No free lunch is right. iPhone photos look incredible on iPhone screens. They look terrible on my high resolution desktop screen. Instagram kids don't know this, but that's ok, because we don't need them to, and neither do they.
Increasingly these photo"graphs" have nothing to do with reality either. I may be part of a weird minority but when I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want them to be all fake and wrong. Some Chinese manufacturers have taken this to a ridiculous extreme, they make normal friendly faces look outright scary.
Pictures shouldn't be edited by default, the user should be given the option if they want to. And lets not even get started on the fact that we have all these face recognition algos and such in a device constantly connected to the internet, with people taking pictures of themselves and everyone around them. What could go wrong...
This statement requires more precision. A camera sensor usually has more dynamic range than the display can represent. Lenses often introduce distortions. Sensors capture noise. The tint and color temperature of light sources vary greatly. Here's a set of seven images taken at steps along the path starting from as close as a JPEG can represent to the raw sensor data to a finished image that reasonably represents how my eyes saw the scene:
When using a dedicated camera and generating a JPEG in the camera, a similar set of steps is applied automatically. There's no such thing as "no filter" in digital photography; even the "unprocessed RAW" is one program's opinion of how 12 bits per channel should be rendered at 8 bits per channel to display on your screen (as well as downsampled and compressed, in this case). There are often user-selectable profiles that each have a bit of a different look, much as different film stocks produce different looks (Fuji cameras actually call their profiles "film simulations" and name them after the company's film stocks).
So I think what you really mean is that you want the camera to produce an image that appears on a screen as much like what you saw with your eyes as it can.
> when I take pictures I do it to document things, I don't want them to be all fake and wrong
> Pictures shouldn't be edited by default
I don’t think you can have both of these things. In general, if you want to closely reproduce what your eye sees, you’re going to have to do some editing.
> iPhone photos look incredible on iPhone screens. They look terrible on my high resolution desktop screen
yea, whith our first child we still used a dedicated camera (compact, no dslr) and there is a very noticeable drop in imagequality after that because we got lazy and use our phones.
then again "the best camera is the one you have with you"
