EOS R6 Vs iPhone 13 Pro for Photography (PICS)

Oh well...

https://www.dxomark.com/category/mobile-reviews/

tkbslc wrote:

Larawanista wrote:

Oh well...

https://www.dxomark.com/category/mobile-reviews/

Unless you turn on the USA filter. Since we can't have most Chinese Androids.

Sad but true. The software and hardware advances in this side of the world puts the iPhone at least a generation behind.

Pickles says thanks, Marco… 😉

MikeJ9116 wrote:

Most dedicated camera users have been dismissing the relentless fast pace of smartphone camera tech advancement for a decade. Even in the face of irrefutable evidence that smartphone tech is the future of mainstream photography. I have been saying for some time that traditional photography gear is ever moving toward a hobby that will be practiced by those with a lot of disposable income or very successful professionals.

We are seeing smart phone tech move to smaller ILC devices with MFT sensors. This is in its infancy but the trajectory is the same as smartphones. What smartphones did to the P&S segment these new MFT (and 1" sensor or smaller) devices will do to the ILC segment. These devices will be small, lightweight and, most importantly, AFFORDABLE. They will offer superb IQ, capability and nearly all the features of a smartphone.

If the current trends continue, the last Canon camera I will buy is one with an APS-C sensor and RF mount, if it comes to pass. I have FF cameras that are plenty good to meet my requirements for the rare times I need one. I am looking to greatly reduce the load of camera gear I carry as I get older. I welcome what the new generation of smartphone tech based photography gear will bring. IMO, what is coming will be nearly as big a revolution to photography as the move to digital sensors was over 20 years ago.

May be part of the reason Canon is not investing big money on cropped sensor, because of this inevitable?

MikeJ9116 wrote:

Larawanista wrote:

MikeJ9116 wrote:

Most dedicated camera users have been dismissing the relentless fast pace of smartphone camera tech advancement for a decade. Even in the face of irrefutable evidence that smartphone tech is the future of mainstream photography. I have been saying for some time that traditional photography gear is ever moving toward a hobby that will be practiced by those with a lot of disposable income or very successful professionals.

We are seeing smart phone tech move to smaller ILC devices with MFT sensors. This is in its infancy but the trajectory is the same as smartphones. What smartphones did to the P&S segment these new MFT (and 1" sensor or smaller) devices will do to the ILC segment. These devices will be small, lightweight and, most importantly, AFFORDABLE. They will offer superb IQ, capability and nearly all the features of a smartphone.

If the current trends continue, the last Canon camera I will buy is one with an APS-C sensor and RF mount, if it comes to pass. I have FF cameras that are plenty good to meet my requirements for the rare times I need one. I am looking to greatly reduce the load of camera gear I carry as I get older. I welcome what the new generation of smartphone tech based photography gear will bring. IMO, what is coming will be nearly as big a revolution to photography as the move to digital sensors was over 20 years ago.

May be part of the reason Canon is not investing big money on cropped sensor, because of this inevitable?

It could be but I think Canon will offer limited APS-C cameras in the R system. I think there are too many Canon DSLR APS-C users for them to ignore. These people will not buy into the M system. They need to bring as many DSLR Canon users as possible into the R system. I believe Canon has to wait and bring APS-C to the R system in a calculated way due to them having the M system. When they make the move to APS-C in the R system it will all but kill off the M system.

I am kind of doubting this but the total lack of progress regarding the M system is pointing towards this conclusion.

Sony and Nikon don't have completely incompatible mounts for MILC FF and APS-C so offering both sensor formats isn't an issue for them. Canon's move to offer APS-C in the R system has complications which is one reason I think we have yet to see APS-C RF mount cameras.

MikeJ9116 wrote:

Most dedicated camera users have been dismissing the relentless fast pace of smartphone camera tech advancement for a decade.

I'm pretty sure what some have dismissed is the excessive praise heaped upon smartphone photography. Smartphones certainly have an advantage when it comes to camera sales: the camera is attached to a device that does a lot more than just make phone calls and has quickly become a necessity in our modern world.

