Smartphones have Destroyed More Than Just Camera Sales.

Pontoneer said:

Aaron801 said:

... or the mp3 player. I still use a (very old) iPod for that. Having all of that stuff in one little device is very cool, I have to admit, but for various reasons I like using deadicated gizmos better...

Click to expand...

I use the camera quite a lot as an electronic notebook , it’s quicker to just take a snapshot of something than to write it down.

Click to expand...

That's the main reason I use the camera on my phone.... Not so much for what I consider "real photography," though I certianly have seen good work by other folks using camera phones. I'm not against using any tool to make art, but a cell phone camera just isn't my personal preference.

Film cameras destroyed painted portrait sails. Digital cameras destroyed film sales. One day, something will come along and destroy the smartphone.

phone now take good IQ photo comparable with real camera, at least in base ISO

most important to me is almost never miss focus

all camera i have including the recent A6500 miss focus in AF-S

also exposure, i don't know why phone get exposure right more often than real camera

why can't real camera get focus/exposure right?

they get abandon for a reason

john Clinch said:

I think log to the base 10 of 2 is 0.3010. But that is a 35 year old memory

The natural log of 2 is 0.693. Could be wrong but it's a more recent memory

Click to expand...

You did it. Double checked on my calculator.

During my engineering career, never had to pull those numbers from memory.

Speaking of engineering, there is an idiom about someone going non-linear. Non engineers use it all the time. I wonder how many can explain what the meaning of this idiom really is? I admit that I don't know the official meaning, but knowing engineering, I can guess. Anyone want to venture a guess what they think it means?

JimH123 said:

john Clinch said:

I think log to the base 10 of 2 is 0.3010. But that is a 35 year old memory

The natural log of 2 is 0.693. Could be wrong but it's a more recent memory

Click to expand...

You did it. Double checked on my calculator.

During my engineering career, never had to pull those numbers from memory.

Speaking of engineering, there is an idiom about someone going non-linear. Non engineers use it all the time. I wonder how many can explain what the meaning of this idiom really is? I admit that I don't know the official meaning, but knowing engineering, I can guess. Anyone want to venture a guess what they think it means?

Click to expand...

Going off on a tangent, going off the rails?? when you are up to you a*se in alligators it's hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp.

Maybe.

Lert said:

JimH123 said:

john Clinch said:

I think log to the base 10 of 2 is 0.3010. But that is a 35 year old memory

The natural log of 2 is 0.693. Could be wrong but it's a more recent memory

Click to expand...

You did it. Double checked on my calculator.

During my engineering career, never had to pull those numbers from memory.

Speaking of engineering, there is an idiom about someone going non-linear. Non engineers use it all the time. I wonder how many can explain what the meaning of this idiom really is? I admit that I don't know the official meaning, but knowing engineering, I can guess. Anyone want to venture a guess what they think it means?

Click to expand...

Going off on a tangent, going off the rails?? when you are up to you a*se in alligators it's hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp.

Maybe.

Click to expand...

Maybe. But I have an actual engineering problem in mind that drives the idiom. Non-linear actually refers to some actual problem.

Pontoneer said:

john Clinch said:

The reality is that a modern smart phone is just better than the gadgets it replaced

My old sat Nav didn't know where the crashes where to reroute me

Click to expand...

my car radio still alerts me of hold ups

Pontoneer said:

Spotify on my phone uses a higher bit rate than my old MP3 player. It had better had found quality than my parents record player or tape deck. It can also access 4 million sings

Click to expand...

thats if you have an Internet connection , which isn’t everywhere. A good record player is still better than any digital player ; ditto tape recorders of whichever format

Pontoneer said:

The camera in even this phone is better than the one my parents owned in the 1970s. Every day I see great phone shots shared on my phone

Click to expand...

depends on the camera : my Rolleiflex would still hold its own for picture quality with any modern camera , and much better than any phone camera

Pontoneer said:

So I refuse to join the it's all terrible brigade

It's also ironic to see people in a forum owned by Amazon complaining about data harvesting...

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

In most cases the points you make agree with with my thoughts. The best 70s camera and record player exceed what a smart phone can do. But for most Western consumers the quality has improved with the smart phone

The radio traffic alert is actually the one where the phone has taken us the furthest. Navigating with google maps is amazing. Bringing my daughter hinge from university there are 2 main routes. The motorways are faster if they are clear. It displays the time for both routes based on current traffic conditions with time estimates for each delay. It live updates you and reroutes you around problems

Ps Spotify will save as much music too my phone as it will hold for off line use. The only condition is that the phone must hand shake the internet every day 30 days to confirm my subscription.

--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/john_clinch/
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/john_clinch/popular-interesting/

JimH123 said:

john Clinch said:

I think log to the base 10 of 2 is 0.3010. But that is a 35 year old memory

The natural log of 2 is 0.693. Could be wrong but it's a more recent memory

Click to expand...

