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genewitch 11 days ago

I generally judge a camera by how accurately it can capture sunset, relative to what i actually see. on a samsung galaxy note 20, i can mess with the white balance a bit to get it "pretty close", but tends to clamp color values so the colors are more uniform than they are in real life. I've seen orange dreamsicle, strawberry sherbet, lavender, at the same time, at different intensities in the same section of sky. No phone camera seems to be able to capture that. http://projectftm.com/#noo2qor_GgyU1ofgr0B4jA captured last month. it wasn't so "pastel", it was much more rich. The lightening at the "horizon" is also common with phone cameras, and has been since the iphone 4 and Nexus series of phones. It looks awful and i don't get why people put up with it.

throwanem 10 days ago | parent [-]

I think we see, or more properly perceive although weakly, some higher-order color harmonics that cameras don't capture and displays don't (intentionally) reproduce, and I think the pinky-magenta-purplish region of the gamut might be the easiest place to notice the difference.

I think people mostly put up with it because on the one hand it doesn't matter all that often (sunset is a classic worst-case test for imaging systems!) and, on the other, well, "who are you going to believe? Fifty zillion person-centuries of image engineering and more billions of phones than there are living humans, or your own lyin' eyes?"

genewitch 10 days ago | parent | next [-]

i've wanted a de-bayered sensor camera for a decade and a half; but i'm not willing to pay Red or Arri prices for a real monochrome cine camera. I had an Huawei Honor 8 that had a real-honest-to-goodness monochrome sensor on it. It used it for focusing, but one could take images straight from that sensor. It was around the time that Asus zenfone was using IR Lasers to do focusing, other phones had other depth sensors.

I still have to manually focus (by pushing the screen where i want it to focus), but on newer phones the focus tries to "track" what you touched, which is... why would they change that? I tilt the phone down to interact with it, i know where in the frame i want it to focus, because before i tilted the phone down, i was looking at the frame! Rule of thirds, i can reframe the image to put focus exactly in one of the areas it ought be, zoom in or out, whatever. But no, apparently it has been decided i want the focus to wander around as it sees fit.

I just unplugged the honor 8 to take a picture and apparently the battery is kaput since the last time i used it. Sad day, indeed.

genewitch 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

got it charged, but not willing to unplug it to test, so a quick shot out the door:

http://projectftm.com/#H-6GJlHgGFA8Yek86MrkVw "Neutral Density" unedited but cropped

throwanem 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm too much the artist, I find. I tried shooting my D850 in B&W and it's as good as I would expect from a color sensor with a Bayer filter. But it feels like I'm just giving up all the degrees of freedom Lightroom can give me when converting a color raw, and there's a degree of "push" and "pull" processing flexibility that doesn't seem easily replicable by other means.