Apprentice managed to lose a days pay

[Simon Finnigan]

information.

I was in a presentation once from the security services where all phones where physically taken off you and locked in a differ room before it could start :-)

[Simon Finnigan]

I do carry my proper camera round with me - in my smartphone. I've not used my proper camera is over three years now since its just not worth it. It's too bulky and annoying to have with me, so never gets taken out unless its a special occasion, and I kept forgetting it then.

[Simon Finnigan]

So for the 0.01% of people into that kind of photography a smartphone isn't suitable. For the vast majority of people, a smart phone take perfectly good pictures. It's like claiming that because you live on a mountain only accessible by dirt track road that the only vehicle that's any good is a

4x4 - you seem to have unusual needs in a camera, but to extend that to the idea that smartphone cameras aren't fit for purpose is just ridiculous.

[charles]

You should be able to store over 100 photos on a memory card. so saving them to a computer can wait till you get home, back to hotel or whereever. The same "storage to somewhere else" applies to a phone, too.

[Huge]

Hear, hear.

[John Williamson]

It's easy to sell pixels, you just count them. It's harder to sell a better signal/ noise ratio, as the numbers are (a) manipulable and (b) not defined by a generally used standard. Something else that is easily manipulated is the jpeg compression ratio, so you can get *thousands* of pictures on a card, if you compress them enough, which means people will think you have plenty of room on the card. You can't use them for anything after they've been compressed, though, and this is where a lot of camera phones fall down, as their compression ratios are designed to fit as many pictures as possible into the internal phone memory.

I recently bought a Panasonic camera which actually boasts *fewer* (12 megapixels) than the one it replaced (14 megapixels), and sold this as being better. Unfortunately, it also processes all the pictures to have flourescently bright colours, so increasing the chroma noise while the luminance noise is better. You can't turn the processing off, either.

I prefer the results from an old Fuji 9500, which only boasts 9 megapixels on jpeg files, but when saving raw files, can give a real non-interpolated 14 megapixels with impressively low noise.

[John Rumm]

exposure time).

hard to setup)

Most people don't - but most would not count photography as a hobby.

For the large section of the population who used to buy basic point and shoot cameras, a camera on their phone will do pretty much all they need. For those that used to buy SLRs, they still need to buy an SLR for the large part - a phone is not going to be a substitute in the same way they would have not considered an Olympus Trip a substitute...

(although a trip would wipe the floor with pretty much any camera phone)

[John Rumm]

Agreed - most people are not interested in photography as such, and don't really care about the results, so long as they can capture the "moment" etc.

(although your 0.01% I suspect is obviously way off the mark - the DSLR industry would not survive on a market of 1 in 10,000 users)

Who said they are not fit for purpose?

I said it was inadequate for real photography. Since most are not interested in real photography (i.e. photography as an end in itself) they are not going to be bothered by a camera phones limitations. Also many people who are into photography will also have a camera phone - they two are not exclusive.

[dennis]

8<

A trip might beat the flash on some camera phones but it wont beat the picture quality on a S2. Not even with a decent film.

[brass monkey]

I was under the impression that film was equivalent to ~15 megapixels.

[Tim Streater]

And the "smallest of compact 16M pixel cameras" will have a shittily small sensor and, with a 20x zoom, seriously shitty optics.

[John Rumm]

The trip did not have a built in flash (it had a hotshoe for a top mounted flash, and a flash socket for external or tripod mount attached flash).

It had a decent Zuiko 4 element lens that was quite well thought of, and IME held its own in image quality stakes against a reasonable optical quality SLRs. (as sharp as my early Praktika SLRs prime lenses, better than my later Ricoh 35-70mm zoom, and slightly inferior to the f/1.7

50mm Richonon prime)

I have seen the results from an S2 and they are certainly not bad, but still short of the trip I would say (which I used for a few years as a kid).

The camera was basic and offered insufficient control to satisfy a serious photographer for long (4 focus zones, two shutter speeds, but full aperture control from f/2.8 to f/22, as well as a full auto exposure mode).

There are some examples here where someone compares results from one to a high end full frame Canon 5D DSLR:

I was under the impression that film was equivalent to ~15 megapixels. Its hard to make comparisons since film does not have pixels as such, but 15 to 20 is often quoted as an approximation. Having said that, others claim you would need something like 90MP to fully capture the detail on a very fine grain film like Velvia for example.

[djc]

Depends if you are looking at just resolution or also consider dynamic range etc. Above 12MP you will need a top quality lens to notice much difference. 25-36MP would be equivalent to a high resolution scan of a

35mm negative, which would probably resolve more film grain than actual image detail. Film still has the potential to cover a wider dynamic range. A digital sensor can practically see in the dark.

[stuart noble]

I have some prints of a football crowd taken I believe circa 1950 with a Hasselblad. The detail is just stunning, but they also capture the atmosphere somehow, and this can't be measured. I'm amazed at the gulf between what modern cameras can do and what the average user understands. I'm at the point and shoot end of the spectrum but I do move the dial now and then. Still amazed that the S2 has no action setting

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Google gigapan film - still plenty of life in film yet using that in

35mm and also if you do large format, using more mainstream films. Anyway, the film vs digital arguements became tedious a decade ago.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think you are wildly optimistic about film grain. Fast film is as bad as 2Mp more or less. good film like velva is around the 8MP mark and only Kodachrome sends you up to the 20MP arena.

[Simon Finnigan]

But the moment my phone connects to WiFi, it backs the photos up - including when using my mifi portable wifi hotspot. So I can have the photos backed up as soon as they're taken anywhere in the UK.

[Simon Finnigan]

So for most people, a smart phone camera is perfectly fit for purpose.

[Andy Champ]

I'm currently digitising my parent's slides. I find that 1200dpi is quite adequate, anything over that and all you are doing is digitising the grain.

The dynamic range, OTOH, is quite impressive. I'm pulling them down to standard JPEG with 24-bit colour, and I have to fiddle with the tone curve on a lot of the pictures - the detail is there in the shadows and/or the highlights, but you can't see it without some care.

Andy

[dennis]

That isn't really true.. it is true that jpegs cover less dynamic range than film. However the sensors can easily cover more and RAW output is generally more than film.

A digital sensor can be exposed for longer periods than colour film and still produce "proper colours", film gets colour casts if you expose it for long and bright spots also diffuse into the surrounding areas.

You might want to run multiple shoots of digital and combine them if you want to photograph in very dark conditions, something that is hard to do with film as you may never actually record anything on film if its really dark. Unlike film digital sensors can get down to ~single photon sensitivity.

I don't think photography would be as popular if it still relied of film, its the immediate results that make most people take pictures these days.