Portrait Mode Confusion

Matt Birchler on photos, iphone, pixel | | 2 min read
Portrait Mode Confusion

This photo comparison was really interesting to me. I shared a portrait taken from the iPhone 11 Pro and Pixel 4 and asked people which they preferred. Opinions were split, to say the least. Here are the photos for your viewing pleasure:

Pixel 4 Portrait Mode
iPhone 11 Pro Portrait Mode

I personally think the iPhone shot is way better than the Pixel one. The colors are far more accurate to reality, and also looks better in my opinion. When I zoom in on the images, the statue itself is sharp on the iPhone photo, but looks way over-sharpened on the Pixel one. The fake bokeh is similar on each photo, but I think the iPhone's is a little more pleasant and has a better roll-off on the statue.

But these feelings are not universal!

Devon thinks the PIxel one looks way better.

I prefer the look and feel of the second photo, for sure. Quality is all together higher, but could be lighting factors.

Kareem agrees.

  1. Not too bright. Not too dark, perfectly balanced.

Fouzan triples down.

IMO 1 is too vibrant for the overcast day it was shot in.

You could increase contrast with 2 and fix it. The DOF effect is very unrealistic with 1, and really bothers me. It wouldn’t be easy to fix.

What I find most interesting about these is that numerous people who thought the Pixel was better cited the "accuracy" as a reason for this. The reason this is interesting is that, as the person there, I can tell you the Pixel shot looks much different from the reality of the scene. For example, the fox statue is straight up not the color shown in the Pixel photo, while the iPhone one is pretty spot on.

Dynamic Range, Telephoto, and the iPhone 11 Pro & Pixel 4

Matt Birchler on photos, iphone, pixel | | 1 min read
Dynamic Range, Telephoto, and the iPhone 11 Pro & Pixel 4

One thing I've noticed in the last few months using the Pixel 4 and iPhone 11 Pro day-to-day is that photos off the iPhone's telephoto lens tend to be better quality. The Pixel 4 is no slouch, but side by side, the iPhone tends to do better for me.

As an example, below is a shot I took this morning directly into the sun. The sun is obviously super bright, but the ground is all backlit and darker. The photos have very similar colors, which is not always the case between these cameras, but you can see there is much less clipping on the highlights in the iPhone shot (look at the cloud above the sun), it avoids the lens flare that the Pixel has front and center, and the little details like the tree branches are more sharp.

iPhone 11 Pro
Pixel 4

Deep Fusion and Indoor Dog Photos

Matt Birchler on iphone, pixel, camera | | 2 min read
Deep Fusion and Indoor Dog Photos

Psst, the above photo has nothing to do with the comparison, but I had to share a picture of Sherman shortly before the comparison photos were taken.

My dog Sherman was chilling on the couch last night and I wanted to take a picture of him just lying there, loving life. The type of shot made the telephoto lens make more sense, which is all well and good, but results in worse shots in low light.

But that presented an opportunity for me: a test! Let’s see how much of a difference Deep Fusion makes when using the telephoto lens. Here’s the iPhone 11 Pro:

And here is the Pixel 4:

Pardon the yawn, but for the sake of this test it’s worth noting that he was paused in that pose for about a second, so it’s not the action shot it may look like. You can probably already tell which one looks better, but here’s a crop in on each one:

It’s really night and day, with the iPhone producing a much cleaner image. Both cameras still have that watercolor-esque look on the body fur, but the iPhone has crisper lines on his longer ear hairs and the green blanket has more texture.

I previously did a similar comparison using the main wide lens, but the difference using the telelphoto lenses is even more pronounced.

Night Modes Are Great, but Have a Long Way to Go

Matt Birchler on photos, iphone | | 1 min read
Night Modes Are Great, but Have a Long Way to Go

I posted a photo comparison this morning to see what people preferred. Usually, this is an iPhone vs Pixel comparison, but this time it was the same iPhone photo (a) as it came out of the camera app and (b) after a few edits in Lightroom.

