7 ms·

Dual-camera setups for phones are not new at all, yet only Apple gets the props for "changing the camera industry" .. For the other vendors it's a "gimmick" !

sharkjacobs 10y ago
Ford didn't change the transportation industry when he invented the Model T, he changed it when he put 15 million of them on the road
- king_phil 10y ago
  Wait, wait, wait. It's not about the photography industry (which would be the transportation industry) bit about the camera (automobile) industry.
- WayneBro 10y ago
  When Microsoft was on top, Apple fans used to say "it's not about marketshare or profit" and then they would proceed to compare Microsoft to McDonald's. So, it's hilarious to me that today the number one statistic quoted by Apple fans is about how much money Apple makes or how many units they've sold.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Having been around the Apple world for both eras, the two sets of people seem to have very little intersection.
    - WayneBro 10y ago
      I myself, also having been around the Apple world for both eras, see plenty of intersection. It's almost as if many of the people who lived in the 90's are still alive today, including the Apple fans. I personally have many friends who were Apple fans then and now.
      - mikeash 10y ago
        The same people are mostly still around. But the people who talked about Apple being superior in form or function despite being inferior in profit back in the 90s are not the people who today talk about how Apple is great because they're so crazy profitable.
- emilsedgh 10y ago
  I find the comparison to Ford stupid. When Ford cars came out, cars weren't easily accessible to public. Ford did that. It also applied to original iphone. But now, other phones are on par regarding quality and accessibility with iphone and they've had this feature for long. Your comparison simply doesn't apply. Apple, at this point, is only a marketing gimmick. Unfortunately after several years of using Android phones, I got an iphone (6s) this year. It's simply a bad phone. I'm getting a new Android device this week.
  - tommymachine 10y ago
    The fastest smartphone CPU was last year's chip from Apple. The old Apple chip just got beaten by the new Apple chip which is 40% faster than second place--which is still the old Apple chip. Even if the camera stuff wasn't better in any proprietary way (it is), it still operates on the best chipset in the world by a huge margin. So I guess if you're looking for a marketing gimmick in all this, you might say Apple's engineering dominance is a pretty good marketing gimmick. I mean, I can't really think of a better 'marketing gimmick' than designing better core technology, patenting it, and using it as a platform for launching other new tech that also contains better core technology. I'm even hesitant to call it a gimmick. It's more like... the actual way capitalism is designed to work.
    - emilsedgh 10y ago
      Is the CPU speed the most important and only factor? How does iphone compare to other phones in a bigger picture?
      - tommymachine 10y ago
        Chip performance is the bottleneck everything on a phone has to run through. It can give a proprietary boost to a brand if they put out better performing chipsets. Is it the only thing in a phone that matters? God no! But a better chipset allows the peripheral tech (touchscreens, cameras, etc) to do more sophisticated stuff more easily. So chipset performance affects the big picture more than any other component. It's hard to zoom out and compare peripherals and overall design without getting into personal taste and preference. To measure personal taste empirically, you could look at profits. Higher profit means people aren't buying on price but on perceived value and personal preference. iPhone is a huge winner here. Apple actually books a majority of the smartphone industry profits every quarter -- more profit than every other company combined (in 2015 it was 91%). It's hard to charge high margins when you don't have some proprietary unfair advantage like faster CPUs. Samsung et. al sell more phones and have more revenue, but they make a fraction of the money because their value prop competes on price. In fact, Samsung is the only other company that made a profit selling smartphones in 2015, everyone else lost money or broke even. CPU performance is a huge part of that story. Samsung has the second fastest CPUs. That's a difference between first place and second place of almost 100 billion dollars. Third place is you're fired.
- exadeci 10y ago
  Nokia sold millions of camera phones that were the best of the market and the Iphone actually brought it down for a while: "The launch of the initial iPhone may have harmed mobile camera tech development. There was a rush was to put touch screens on everything and cameras seemed to be less important all of a sudden when busting out a top-end spec list." http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/flashback-the-past-present-and-future-of-the-camera-phone-1209860/2 http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobil...
paulrouget 10y ago
As usual, Apple was not the first to came up with the technology, but the first to make it work really well and put it in many hands. Look at HTC. They tried and failed. Dual camera, but the Bokeh is actually a gimmick. It doesn't work.
- pavlov 10y ago
  It looks terrible on the iPhone 7+ as well. Look at the samples provided by Apple: http://petapixel.com/2016/09/07/iphone-7-7-plus-announced-dual-cameras-zoom-bokeh/ http://petapixel.com/2016/09/07/iphone-7-7-plus-announced-du... (Scroll about halfway down.) The fake Bokeh from the dual cameras looks like flat circles with Gaussian blur applied. It's a useless gimmick, I can't imagine ruining real photos with this look.
  - oceanofsolaris 10y ago
    Well, it still serves the purpose of emphasizing the foreground. It does, however, not look like the depth of field you would expect from a 'real camera'. But I don't see it as 'ruining' photos. It's just a tool in your toolbox for creating pictures.
  - philjohn 10y ago
    But because you get a digital negative, you don't have to - it's a non destructive edit.
  - 4ad 10y ago
    It's very bad, but it's not on the market yet, possibly because it's so bad. Considering they have real depth information though, I don't see why it can't be made to work correctly. We'll see when it's actually released. Also my understanding is that there's no blending of images between the two cameras at all. You literally use only one camera or the other. There are existing systems on the market that do this correctly to obtain a much higher quality of image than what is possible with only one camera alone. I would expect Apple to implement this in a future software update.
    - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Even in the article they author mentions they weren't the first, and yet, Apple changes the industry.
coldtea 10y ago
Changing the industry requires having impact. Few people can even name those "Dual-camera setups" and even less bought them (HTC and so I presume).

