this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
1433 points (97.3% liked)
Greentext
4379 readers
1759 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
two people can argue whether or not that matters, we might as well call every lossy compression format ever useless because it degrades the quality of the final video significantly.
im sure they have documentation on automatic camera switching, and other documentation on all the other "features" it involves. God forbid you use a third party app to interact with your camera. I'm buying a phone because of the computer, not because of the cameras, i just don't need them, and yet now its YET another feature i have to contend with. One might say i should just ignore them, but alas i am stuck here, spending money on them, i am damn well getting the value out of my purchase, regardless of how useless it is.
yeah, doesn't limit it to phones though. you provided an example as to why generic hardware would be beneficial for context. I expanded upon it, explaining why i didnt think it was a very good reason. My phone is 7 years old, and quite literally, cost nothing.
I.E. using the camera that my phone has, when i need it, and just living with the fact that it's not the best quality in the world. 3 more cameras might improve my photo slightly. I don't really care though. Modern flagship phones will take "4k" photos. I really don't understand why you would need much more. You can do a 2x digital zoom and still retain reasonable quality, assuming the original isn't making up pixels. Which is very well might be.
Having photos of everything is cool and all, kids i will excuse from this due to societal reasons. But most things in life, that you can take a picture of, you probably shouldn't. Sure it's cool when a hawk lands in your yard, or you see a new bird that you haven't before. You could pull out your phone, and take a picture or a video, or you could also just sit there, and watch it.
It's always bothered me when people stop the entire group, to take a forced group photo because "look we're having fun" when we could be having fun instead. It's a buzzkill frankly. If i'm with my friends or family i want to interact with them and talk with them, because i like them. I don't want to take pictures with them. Spontaneous photos i have less of a problem with, especially if its in the moment. They tell a much better story anyway, which is what mediocre phone cameras excel at.
I feel like since the invention of phone cameras, particularly good ones, people have just been photographing EVERYTHING, which does less good than if they just didn't. Scroll through an average family photo roll, and see how many of those photos are actually worth telling a story over. Most of them have no story, because they were forced. Some of them have "an" story, because they're tangentially related. And then a few are actually interesting.
I really just don't think you need that many cameras. Wanna put two on there? Sure, do your box standard "phone camera" and then put a zoom camera. You need nothing more. Anything else is just a waste of time. If you REALLY insist on having more than 2, do a fish eye. By that point you're hitting diminishing returns though. Also a point of contention for me, why does the base model iphone 15 have 2 (might be 3 i have no clue) cameras, but then also have usb 2.0? This isn't a cheap phone. It should just have usb 3.0.
expanding on the CPU GPU analogy you used prior, this is like owning a mini computer in the 70's 80's all of them were bespoke, they all did for all intents and purposes, basically the same thing. Some of them specialized slightly more than others (most specialization was done with third party hardware though) You just kinda pick one, and then use it. It's fine. Even though technically having multiple different ones would be ideal, nobody did that, unless they wanted to do more computing. Though in this case it's kind of hard to "use more than one camera at a time" In fact it's pretty heavily limited, i think on apple hardware, there is one app, that kind of lets you do it. That's it.
Lossy compression is a trade off between loss of quality and file size. You can objectively test whether one file is better quality than another at the same file size or whether one is smaller than the other at the same quality.
You can read technical websites to learn how it works just like you can read about multi threading or other hardware features of your phone.
But to the end user there is there is no feature to learn. It is the same pinch to zoom whether you have one camera or three. My technologically illiterate mother in law uses her iPhone to take pictures and has no idea her phone has more than one camera. Just like she has no idea her phone has more than one CPU.
I didn't change to the context of PC's or generic.
"Ranting about cameras you don’t use is like ranting about CPU cores you don’t use. I don’t game on my phone, where’s my phone without a GPU??? "
Do I have to preface every single sentence with "on a phone"? Am I now allowed to misinterpret every sentence that doesn't contain the phrase "on a phone" as meaning you are talking about cars?