So having a camera with you at all times is great. There are certainly millions upon millions of people who never would have purchased a standalone camera who are now gladly shooting and posting their images to Facestagramitter.com.

But as with any new technology, eventually the market saturates, technological advancements either slow or reach a threshold point at which more improvement just isn't all that necessary or compelling, and sales plateau and then fall.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/

The exact same thing would have happened to digital camera in a vacuum, although almost certainly not nearly as soon or nearly as precipitously, especially when it comes to the direct competitor of the point and shoot, lower end cameras.

Even in the face of irrefutable evidence that smartphone tech is the future of mainstream photography.

Again, this is only irrefutable because you're putting a camera in the hands of people whose only interest is social media primarily and not photography. I believe that is where the opposition landed on the subject: creating an entirely new population of photographers does not necessarily imply that the enthusiasts and professionals would transition nearly as quickly or certainly as the exploding numbers of new photographers on their smartphones might otherwise imply.

I have been saying for some time that traditional photography gear is ever moving toward a hobby that will be practiced by those with a lot of disposable income or very successful professionals.

That has always been true of photography. The increasing sales of film cameras over the last few decades of their heyday was due to the reduced cost of film cameras and film, not to mention the new disposable film cameras that became a thing for a few years.

That explosion in sales quickly transitioned to digital camera because the new technology present a huge new value proposition especially in the age of the internet which was just getting started in earnest. No more developing film. No more waiting. And when digital became an obvious improvement to film quality, and coincidentally everyone had both a computer and the internet suddenly, film tanked hard. A confluence of factors destroyed film photography and it is now a niche. Digital photography has the advantage of not being an obsolete technology.

We are seeing smart phone tech move to smaller ILC devices with MFT sensors. This is in its infancy but the trajectory is the same as smartphones. What smartphones did to the P&S segment these new MFT (and 1" sensor or smaller) devices will do to the ILC segment.

Lower end, cheaper bodies have always been and will always be more popular than larger, more expensive full frame bodies.

These devices will be small, lightweight and, most importantly, AFFORDABLE. They will offer superb IQ, capability and nearly all the features of a smartphone.

If the current trends continue,

Current trends never continue. That's why there's a name for this notion: extrapolation fallacy. It just means that people tend to take a very small period of time and try to make predictions into the future that are quite often very inaccurate. But often the best model we have available to us is simple extrapolation.

the last Canon camera I will buy is one with an APS-C sensor and RF mount, if it comes to pass. I have FF cameras that are plenty good to meet my requirements for the rare times I need one. I am looking to greatly reduce the load of camera gear I carry as I get older.

And it is really great that smaller bodies are becoming better and better all the time. Full frame certainly will suffer by comparison for the same reasons as I mentioned earlier: there is a threshold for quality beyond which people don't see much increase in the value proposition and also as technology improves the pace of improvements slow while also costing more and more to accomplish.

I welcome what the new generation of smartphone tech based photography gear will bring. IMO, what is coming will be nearly as big a revolution to photography as the move to digital sensors was over 20 years ago.

If you look back at audio recordings you'll see that, as the old adage goes, the more things change the more they stay the same. Records gave way to tape recordings which gave way to CD's which gave way to digital files.....and that's where we stalled out completely. A 128kbps MP3 is still the standard despite being a not great quality, and streaming has cemented the dominance of pretty poor audio bit rates. The digital photography space will stall out as well, and I'd argue we're almost certainly already at the plateau point. Most phone shooters don't care about all the extra gimmicks and fake bokeh. And I'd bet the new Google effects like fake motion blur will only be as popular as the old Instagram sepia filters that people loved ten years ago for about a week.

I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max with the Procamera app. Low light is definitely improved and my mobile is now easily a decent alternative to the Sony RX100 IV that I used to carry around.

99% of my photography is taken on my mobile phone, previously Samsumg S20 Ultra.

