Not sure why you felt you had to say this twice - but no I’m not underestimating anything, I’ve seen the pictures and I’m not impressed. You’re letting the marketing cloud your vision, the X is a smartphone camera boasting some predictable improvements over previous gen smartphone modules but still trailing anything with a bigger sensor by a country mile.
Pixel peep and it’s garbage in anything but perfect light, and guess what, in the future as display technologies continue to improve, we’ll all be pixel peepers. We’ll all see the noise, the false colour, the missing detail, the ludicrous artefacting around “portrait mode” subjects, all the crummy compromises that come from trying to pretend that a sensor the size of a gnat can somehow do the same job as an actual camera.
What makes you so certain anyone will want to look at your lousy photos on the hi-def displays of the future?
- Please understand my intention with that previous statement is an attempt at humor, but I do ask myself this very question sometimes....
And save me the nonsense about lugging suitcases full of camera gear around, it’s 2018. I carry an X-Pro2, I choose a lens to go with the day I’m having and I just go shoot with that, no luggage, no bags, it’s weather sealed so doesn’t need a case, just me and a small, lightweight camera. I make all the exposure decisions, I do all the photography, and the camera delivers files which will still be putting the iPhone XX to shame in ten years time.
The X-Pro2 is nice and all, but if you're really concerned about showing your best on the displays of the future, shouldn't you be using Fujifilm's GFX 50S, or better yet a $45,000 Hasselblad H5D?
Seriously, I get what you are saying, but you're preaching to the wrong audience. Your message would be better received on some of the photography forums I sometimes participate in (including DPReview). Actually, I have read this very same argument on DPReview for many years when people discuss all kinds of photography choices:
- Cheap lenses vs expensive ones
- Tripod vs no tripod
- APS-C vs 35mm Full Frame
- m4/3 vs APS-C
- Whether or not we really need more megapixels...
Every single choice we make when it comes to choosing photography gear is a compromise in some way, and different people value different things. Honestly I was amazed to see the surge in DSLR cameras that we experienced in the last 10 years. In 2004 I would be out shooting with my Nikon D70 and would hardly see any other DSLR shooters. By 2010 you would see DSLR cameras all over the place, and it was clear that many of the folks using them were not photography enthusiasts. I'd say about 3 years ago we reached a point when smartphone cameras were "good enough" for the masses. Last Fall we took our kids to a local pumpkin patch that used to be littered with DSLR cameras. I noticed that there were hardly any. We were there on a really busy day. I saw one or two DSLR cameras. I had my Olympus OM-D kit, and almost everyone was using a smartphone. That's in a place where many locals go to get the family photo they will use for their holiday cards, so you'd expect people to be using their best cameras.
This is a bit like telling people in the film days that they shouldn't be using 110 film pocket cameras, disc cameras, disposable cameras, or polaroids... all of which were incredibly popular. Anyone my age (mid-40's) probably has some old family photos taken with a lousy 110 film camera. They probably have weird but charming colors, poor dynamic range, tons of grain, and many are likely to be slightly out of focus. If flash was used you got the worst red-eye you've ever seen, but the photo-development shop would sell you what was basically a black sharpie to help with that. The negatives and prints are so badly damaged that scanning them to a 20 MP digital file yields frighteningly bad results. And yet, if they are your childhood photos that include family members long deceased, you cherish them. My wife was fortunate in that her father had a Pentax 35mm SLR with some decent lenses (still has his kit with the Super Takumar lenses and the radioactive thorium lens coatings). His prints, slides, and negatives scan with much better results, but many of them are still a bit worn and damaged.
You could argue that analog defects are less offensive to the eyes than digital artifacts. I suppose it depends on the photo and what kind of artifact we are talking about, but yes... the bad Photoshop look from a poorly masked portrait modes, mushy pixels from using tiny sensors in low light, or the weird jaggy pixels from JPEG compression tend to stand out as really nasty to my eyes. Nevertheless these things will matter little when my children are grown and start having children of their own. I don't harbor any ill will towards my parents for using cheap cameras. The content matters much more than the technical quality in those photos, and the photos are of their era and suffer the same imperfections as countless others. Our children are fortunate in that the current crop of smartphone cameras can produce photos that look far better than what we inherited, and for most that is good enough.
Whether "good enough" is really that, I suppose it ultimately comes down to why you take photos and what you hope to do with these photos in 10, 20, 30 years. If you are a photography enthusiast then you are more likely to be using the gear and the techniques to produce output that will look outstanding whether it's printed ginormous or viewed on a super-duper so-hi-def-your-eyes-don't-even-know-how-good-it-is display. This is not why most people take photos. They take them to preserve memories, and even the foggiest photo can trigger the sharpest memories. If your photos stand the test of time and look better on future displays than most from the same era, it will be icing on the cake and hopefully appreciated. That said the photos that you take that might be cherished most will be the casual snapshots more than the landscapes or wildlife photos you labored over for many more hours. Think about the shear volume of photos and videos future generations will inherit. We will be lucky if our grandchildren see a fraction of the photos we hope they will one day appreciate. That's one reason why I keep printing physical albums and photo books (as well as some large prints). Families tend to hold onto those things, while so many digital files may be lost even more easily than we lost track of shoeboxes full of negatives and prints.
So I'm under no illusions that most of my photos will have as much value decades from now as I would like them to have, but they have value to me in the present. The photos I labor over the most are the ones I take to satisfy my own photographic desires. If others appreciate them now or in the future, that's great... but I know it's the family photos that will be more valued. So even 10 years from now we will be using much higher resolution displays and televisions that are capable of displaying wider color gamuts and more dynamic range. Our photos from the dawn of the digital era are definitely going to look a bit flat compared to what cameras will be capturing by then, but we will still be able to produce fantastic prints out of our old digital files. There will also be software that will feature improved algorithms for upsizing low resolution photos, and for fixing any number of flaws. For that reason I don't think today's iPhone X photos will look as bad as you think they will, but they won't look as good as modern photos when viewed side by side.
Geez... sorry about the length. I'm not even sure I could summarize this ramble into a TLDR version. Perhaps it's enough to say that hopefully your efforts to produce the absolute best possible images will be appreciated in the future, but given the insanely high usage rates of smartphone cameras you can be sure that technology will be developed that will preserve and display those memories as well as they possibly can be. On the other hand smartphone cameras are good enough for most people today, and the output will be good enough for preserving memories well into the future... at least for most people.
