Category Archives: iPhone

A smartphone with a decent camera

Serious magic

iPhone

Night Mode

With the nights getting colder, it’s time for the annual overhaul of the propane heater on the patio. This exceptionally bad design dictates that something fails annually. Over the four years of ownership, the pilot has got clogged, the tilt switch failed and finally, this year, the pilot had to be completely replaced as it was beyond redemption. (The main burner will not ignite if the pilot is faulty). $18 and some sweat equity did the trick. Quite why so commonly used a device should stick with 1950s technology last seen in the Eisenhower administration defeats me, but the chances are if you eat at an outdoor restaurant equipped with these propane heaters, half of them will not be working. The lead chap at Chernobyl probably cut his teeth on propane patio heater design.

As an example, the tilt switch, which is a safety device intended to disable the main burner in the event the heater is accidentally tipped over, uses a mercury switch last seen 50 years ago in domestic HVAC systems. It is designed to fail and I simply bypassed it when it did so. The risk of a tip over in my location is zero. One thing less to go wrong.

The spark starter finally failed this year and I have given up on replacing it in favor of a wand type gas lighter. Simple, fail proof and cheap.

To cut a long story short I finally got the heater working and when it works it really is an object of wonder, putting out amounts of heat that electric alternatives can only dream about. A 5 gallon propane tank last for many hours.

Add the firepit (no pilot, no sparker, no tilt switch and bog reliable as a result), which also uses bottled propane, and you have a pretty jolly setting for watching the TV at night. As we fired up another episode of the wonderful ‘Endeavour’ series about the early life of Inspector Morse, starring that fine Welsh actor Shaun Evans, an actor far superior to the overrated John Thaw in the BBC original, it struck me that it was time to again report on the magic of Night Mode in the iPhone 11 Pro.

Winston enjoys some late night TV.

The sole illumination for this snap was the two propane sources plus the smallish flat screen TV some 10 feet from my son. This image is ‘straight out of camera’ and hand held. Night Mode kicks in automatically when needed.

The just announced iPhone 12 Pro further improves Night Mode by enhancing focus accuracy using the newly added LIDAR detector. I can’t wait.

iPhone 12 Pro

iPhone

Another nail ….



Hastening the demise of the DSLR.

…. in the coffin of DSLR and mirrorless camera makers. Yes, Zeiss just released an Android based mirrorless which will run you $6,000 and will get you hacked at no extra charge. A fool and his money …. But innovative?

The point is that innovation in traditional camera design is notable for its absence. Nikon makes ugly ducklings cobbled together by a committee, Sony makes more models than you can shake a stick at and Canon is focusing on multi-megapixel high ISO sensors no one needs. ISO 100,000 and 80 megapixels? Essential, no? And they all cost more than the iPhone which can be upgraded annually for less than $500 and does lots of other things than just take pictures.

You can read my iPhone 11 Pro user review here and the iPhone 12 Pro comes with no surprises, kaizen being the order of the day. Perhaps the most interesting new feature for photographers is the addition of a LIDAR detector. The newly added Laser Imaging, Detection and Ranging sensor makes nighttime focusing even more accurate, building on the already stellar Night Mode missing from your $3,000 mirrorless SLR.

Suffice it to say that the iPhone 11 Pro saw me selling my two Nikon FF bodies, some two dozen Nikkor lenses and two Panasonic GX7 bodies with four more lenses. I would have sold the china cabinet this lot needed for storage, but a small thing called COVID got in the way.

On the phone front there is 5G, a not-ready-for-prime-time feature awaiting the build out of US networks, but, hey, trendy as heck.

More when my iPhone 12 Pro arrives here, my order delayed by the wait for my favorite Lameeku wallet case to be released… Yes, the iPhone 12 Pro is differently shaped than the iPhone 11 Pro and that may be the greatest new ‘feature’ of all, for any change to the iPhone’s awful handling can only be an improvement. When Steve released the slab sided iPhone 4 in 2011 – a form factor emulated by the iPhone 12 Pro – he stated that his goal was to emulate the quality feel and experience of using a Leica. What he did not mention was that the iPhone was a fraction of the cost of the Leica rangefinder and did not break down. These two attributes carry over to the iPhone 12 Pro. There is still no optical zoom lens, but I would think that will be added next year when Apple perfects the periscope zoom design which will fit within its existing case designs.

