The iPhone 11 Pro is just another step in the seemingly unending march of the camera phones. The falling sales of cameras across the price and performance spectrum is a testimonial to how everyday people take photographs. As a believer in computational photography and the improvement curve of phone-camera capabilities, I have often written about the changes and improved performance. So it good to see experts and professional photographers have come to the same conclusion as well.
There’s no way phone camera technology is going to get any worse. Not only is the compact dead but things that are higher up the food chain also have numbered days. I’d go so far as to argue that the shooting envelope of the iPhone 11 Pro is greater than the XF10 or GR3, even if peak IQ isn’t as high under ideal conditions.
Ming Thein
Ming Thein is a very respected and internationally known Malaysian photographer who has worked for Hasselblad in the recent past and he knows his cameras, so his words carry a lot of weight. Ricoh GR3 and Fuji XF 1o are APS-C fixed-lens compact cameras, and GR3 is my favorite camera and is my everyday carry. I have made some exceptional photos with it, but these days at least during the daytime, it rarely comes out of the bag. Instead, I use the iPhone 11 Pro, which performs well especially during good light. I am pretty sure folks who own Pixel 4 or Huawei’s latest top-end phone are also doing the same as well.
As I wrote earlier, “Apple, Samsung, Google, Huawei are outspending the traditional camera makers exponentially. That is why we will continue to see massive gains in computational photography and camera-phone technologies versus traditional cameras.” It is no surprise I am excited about the future of our phone cameras.
December 11, 2019, San Francisco