You did it. Double checked on my calculator.

During my engineering career, never had to pull those numbers from memory.

Speaking of engineering, there is an idiom about someone going non-linear. Non engineers use it all the time. I wonder how many can explain what the meaning of this idiom really is? I admit that I don't know the official meaning, but knowing engineering, I can guess. Anyone want to venture a guess what they think it means?

Click to expand...

I teach physics for a living

The log to the base 10 I just weirdly remember from school. The ln2 crops up every year because decay constant times half is ln2. But the data sheet use to say 0.693

I talk about non linear all the time. If I'm correct it's a huge part of what I do. Most students assume all change is linear. Some changes are. If the wire is twice as long it has twice the resistance. But if the wire has twice the diameter it has one quarter the resistance. That's the non linear bit

That feeling when a crowd of people are trying to take a photo with their shoddy phones of a subject that's inaccessible + far away and I go in there and whip out my cheap m50+55-250 and get a sharp shot of the subject.

I was reading a newspaper article recently about how sales of paper maps in the uk have been rising consistently over the past four years.

The same newspaper predicted the effective demise of the paper map back in 2014 owing to the explosion in sales of GPS devices. What has actually happened is society came to its senses and realised the two forms of navigational aid are complimentary, not competitive.

I'd suggest the smartphone hasn't lost its gimmick status yet.

mandm said:

Click to expand...

We had a shooting this Morning - 3 FF DSLR users and one model. After we went to lunch and as usual we started comparing photos on the Library on our smartphones:

- the two photographers showed us some excellent holiday snaps done on smartphones. They use their DSLR's for "serious" shooting and do the rest on smartphones - using some creative angles to get over the limitations of the devive

- the Teacher did a group shot on his iPhone 6. Then the model got out her smartphone (the latest Galaxy Note 9) and did a much better group shot on it, quite simply

If you're just going to do holiday snaps and not print bigger than 8x10 inches then I think that the current generation of smartphones has become more than good enough

--

Franglais91 said:

mandm said:

Click to expand...

We had a shooting this Morning - 3 FF DSLR users and one model. After we went to lunch and as usual we started comparing photos on the Library on our smartphones:

- the two photographers showed us some excellent holiday snaps done on smartphones. They use their DSLR's for "serious" shooting and do the rest on smartphones - using some creative angles to get over the limitations of the devive

- the Teacher did a group shot on his iPhone 6. Then the model got out her smartphone (the latest Galaxy Note 9) and did a much better group shot on it, quite simply

If you're just going to do holiday snaps and not print bigger than 8x10 inches then I think that the current generation of smartphones has become more than good enough

--

Click to expand...

As I said in another post, smart phones brought more people to photography than everything else combined.

My wife NEVER wanted a camera when we were younger, never took pictures with mine. Now she snaps right, left and center an is quite good at it. Virtually all our friends take pics with their phones and share them when we meet. Many of them never abandoned their SLRs, they never had them

On the other hand, some that were into photography before, still are, in addition to smartphone photography.

Franglais91 said:

http://charlestompkins.book.fr

Click to expand...

Neil-O said:

I was reading a newspaper article recently about how sales of paper maps in the uk have been rising consistently over the past four years.

The same newspaper predicted the effective demise of the paper map back in 2014 owing to the explosion in sales of GPS devices. What has actually happened is society came to its senses and realised the two forms of navigational aid are complimentary, not competitive.

I'd suggest the smartphone hasn't lost its gimmick status yet.

Click to expand...

As a business traveler, I couldn’t disagree more. The smart phone isn’t a gimmick, it has became vital.

+100 your list, Ron.

sportyaccordy said:

Humanity has survived largely through rapid innovation and adaptation though and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Click to expand...

The rapid pace of innovation is quite recent and fuelled by cheap energy. It will be our downfall.

john Clinch said:

JimH123 said:

john Clinch said:

I think log to the base 10 of 2 is 0.3010. But that is a 35 year old memory

The natural log of 2 is 0.693. Could be wrong but it's a more recent memory

Click to expand...

You did it. Double checked on my calculator.

During my engineering career, never had to pull those numbers from memory.

Speaking of engineering, there is an idiom about someone going non-linear. Non engineers use it all the time. I wonder how many can explain what the meaning of this idiom really is? I admit that I don't know the official meaning, but knowing engineering, I can guess. Anyone want to venture a guess what they think it means?

Click to expand...

I teach physics for a living

The log to the base 10 I just weirdly remember from school. The ln2 crops up every year because decay constant times half is ln2. But the data sheet use to say 0.693

I talk about non linear all the time. If I'm correct it's a huge part of what I do. Most students assume all change is linear. Some changes are. If the wire is twice as long it has twice the resistance. But if the wire has twice the diameter it has one quarter the resistance. That's the non linear bit

Click to expand...