Three hundred bucks a year

iPhone

High end photography has never been cheaper.



The iPhone 11 Pro lens array.

The ever bubbling rumor mill has it that this year’s iPhone 12 Pro will come with a 60+ megapixel sensor and a fourth ‘time of flight’ lens which will enhance virtual reality viewing as well as providing more granular depth map data for selective focus effects, rendered in software.

I will immediately list my iPhone 11 Pro on Swappa and will sell it for $300 less than its iPhone replacement. This is the extent of my annual hardware cost, the equivalent of a few rolls of film plus some prints or another lens for a DSLR or mirrorless body. Photography has never been cheaper. And I get a new camera annually, comfortable in the knowledge that every iPhone camera has been better than the one which came before it.

Night Mode optimisation

iPhone, Photographs

A modicum of care does the trick.

Night Mode is one of those brilliant enhancements in the iPhone 11 which obsoletes every ‘serious’ camera on the market.

Those 8 billion plus transistors in the iPhone’s A13 chip are put hard to work taking multiple images and then stitch together the best bits for a stunningly good result. And the device’s outstanding HDR technology makes sure that the dynamic range is constrained to what the technology can handle. No highlights are burned out.

Still, a modicum of care will be repaid with the best possible images. If you use the iPhone’s default Camera app, Night Mode is automatically invoked when needed. You cannot force it ‘on’.

When Night Mode is active a yellow flag appears at the top left of the iPhone’s display and the image ‘seen’ at the time of exposure remains frozen on the screen. When processing is complete some three seconds later – and you are warned to keep the camera still – a second image appears on the display showing what was recorded. If you notice a significant shift between the locations of objects in the second image compared with the first then it’s more than likely that the result will be blurred. I obviate this problem by using a monopod, which eliminates vertical motion which is the real killer here. I don’t bother with any attachment device, simply holding the iPhone tightly against the top of the monopod. The results are peerless, as these two images from the garden at night illustrate. The extreme dynamic range will only embarrass your DSLR or mirrorless monster. Don’t bother. Get an iPhone 11 – these are SOOC, naturally:

Back to the future

Cameras, iPhone

Minolta pointed the way.

Given that they have yet to have an idea not stolen from someone else – meanly mostly from Apple – I spend little time in reading about anything from Samsung.

But their most recent theft is surprising only for how long it took them to think of it, for their latest ‘high-end’ phone (there’s an oxymoron for you) steals from a 2002 inspired design by Minolta in its 2mp Dimage digital point and shoot.



The elegant Minolta Dimage of 2002.

This elegant design had one truly original feature, in addition to its neat packaging in that small square case. It used a periscope optical zoom, vertically oriented inside the case, with light rays deflected through the associated right angle with a mirrored prism. This allowed the incorporation of an otherwise lengthy optical path within the tight confines of the body, a small 3.3″ x 2.8″ x 0.8″. For comparison, my iPhone 11 Pro in its case measures 5.5″ x 3″ x 0.5″.

This cutaway view shows how it worked:



Illustration of the ‘folded’ optical path.

We can expect to see this sort of thing in a future iPhone as modern technology has made things even smaller 18 years after Minolta’s inspired design. Optical zooms beat digital zooms as there’s no pixel degredation as magnifications increase.

Now if there’s a criticism to be leveled at the iPhone 11 Pro – in addition to its poor ergonomics – it’s that there’s no lens at the long end. Sure, there’s a 10x digital zoom, but you can do that just as easily in Lightroom, with all the attendant issues. So you are stuck with ultrawide, very wide and normal, call it 12mm, 24mm and 50mm FFE, all superb but none of them long.

So if Apple can add one of those ‘periscope’ optical zooms and make the 50mm a 50-200mm optic, well, that’s going to be all she wrote for the few remaining sales of silly-priced and even sillier-sized DSLRs.