I just can't help but notice all phone cameras right now are incredibly close in quality, and the differences don't really matter anymore. The software experience has become the only important thing.
There's an easy explanation for it too. Pretty much every single high-end phone released in the last two years uses a Sony sensor. They completely dominate the smartphone sensor market right now.
Software is key and one of the selling point of Google made phones, like the Nexus 4, was the promise of a lightweight android installation with minimal apps. On my Nexus 4, this is no longer the case as you cannot remove Google's apps and they frequently require updates [1]. Add the fact that the really cool new Android features, e.g. Google Now, are poorly supported outside the US, and I'm not sure my next phone will be a Google phone.
[1] Current list of these unremovable apps on my Nexus 4: Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Presentations, Cloud Print, E-mail, Google Now, Google Drive, Google Earth, Google Indic Keyboard, Google Keep, Google News & Weather, Google Play Books, Google Play Movies, Google Play Music, Google Play Games, Google Play News kiosk, Google street view, Google talkback, Google text to speech, Google+, Hangouts, Google Wifi connectivity, Youtube.
> On my Nexus 4, this is no longer the case as you cannot remove Google's apps and they frequently require updates
While I don't think you can properly "uninstall" Google+ and Hangouts, you can "disable" them, which makes them inaccessible. I don't think you get updates pushed for disabled apps, either.
They get removed, not soft-uninstall. Moreover, those apps (docs, spreadsheet etc) were not present initially, I had to install from play store. The fact that, Samsung/LG won't let you uninstall (only disable) their crap-wares is the main reason I stick to stock Android.
Can you uninstall Google Play Games, Google Play Movies & TV or Google Play Music? I have a Nexus 5X running Android 7.0, and it appears these can only be disabled, not uninstalled.
I don't really begrudge them for not allowing the store application to be removed. I can't imagine the number of customer headaches that would exist because of accidental uninstallation.
I'm kind of looking forward to and also kind of dreading doing the same thing (flashing Copperhead) on my 6P. I have traditionally just disabled all the Google apps from the stock ROM while retaining Google Play Services for the Play Store and push notifications. Not sure how easily I will adapt to not having either of those things on a truly Google-free phone.
I'll also be abandoning several paid apps that I've bought over the years that are only available on the Play Store. It's going to be hard extricating myself from that ecosystem.
I'm running a rooted phone at the moment but you're essentially reducing the security of the phone. I wish I didn't have to root my phone to get all the features I want (removing apps, backing up apps to somewhere I control, redirecting audio)
I'm a fellow rooter also concerned about device security. I think full disk encryption, with the unlock key encrypted with a passphrase not stored on the device gives me more than the security that was lost by rooting my phone. Even recovery can't touch the OS or my files without me feeding it the passphrase.
Nexus phones have never been about about an "lightweight Android installation or minimal apps" but no crappy heavy skins (TouchWiz) and no 3rd party or carrier apps.
Your point is still valid, but I think you can at least disable the built-in apps. This way the won't require updates and will not clutter your apps list. They still take up space on the internal storage though.
The Pixel phone also reserves a copy of the system partition, so you can update faster (all those 2 times per year that a big update happens), so double the bloat.
That is an amazing feature that benefits everyone, you really want your users to keep updated for security reasons and guess what happens once users can no longer update due to a lack of free space? Apple ran into this because they insisted on selling 16GB models well past the time that was not enough space. I applaud Google for making the hard choice of less free space, but more timely updates.
Android correctly gets a lot of flack for having a fragmented user base which makes it a security and developing nightmare, if this feature were to become standard it would help everyone.
It should also be noted that they are giving away unlimited cloud storage for photos and videos which makes leaving some free space for updates a lot less painful. You probably won't fill your phone with app binaries, it's the photos and videos that take up lots of space.
It's not just about saved minutes. It's also a much safer update mechanism, and it's what is used by a lot of enterprise level network equipment. It allows easy rollback if there's any sort of problem. So it's not just quicker updates, it's quicker, safer updates.
Yeah, so instead of testing their updates, user still has less space JUST IN CASE. Sorry, not buying this. If the phone had expandable storage, then yeah maybe, but this is the 16GB story all over again (woops, 11GB actually and less after the Play apps updates).