My Canon R5 and RF lenses, especially my RF70-200 2.8 and RF100-500, blow the 13 Pro Max away for quality and the mobile cannot match the autofocus tracking and a host of other tools. The R5 is very clearly the more capable Camera and so it should be.

But my mobile is always with me. I spend 3-5 hours a day cycling and I can't have my best gear while training but I do have my phone in my jersey pocket.

MikeJ9116 wrote:

Thomas A Anderson wrote:

MikeJ9116 wrote:

Most dedicated camera users have been dismissing the relentless fast pace of smartphone camera tech advancement for a decade.

I'm pretty sure what some have dismissed is the excessive praise heaped upon smartphone photography. Smartphones certainly have an advantage when it comes to camera sales: the camera is attached to a device that does a lot more than just make phone calls and has quickly become a necessity in our modern world.

So having a camera with you at all times is great. There are certainly millions upon millions of people who never would have purchased a standalone camera who are now gladly shooting and posting their images to Facestagramitter.com.

But as with any new technology, eventually the market saturates, technological advancements either slow or reach a threshold point at which more improvement just isn't all that necessary or compelling, and sales plateau and then fall.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/

The exact same thing would have happened to digital camera in a vacuum, although almost certainly not nearly as soon or nearly as precipitously, especially when it comes to the direct competitor of the point and shoot, lower end cameras.

Even in the face of irrefutable evidence that smartphone tech is the future of mainstream photography.

Again, this is only irrefutable because you're putting a camera in the hands of people whose only interest is social media primarily and not photography. I believe that is where the opposition landed on the subject: creating an entirely new population of photographers does not necessarily imply that the enthusiasts and professionals would transition nearly as quickly or certainly as the exploding numbers of new photographers on their smartphones might otherwise imply.

I have been saying for some time that traditional photography gear is ever moving toward a hobby that will be practiced by those with a lot of disposable income or very successful professionals.

That has always been true of photography. The increasing sales of film cameras over the last few decades of their heyday was due to the reduced cost of film cameras and film, not to mention the new disposable film cameras that became a thing for a few years.

That explosion in sales quickly transitioned to digital camera because the new technology present a huge new value proposition especially in the age of the internet which was just getting started in earnest. No more developing film. No more waiting. And when digital became an obvious improvement to film quality, and coincidentally everyone had both a computer and the internet suddenly, film tanked hard. A confluence of factors destroyed film photography and it is now a niche. Digital photography has the advantage of not being an obsolete technology.

We are seeing smart phone tech move to smaller ILC devices with MFT sensors. This is in its infancy but the trajectory is the same as smartphones. What smartphones did to the P&S segment these new MFT (and 1" sensor or smaller) devices will do to the ILC segment.

Lower end, cheaper bodies have always been and will always be more popular than larger, more expensive full frame bodies.

These devices will be small, lightweight and, most importantly, AFFORDABLE. They will offer superb IQ, capability and nearly all the features of a smartphone.

If the current trends continue,

Current trends never continue. That's why there's a name for this notion: extrapolation fallacy. It just means that people tend to take a very small period of time and try to make predictions into the future that are quite often very inaccurate. But often the best model we have available to us is simple extrapolation.

the last Canon camera I will buy is one with an APS-C sensor and RF mount, if it comes to pass. I have FF cameras that are plenty good to meet my requirements for the rare times I need one. I am looking to greatly reduce the load of camera gear I carry as I get older.

And it is really great that smaller bodies are becoming better and better all the time. Full frame certainly will suffer by comparison for the same reasons as I mentioned earlier: there is a threshold for quality beyond which people don't see much increase in the value proposition and also as technology improves the pace of improvements slow while also costing more and more to accomplish.

I welcome what the new generation of smartphone tech based photography gear will bring. IMO, what is coming will be nearly as big a revolution to photography as the move to digital sensors was over 20 years ago.

