Originally Posted by Quattro Pete
Originally Posted by bunnspecial
Still, though, on the whole I'd say that they are pretty similar,
I guess "pretty similar" is a relative term.
The iPhone photo has clipped shadows, beyond recovery - see the area on the ground under the bench. Either the detail was not captured due to the sensor's poor dynamic range, or the detail was captured but it got killed due to the phone's heavy built-in post processing. In either case, that detail is lost forever.
That's one aspect where shooting RAW has a huge advantage - on a properly calibrated monitor, you can easily see that detail in your Nikon shot. Not sure if the iPhone allows you to shoot in RAW to compare if it would fare any better in this particular scene.
Fair enough on that, and among other things I did "dig out" the shadows a bit when processing the RAW file-I always capture RAW+JPEG(on separate cards) on my main camera, so I will look at the JPEGs and see if the shadows are clipped that badly. I think there's a way to get RAW images from the iPhone, but I'm not positive.
In any case, the original point was made about a 3.2mp Fuji camera. Full frame CMOS sensors have an enormous amount of dynamic range-something that only continues to get better relative to this nearly 10 year old D3s-and IN GENERAL CCD sensors are not as good. The only real exception to this I can think of is the Fuji "Super CCDs" used in their DSLRs, which have two pixels per photosite to extend the DR. I do still use a Fuji Finepix S5 as I like both its color rendition and dynamic range.
So, my next project will be to both see if I can do a RAW capture from an iPhone, and also to try this same sort of test again with a CCD-based DSLR like a Nikon D200(10mp).
I also come back to the original claim that 3.2mp, 20 year old P&S looks better than an iPhone-I'm still skeptical of that for a lot of reasons.
BTW, I'm also NOT saying that the iPhone is in any way a replacement for a dedicated camera-just that I wouldn't necessarily dismiss one as being a useless toy. There are a lot of things I can do with a DSLR that would be impossible with a cell phone.