  • 4 people preferred the unedited photo
  • 11 people preferred the edited photo

It's slightly imperfect since I got a little too aggressive with the saturation on the edited image, but even still, the numbers still went that direction (i fixed the edit to be a little more subtle at the top of this post).

I did this test because I think that night modes on all cameras I've used so far are good at getting lots of image data, but are not to the point where they produce a pleasing image right off the bat. In most cases, the night mode photos I am happy with are the ones that I edit to look better.

And for all the hype that Apple got for making their night photos "not look like day" I still think they look too much like daytime before edits are made. This isn't a slight on what Apple's doing, or what Google or anyone else are going with night modes, just that we've got a long road ahead of these getting better over time, and that's pretty exciting because even in this early stage they feel like magic.

The Solution Can Not be “Just Follow Fewer People”

Matt Birchler on iphone | | 3 min read
The Solution Can Not be “Just Follow Fewer People”

I posted a picture like the one above earlier today and commented on the anxiety it caused me. The responses pretty much across the board were that I should follow fewer people. Some people suggested I just give up and skip to the end.

Now some of these were shared in jest, and I mean nothing bad at those who suggested that was the solution, but it strikes me because this is a common response whenever I mention that I have too much of anything on iOS, and these folks are not wrong, this is the only solution to this problem.

Another issue that brings this up for me is when I express my love for how Android handles notifications. I feel like I can always keep up on what is happening in my life in seconds, while iOS’s notification system is more of a “miss it and you’ll never see it again” thing for me.

Again, the response is stop getting so many notifications.

The final example for now is email. I like an email app with a “priority” inbox, one that tries tp put my most important emails front and center. Some people don’t like this because it betrays the almighty chronological feed of emails. The solution: unsubscribe from some emails.

I get people have different preferences, but this “follow fewer people” or the fascinating “get fewer emails” suggestions just don’t square with me. Yes, I follow a few hundred people on Twitter, and yes I get a lot of emails at work, and yes I get more notifications than most on my phone, but that doesn’t mean that my needs as a user don’t matter. That’s doubly true when there are alternatives out there that do not have these same problems for an “outlier” like me, and I think I finally know how to sum it up briefly.

The difference between Tweetbot, iOS notifications, & classic email inboxes and Twitter, Android notifications, & Outlook all comes down to organization. The systems that work for me take preemptive steps to present information in a logical way. The systems that don’t work for me are the ones that just look at 100 messages and spit them out with no sense of order.

Maybe I could follow fewer people on Twitter, but I genuinely like basically everyone I follow and like to see things from all of them. I don’t see every single tweet from everyone I follow right now, but Twitter has some pretty great logic that shows me the most interesting things from those people when I open the app. For example, someone I follow got hired at Apple a few weeks ago. Twitter made sure I saw the tweet the moment I opened the app because it got tons of interactions and was probably worth seeing. If I used Tweetbot I would have needed to make sure I read all 1,000+ tweets in my timeline so I wouldn’t miss it.

The same goes for my phone notifications. I use Signal for messaging some of my friends with Android phones and it’s on the second page of my iPhone. I can’t tell you how many times I completely miss messages for hours because I missed the notification and never saw it again. This never happened on Android because these messages were displayed in a more intelligent way.

And for work, well, it’s not really up to me how many emails I get per day.

Ultimately what I’m saying is that suggesting someone follow fewer people, get fewer notifications, or just unsubscribe from some emails is not particularly compelling: it’s more an admission that a piece of software doesn’t scale.

The Damn iPhone 11 Camera

Matt Birchler on iphone, camera | | 1 min read
The Damn iPhone 11 Camera

Look at the photo above. Really look at it.

That’s a picture of my dog, Sherman, shaking himself off this morning. He’s moving incredibly fast here and is just a blur to the naked eye, but the camera on the latest iPhone is able to get a remarkable amount of detail. The lighting was good, but even so, this picture is more sharp than I’d expect from any consumer-grade camera.

