just have to know what you're doing.

- Don't use the super wide lens and stand too close to people

- Use the super easy edit features to fix distortion

- Pay attention to lighting & exposure

- Don't just accept the iPhones default settings

If you want toned down contrast and color smartphones are perfectly happy to do that.

Otherwise.. I do configure my fancy digital camera to capture reduced contrast and color saturation compared to the defaults on a smartphone. So a lot of the time my samples would look like his.

Average people want contrast + saturation turned up like crazy. This is why the defaults ship that way. This is why a lot of the beginner non-phone digital cameras often shipped with the defaults that way. This is why TVs ship with the brightness/contrast/saturation boosted. The average person might look at your more subtle photo and appreciate it as better than theirs but then they will go right back to being super happy with their high contrast/saturation images.

Interesting discussion here, I particularly like that people have recognized that the people who use phones to take pictures and the people who use cameras to take pictures often have different goals.

There are lots of areas where there is a ‘convenience’ / ‘art’ split. One I recognized early was houses that were ‘architected’ and those that were just ‘built’. Looking at cabins from the 1800’s vs houses you can really see a cabin is practical, it is focused on utility that is easily built with a wide variety of materials at hand and skill sets of the builders. Whereas homes that were architected and built used a lot of craftspeople, bespoke materials, etc.

My dad was a professional photographer and he would take pictures and I would take pictures and his looked great and mine looked ‘ordinary’? I was just capturing the view in a given direction and he was composing a view to have various elements in relation to make a picture.

Phone cameras are “free” in that you bought a phone and it happened to come with a camera, and you carry it with you everywhere because phone. So a lot of the image capturing that is done is what you see. People do compose shots, and I’ve seen great photographs from phone cameras. But it is pretty clear that a photographer using a phone works harder to get their shot than someone who just wants a snapshot, and it goes the other way too, a person who just wants a snapshot works a lot harder to figure out how an SLR works, “just to take a picture” while the photographer seems to effortlessly bring it up to take a wonderful shot.

So if you take the whole set of people who are using a tool, you optimize for the largest portion of that population which is where the culture aspects kick in it seems. People grabbing snapshots with ‘one button activation’ vs people taking photographs composing with scenes and light.

Most of the issues noted are because of the wide angle lens of the iPhone. The more expensive iPhones (the Pro models) have 3 lenses one of which can produce photos similar to a traditional camera.
The average person does not know anything about all of this.

I start with TV sets. The usual way to chose one was walking into a shop, looking at dozen of TVs tuned on the same channel, picking the ones that subjectively looked best then check the price and size. Did we (average people) cared about the inner workings of the TV? Nearly zero.

Enter cheap compact digital cameras (200-300 Euro or Dollars.) We didn't have a chance to take pictures to compare cameras and even if we did it would take too much time. We read reviews, trust them, shop from home. Most people would buy the model with the highest number of Megapixel.

Enter smartphones. On average there are people that will buy an iPhone no matter what and people that will not buy an iPhone no matter what. Then they would use the camera inside the phone and would possibly notice that its pictures looked better or worse than their previous phone, especially in dark places.

And about camera vs phone: the phone is always in the pocket, the camera is always at home unless somebody goes on vacation in some scenic place and plans to take a lot of pictures. Half of them will be taken with the phone anyway.

I do have a compact camera. It's some Sony model with 30x optical zoom. It's great to take shots of animals without having to get close and scare them away (so no picture.) It's definitely better than my phone but my phone is not so bad too and it's more convenient to use. Furthermore those compact cameras lost many manual settings that would make them more useful. Sometimes it's easier to pin the autofocus of my phone on a subject than to make my camera understand that it must focus to something instead of doing its best to focus on the surroundings. And I won't digress on how long it takes to take a picture with cameras and send it to somebody on WhatsApp.

So, those 5 golf players look better on the camera but their picture will be taken and shared with a phone 99.9999% of the times.

I've been a pretty enthusiastic amateur photographer for a long time, though COVID broke a good part of that habit.

Even so, though, 5 or 7 years ago it became clear that I could absolutely use some iPhone shots as part of my travel sets. Yeah, you could tell they weren't from the full-frame Sony, but the delta was small enough that it was okay. Now that delta is narrower.

But the BULK of the photos I end up sharing are still from a real camera. Some of that is the lack of distortion, and some of that is likely the intentionality of Using A Camera vs. whipping out one's phone, and a good chunk of is the level of control a competent shutterbug has with a proper camera that is mostly absent, or at least harder to manipulate, on a phone (aperture, shutter, ISO, etc).