15 years ago 100 million people a year bought digital cameras to get 3x-5x optical zoom (the typical range of consumer digital cameras). There is a huge difference with optical zoom and you still have digital zoom to get even more. The wide lens is needed when you can't frame everything in the shot and can't physically move farther back. Again consumer points and shoot digital cameras had that feature because they had the physical space to use a wide lens on a expanding mount to give the range. Now phone can match consumer digital cameras from 15 years ago but have to do it with a separate lens because of size constraints.
Why a wide lens? You want the Christmas dinner table shot of everyone and can't move farther back in the room. You want the shot of the entire orchestra but can't get out of your seat, walk 5 rows back and block the audience. People bought cameras with a wide lens and good zoom before smartphones.
You edit video. What made the video ? A camera without zoom or interchangeable lens? Of course not.
I already quoted with sources the 100 million cameras a year every year. Before that it was analog cameras. People have been taking garbage photos for as long as there have been consumer cameras. The boring carousel slide show of vacations was a staple comedy joke 40 years ago. At least now the photos aren't also blurry.
Well there you go, 3 camera modules just like my Pixel ( not including the front). It can do it with only 3 because of the periscope lens (there was a consumer compact digital camera that did the same trick 15 years ago). But the periscope lens requires more physical space. On a smaller phone manufacturers use more lenses to cover the same zoom ranges. If phones could be as large as a camera with a long lens sticking out the back, all phones would need only one lens just like cameras from 15 years ago.
Phone manufacturers add lenses to equal the features of compact digital cameras from 15 years ago but in the form factor of a phone. People loved their digital cameras. Now phones can replace them.
Again, the switching between cameras isn't something the user is aware of. It is completely seamless with not even an option on the UI to know that it is happening.
ignoring the circular reasoning here, my point is not that it's impossible to gauge the difference, my point is that you have to be careful with what you state and what you measure. Can you objectively quanity the quality difference and efficiency of two different lossy compression algorithms? Yes, theoretically you can. Now go that and create a model for it applicable to every real world use case that compression algorithm is going to see. That's the hard part. Also not to mention the fact that it likely doesn't even matter. The reason we use lossy compression is because to a point, it's impossible for us to notice any significant degradation in quality. That point from person to person, varies.
Those lack depth and specific information, i wouldn't be making that point if that wasn't a problem. And besides joe shmoes blog on why the [insert item] here has [insert feature] here might not even be correct. Or present all the information required even.
it has more than one core, not more than one cpu, a cpu is loosely defined as an explicit piece of a hardware, that can perform the tasks of a CPU. You can have multi cpu configurations, but you can also have cpus with multiple cores. This is a semantic complaint though.
i did, because that's what im familiar with, though it does also apply to things outside of PC hardware, naturally, as evidenced by the fact i brought up embedded devices.
no but it's also probably good to not make arguments after making an assumption. If you want to preface an argument with a known assumption you can. You asked me if i edited video on my phone, and then continued to make an argument as to why it was weird that i said that. That's just not something you do.
literally not a camera? I have edited ONE single video (sourced from real footage), and as i said, it was perfectly fine. The biggest issue with it was an audio problem the hardware created, ironically enough. Everything else i edit is screen recorded. With OBS. And like i already said, if i want better quality, i'll just buy an actual camera, for the same price as a top of the line smartphone. And then get modularity, as well as other convenient features that make shooting video for production much easier.
this is not explicitly true, go look at film camera enthusiasts in the modern day. One of the selling points is taking photos that don't waste film "make you shots count" even then it's only been multiplied by 10 fold.
i'd much rather not spend modern premiums to get features that are a decade old. I think that's reasonable. Especially when we start talking hardware real estate, these camera arrays take up a considerable portion of the phone. You could put a headphone jack there, more battery, better hardware, cooling, etc...
Especially when i can buy a modern used camera for a few hundred bucks, and get image quality MILES better than any phone sensor could ever think to produce. As well as flexibility with how i use it. I'm objectively just not buying a phone for better camera quality. It's a non starter, it's like saying every car NEEDS to be sporty. And now suddenly everybody is buying trucks and SUVs because they prefer the lofty ride of trucks over small cars with stiffer suspensions and smaller tires. Even though they might handle better, nobody cares. They want something more "luxurious" rather than performant. It's just not a good use of money.
this isn't true. Unless you place the cameras in the EXACT same location, there will be differences in parallax. As well as camera sensor quality itself. The iphone 15 when zooming, while recording has very explicit artifacts from switching between cameras. Not to mention the difference in quality due to the fact they have different lenses. It's not as significant with photos. But all of those still apply. And besides, maybe i dont want it to forcibly switch, maybe i want to have control over the hardware i paid for and own?
