Will the iPhone 13’s insane camera specs kill off ‘proper’ cameras?
Sep 15, 2021
Alex Baker
Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe
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Apple announced the launch of the new iPhone 13 range yesterday, and its camera is a real game-changer, particularly for videographers. With new features such as a wide-angle and macro lens, plus 3x telephoto zoom and a dedicated cinematography video mode, could this be the beginning of the end for bulky DSLRs and mirrorless cameras?
The phone boasts many impressive attributes such as a 1TB storage, 5G, and extended battery life. Additionally, for photographers and content creators, several features will be very exciting.
Cinematography
Firstly let’s look at the cinematography mode. This actually replicates the rack or pull focus effect that you see in movies when the focus transitions seamlessly from one subject to another. For anyone who has tried to do this on a DSLR or Mirrorless camera manually will know how difficult this is to do smoothly. In fact, in large Hollywood productions, there is a camera assistant employed specifically to do this job. The iPhone 13 will actually do this all for you following a subject through a scene and will even change focus automatically when the subject looks away.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the cinematography mode though is that it will let you choose the focus after the fact. That is going to be incredibly useful, how many times have you shot something and wished that you could go back in time and alter the point of focus? Furthermore, a scheduled update for the Pro model will allow the phone to use the ProRes video codec at 4K 30 fps. This codec compresses data without losing image and colour quality. This is used regularly on dedicated video cameras but will be the first time that this will be used on a mobile device.
Wide-angle and macro
In terms of the camera for still photography, an exciting feature of the PRO version is the macro lens and the ability to focus only 2cm away from a subject. Coupled with an aperture of f/1.5 the iPhone 13 can take some very impressive ultra close-ups with lack of light not being an issue due to the way the phone takes multiple images and stacks them together in a sort of ultra HDR while still a retaining normal look. Again the super wide-angle lens performs much better in low light situations than previous models, meaning that potentially this phone could be used for night photography and photographing stars.
New Macro photography as close as 2cm in the new iPhone 13 Pro#AppleEvent pic.twitter.com/zjXfV646Hk
— iJustine (@ijustine) September 14, 2021
Now all this is fairly impressive, but how does this affect us as photographers? Tyrone Turner from Flash Film Academy commented in a short video that he thinks that the end is nigh for the need for DSLR’s and mirrorless cameras. The new iPhone has just “killed about 70% of your lenses on one device, and that device is smart enough to light your scene for you.”
He does concede that they probably won’t be making movies on these devices anytime soon, however, Apple isn’t targeting that market, they are going after the much larger market of content creators, and this is where the iPhone camera specs will really come into its own. “What else are they gonna kill?” he asks, “your slider? Your gimbal? Your drone?”
It’s an interesting point of view, and calls to mind how impressed I was with the capabilities of my friend’s Huawei P30 phone camera with Leica lens when we did some astrophotography together. His phone was actually taking better images than his Canon M50. In my opinion it merely just adds to the possible tools we have at our disposal as visual creators, further reinforcing the idea that the equipment used is less and less important than the person and creative mind using it. And it comes in pink ;)
[Via CNet]
Alex Baker
Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe
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4 responses to “Will the iPhone 13’s insane camera specs kill off ‘proper’ cameras?”
I suspect that for the average person, there’s no need now to get any sort of DSLR, though there hasn’t really been for awhile. Your best camera is the one that you have with you, and the phones are small enough, and the cameras good enough for many applications, that most people don’t want to lug a DSLR with them. That was the case recently when I went to a national park with my dad … I have photos with my parents in Rocky Mountain taken with my DSLR ever since I got one in 2006, but this time, I used my iPhone XS. It was good enough to capture the time with my dad and the scenery, and certainly much smaller and easier to set up than a DSLR. The iPhone 12S … err, 13 … makes further improvements and lends itself to more applications than my 3-year-old phone.
With that said, there will always be specialty applications that require only what a DSLR can afford. I do astrophotography. I’m never EVER going to do that on my phone, I need the giant light bucket that a large lens offers, the stability of a heavier DSLR, and the much larger sensor of a DSLR. Same goes for other low-light situations … computational photography can only get you so far when you’re limited by the fundamental physics of photon noise and quantum efficiency of your detector, and a bigger detector is ALWAYS going to win out over a smaller one when it comes to that.
I also do time lapse and time slices with my DSLR, and the ease of getting to the raw data, the ability to set it up and let it run for hours without overheating or having the battery die, etc. aren’t going to make me move from the DSLR for that application any time soon, though it’s possible in a few years I might.
Same with my GoPro, even in this day and age I got the GoPro 9 because it is better for some applications than the phone or DSLR, like under-water (native water-proofing down to many meters for extended periods of time), and also its time lapse abilities while plugging into an external USB-C power source and going on my merry way while it shoots for a few hours and I still have use of my phone.
So, yeah, the new phones are slowly increasing the number of different uses they can fill in for, but I think there will always be some applications where you need a DSLR, or other specialty device.
Computational photography can get to a lot farther than you probably think. Yes, you have a “giant light bucket” but if your frame stacking, noise reduction, deghosting, etc. is not better than Google or Apple, the phone is going to take better photos, and often raw hdr as well.
Also on-camera learning can do a lot of stuff you can’t do in Photoshop since it has access to data from things like the accelerometer (eg. to reduce shake, choose exposure times dynamically). Yes, GIGO is a fundamental law, but if you can make educated guesses at the garbage, it can be bent a lot farther than anybody would have thought possible a decade ago. Camera manufacturers are decades behind. Not years. Decades.
Oversharpening. Wierd colors, limited dynamic range and poor low light performance….. But still for most purposes a phone does more than well enough for 90% of peoples needs.
Low light performance is now far better than most dedicated cameras on phones like the pixel or iPhone. They don’t have the computational horsepower to align, stack, and deghost in realtime.
Dedicated sensors are better, sure, and if you have a tripod, take multiple exposures, and know how to postprocess the images, you can get closer, but still. You’re fighting against Apple and Google — masters at computational photography.