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There is a question that has been killing me and no YouTube video has answered it for me cuz on paper the specs on this iPhone and the specs on this lens are exactly the same. Apple has made a point to that. The best camera system we've ever made. This is our most powerful pro camera system ever. Best camera system yet. But almost by instinct, we know that the photos from a pro camera have to look better, right? So, why is Apple lying? Or is carrying all of this equipment a waste of time and space? I'm about to go on my honeymoon. I only get one shot at this, and I needed to know for sure. So, for the past couple months, I've been doing this fake sort of lonely honeymoon
rehearsal through seven insane locations in Costa Rica. I'm going to snatch the same photo with the exact same settings, the exact gear, and you guys are going to compare. Man, this thing is not what you expected. Like I've been to some dark, nerdy places. I've looked at these sensors in the eye and I think that Apple is lying to all of us. Okay, so let's first set some ground rules for this challenge. The challenge is simple. Can you tell the difference between a pro camera photo and a smartphone camera photo in the context of an Instagram story? So rules. Rule number one, it all has to fit in my Peak Design bag, which is all I would be willing to carry on my vacation anyway.
Two, I have to use the exact same settings for each photo that we compare. Three, I must spend the same amount of time editing each photo. And four, I must pick the winner looking at these photos only in the context of an Instagram story, not in a big screen, not zooming in. I've also been putting these comparisons on Instagram over the past few weeks and most of the time people have guessed right. But why is it so obvious how if the specs are the same? Now I was going to start this trip at the beach cuz we've got we've got plenty of that and also you know sunset photo company sponsored trip to the beach. Amazing. But that may be too easy to guess. So I'm going to try something different.
All right. So, here's the first photo in this honeymoon rehearsal thing. This is the Nujaka waterfall in the southern part of Costa Rica. Which one do you think is better? Which is the iPhone photo and which is the camera photo? I'm going to give you a moment to decide before I tell you. This maybe could be a photo that maybe tricks people. That's why I chose it first because if you know which settings to tweak in your phone, then you can maybe match the look to a pro camera. So, I'm going to use the Pro Camera app to exactly match the settings that I had intended to use in my A7C. We'll see. We'll see if you can catch it. The idea is very simple. If you let the sensor see light for longer, you
might get a shaky, blurry photo, right? But if the camera is fixed on something, all that moves in the image is what's moving in the image. In this case, the water, which gives us this kind of magical look. Now, in order to shoot this photo, you're going to need something to keep the camera stable. Something like a tripod. Without this, this photo is probably impossible. And another thing you need is because the sun is shining on the waterfall, we're going to need to put a filter. Like I have a camera filter that will solve it for the camera. I don't know what I'm going to do with the phone yet. I spent the same amount of time editing them. And again, there's no cheating. We can't zoom in. Let's see if you can get
it. This is the pro photo. Very hard to tell from a distance, but I think the filter worked better on the camera versus my hack. Notice that the water looks actually a little bit better. And I do think that overall the camera photo looks better. So, I think that's one point for pro cameras. But this concept of shutter speeds is honestly as old as cameras basically. And I wanted a much bigger challenge. So, for the next photo, I really want to stretch these sensors to the very limit. What photo that I might shoot in Costa Rica might be a closer match between, say, an iPhone 17 and a pro SLR camera. A photo of a lush green jungle or forest scene would be a great choice. The even natural light and rich green.