sharkjacobs 10y ago

Ford didn't change the transportation industry when he invented the Model T, he changed it when he put 15 million of them on the road

king_phil 10y ago
Wait, wait, wait. It's not about the photography industry (which would be the transportation industry) bit about the camera (automobile) industry.
WayneBro 10y ago
When Microsoft was on top, Apple fans used to say "it's not about marketshare or profit" and then they would proceed to compare Microsoft to McDonald's. So, it's hilarious to me that today the number one statistic quoted by Apple fans is about how much money Apple makes or how many units they've sold.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Having been around the Apple world for both eras, the two sets of people seem to have very little intersection.
  - WayneBro 10y ago
    I myself, also having been around the Apple world for both eras, see plenty of intersection. It's almost as if many of the people who lived in the 90's are still alive today, including the Apple fans. I personally have many friends who were Apple fans then and now.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      The same people are mostly still around. But the people who talked about Apple being superior in form or function despite being inferior in profit back in the 90s are not the people who today talk about how Apple is great because they're so crazy profitable.
emilsedgh 10y ago
I find the comparison to Ford stupid. When Ford cars came out, cars weren't easily accessible to public. Ford did that. It also applied to original iphone. But now, other phones are on par regarding quality and accessibility with iphone and they've had this feature for long. Your comparison simply doesn't apply. Apple, at this point, is only a marketing gimmick. Unfortunately after several years of using Android phones, I got an iphone (6s) this year. It's simply a bad phone. I'm getting a new Android device this week.
- tommymachine 10y ago
  The fastest smartphone CPU was last year's chip from Apple. The old Apple chip just got beaten by the new Apple chip which is 40% faster than second place--which is still the old Apple chip. Even if the camera stuff wasn't better in any proprietary way (it is), it still operates on the best chipset in the world by a huge margin. So I guess if you're looking for a marketing gimmick in all this, you might say Apple's engineering dominance is a pretty good marketing gimmick. I mean, I can't really think of a better 'marketing gimmick' than designing better core technology, patenting it, and using it as a platform for launching other new tech that also contains better core technology. I'm even hesitant to call it a gimmick. It's more like... the actual way capitalism is designed to work.
  - emilsedgh 10y ago
    Is the CPU speed the most important and only factor? How does iphone compare to other phones in a bigger picture?
    - tommymachine 10y ago
      Chip performance is the bottleneck everything on a phone has to run through. It can give a proprietary boost to a brand if they put out better performing chipsets. Is it the only thing in a phone that matters? God no! But a better chipset allows the peripheral tech (touchscreens, cameras, etc) to do more sophisticated stuff more easily. So chipset performance affects the big picture more than any other component. It's hard to zoom out and compare peripherals and overall design without getting into personal taste and preference. To measure personal taste empirically, you could look at profits. Higher profit means people aren't buying on price but on perceived value and personal preference. iPhone is a huge winner here. Apple actually books a majority of the smartphone industry profits every quarter -- more profit than every other company combined (in 2015 it was 91%). It's hard to charge high margins when you don't have some proprietary unfair advantage like faster CPUs. Samsung et. al sell more phones and have more revenue, but they make a fraction of the money because their value prop competes on price. In fact, Samsung is the only other company that made a profit selling smartphones in 2015, everyone else lost money or broke even. CPU performance is a huge part of that story. Samsung has the second fastest CPUs. That's a difference between first place and second place of almost 100 billion dollars. Third place is you're fired.
exadeci 10y ago
Nokia sold millions of camera phones that were the best of the market and the Iphone actually brought it down for a while: "The launch of the initial iPhone may have harmed mobile camera tech development. There was a rush was to put touch screens on everything and cameras seemed to be less important all of a sudden when busting out a top-end spec list." http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/flashback-the-past-present-and-future-of-the-camera-phone-1209860/2 http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobil...

paulrouget 10y ago

As usual, Apple was not the first to came up with the technology, but the first to make it work really well and put it in many hands. Look at HTC. They tried and failed. Dual camera, but the Bokeh is actually a gimmick. It doesn't work.

pavlov 10y ago
It looks terrible on the iPhone 7+ as well. Look at the samples provided by Apple: http://petapixel.com/2016/09/07/iphone-7-7-plus-announced-dual-cameras-zoom-bokeh/ http://petapixel.com/2016/09/07/iphone-7-7-plus-announced-du... (Scroll about halfway down.) The fake Bokeh from the dual cameras looks like flat circles with Gaussian blur applied. It's a useless gimmick, I can't imagine ruining real photos with this look.
- oceanofsolaris 10y ago
  Well, it still serves the purpose of emphasizing the foreground. It does, however, not look like the depth of field you would expect from a 'real camera'. But I don't see it as 'ruining' photos. It's just a tool in your toolbox for creating pictures.
- philjohn 10y ago
  But because you get a digital negative, you don't have to - it's a non destructive edit.
- 4ad 10y ago
  It's very bad, but it's not on the market yet, possibly because it's so bad. Considering they have real depth information though, I don't see why it can't be made to work correctly. We'll see when it's actually released. Also my understanding is that there's no blending of images between the two cameras at all. You literally use only one camera or the other. There are existing systems on the market that do this correctly to obtain a much higher quality of image than what is possible with only one camera alone. I would expect Apple to implement this in a future software update.
  - 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

Even in the article they author mentions they weren't the first, and yet, Apple changes the industry.

coldtea 10y ago

Changing the industry requires having impact. Few people can even name those "Dual-camera setups" and even less bought them (HTC and so I presume).