If you look back at audio recordings you'll see that, as the old adage goes, the more things change the more they stay the same. Records gave way to tape recordings which gave way to CD's which gave way to digital files.....and that's where we stalled out completely. A 128kbps MP3 is still the standard despite being a not great quality, and streaming has cemented the dominance of pretty poor audio bit rates. The digital photography space will stall out as well, and I'd argue we're almost certainly already at the plateau point. Most phone shooters don't care about all the extra gimmicks and fake bokeh. And I'd bet the new Google effects like fake motion blur will only be as popular as the old Instagram sepia filters that people loved ten years ago for about a week.

The ILC makers have not accommodated what the people are wanting from their imaging gear. This is why ILC sales is falling off a cliff. The billions of smartphone users are comfortable with computational photography and for most younger people this is all they know regarding photography. They have zero interest in traditional ILC gear. It would be interesting to see a chart of the average age of a person using traditional ILC gear over the past 20-30 years. I would bet the average age has been climbing fast over the past ten years.

I think the new MFT based devices are an indication where things are going for mainstream photography. This format is nearly the perfect platform for Android based cameras using computational photography. They can offer convenience, small size, lightweight, smartphone features AND function like a more traditional camera when needed or wanted. Also, the 1" format, fixed lens cameras are ripe for applying computational photography and smartphone features. I see these devices filling the need for those who are being priced out of the traditional ILC segment or are no longer being served by this segment.

Lastly, there is a desire from smartphone users for better imaging systems. I see more and more people here talk about how each new generation of smartphone imaging tech makes them use their traditional gear even less. I expect many people here will buy a MFT and/or 1" sensor Android based device that is heavy on smartphone tech when a good example comes to market. I will be one of them. Traditional ILCs are dying. The hobby of photography isn't dying. It is just looking for the format that is going to fill the needs/wants of the hobbyists, enthusiasts, some professionals and smartphone users who want more imaging capability than their smartphone can deliver. This format will be here one day in the not too distant future. We already have examples that can be bought but they need more refinement before they are ready for prime time.

You didn't really respond to any of what I said. It sounds like you believe that people who love their smartphones and the cameras that are built into those would not only spend $1,000 on a phone that they already carry around with them everywhere but then they want the same photography features in a separate camera with a larger sensor. That position seems self-contradicting and while I'm sure there are some people who want what you're proposing, I find it much more likely that a standalone camera that uses actual photographic technique and optical effects to achieve what phones are only now attempting to fake would be the real attraction to a larger camera with a larger sensor.

Long story short, it sounds like the thing you want wouldn't have enough of a market to make it commercially viable and so I doubt we'll ever see it happen.  The camera would not only have an expensive large sensor in it, it would also require the most expensive element of a smartphone which is the processor in order to make all those computational features happen.  And people will already have a phone that they upgrade every few years to pay for.

I haven't read all the responses, but from the first few that I have I'm guessing they are consistent. Marco Neroasks if the iPhone will replace a dedicated camera...on a photographer's message board that is full of photographers who love their gear.

I'm one of those guys too, of course, and happy to be one. I'm a long time Canon shooter with two bodies that continue to serve me very well (5DmIV and 7DmII) along with a fantastic 70-200 f/2.8 II, a super wonderful 24-70 f/2.8, and a few non "L" series lenses that are just fun. I have been considering renting an R6 to play with and perhaps put on my wish list going forward. I can't count the number of times that I've pulled out my iPhone only to be a little disappointed in the results. I'd love to carry my gear with me wherever I go.

However...I travel for a living, and lugging around camera bodies and lenses just isn't practical. The iPhone 13 Pro may give me more flexibility while I travel, and if that's the case I'm in because this will become another tool in my photographic arsenal.

Will the iPhone 13 stop me from buying an R6? Well, yeah...for a little bit since there is only so much expendable income to go around for me. Will it replace my current bodies and lenses? Of course not because those tools are for other purposes.

Marc

TempusFugit2012 wrote:

I haven't read all the responses, but from the first few that I have I'm guessing they are consistent. Marco Neroasks if the iPhone will replace a dedicated camera...on a photographer's message board that is full of photographers who love their gear.