You can't tell me that the minor difference in quality between camera A and B is significant enough to warrant B over A or vice versa. And then ignore the obvious negative implications that multiple cameras have. Or tell me that lossy compression can be objectively quantified in an explicit manner that removes ALL doubt present about the efficacy of its algorithm. And then tell me the very physical nature of having two cameras in two different spots, means they take two different pictures just doesn't matter at all.
That wasn't your claim. You said all lossy compression is useless. Is a pixel there that was in the source? It's a test that anyone can agree on. Which is beside the point that a better quality camera is an objectively testable feature.
That two cameras could give images that are so close as to result in subjective judgement as to which is better isn't what we are discussing. Unless you are going to get weird and claim you prefer a blurry pixelated image.
Because it isn't a problem! If you want to look at the Android source code and see how it multi threads based on the number big cores and little cores you can. But an end user does not need to read that documentation to use their phone. It is completely transparent to the phone user.
Nor is how the camera software distributes control to various camera modules a problem for end users. How the camera takes the photo is completely transparent to the end user.
Most of those 100 million cameras purchasers every year were not buying a camera for the first time in their life. Most were upgrading from their old camera. They bought the new camera to take better photos.
I already linked the study that showed people buy new phones primarily to take better photos.
The best camera is the one you have with you. You claimed you almost never take photos but now you are claiming you would buy another gadget to carry around all the time?
Yes a professional comparing a non zoomed and zoomed could tell they were taken from a different position. So what? The end user doesn't need to care. The UI is pinch to zoom. That's it.
Besides the actual parallax change will be smaller than a human hand is capable of being steady. The lenses are 1cm apart. Taking a picture 10 m away ( and really you would use zoom for things much farther ) yields an angle change of .01 degrees. Hand motion is why photographers have the 1/f rule. Your hands can't keep a camera perfectly steady.
Then download a pro camera app. But your original claim that extra lenses are a burden on the end user is false. The default camera UI presents a seamless UI to the user just like the user doesn't have to know how many and what types of cores are in their phone in order to use it.
Is your claim that there is absolutely no measurable difference between any cameras ever? Because that's what you are arguing.
I claim my Pixel 7pro camera is objectively better than the camera in my 11 year old Galaxy Nexus. This isn't iPhone 15 vs Pixel 8 pro where both are so equally matched that it becomes subjective.
You claimed you don't see a need for more than one lens on a smartphone. I explained the technical reasons why phones have use multiple lenses to do what compact digital cameras can do with one lens.
Consumer now buy smartphones every few years for the better camera just like they bought better cameras every few years before smartphones existed.
as an analogue to your point about the camera being objectively better. My point is that you can't boil everything down to objective facts, even if it is true, there are a number of other variables.
With lossy compression, that quite literally gets thrown out the window the second it's used. If that's the standard then all lossy compression is bad. The question is at what point, does N amount of deviation from the original image, make it noticeably different from the original image, to the point that it negatively affects the image more than the space it saves. That's the hard part to quantify. And yet we use lossy compression everywhere. Literally nobody can agree what standard of compression is acceptable. I for one never touch HW accelerated encoding because it's not efficient, and introduces artifacts. Yet other people are perfectly content using it. I would much rather store the original source file, even if it's insanely big, over HW encoding it down to something more manageable, and potentially forever altering that file.
