Interesting article - thanks for posting.
Where it misses, for me personally, is the lens aspect...
It's not enough for a lens to be optically near-perfect in a technical sense. The character imbued by each lens is terribly important (at least, it is to
me, and judging by these forums, I don't think I'm alone). If we leave our DSLR / mirrorless cameras at home and start shooting with iPhones, we'll all have that same lens and a bunch of clever processing to produce effects and emulations such as shallow depth-of-field bokeh, and everything will start to look the same except for in-camera- or post-processing adjustments.
In one sense, that could be seen as a great leveller, in that our abilities and techniques become the sole differentiator... in the same way that certain classes of motor racing allow just one manufacturer, model and preparation of race car, and the results are primarily based on driver performance. But this is photography, and each lens plays a unique role in giving our images a certain look and feel. If I'm shooting with an 85mm lens, some days I might choose my Jupiter-9, while on others I'll go with the Helios-40-2. Same field of view, but wildly different rendering, and that has a big impact on the photographs I take. It also requires a little knowledge, experience and judgement in picking the right tool for the job - and that's part of the fun.
Of course, technologists (and I say this respectfully, having spent much of my career in technology-related roles) will say those lens characteristics can be emulated in software, and to some extent I'm sure they can. But those emulations won't capture every nuance of a lens. At best, they might offer a vague approximation, in the same way that film emulations in post-processing vaguely approximate the real thing.
So, whilst I look forward to seeing what can be done with code - and I've no doubt it will be both impressive and, in the right applications, very useful - I'll stick with my interchangeable lens cameras and a selection of - thankfully - far from perfect lenses...
Last edited by BigMackCam; 10-25-2018 at 03:29 AM.