It's probably no secret that adding a reasonable quality digital camera to a smartphone will kill off a camera/lens sale.  I suspect the entire camera industry is mindful of this.  The one thing we know is that everyone needs a smartphone these days... so that means having a digital camera literally at arm's reach is the reality for most of us now.  If I was selling something on Ebay or perhaps selling a car, I'd simply use a smartphone these days to take the pictures.  People used to borrow cameras from friends and family but they also tended to hire professionals to take pictures for them when needed.  I guess those days are on the wane.

Will the iPhone 13 stop me from buying an R6? Well, yeah...for a little bit since there is only so much expendable income to go around for me. Will it replace my current bodies and lenses? Of course not because those tools are for other purposes.

Marc

iPhone 13 (Pro Max) - Initial observations - with PICS.
So far the cameras on the iPhone 13 Pro work fine although it took a few days to figure them out well enough to consider leaving my dedicated cameras behind. If I had to start again, I'd probably buy an EOS M6 II camera with four decent EF-M lenses and one EF telephoto zoom and that would probably be it.  But I do appreciate the wonders on cameras like the EOS R6 and nothing quite beats the impressive bokeh from a wide aperture lens on a Full Frame camera.  The image quality is simply wonderful on a dedicated camera.  But I do intend to test out the iPhone 13 Pro in the desert and in several remote locations in future.  Photographing closeups of venomous wildlife in Australia is going to get a little more complicated with something like an iphone though.
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I've had the iPhone 13 Pro Max for 3 days now (which isn't long enough for a fair review) and I've spent each day changing settings and testing out the camera on various subjects in different types of lighting conditions.  I like it and to be perfectly honest my old iPhone 6S was on it's last legs since Apple were going to stop supporting it this year and its second battery was loosing power.  The Face-ID took some getting used to... until I discovered you can set up an "alternate appearance" for when wearing glasses etc.  I feel the price of the newer phones is too expensive when you compare them with the price of prior models which function much the same.
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The colors from my iMac wallpaper reflected nicely on the iPhone 13 Pro Max's reflective surfaces when I went to take this picture of it sitting on my desk this week.

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At first I was slightly impressed with the three new cameras on the phone.  Then I discovered that the images were eerily HDR-like... which turned out to be because the camera uses Apple's HEIF files instead of JPEG by default.  All the HEIF files are in fact HDR shots.. which explained the ghosting effects (see example directly below which was taken on a clear sunny day as I passed someone's garden). This meant that areas of high contrast often had exaggerated halos around them.  So I changed the setting to capture in JPEG instead.  Again, the in-camera sharpening kicks in and produces artifacts around say leaves on distant trees etc.  So then I tried ProRAW.  Admittedly, this was closer to a normal shot from a camera although Photoshop didn't recognize the DNG files so I had to first open them up in Lightroom.
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HEIF files have quite a bit of room for accessing and shifting the Dynamic Range of images, but so too do the JPEGs. 
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The HDR

A 4mm long native bee - around 1/10th the size of a Honey Bee.

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Now that I've had the last two days to push the three lenses, I discovered that my iPhone 13 Pro Max required a firmware update, even though it left Apple's assembly line barely a week ago.  But hidden in that firmware update was a new switch that was added to the iPhone's camera app.  In the menu, you can now finally tell the camera to stop shifting between lenses when attempting to take a macro image. The new switch is called "Auto Macro" (on/off) and it appeared right at the bottom of the camera settings in the User Settings menu... so it's wasn't immediately visible unless you scrolled right down.   With this switch activated, the camera stops trying to switch between lenses when its trying to focus using Macro.  Now, you simply select the Wide Angle lens when using the Camera app and just zoom the camera towards the subject with your hands.  I am glad they did this because the first day of trying to use macro was nightmarish as the camera just kept switching between lenses.
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Image quality?  I'm not really sold on it yet.  The closeup shots if using the 77mm camera seem awfully digital looking and smeared.  It's like the camera switches to a digital zoom instead of an optical one.  Either way, I thought this would be great to have a 77 optical zoom on a camera yet the results are unsatisfactory to me.  Perhaps I'm doing something wrong.
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The HDR effect from using a HEIF file format

Even in JPEG mode I get halos around the fine details on trees.  Holding a CPL filter in front of the lens was not as simple as I thought it would be.  Nor was it necessary with most sky images.  Using a CPL filter with the Wide Angle lens was much more difficult - although this image was shot using the 77mm lens.

