Originally posted by ThorSanchez Even though it's DPReview, I found
this article on what Google's been up to with regards to their Pixel smartphone's cameras very interesting.
A lot of what they're doing involves constantly buffering 10 or 15 images, prior to hitting the shutter button, so that they can do all kinds of multi-exposure blending with zero or minimal shutter lag. I have an original Pixel that's a few years old, and it defaults to essentially HDR mode. I'm often surprised by how good the images from the phone are.
But with the 3 they've upped it several levels, and now the default mode sounds a lot like Pentax' dynamic pixel shift. Just without the slower multi-exposure shutter/mirror/wait for computation part. In the phone it's seamless, in the background, indistinguishable from just hitting a button. They're even doing multi-image blended RAW now.
One of the thoughts I had about this is the converse of what you typically hear, which is that this technology makes smartphones closer to being on par with ILC cameras. I think this will eventually make it into ILCs, and enable APS-C cameras to have more like FF or even MF results. A full frame camera could out-resolve a MF. Everything they're doing with a 1/2.5" sensor could be done with much larger sensors with crazy good results. Pair that with a pro-level 70-200 or the new 50mm Pentax lens and you could have results that hard to duplicate with any camera available at any price today.
The limiting factors seem to be lack of processing power in the camera, larger sensors mean
a lot more data to continually process, and if your camera is always on and processing lots of data your battery life is going to suffer. Another consideration for us DSLR folks is that much of this relies on continual buffering of lots of images, which pretty much means electronic shutter, which means mirrorless or an SLR in liveview. If you're always in Live View then why have the mirror at all?
Smartphones pretty much are the future of photography. ILC camera development is stagnant, and has been for several years. Meanwhile Smartphone cameras keep getting better and better. The other thing with smartphones is their ubiquitousness. Everyone has one, and for the most part, everyone upgrades every couple of years or so, and every couple of years, the camera in those devices has improved tremendously.
People have been forced into stand alone cameras and if they wanted something a bit better than a P&S they had to buy either a bridge camera or an ILC. Now we've seen the demise of the compact P&S, killed by the smartphone a few generations of phone ago. It won't be too many more generations before the bridge camera is also killed, as it is little more than a glorified P&S.
People want convenience above all else. Image quality is a very distant second (or possibly even further down the scale). Most images are now viewed on smartphone screens, so the need for real quality isn't there anyway.
The smartphone is convenient, and it's something that is with the user every moment of every day. The camera in it is, therefore, about as convenient as is possible. Compare this with a bridge camera, or gawd forbid, an ILC. Big, cumbersome, and they don't multitask.
The smartphone camera is getting to the point where it will do most of what users want, and for those special occasions where they need something better, they might have an ILC in the back of a closet. As the smartphone camera continues to improve, that ILC is going to see less and less use, and as more and more people see less and less use for ILCs, the sales of them will continue to drop.