It depends on what standardized photo testing you use. If i can take a photo roughly 2-10 feet in front of me, and it looks decent. I do not care about anything else. If it's outside of that range my eyesight is bad enough it doesn't matter anyway. A phone with a built in zoom lense might be able to take better far shot photos. But i never take those, so it's useless to me.
i mean, if we include photo processing, that's just not true, unless major phone manufacturers have started open sourcing their software since i last checked.
i didnt look at it, but im not going to discount it either, frankly i just don't care. I just don't think more than like 30-40% of why people buy a new phone is to take better photos, maybe thats how they justify spending that money to themselves, i could see that. But JUST for better photos? idk. Maybe i'm just a bad capitalist who doesnt spend enough money.
as you already said "the best camera is the one you have with you, you continually brought up editing, and real world use cases where having a better camera would make sense. Which is where i would use that actual camera, i just don't really care about the quality of the pictures i take that aren't supposed to be actual media. It's fine enough as is. Being any better isn't going to appreciably change that.
i didn't say that, i just stated that at a certain point, an end user is going to stop caring about a "feature" when it's feature set is severely convoluted. Maybe i actually just care about what i spend my money on, and other people don't. But i like knowing what im buying, before i spend my money on it.
no my claim is that anything that is 80% efficacy is going to be more than fine, your claim is that 99% efficacy is worse than 100% efficacy, which is true, but not perceptible.
i claim my iphone 5 as having a better camera than the leapfrog leappad. My point there, even though you have butchered it incredibly, is quite literally the difference between a pixel 8 and an iphone 15. You can't go back to before multi cameras, because a modern single camera phone will still have improved since then.
i know, but for the same reason that i don't care about a 4090 ti being faster than a 1070 due to its price being fascinatingly high. I don't care about phones with more than one camera having better camera quality. I just dont want that feature.
Literally this entire thread started with "still don't understand the appeal of multi camera phones" or something like that, it's paraphrased. I know there are technical reasons one would do that, but i just can't justify it for what it provides. Unless i see an actual proper realistic breakdown, of which exactly NONE exist. So i couldn't line them up even if i wanted to. I'm just left to my own devices to see what else could be done. And so i just dont care. Same reason i dont care about phones having high refresh rates, it just wastes processing power, it feels smoother sure. I don't really care though. I use it like 10 minutes out of my day maybe. Swiping sideways at 90hz doesn't matter if i dont use it anyway. (dont bother explaining the difference to me, because i own multiple 144hz displays, i already know.)
And my point is that you can measure blurry image from a clear one. It's not subjective. Is a glass back better? Maybe. Is one photo better than another? That can be measured. It is only when two cameras take photos are almost indistinguishable that it becomes subjective.
There is a difference between blurring a little and blurring a lot. I already discussed the trade of of size vs quality that allows you to compare lossy compression. That's why JPEG has a quality option and chroma subsampling option. You can control how much detail is lost. If it literally got thrown out the window, a jpeg could not be recognizable as the original.
I already said it is a trade off of size vs appearance. You are setting up a strawman of "what if we had two cameras that made almost identical photos"
Again, no. This is about taking a photo. The process of taking a photo is the same in my current 3 camera phone as your single camera phone. Your claim that it adds complication to the user is false.
No I didn't. Please quote. You said you did video editing on a PC which was a complete non sequitur to my comment about your phone having 8 cores.
What are you talking about? Where did I mention percentages before? The Pixel 7pro camera is obviously better than my Pixel 3a in the same way my Nikon DSLR with 300mm lens was obviously better than my Canon S100 digital Elph compact camera. The Pixel 7pro needs 3 cameras to be better than the 3a. 1 camera is wide which the 3a couldn't do. One camera is about the same as the 3a (probably better if I zoomed carefully). One camera is optical zoom which is so much better than digital zoom it is clearly better. But although I happen to know the details because its my hobby, it requires nothing in the UI to use the 3 cameras. It is completely automatic with the same UI as my older Pixel 3a.
??? There is no significant difference between a Pixel 8 and an iPhone 15. They both have 2 camera modules on the back. The 8 pro and 15 pro both have 3 camera modules on the back.
You said you didn't see the need for more camera lenses. A Pixel 8 pro can take noticeably better photos than your current iPhone 5 because of the additional lenses.
It only seems convoluted to you because you haven't used it. You think it must be complicated in the same way someone would think having multiple cores in their phone cpu would be convoluted and hard to use.
The iPhone 5 is so old there aren't going to be direct comparisons. (or was that a typo and you meant you have an iphone 15) Can I argue that a 10 year old Intel PC is no faster than a current high end AMD PC because there are no websites that directly compare 10 year old PCs to current PCs? There are dozens of reputable websites that reviewed the iPhone 5. There are also reviews of the Pixel 7 pro. GSMarena.com even goes far enough back to directly compare an iPhone 7 to a Pixel 8pro. And that's not even factoring in optical zoom.
