Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "The Crazy Computations Inside Your Smartphone Cameras" video.

  1. Some of the effects of computational photography used to be achieved with (less precise) chemical methods: you could enhance the sharpness of an image by controlling the dilution and frequency of agitation of the developer as it acted on the negative (enhanced sharpness (technically acuity) might be gained at the expense of fineness of detail, and that was a big thing in the 1960s. Doing this, and much more, digitally gives greater precision and control. At the moment, the basic happy snap from a phone camera is getting to the point where it looks a little over-processed--hyper-reality rather than reality. I notice this when I compare results from my iPhone 13 Pro with the pix I get from "real" cameras with bigger sensors (and much less processing power). But I also like the phone look, most of the time. And you aren't doomed to have it. I haven't tried using the RAW images from my phone, because I'm not doing anything serious any more, but it's there on many makes of phones. What I would like is more ability to control the degree of processing, as you get on a stand-alone camera. Some control is there on phone cameras, but there could be more. But phone cameras are really the social equivalent of the box camera (or the Instamatic, like the little Rollei at the beginning of the video), and it's astonishing how technically capable they are. I would never have dreamed of taking a movie of a bumble bee enjoying itself in the flower of an artichoke, but it was a piece of cake with an iPhone SE (1st gen).
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