should modern mirrorless cameras embrace more automation to survive

[tomO2013]

I’m currently flying back to my home in canada after a wonderful trip to Ireland - we had a whirlwind trip around the emerald isle and I have to say I think I’ve left a big part of my heart behind.
I never realized just how beautiful the west coast is with its rugged cliffs, beautiful sandy beaches , sand dunes, lakes, mountains….. gorgeous. I’ll share some photos in another thread.

For this trip I took my Lumix S5iix with me as i wanted to shoot some video, however I left my fast 2.8 zooms and 1.4 primes behind. Instead I took my F4 24-105, F4 16-35 and a 50 1.8. All told it was a winning combo for this trip. I also took my iPhone 15 pro….

On super bright and high contrasty days something struck me - the iPhone was intelligently taking HDR shots to capture as much dynamic range as possible in camera. Yes some of these look somewhat over-processed however at no point did I have to setup a tripod , go into focus bracketing mode, take 5 shots, then go into affinity photo and HDR merge.
On the FF I can accomplish even better results by underexposing for the highlights and using the in-built latitude to pull up shadows in post, OR I can HDR bracket and manually merge in post production.
Without doubt, the mirrorless full-frame camera took higher detailed, nicer tonality photos that hold up better under any type of cropping where the iphone resulting image tends to fall apart when you look at it on a larger screen and crop in. No replacement for displacement and the physics of the sensor size and large glass - however there is also no replacement for convenience and intelligent features too when it comes to keeping a trip fun.
What really struck me is that often the case, I wanted to take a quick grab shot and share it with family on whatsapp or apple messages and I’d be happy to have a reasonably good HDR in-camera processed capability where the actual jpeg merge was intelligently done in camera (similar to an iPhone) for quicker sharing.

This lead me to post the question on another site… why don’t more mainstream camera manufacturers embrace more computational photography?!
What I was answered with is that professionals use MILC and DSLR’s these days and they want full manual control. I’m a professional (shoot weddings and portraits on the side) and 100% I want to have the option for manual control and for certain shots 100% I’d prefer to do a more custom human-tailored HDR in post. However when on holidays and quickly sharing a snap with family back home, I also want the option to let the camera decide to HDR process for me.

Are any of you guys aware of any camera brand that does in-camera processing bracketed images to jpeg ?

Lumix does it for the hand held high resolution, live seen composite (similar to Olympus composite) and a bunch of other computational photography stuff that’s great… but for bog standard jpeg (where the scenes dynamic range exceeds the native sensor) i gotta say, the iphone was kicking butt and doing a better job of not blowing highlights or crushing shadows with Apples intelligent scene stacking HDR technology.

I really think for MILC and DSLR to survive longer term, they need to leverage more computational capabilities into the bodies themselves or even their native phone apps that they provide.

 

[Yoused]

I suspect that the logic circuitry inside a good camera is highly ASIC with minimal CPU power – they might even be using 32-bit ARM in many of them. Phones, by contrast, are small computers with a pretty good camera attached – compared to a computer you would have bought in the eighties, the typical phone is tens-to-hundreds of times faster, has up to a thousand times as much RAM and absurdly more storage.

Cameras are tailored to collecting, compressing and storing image data and are really not suitable to adding a lot of features to. Do too much on the back end and you end up cutting back on front-end features (like CCD capacity). I suppose the ideal for obtaining what you want is a camera that could pipe directly into an iPhone, preferably with a USB cable.

In fact, it seems like it could be a pretty worthwhile concept. You build the camera part to the highest quality standards, with clamp to hold the phone while shooting (or hold the phone separately in some situations) and bypass the computational part, instead just feeding raw image data to the phone for handling. Camera: do work; phone: do magic.

 

[tomO2013]

I totally understand what you are saying and I agree about the camera industry's use of ASIC - there is likely some degree of cost cutting involved as well to hit a price point owing to the significantly lower economies of scale.

