unfocused said:
New iPhone:
10 frames per second; in-camera stabilization, white and amber flashes that can be balanced with ambient light, f2.2 lens, larger sensor, slow-motion video. (If I got the specs right)
I've been wishing for years that DSLR flashes would adjust their white point to match the available lighting. Here's hoping that at least the concept (though certainly not the implementation) will end up in Speedlite flashes one of these years.
unfocused said:
Is this the final nail in the coffin for Powershots and other Point and Shoots?
I pretty much declared those dead five years ago.
unfocused said:
Should Canon and Nikon worry about their DSLR sales? Try to think outside your own personal prejudices and look at it objectively. What do you think?
Let me start by saying that I love my iPhone 5, and I love the ease with which I can get lots of day-to-day pictures with it. I use my iPhone 5 to grab pictures of random things when I don't have my DSLR with me. It shoots reasonably good photos within limits. Phones work great for photography when you're shooting pictures of people who are only a few feet away in good lighting.
But a replacement for my DSLR, it is not. Camera phones cannot possibly compete with DSLRs in two key areas: distance photography and low-light photography.
Distance photography
Camera phones typically have no optical zoom. This means that when you zoom in by a factor of 2, that 8 MP camera effectively becomes a 2 MP camera. It's like shooting with a 33mm prime lens, give or take. You can always crop it in post, but if you really needed a 300mm lens, you're just not going to be happy with the results even with a DSLR.
You'll never see a pro photographer shooting a wedding from the balcony of a church using a 33mm prime (same field of view as an iPhone 5) except when shooting some establishing shots. For the good stuff, they'd be shooting with a 135mm lens at a bare minimum, and probably more like a 70-200 or 70-300. For the same reason, you won't ever see anyone seriously photographing a wedding with a camera phone. Just for grins, I tried it a couple of weeks ago at a friend's wedding. The bride and groom were little more than a couple of blurry smudges. I deleted the photos.
Similarly, when I take pictures of the Pope saying the Angelis prayer next Sunday, I'll be using my 6D, not my iPhone 5. From any angle that doesn't involve seeing up his nose, he'd cover only a handful of pixels on my iPhone 5. On my 6D with a 70-300L and a 3x extender, before cropping, I expect to be approaching a medium-close-up from... IIRC near the first fountain, roughly a third the way across the piazza.
For many people who buy point-and-shoot cameras, zoom might not matter much. Many of them use the zoom infrequently anyway, and even for the ones who do use it, the convenience of not having to carry one piece of gear can outweigh the inability to get certain shots. For the sorts of people who are willing to spend the money for a DSLR, though, reach matters.
And to the extent that you can improve the digital zoom by adding more pixels, your low-light performance is worse, because there's an inherent tradeoff between pixel count and noise. Which brings us to the second area in which camera phones cannot realistically compete with a DSLR.
Low-light photography
There's simply no way to cram enough light gathering into a sensor that size to take shots that approach my 6D. The sensor is only about 18 square millimeters, by my quick calculation (1.5 microns squared per pixel times 8 million pixels). Compare this with 855 square millimeters for a 6D sensor, and the 6D takes in 50 times more light. Even if you don't do any binning of pixels and shoot with the 6D at a wider angle so that the subject covers the same number of pixels, that would still be 339 square millimeters, or about 19x as much light. So even if the iPhone 5's sensor miraculously captured every single photon perfectly, it would still be getting only a tenth as much light per pixel, and thus will still have much worse SNR. And although you can do a lot with noise reduction, it only goes so far before you start having to take long exposures that smear badly.
I can't see any phone ever being able to approach the pictures I took at the party after my friend's wedding, many of which involved little more than candlelight. You just can't shoot shots like that with a camera phone without unacceptable amounts of grain.
For those two reasons, I can't see a camera phone replacing my DSLR for the foreseeable future. If somebody builds a cell phone in which the entire back of the phone is a microlensed light field array or something, I might reevaluate that statement, but even then, probably not.
This is not to say that camera phones don't replace certain limited uses of DSLRs, but I would expect them to basically destroy the point-and-shoot market while leaving the DSLR market largely untouched. People buy a DSLR because they care about image quality enough to lug a suitcase full of heavy glass around. They're not going to give up that image quality just because they are already carrying a cell phone camera in much the same way that someone who spends $200 on a bottle of champagne every week is unlikely to give up drinking champagne merely because his hotel offers free Budweiser to its guests.
