Quote from: LOL on April 27, 2021, 14:45:59

Quote from: S.Yu on April 26, 2021, 22:52:30
Totally insane. The improvement in IQ is not on par with the increase in sensor size and resolution, no joke. Most of the core improvements in recent years came from the software side and lack of effort(or, deliberate sabotage, like locking access to certain modules by 3rd party apps) on software easily overshadows improvements in hardware specs.
I'm quite disappointed about my NEX3S's native camera performance despite its relatively large sensor size and high resolution(1/1.8" 64MP). It focuses far less reliably than my old Note 8, has poor stabilization, takes equal or even more heavily smearing photos in low light(except for night mode), and I couldn't even get it to match Note 8 performance in Gcam. It only has slightly better detail in good light with the default camera, which I don't need most of the time as Note 8 + Gcam outputting DNG still far outclasses it.

It's a Chinese phone. You get what you paid for.

Anyone can assemble a phone in a sweatshop, even with premium parts.
But not anyone can do real R&D, improve things on the software side.

Chinese sweatshop phones entice you with amazing specs on paper at an attractive price, but performance and daily usage is frustrating or annoying. It's up to each individual to decide if the discounted price is worth putting up with those frustrations and irritations.

Most Xiaomi models can be unlocked so you could run many UI's on them, and Gcam support for Xiaomi models is, like many other community-sourced projects, pretty good. I don't believe this is at all an issue of funding, or "real" or "fake" R&D, Vivo has high margins(a notch higher than Xiaomi) and this was one of its two flagships of the year, the standing issues are likely due to company culture.

Quote from: Not funny on April 28, 2021, 00:50:46
Samsung isnt Chinese tho and on the manufacturing side most of it is being automated by robots anyway, with not much human labor or involvement. But anyway, I think I get your point that their software on post processing side can't match up to American vendors like Apple / Google.

And I agree with S.Yu. I myself have a Pixel 4a and pretty blown away IQ taken from it. I tried some other devices (108 MP Mi 10T Pro) and while it probably did have a bigger sensor that could take slightly better daylight photos due to pixel binning and additional detail taken from such a high Res image, the camera completely fell apart in low light.

The only downside with pixels is that there is literally no optical zoom (like there is on Samsung's with space zoom) and the video quality is merely average, nothing that impressive. So I hope periscope lenses and video quality become the next big focus on improvement. Hopefully, the future improved AI/Tensor core hardware will help with the video encoding.

Will you be upgrading to another Note / samsung or will be thinking about changing phone vendors in future, S.Yu?

Upgrade cycles are now far longer and I don't know when I'll be getting my next device, but currently I'm in favor of Sony and Asus for the headphone jack and all-round specs with no notable shortcoming. I did enjoy OneUI, but I'm somewhat reluctant to go back to Samsung because they were one of the relatively earlier ones that removed the headphone jack from flagships. I previously considered Meizu too but they also disappointed in that respect, now they fail to achieve any meaningful differentiation.

Samsung isnt Chinese tho and on the manufacturing side most of it is being automated by robots anyway, with not much human labor or involvement. But anyway, I think I get your point that their software on post processing side can't match up to American vendors like Apple / Google.

And I agree with S.Yu. I myself have a Pixel 4a and pretty blown away IQ taken from it. I tried some other devices (108 MP Mi 10T Pro) and while it probably did have a bigger sensor that could take slightly better daylight photos due to pixel binning and additional detail taken from such a high Res image, the camera completely fell apart in low light.

The only downside with pixels is that there is literally no optical zoom (like there is on Samsung's with space zoom) and the video quality is merely average, nothing that impressive. So I hope periscope lenses and video quality become the next big focus on improvement. Hopefully, the future improved AI/Tensor core hardware will help with the video encoding.

Will you be upgrading to another Note / samsung or will be thinking about changing phone vendors in future, S.Yu?

Quote from: S.Yu on April 26, 2021, 22:52:30
Totally insane. The improvement in IQ is not on par with the increase in sensor size and resolution, no joke. Most of the core improvements in recent years came from the software side and lack of effort(or, deliberate sabotage, like locking access to certain modules by 3rd party apps) on software easily overshadows improvements in hardware specs.
I'm quite disappointed about my NEX3S's native camera performance despite its relatively large sensor size and high resolution(1/1.8" 64MP). It focuses far less reliably than my old Note 8, has poor stabilization, takes equal or even more heavily smearing photos in low light(except for night mode), and I couldn't even get it to match Note 8 performance in Gcam. It only has slightly better detail in good light with the default camera, which I don't need most of the time as Note 8 + Gcam outputting DNG still far outclasses it.

It's a Chinese phone. You get what you paid for.

Anyone can assemble a phone in a sweatshop, even with premium parts.
But not anyone can do real R&D, improve things on the software side.

Chinese sweatshop phones entice you with amazing specs on paper at an attractive price, but performance and daily usage is frustrating or annoying. It's up to each individual to decide if the discounted price is worth putting up with those frustrations and irritations.

I finally spent about 3 hours downloading various Gcam mods(most of which refuse to even load the UI, curse you Vivo) and tinkering and finally found one that runs without crashing(not any of the latest, it's in fact about 2 years old, barely newer than the one running on my Note8) and provides the processing that I had access to with my Note 8. The key is to output DNG, stick to night mode for everything, and turn off dehaze and do it yourself in LR in post, so many Gcam mods that don't even have the option to tweak dehaze are out of the question as Google's failed dehaze seems to be the culprit leading to texture destruction in recent Pixel models. Lifting shadows using the tone curve or gamma curve also helps bring out a natural look instead of crushed shadows. I've yet to see if some of the denoise parameters should be tweaked but as it is it's already better than my Note 8 because this version allows using the system default noise pattern, which vastly improves chroma noise behavior compared to the Pixel noise pattern and allows effective denoise in LR, whereas previously LR's chroma NR was almost always ineffective, either dialed to >30 for a modest effect(reducing fine noise but leaving large color blotches untouched) or having no effect at all, while now 5-10 entirely cleans up everything.

This is what progress in mobile photography should look like:
https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/dev-UltraM8/f/dl1/
Though neither of my phones can run it, it should bring out the last drop of performance from any hardware supported.

Totally insane. The improvement in IQ is not on par with the increase in sensor size and resolution, no joke. Most of the core improvements in recent years came from the software side and lack of effort(or, deliberate sabotage, like locking access to certain modules by 3rd party apps) on software easily overshadows improvements in hardware specs.
I'm quite disappointed about my NEX3S's native camera performance despite its relatively large sensor size and high resolution(1/1.8" 64MP). It focuses far less reliably than my old Note 8, has poor stabilization, takes equal or even more heavily smearing photos in low light(except for night mode), and I couldn't even get it to match Note 8 performance in Gcam. It only has slightly better detail in good light with the default camera, which I don't need most of the time as Note 8 + Gcam outputting DNG still far outclasses it.