There is also what I believe is a 'traditionalist' photography philosophy from the big Japanese camera manufacturers that MILC/DSLR consumers want a separate experience from the camera phones and in turn to a certain extent, the big japanese camera manufacturers 'look down on' rather than wholeheartedly embrace the cell phone as part of the modern experience.

I do find myself wondering however, the iPhone (and most android devices) have had sophisticated image processing pipelines for many years - you don't need the latest ARMv9 processor in your camera to process images in camera. Heck even back as far as 2012 I remember buying an Olympus OMD EM1 and it had live composite and a bunch of in-camera processing features. The hardware capabilities have been available at reasonable costs for many many years.
Probably today the most practical would be the offload part of the image processing chain to the iPhone/Android device.

 

[Roller]

I totally understand what you are saying and I agree about the camera industry's use of ASIC - there is likely some degree of cost cutting involved as well to hit a price point owing to the significantly lower economies of scale.

There is also what I believe is a 'traditionalist' photography philosophy from the big Japanese camera manufacturers that MILC/DSLR consumers want a separate experience from the camera phones and in turn to a certain extent, the big japanese camera manufacturers 'look down on' rather than wholeheartedly embrace the cell phone as part of the modern experience.

I do find myself wondering however, the iPhone (and most android devices) have had sophisticated image processing pipelines for many years - you don't need the latest ARMv9 processor in your camera to process images in camera. Heck even back as far as 2012 I remember buying an Olympus OMD EM1 and it had live composite and a bunch of in-camera processing features. The hardware capabilities have been available at reasonable costs for many many years.
Probably today the most practical would be the offload part of the image processing chain to the iPhone/Android device.

I think your point about traditionalism makes sense. It's as if the big manufacturers are saying "If you want to take great photos, you need a real camera." That's true to an extent, especially when it comes to lenses and sensors. But maybe they're also reluctant to adopt or leverage mass market technology like smartphones that are available to just about everybody these days.

 

[Yoused]

But maybe they're also reluctant to adopt or leverage mass market technology like smartphones that are available to just about everybody these days.

I suppose the concern could be that they cannot rely on the user attaching a high-quality smartphone to the camera, so it might yield less-than-ideal results because the phone is not handling the data properly. Of course, if you are going to spend a couple thousand dollars on a 100MP camera, plus another thousand on good lenses, going cheap on the phone would be just silly.

 

[Citysnaps]

For the photographs I like to make (not take) I'm perfectly fine using an iPhone or a regular mirrorless cam. Lately I've been using iPhones a lot over the last 6-7 years. It really makes little difference for the kind of photos I like to make (mostly people - strangers on the street I hit up for conversation and a portrait, candids, some beach/ocean photos, buildings, etc). Of course for the most part phones wouldn't work well or be ideal for shooting sports, most weddings, etc.

As long as I can get a decent RAW file, I can process it in Lightroom and usually get what I visualized when making the photo.

Imo... what makes a song photo has little to do with gear. And is more about the photographer and how he/she sees.

 

[Yoused]

I have a somewhat decent Canon, which has the advantage of being able to take 6 second exposures, but there is one thing that bugs me about it. I have to use the display to frame a shot, which sucks the big one on a sunny day. Fortunately, the capture is usually broad enough that I can crop out the part I do not want, but I sure do miss that junky old Nikon I bought fifteen years ago, solely because it had a viewfinder.

 

[Eric]

I see them as two different mediums, point and shoots (iPhone, etc) have come a really long way and I even include footage from it for client work from time to time with both images and and video.

Auto in-camera bracketing for HDR is included in some higher end cameras, like Sony but only with .jpg. If I want to show a quick snap to friends or family I'll take it with my iPhone and share it out. Anything coming out of the mirrorless is always shot in RAW and post processed before the benefits are ever seen, even with bracketed exposures, which I use less and less these days because the dynamic range of these newer cameras is simply amazing anyway.

That said I'm sure it's only a matter of time before more automated features are included, even in the higher end pro cameras.