You don't care but other do. It doesn't have anything to do with modern phone culture. People upgraded their cameras to take better photos even before digital cameras.
if it was literally thrown out the window, we would be talking semantics and philosophy. Moot point anyway. Your proposal was that the pixel be identical to the pixel on the previous photo. You can make an image using a bunch of pennies in varying states of oxidation that resemble an image. You cant spit an image into an ASCII converter, and it will resemble that image. Those are quite literally not the same picture. Your proposal defined a provable system, to demonstrate that the images were identical. I said they were objectively not because they are not. Image compression also isn't explicitly blurring. But again moot point.
My point there was demonstrating that your approach to defining quality was bad.
it's more complicated than size vs appearance, but generally. Size vs quality, is how lossy compression is considered. HW accel av1 and software av1 are going to look and output vastly different media, at different sizes. They work differently, even though they use the same underlying codec. My point is that nothing is an objective binary state.
Yeah, if we obfuscate it down to ignore everything else, it's fully transparent. Much like cigarettes are good for you because they make you feel normal. Dont worry about the lung cancer stuff it's normal and happens to everybody.
do you not understand the concept of an analogy? Or even the concept of drastically simplifying concepts in a way that can be easily explained and translated between individuals without having complete and total understanding between those two individuals? it'd be weird since that's explicitly what you're doing. That statement is explaining my point of view, and explaining your arguments in turn. It should be fairly obvious why i just don't care.
the pixel 7 pro was released sometime in october in 2022. The 3a was released in august of 2020. That's 2 years between the models. Not to mention the obvious model disparity between the 3a and the 7 pro, the 7 pro being $900 and the 3a appearing to be $400, they are objectively not in the same class of phone, nor are they even in the same time period. The majority of difference in camera quality is going to be down to the sensors themselves improving, rather than having more cameras.
yeah, because any two phones today, one produced with one camera, and one produced with three, are going to take pretty similar photos. It has nothing to do with the amount of cameras, it has everything to do with the amount of capability between the two. If you think back, you'll remember my point about percentages, which seemed to have confused you. This is a literal product based interpretation of that statement. Which also seems to have gone over your head.
this is actually just wrong. The iphone 5, released in 2012. the pixel 8 pro seems to have released sometime in 2023. More than a decade apart. It takes better photos because the camera is just better. The sensor is significantly bigger, the bump well, exists now. All qualities that lead to a better camera quality. The pixel 8 pro with one camera, or three cameras, is going to take the same kind of photo regardless of what i do with it. It does have an ultrawide, of which i genuinely have no idea what i would use for. And a telephoto, which has some obvious uses. but nothing that i care about. The instances in which i would use those cameras, are still going to look bad.
if we're bringing the concept of multi core cpus in again, then i can actually hit you with some knowledge truths on this one. Multi core cpus are significantly more convoluted to handle from an OS perspective. This is why they didn't exist for the longest time. Instead of everything running sequentially on one core, there are multiple, some of them are even "phantom" cores, that only exist when the main core is busy. Which means you need to figure out a way to divide cpu time, across cores, presumably evenly because that would be the most effective manner of doing it. While also not incurring significant overhead costs, such as latency, and even cpu cycles. Because if your queue handling is bad, you might as well just have a single core. Especially if you can block up the queue, and crawl the system to a halt.