> Yeah, so instead of testing their updates, user still has less space JUST IN CASE.
That seems a little short sighted. You seem to assume the only way an update can fail is in because of a software bug, and it's just a matter of not enough testing. If the phone loses power for some reason, or one of the hardware components is misbehaving, I would rather it not brick my phone. This is the industry standard, because shit happens, and CYA is a good thing.
> Sorry, not buying this. If the phone had expandable storage, then yeah maybe, but this is the 16GB story all over again (woops, 11GB actually and less after the Play apps updates).
Buying what? I'm not selling you anything. Is there somewhere I tried to convince you it was ultimately the best solution? I simply explained it had an additional (likely primary) purpose that you were not accounting for.
Security patches prior to N also required recompiling all apps, which takes more than "a couple minutes" for nearly everyone. This, along with not being able to adequately control when & how updates are downloaded & installed, has always been a major pain point. Imho, the new method is a huge improvement in both user friendliness and stability/safety.
Not only that, nearly all of them use the IMX377 :)
That said, there is TREMENDOUS variance in image quality, even if you're using the same sensor. The ISP and color tuning process is extraordinarily complex and severely subjective; the noise filtering and encoding processes are incredibly difficult as well.
And then there is Autofocus; HDR blending; when to do HDR at all; video stabilization; and so on and so on.
You can fuck up good sensor data in post-processing. I find the iPhone 6 and iPhone SE cameras to have too much noise reduction (or maybe JPEG compression) applied. Even in daylight, the images are very soft.
I'm not expecting D810 quality, but I do find it suspect when artifacts appear in blue skies. There is plenty of light, there shouldn't be any noise. Then again, there are a lot of pixels packed into a very small space.
With a 6s or SE or higher you can shoot DNG as well and compare to what Apple spits out of their image processor. I played around in Lightroom for a little bit and the differences were definitely there.
Lightroom Mobile is my current weapon of choice for this, also provides a basic processing interface + sync with Adobe CC so you can grab them from your desktop. There's plenty of others out there, but since I already have a CC subscription I just went with it (as it does require you have at minimum Lightroom CC).
I can't agree with all phones being close in quality at all. Even some high level flagship devices have notably deficient cameras compared to the top of the list. Once you get into the sub $300 Android range, you can get wildly different results. Even the Nexus range had common camera complaints through 6.
Based on what we're seeing here, there might be a viable competitor to the iPhone in this space, but that hasn't really been the case until now.
> Based on what we're seeing here, there might be a viable competitor to the iPhone in this space, but that hasn't really been the case until now.
Let's stop perpetuating this falsehood. Agreed that iPhones produce great results. But as you can see from the previous and current DxOMark results, there have been several cameras that had better image quality than the iPhone. High end Samsung and Sony cameras have been consistently good for a while.
I've owned a couple of those; when I say "this space" I mean top-of-the-line smartphones with great cameras. Those Samsung & Sony phones fulfilled only one of those parameters.
I can't speak to the Sony phones, but for at least a couple of generations (Galaxy S6, S7, Note 5, Note 7, etc.), Samsung phones have been right there with the iPhone in terms of camera quality. The S6 beat the iPhone 6S+ by about the same DxOMark margin as the Pixel is beating the iPhone 7.
Looking at any sort of comparative review, you'll find that on some shots the Samsung produces better results; on others, an iPhone looks better. Each phone may perform a little differently in different situations -- low light, high contrast, whatever. But taken as a whole, at least some Android flagships' cameras have been as good as the iPhone's for a couple of years now.
Nexus phones have been noticeably worse, but they've also tended to cost 60% as much, so it's not exactly an easy comparison to make.
"Nonsense", to the other responses to your question, the 5X camera (along with the 6P) is outstanding! I consistently "out-shoot" friends with the iPhone in side by side photo situations. This usually involves low light so I can't speak to other scenarios. My 5x camera is one the reasons I love the phone, among quite a few others.