Yep. The twice-as-long wire has to push electrons twice as far through the same size pipe. The twice-as-thick wire is a pipe with four times the cross section (to carry four times as much flow) and only has to push electrons through the original length.

A graph of the first process should be a straight line (linear); a graph of the second should be a curve (non-linear).

sybersitizen said:

john Clinch said:

JimH123 said:

john Clinch said:

I think log to the base 10 of 2 is 0.3010. But that is a 35 year old memory

The natural log of 2 is 0.693. Could be wrong but it's a more recent memory

Click to expand...

You did it. Double checked on my calculator.

During my engineering career, never had to pull those numbers from memory.

Speaking of engineering, there is an idiom about someone going non-linear. Non engineers use it all the time. I wonder how many can explain what the meaning of this idiom really is? I admit that I don't know the official meaning, but knowing engineering, I can guess. Anyone want to venture a guess what they think it means?

Click to expand...

I teach physics for a living

The log to the base 10 I just weirdly remember from school. The ln2 crops up every year because decay constant times half is ln2. But the data sheet use to say 0.693

I talk about non linear all the time. If I'm correct it's a huge part of what I do. Most students assume all change is linear. Some changes are. If the wire is twice as long it has twice the resistance. But if the wire has twice the diameter it has one quarter the resistance. That's the non linear bit

Click to expand...

The twice-as-long wire has to push electrons twice as far through the same size pipe. The twice-as-thick wire is a pipe with four times the cross section (to carry four times as much flow) and only has to push electrons through the original length. I'm not sure how graphs of the two processes would look.

Click to expand...

OK, here's my guess as to where this idiom came from. First, an idiom must have something that its based on to even have gotten started in the first place.

Before there were transistors, there were vacuum tubes. Now a vacuum tube is a voltage amplifier. Put in a small sine wave signal, and get back out a larger sine wave signal. But there are limits to what can be injected into the tube. The operating range of inputs is expected to be in the linear portion of the vacuum tube. If you should drive this vacuum tube too hard, the vacuum tube goes into what is called the non-linear region. And if this was an amplifier being used for music, for example, while staying in the linear portion, the music gets louder and louder, but it does not distort. Once it is turned up too high, the amplifier enters non-linear mode, and the signal starts to distort badly. Maybe you have experience hearing a teenager play their music so loud that it ceases sounding like music and becomes ugly noise. This effect can be heard with transistor amplifiers too, but its been around so long, that I think that it started with vacuum tubes.

My guess is that early engineers (we are all over the place) started calling this region by the phrase "going non-linear" and others liked the term and started to apply it to all sorts of things/people going wrong.

Now this is my best guess. I can't find the source in the online free idiom dictionary. But who else but an engineer would even think up this term?

In thinking of vacuum tubes, my thoughts have moved to wondering just how big the Sony A9 camera would be if it was based on vacuum tubes and the memory cards based on ferrite core memory. As a clue to how big this would be, the first large computer, named ENIAC, built in 1945, and which was used to help win the war, is described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

hint: The Sony A9 camera has way, way, more computing power than ENIAC and it has way, way more memory.

The car destroyed the sales of:

• Blacksmiths
• Carriage makers
• Horses
• I'm sure a lot of other services that we don't even know because we weren't around then

Instead we created:

• Auto dealers
• Repair shops
• Parking structures
• Paved roads
• Etc.

In a capitalist society, when a better product (in whatever ways that are important to the consumer) is created, a paradigm shift happens and this is known as "Creative Destruction". Smartphones are no different than countless other new technologies in this regard.

By your logic, we should all be riding horses. The horses and carriages still exist, they're just niche for experts and enthusiasts.

PhotoFactor said:

The car destroyed the sales of:

• Blacksmiths
• Carriage makers
• Horses
• I'm sure a lot of other services that we don't even know because we weren't around then

Instead we created:

• Auto dealers
• Repair shops
• Parking structures
• Paved roads
• Etc.

In a capitalist society, when a better product (in whatever ways that are important to the consumer) is created, a paradigm shift happens and this is known as "Creative Destruction". Smartphones are no different than countless other new technologies in this regard.

By your logic, we should all be riding horses. The horses and carriages still exist, they're just niche for experts and enthusiasts.

Click to expand...

We all should be riding horses. Like Duthraki.









--
"Very funny, Scotty! Now beam me down my clothes."
"He's dead, Jim! You grab his tri-corder. I'll get his wallet."

And digital cameras killed Instamatics.

Which killed Brownies.

But we didn't have an internet then, so geezers couldn't go on forums to complain about it; we had to settle for whinging in barber shops, shuffleboard courts, and old folks homes. Darn kids!