Loving these! I’m a keen hobbyist photographer and often print my work to put on our home photo wall. Over the years the wall was composed of mostly shots from a dedicated stills camera like the a7rII but slowly more prints are appearing from just phone pics and the quality is really getting remarkable! It’s honestly getting to the point where I may consider selling my dedicated camera setup (now an A7rV) and upgrading my phone. However, there is something special about using a dedicated camera with a tripod and with things like filters (if doing long exposure sea scapes for example) that a phone just does give/do. But that line is getting way more blurry and harder to justify spending the additional money on for a hobbyist. Thanks for putting the time and effort into these!
In reality, few people scrutinize photos to this extent (except, maybe other photographers). I gather from this exercise that the photos you choose are indistinguishable at normal viewing distance by the generality of people. That is quite impressive for the iPhone. Of course, I doubt that this holds true for all situations, but still -pretty impressive at 24x36! Nice video, Alex!
Phones really have come a long way and do a great job for taking pictures. My S21 Ultra is very impressive. But....if I want to create a photograph, or take a portrait, out comes the Mark4.
what was the settings on the Canon R5, did you use HDR capability, so comparison is done same way as in iPhone where it is composed from multiple images/exposure, rather then only one?
Alex Please redo this with the s23 ultra phone with the 200 MP camera see what the results will be like. Definitely a lot of people would be interested in the video.
Landscape test! Right! Let’s try sport photography, close ups during sport photography, formula 1 race, panning shot in sport. Let’s try bird, wild life photography, night photography with same settings on both phone and camera…and then get the poster! Landscape during sunset or sunrise is the easiest way to mislead , well lot of people noticed but still not a good way to show difference! I am sorry to comment that but as a pro photographer i hate those videos. You are not showing respect and credits to not only our work but passion and dedication to our love to photography!
You lost me when you said you edited the shots... I get that it's a photographer thing but isn't the point of doing a blind test is to let the device show without editing? maybe I'm illiterate to this sort of thing but if I'm comparing photos... I don't want any editing done to them so I can make a truly informed decision based on actual software enhancements from the device and the actual camera hardware in both devices..
The is no such thing as an unedited photograph. If you don't edit an image from a camera yourself, the device will do it for you. Most landscape photographers use RAW images which will look nothing like what you saw with your eyes. Meanwhile iphones heavily edit images unless you also take the image in RAW. I'm sure Alex edited them to closely match each other, since this was more of a test of resolution and sensor size.
without question you are right that pro cameras will in the vast, vast majority of cases take the best photos... the gap is closing rapidly to the extent the untrained eye, in particular when viewed online or in snapshot size prints will have a great difficulty telling the difference... that will leave the standalone camera market to the pros and niche hobbyists. it might be horrifying to think about, but its the truth.
