Canon: "The market for digicams could shrink to about half in the next 2 years"

[Dan Wells]

You're right about Ansel Adams and the darkroom - he said as much at the end of his life, when he saw the reproductions made from drum scans for a couple of his last books. I think he'd have actually been surprised that silver halide black and white has held up as well as it has in the age of inkjet. It's clear that a good color digital print is far better than any color chemical print - even if your starting material is an 8x10" color transparency, the first step to a good print is "scan it". That's not necessarily true of a B+W negative (yet)...

On the other hand, the diffraction question on cell phones is VERY real, and it's not easy to surmount. A friend does a lot of video with odd cameras and odd locations, and I wondered if any of the devices with phone sensors really shoot 4K (yes, they record 8,000,000 pixels, but can they resolve them)? Using the diffraction calculator at Cambridge in Colour, a 1/3" sensor (typical phone) with a f1.8 lens is diffraction-limited to between 4 and 5 megapixels. The newest iPhones and some high-end Anndroids have somewhat larger sensors, diffraction limited around 6 MP. Diffraction sets a maximum, if you had a perfect lens - and phone lenses aren't even close to perfect. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the real performance of many "good' phone sensor/lens combinations is around 3 MP?

[Benny Profane]

A well done dye transfer could still beat a good Epson print, and both have similar life spans, but the former takes skills and equipment that just dont exist anymore, especially the skills. I worked in a lab in Manhattan in 1980 that was run by a master that could reproduce a Kodachrome on paper. Computer stripping stations killed that trade in very short time.

And yeah, I wasnt saying that phones are going to achieve large print quality output soon, but, man, they have come a long way, and certainly disrupted the small camera market. Like I said, who knows in ten years. This is far from settled.

[BJL]

Perhaps I should reduce my pessimism about low light/high shutter speed photography with phone-cameras (and pocketable cameras in general), after reading about this new “Nokia” model: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/meet-the-nokia-9-five-cameras-bring-a-different-approach-to-phone-photography/
Basically it combines the images from multiple cameras with the same FOV, to improve light gathering speed and dynamic range, and/or to do elaborate depth mapping for “artificial bokeh” and such.