How about a few more?

Seriously, pinch to zoom in on these and see the level of detail in each shot. You can make out individual snowflakes in the two Sherman shots.

I of course have more, but those are just a few from the past week that really struck me in terms of how unbelievably crisp things can be.

Not every picture is as remarkable as these, which just means there is room to improve, but 4 months after getting the iPhone 11 Pro, I’ve had plenty of situations like where where I’m just flabbergasted by what I’m seeing in my camera roll.

Low Light Christmas Trees on 2019’s Best Phones (and an iPhone SE)

Matt Birchler on camera, iphone, pixel, samsung | | 2 min read

We have a little tree my wife and I put up every year and it’s a thing that is kinda hard to take good pictures of. There is quite a bit of dynamic range which typically means photos look overly darkened to compensate for the bright lights.

2019 has been a very good year for smartphone cameras, so I gave a few of them a shot last night to see how they’d do.

Samsung Galaxy S10e

Pixel 4

iPhone 11 Pro

And for fun context, the 2016 iPhone SE (with the 2015 iPhone camera)

Overall, I’m pretty impressed! Especially when you look at what we were using just 3-4 years ago, the differences in color and clarity are striking. Outside of the SE clearly being worse than the newer phones, the Pixel 4 is the outlier here in terms of color; it’s much cooler than the other images and is not an accurate representation of what the tree actually looked like. I think this has to do with Google’s new smart white balancing feature, which usually makes great choices, but sometimes results in crazy decisions1.

  1. Supposedly this was fixed in a previous update, so maybe this is a choice and not a bug, but either way I’d say this is not right. ↩

iPhone 11 Pro and Pixel 4 Christmas Lights Shoot Out

Matt Birchler on camera, iphone, pixel | | 2 min read

I took the iPhone 11 Pro and Pixel 4 out to a public space last night that was lit up really nicely for the holidays. This is not a complete comparison for how well each phone does, but it’s a good first test and I’ll show you the comparisons before giving you my thoughts.

Point of order here, my tripod broke last night so all of these were taken handheld. Also, they were all slightly touched up in Lightroom to make the colors a little more pleasant. See this post for why I do this in my photo comparisons.

On the surface, these look pretty darn similar. Especially when viewing on a phone, the differences in quality are hard to see, so let’s zoom in on a couple of these.

The difference still isn’t huge, but my takeaways are:

  1. The iPhone maintains more detail in every single shot.
  2. The iPhone has better dynamic range, capturing the bright lights with less bloom.
  3. The raw shots came out very similar from each camera. Sometimes there is a major color temperature or white balance difference in these cameras, but not last night.
  4. In some of these, “night mode” didn’t even kick in. The lights are so bright that they don’t require an extended exposure.
  5. The iPhone has some occasional artifacts around really bright lights in the middle of frame. You can see this in the last comparison above the lights in the sky. I don’t know why this happens, but it’s not something that can be fixed by cleaning the lens. Maybe I have a defect or maybe it’s the nature of the camera, I’m not entirely sure.

I’ll be playing around more with these cameras throughout the month and will report back with anything else interesting, but for now I’d say that either of these phones are able to produce Christmas light photos unlike any other phone before them, and I think owners of both will be very happy with what they are able to accomplish.

Have iPhones Been Getting More Expensive?

Matt Birchler on iphone | | 4 min read

Yes.

But also no…it’s complicated.

Only one part of this is simple: iPhones have gotten more expensive on the high end. When the iPhone 6 Plus came out, you could max it out and get up to $949. Today, you can max out an iPhone 11 Pro Max and pay $1,449. Even adjusting for inflation, that’s 40% more money. If you want the biggest, baddest iPhone money can buy, you can throw more money at an iPhone in 2019 than ever before.