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Overall, the majority of shots are noticeably better than my old Apple iPhone 6S.  But I'm personally unconvinced that the new iPhone 13 Pro Max is capable of remotely approaching the image quality of a dedicated camera without the continued use of ProRAW format images.  Even then there's quite a few compromises due to image size and file conversions etc.  I made the mistake of shooting with 16:9 format and ended up with duplicate images since this "letterbox" format in the camera menu is simply an internally cropped 4:3 image... which seems a little less than ideal to me. 
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The "Synthetic Bokeh" is surprisingly good in MOST (but not all) cases.

Homemade sourdough pizza.  
If you get enough light your macro shots can be acceptable.
This image was in taken in shadow with my back to the sun.

The Macro is a little hit-and-miss. But it's MUCH more reliable since downloading the Firmware update yesterday.  I rescued this Honey Bee from ants on a hot road earlier today.

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I intend to test the iPhone out in the city tomorrow.  It will give me a chance sample some of the sort of photography I would normally use my iPhone 6S for and should prevent me from having to carry my mirrorless APS-C and Full Frame cameras with me - which is something I often do. 
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My initial thoughts are that as good at the images can be, there's still a little inconsistency that hampers my use with this device when using it as a camera.  But having all my music and photographs and videos alongside me with a larger screen than I'm normally used to is almost like using a tablet or iPad mini.  I suspect the Macro feature on this new model of iPhone was never intended for viewing plankton but if you keep your distances practical the results are pretty reasonable.
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An uncropped image showing the smeared look which is occasionally generated by the 77mm lens - especially when using it for "closeups".  I can't quite understand why it does this. It's clearly a "digital zoom" being used when the images turn out like this.  Sometimes the wide lens (which is the Macro lens) does this as well.  I took a landscape shot earlier today and ended up with similar muddy details.  I have no idea what's happening here.

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It wouldn't be fair for me to review the iPhone 13 Pro Max cameras until I've spent more time with it to determine what I'm doing wrong or to at least understand what the limitations are.  Anyone with ProCam  (aka ProCam 8 and ProCam XL) - which is a manual-control App for shooting better images with your iPhone cameras - should known that it appears to work perfectly well with the iPhone 13 models.  At first it wouldn't work properly until I delved into the settings to give the App access to my Photos folder.  But the Auto-Focus is far more reliable and even manually controllable using the ProCam App.  With the native Apple Camera App I had little chance at getting  reliable AF with SUPERCLOSE subjects yet the ProCam worked perfectly.
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What I'm noticing is that these images look fine at a distance of when viewed in their entirety.  But zoom in to 200% and the details are essentially gone and the images fall apart under closer inspection. The one thing that impresses me is the artificial bokeh... which appears to use the LIDAR to scan the subject and then separate it from the background.  The effect is surprisingly convincing and it's certainly appealing for certain subjects.  I did notice, however, that when lifting the shadow details in a shot taken of a flower (not shown in this set) that the masking was visible along with a lot of grain that surrounded the masked subject.  So at this point, when it comes to sheer image quality, the iPhones aren't about to replace my cameras for anything extremely important but they certainly have come a long way with the present models.
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I think I posted all of these images (above) at full size (around 4000 pixels wide) but they've been tweaked slightly in both Lightroom and Photoshop.  When I've thrown some more challenging subjects at it, I can perhaps write a more detailed report in a fresh thread some time next week if anyone is interested.

So in short, no improvement over iPhone 12 Pro Max which got owned by Powershot SX60 in image quality.