Yet another little fun fact btw. This is true for all processors, but especially so on multi core processors, to my knowledge single core processors just tended to function a little bit differently (prior to modern multi core architectures) to ensure this wasn't a problem (hardware interrupts) But on multi core cpus you need a way to ensure that a piece of software accessing the cpu can't hog the entire cpu, blocking out the OS that's managing it, and it's scheduler as well, this would cause a dead lock. Which means you wouldn't be able to do anything. Even if the end user experience is transparent, it's still more convoluted, shitting on the carpet and sweeping it under the rug doesn't remove the fact that you shit on the carpet. Unless we're arguing that convolution doesn't exist, im not sure how else it would work. Convolution incurs costs, and costs incur many things.
i could very well argue that you must think cpus are simple because you don't understand them. An objective truth of design and philosophy, is anything that adds more complexity, makes it more convoluted. There is no way around this.
even then it wouldn't be accurate, the iphone 5 is 12 years old now. The iphone 6 would be a better argument, though still not a good one. Ironically enough, dankpods recently did a video where he compared an iphone 15 and an iphone 5c. The 15 was better, but both were still bad.
there are websites for that, so you couldn't argue that anyway. Though again moot point.
because i guess taking photos was never a part of phone culture. That was just something people did randomly for no reason, and by accident. I dont integrate with the modern culture, which is why i detest it so much. A lot of people, you included don't mind it, and have opinions on it. A lot of people, me included, can't stand it because i don't want to spend exorbitant prices on what is more than required.
You keep trying to claim that quality difference is subjective. If that is your point then the JPEG quality option does nothing. Quality 1 is the same as Quality 99 because the pixels change. It is a false claim. You can objectively measure the difference from the original. Again this isn't discussing two images that are so similar that the differences are subjective such as two different encoders both at Quality 99.
I am going to repeat this again because you keep ignoring it. I AM NOT DISCUSSING TWO IMAGES WHERE THE IMAGE IS SO SIMLAR THAT QUALITY BECOMES SUBJECTIVE.
You said this, "your claim is that 99% efficacy is worse than 100% efficacy," after I had already said:
"I AM NOT DISCUSSING TWO IMAGES WHERE THE IMAGE IS SO SIMLAR THAT QUALITY BECOMES SUBJECTIVE."
There is no difference in the UI. It isn't obfuscation but presenting a complex task as simple to the user. Just like all modern technology. You don't have to know how the OS multitasks to post your replies.
Stop with the chatGPT crap. I was writing a VxD driver for Windows 3.1 32 years ago.
When typing your reply, what did you have to do to control your multiple CPU's so that you could type and post your reply. Did you have to set the affinity of the browser process to a particular core? Did you manually schedule the threads? No? I thought so.
Show me a website that compares a computer from when the iphone 5 came out directly to a computer today. Yes there are benchmarks archived of PC's from 2012 which can be compared to benchmarks in 2023. But no one has reviewed them side by side today. If you just want static numbers for an iPhone 5 there's DXOMark and GSMArena.com.
So that's your claim? An iPhone 5's camera is as good as any camera unless someone has done a review with a direct comparison? It must be as good as a Canon EOS R6 Mark II because no one has tested them side by side? Really? When you do video editing work, was the source all recorded nothing better than iPhone 5 because its all the same?
The first mass marketed camera was a produced by Alphonse Giroux in 1839. Although everyone didn't have a camera until the release of the Kodak brownie in 1900. It has nothing to do with the phone. Adding the camera to the phone made it possible to not have to buy and carry a separate device to do what everyone had been doing for over 100 years.
You use a desktop computer and do video editing! It's the phone camera users who are traditional.
i'm claiming that it's both objective, and subjective and that in this case, for me, it's primarily subjective, rather than objective, based on my usage.
you asked me where the percentages came from, i explained it.
or what you could quite literally argue is, the definition of obfuscation, though in this case i probably meant abstraction. They're basically the same tbh.
it's not chatgpt, also good to know you wrote insert device drivers for windows.
no, but my system did, having a cursory understanding of this stuff and how it works allows you to better utilize your hardware.
cpubenchmark and basically every other synthetic benchmark tool out there. cpus are a bundle of transistors, it's not hard to bench them (though it's not that simple either) phone cameras are a little more involved. You can't really just go "bigger number more better"
i literally have like two paragraphs explaining my thoughts. Not sure why you even put that in there.
amusingly, not my claim at all, the first phone that released, which really did numbers, had a camera on it. Every phone since then has had a camera. Although i should probably mention contextually here, that i am SPECIFICALLY referring to touch screen phones, the modern ones, which really invented the whole philosophy of modern phone culture, the thing that i was specifically referring to in my previous comment. Since we already established that lack of context is bad and what not.
cool, still not a normie though. Unfortunately.