Maybe It's Time To Carry A Real Camera Again
Maybe It's Time To Carry A Real Camera Again
As computer screens go super-high res, users are finding that their “good enough” cellphone pictures actually look kind of terrible. Long live the actual camera! Well, at least for a little while.
Sometime in the last year, I gave up on carrying a camera. My phone is compact, quick, has the ability to share photos directly, and, at least to my eye, produces photos that are nearly comparable to my $700 interchangeable lens camera. In most contexts, I stand by that — on Facebook, in iPhoto, or on Instagram, my iPhone photos look fine. Great, even.
But one thing I noticed when I first used a Retina iPad, which automatically pulled in my old iPhone shots from the cloud, was that these "good enough" photos looked awful. Grainy, blotchy, and even kind of blurry. Evidently the new Retina MacBook has the same effect. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, says it's driving him back to his DSLR:
As part of my 2012 computer-setup shuffle, I also replaced my laptop with a Retina MacBook Pro, and the first thing it screams for is a high-resolution desktop wallpaper. Great, I thought, I’ll just use one of my photos. (On my desktop, I use a solid gray background, but on my laptop, I like to have a bit of fun. And it would be a crime to put a solid gray background on that screen.)Almost nothing I’ve shot since 2010 is usable.
He's so disappointed with his cellphone photo quality that he's migrating back to a Canon 5D Mk II, which isn't just a nicer camera, it's one of the nicest consumer cameras ever made.
The Retina MacBook is a premium product for now, but few doubt that Apple, and other computer manufacturers, will move to Retina-grade displays across the board. It's just a matter of price and time. This is great in all ways but one: it's going to make our photos look like crap.
It's not a megapixel problem, exactly. Most common smartphone photo sizes compare favorably to even a Retina MacBook's screen:
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