I own a 5x. The camera will be the primary reason I upgrade before I really need to. Its mostly decent but occasionally bad: Out of focus (or incorrect focal point), extremely poor in low light, occasionally crashes (not doing anything fancy here). I think the phone overall is good, and I can't imagine using non-vanilla android. But prior to the Pixel announcement (and after owning this and last gen's Nexus) I'd started considering giving the iPhone a try based solely on the camera.
I'm not sure about that. DxO rates Sony's very highly, and they're by far the most objective of all the camera ratings.
Sony gets a lot of hate online from people comparing full-resolution pictures at 100%. Sony has been using 23MP/25MP sensors in their own phones for a while, but in auto mode images are supersampled to 8MP. In manual mode you can use the full resolution. People always compare the full 25MP pictures at 100% to full 12MP pictures from other devices at 100%. And at that point, they will indeed look a bit less good and less detailed. At Sony's default 8MP things actually do look great. And their camera apps are pretty good too.
For me (the owner of both a Z3C and Z5C) the photos don't even come close to the quality of an iPhone. I don't have any objective measure for that, just my own experience - I will always use an iPhone if I can.
Perhaps just as importantly, it takes at least four seconds for the camera app to activate and be ready to take a photo. Simply put, the software is awful.
I used to have a Sony Xperia Z3C and I feel like the photos were acceptable for me. The bigger issue to me was that the cameras were significantly slower than the iPhone camera. I suppose this is only an issue depending on what you're taking but I mainly only take pictures of my cats who never stay in one position for long.
I have to chime in to backup the others here that despite my absolute love affair with the Z3 compact (I had one stolen after a year and bought another immediately to replace it cause I loved the battery life and form factor so much), the camera really was a big letdown. My second Z3 compact finally broke and due to the fact that the current generation of Android devices lacks a sub 5-inch phone with as good of battery life as the Z3 compact had (I'm purposefully ignoring some great Chinese phones cause they lack licensing to be able to run on 4G/LTE in the USA), I ended up switching to iPhone 5 SE and entering iOS for the first time.
So yeah Sony, you used to have shit cameras but amazing battery life, but now the battery life is trending downwards, great job.
And yes everyone, if you look at just the hardware the Sony phone's cameras should be great, but the software and processing has always been so shitty that the pictures you get have been awful despite the great components.
If that's true, curious if sony ever chooses to, or is forced to ("forced" due to a disruption to their supply chain, I mean) raise prices on that component, that would pretty much raise the price for everyone's phones. (Or at least everyone who relies on that component.) In biology, to fend off this type of dependency, i think they call that genetic diversity; I'm sure there's a name for the same in supply chain management.
Fujifilm and Canon still make their own sensors. Fuji's seem pretty good. Canon can't compete, opting to sell DSLRs to people already locked into their system.
This is not true. Fuji's X-Trans sensors are just Sony sensors with a X-Trans filter instead of a Bayer filter. The latest Canon sensors (5D mkIV) lose to the Sony sensors at base ISO but pull ahead at higher ISOs.
There are a few other manufacturers, but Sony has pretty much cornered the market. Much in the same way Intel has when it comes to CPUs.
I know Aptina[1] has made sensors used in smartphones in the past. And was also the initial manufacturer for sensors used by Nikon in their 1 series mirrorless cameras.
Toshiba has manufactured some in the past, but sold their image sensor business to Sony[2] last year.
What's nice from a photographers view: The Lumia 950 offers RAW image files (DNG, 16 MP). That's what I want to get. But I can understand, that a normal user wants to get automatically optimised pictures (even if a tool like Lightroom can do the job a lot better).
I have the Lumia 929 and it offers both jpg and raw at the same time. That means I get the best of both worlds. It also does a second or so of video before the pic is taken, which is pretty cool.
That's a very simplistic view, IMO. The sensor is just one part of the camera. The lens assembly and the image processor play an equally important role (or even better roles) to get a good picture in the end. Even the type of flash makes a big difference. This is why Apple's cameras have had good quality despite using lower megapixel sensors compared to the competition.
There's an easy explanation for it too. Pretty much every single high-end phone released in the last two years uses a Sony sensor. They completely dominate the smartphone sensor market right now.