I recently switched to an imported phone with a bulky 1" sensor (Vivo X100 Ultra) and although far from my Sony mirrorless, the quality of shots and color science went up dramatically compared to my older Pixel 9 Pro (way overprocessed) and iPhone 13 (way oversaturated and pretty low-res). This is not to say there's no AI or strong computational component to it, but larger and more expensive sensors, which still have not found their way in mainstream phones, do bring massive advantage if they are not killed by excessive AI processing (as, sadly, I saw multiple times when test-driving Samsung Ultra phones)

Ironically enough, the Vivo ("Zeiss") color science also looks more accurate than most phones I've owned, and is pretty flexible at editing time.

> Ever wonder why you never see a smartphone photo printed and framed on the wall?

No.

I have numerous smartphone photos printed and framed. On both walls and horizontal surfaces.

There does not exist a greater pixel-peeping gearslut than I, but that's just a hobby. Hobbies only dominate my wallet, not my life.

I prefer all the iPhone examples. The wider angle lens gives more of a 3D appearance, and the greater depth of field means I have greater choice in where to look instead of the photographer trying to force me to look where they want me to.
The author identified their own problem: "The fish eye iPhone lens creates distortion". If you don't want distortion from the ultrawide camera, don't use ultrawide. The traditional camera didn't have an ultrawide lens on it either (or if it does, it's less wide)

Most other points also seem contrived to me. Not all: skin color really seems better on the traditional camera. Whether that's due to the phone not being able to use the main camera, though, I wouldn't know...

These pictures simply need to be compared with reality if you want to know which camera is better. I can't tell what the shape of the leftmost person's head is. I noticed the difference, found the iPhone version more flattering, but then read the text and saw that the iPhone is apparently distorting it. A reader can't judge how close it is to reality. Continue reading, and matching reality is now bad: the traditional camera can't properly capture the background (or light in the foreground of the later child picture) and the author thinks that's good. Blurring and darkening is something you can always still add in, I'd say that a camera performed better if it delivered a picture close to reality and you can work with that data to highlight any aspect you want. The camera doesn't have to force that upon you

OkCupid (the original one, before they sold out) had a great article showing how your perceived attractiveness changes significantly, based on the camera you're using to take your profile pictures [1]

[1] "Don’t Be Ugly By Accident!": https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/dontbeuglybyacciden... (mirror)

They're still over saturated. Skin tones always have a cosmetic/tanned look compared to real life. Mirrorless camera photos have a lot better output. You can see that even in the first sample comparison. If you look at the photo on the iPhone right when you took it, it doesn't look like the subject you just took a photo of. It's always over saturated compared to real life.

But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject.

But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects).

Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground.

BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)

Framing is different because of bad lens choice on the photo part (why always shoot wide angle??) and this skews the results immensely and unfairly (composition is the most important thing in a photo).

Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.

This is a great article, thank you for this. I will save it as a reference. I usually get unsolicited advice from people when I use my Fujifilm camera's about how a smartphone would shoot better. Even though I own one of the latest iPhone's, there's no comparison between the two.

I don't mind the comments but there's always someone. There's also people with the latest phones who come and brag about their photo quality. I'm always nice about it and give my talking points about the sensor sizes and the lenses as quickly as possible.

Sometimes they are more aggressive about it and start to question my competence. I'm not sure what to do in these scenario's as I'm usually in the middle of a few things during events. I liked how the article mentioned amateur photographer (which would describe me) so it addresses some of these concerns. It also uses examples of older cameras that are very affordable.

Next time someone is coping from Big Tech marketing about the camera on their smartphone, I'll show them this. All the "Pro"s use iPhone camera, right?

Ironically I have a few framed photos, from mobile (because that is what I had in the pocket), digital and film cameras but most photos that I have framed are Polaroid and Instax ones. An instant camera is a major PITA to carry, the film are expensive, a lot of pictures end up bad because of limitations of the media, the colors are often not very neutral but you are 100% sure that you end up with physical photos after every take, and thus some good memories. While smartphone pictures are more likely to end up in a family whatsapp group, I have tons of mobile and digital pictures I don't even remember I have taken and they mostly just take up space in my NAS and backup storage. Nowadays I never travel without either my Polaroid, Instax Wide or Lomo Instant Square Glass. It is also a great way to make gifts. I tried portable printers. It is nice to make gifts but it was just a hassle to even connect and launch the print most of the time.