Tuesday 17 October 2023

iPhone SE vs Fuji X-E4

Take a look at these photos.


The first is from the X-E4. The colours are rich, the details and sharpness are out of this world, one can zoom in and get all the details. But the sky is blown out. That might be me being incompetent, but I don't think so. That's what happened with film, and Fuji are all about making digital photos feel like film. So the sky blows out.

The second you will have guessed is from the iPhone SE. The detail is almost all there, the colour is almost all there, but it doesn't have the presence of the Fuji photo. It does have, however, a detailed sky with clouds and blue bits. I've noticed this before: my iPhone camera seems to be good at not getting blown out by skies, and I'm thinking that's because the iPhone is a way more powerful computer than the Fuji, and the camera software can identify and treats skies differently to the rest of the photograph.

Thing is, call me old-fashioned, but I find the iPhone picture almost unrealistic. That's not how I saw the scene, as I was concentrating on the loco, not the background. I don't want all that background in such detail - it's a distraction. I deliberately have my lens at f4 (f8 equivalent 35mm) to blur the background for that reason. The iPhone gives me detail all the way back. (There's probably an app for that, but I don't have it.)

I didn't do these consciously as an A-B comparison. So maybe if I had filled the iPhone frame with loco to the same extent that the Fuji frame, the iPhone would have blown out the sky.

Beyond that, there is something about iPhone photos, or at least those from the SE. They just don't have the weight or the depth of a real camera, and I grant that's partly because the Fuji has about four times as many pixels. I hadn't been able to see it quite so well before.

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