But let’s not talk about the most expensive iPhone, let’s look at the “mainstream” iPhone. Of course, all iPhones are mainstream, but each year there is a “default” iPhone that most people buy. It was always the small one until last year when the XR took the mainstream title.

In the interest of full clarity, these are the phone’s I’m counting for this comparison1:

  • iPhone 3G
  • iPhone 3GS
  • iPhone 4
  • iPhone 4S
  • iPhone 5
  • iPhone 5s
  • iPhone 6
  • iPhone 6s
  • iPhone 7
  • iPhone 8
  • iPhone XR
  • iPhone 11

Here are the prices for those phones (all with the base storage) when they released:

To the point many will make, looking at the inflation-adjusted price, iPhones were getting less expensive basically every year, even if the sticker price stayed the same. Even at the highest entry price of $749 with the XR, it was still technically less expensive than the iPhone 3G.

But it still feels like iPhones are getting more expensive, so I looked at average wages over the same time period.

Well, that doesn’t changing the result at all. While the inflation-adjusted price of iPhones goes slightly down, the average wage in the US is slightly outpacing inflation.

We can combine these together to find how much of the average worker’s salary would go towards the iPhone that year.

Well hell, that doesn’t show them getting more expensive either.

So basically, iPhone prices have grown slower than the inflation rate and workers are making more money each year, so an iPhone is a smaller portion of their income than ever before.

So why does it feel like iPhones are getting more expensive?

My theory is that we in the tech press and “Tech Twitter” no longer consider the lower end iPhone to be the “flagship” model. I’d say the shift happened with the iPhone 7, where the Plus model added a second camera. The next year saw the iPhone X outshine the iPhone 8 (in sales and attention), and the triple camera iPhone 11 Pro outshine the iPhone 11 (although the 11 is outselling the Pro this year).

Let’s take a look at prices when we consider the 7 Plus, X, XS, and 11 Pro instead of their cheaper counterparts:

There we go, that’s a result! How about compared to average income?

Ok, so if we consider the “main” iPhone to be the 7 Plus and then the X-style models, then prices have indeed risen in the past few years, outpacing both inflation and income increases. This may not be correct but it’s definitely how many people feel.

And finally, there is the fact that it wasn’t until recently that the actual cost of a phone was something most buyers even knew about. Most iPhones cost “$199 on contract” and they only paid that up front and considered that the whole cost of the phone. Looking at it this way is…wild.

And this thread could continue down further into even more insane ways since often people today don’t get advertised the cost of the phone and are instead expected to view it as “$38 per month” which obscures the cost all over again.

Or how about that Apple is now advertising the cost per month AFTER a trade in of another phone???

Deep breath…

My Takeaway

I didn’t have a position I was trying to prove before writing this piece, I just plugged in the numbers and saw what they spit out. My moment of clarity was when I was on the third set of graphs and realized there were potentially a half dozen other ways I could look at iPhone pricing.

As the years have gone on, the iPhone line has gotten more complicated. The original iPhone came in one color and 2 storage sizes. The 2019 iPhone have 3 lines, 3 storage options each, and 10 total colors to choose from; that’s 42 total models. This makes comparisons harder and harder to make each year. What’s the mainstream iPhone? What’s the flagship iPhone? What’s the budget iPhone?

The answer to “are iPhones getting more expensive?” is not yes or no. It’s both, and that makes it so anyone can choose the chart that confirms their feelings.

Before I go, there is one more data point that is worth noting. iPhones last for quite a few years, and there is no reason people need to buy the latest and greatest iPhone. Outside of eBay and third party retailers, in 2018 you were able to buy an iPhone SE from Apple for $249. In 2019 you can buy an iPhone 8 for $449. Those are $208 and $375 in 2008 dollars respectively and that’s kinda nuts. It’s far cheaper to get into an iPhone than ever before, and that is pretty great.

  1. The original iPhone is not on this list because it was priced…oddly. And inconsistently… And resulted in refunds to people who paid a ton for one! ↩