We can do that. We can How about uh Montde? So, Monttover is one of the few cloud forests in the world. Cloud forest is like this special little mountain where it's always cloudy and it's always rainy. But it's it's really weird cuz the rest isn't. That mountain there, that's Mon. And that is the most sick rainbow I've seen in a very long time. This is me delivering on that green request. I don't think it gets any greener than this. So what was the deal again with the green scenes dominated by foliage tend to compress the performance gap between smartphone and fullframe cameras because they concentrate most of their spectral
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Can you guess which is which? Before I tell you, let me explain what that green color thing was all about, cuz it wasn't Chad GPT hallucinating. The answer is probably the best thing that I learned making this video, and it is the key to understanding why Apple cheats with those specs. This is the 48 megapixel sensor on the iPhone 17. I mean, this is a piece of paper, but the point is it's about this size. And this is the sensor in my camera. This is 24 megapixels. So, fewer pixels, but much bigger. Hm. So, for my honeymoon, is bigger better or is more megapixels better? And what does that have to do with green? Well, we said, or Apple said that this sensor had 48 megapixels on it, at least on the new
iPhones. So there are about 48 million photo sites in this sensor. 48 million light detectors. But each one of those sensors is not exactly a pixel. That's a bit like cheating. If you look really closely at any screen, you'll see this pattern of colors. Each pixel is made up of three sub pixels. Three lights. One green, one red, one blue. Now, if you zoom out of that screen, that all blends into something that looks white to us. That's because the combination of red, green, and blue light makes white light. That's because RGB, red, green, and blue are the primary colors of light, and you can combine them into pretty much any color you want. Now, those colors that you generate by mixing RGB, red, green,
and blue, they also make up the pigment colors, cyan, magenta, and yellow, the ones in your printer. And you can also combine them sort of into any color, not with lights, but with pigments. So, anyway, what a camera sensor is trying to do is to reverse this process to capture those colors into an image. But how? So, how do we turn light into ones and zeros? So imagine that we put light through this lens and into the camera sensor kind of like this. This is obviously too small. So I'm going to try it with this one. Now the lens is focusing this light and then the sensor is reading it. Each of these squares is one of these 48 million photo sites.
It's detecting that energy from the light and giving out a reading say from 0 to one and every decimal in between. That is just the intensity of the light. It's it's black or white. So what about color? And actually our eyes work not too different from those sensors. We have these cones in our eyes that are like a flesh version of the sensors. Each one really good at detecting red or green or blue. And our brain takes care of putting the picture together. So to detect this light coming into the sensor and to know which color the light is, we figured that we'd put this thing on top of it. I mean, we didn't figure
it out. Actually, the guy who invented it basically invented digital cameras, modern digital cameras. But anyway, this is a buyer filter. And pretty much every camera sensor in the world has one of these. Notice what it's doing. For every four of these photo sites, light is getting filtered as it's literally passing through a color filter before hitting the actual photo site. Now, if you look at the world through a green filter, you'll find out that greens will start to pop out more. Other colors here, like reds and blues, they'll start to kind of blend into each other. It's harder to tell them apart. Here's a red filter, the blue one. So by putting a buyer filter on top of the sensor, when each photo site detects
that intensity of 0 to one, it's really detecting the intensity of one of these colors. It's detecting whether it's red or green or blue. And because the camera brain knows what this pattern is, it can reconstruct the image now with color. But there are two weird quirks with this system. Quirk number one, there are two green sensors for every blue and red sensor. Now, that was done to mimic the colors of light that our eyes are better at detecting, but it is the reason why digital cameras perform better with green. And it's actually the reason why special effects shots from movies are shot on a green screen. And here's which is which. Very, very hard to tell. As I was uploading them, I actually had to
double check the file name because of how similar each one of them look. But people from Instagram actually caught it really well. Most could tell that this was the iPhone photo. So that is another point for pro cameras. Good for you, Sony. But then there's a second quirk and that's a bit more deceiving. Camera manufacturers are counting each of these photo sites as a pixel. But are they really a full pixel? Remember on your TV screen, you need three of these to make one single color pixel. But here you need four of these pixels to get one full color pixel of information in your photo. So is the iPhone camera 48 megapixels or is it actually something like 12? But the Sony camera operates
pretty much the same way. Are they both just lying to us? Is detail really the same? Now for that we need a photo where detail matters more and where there's less green. So today we're heading out to Haz Volcano, which is one of the largest volcanic craters in the world. This is a photo where pixels and detail are really going to matter. It's also a bit of a honeymoon rehearsal cuz there might be a volcano along the way in the honeymoon route. We'll see. And also these past few days I've been digging a little bit into that whole one pixel versus four photo sites tbacle. This term keeps coming up which is quad pixels. Now quad pixels sounds super fancy in theory but then I started digging deeper. Now here are the photos side by side. By the
way take a guess. I'll tell you in a moment. So this thing I've been using this is a 0.01 001 by 01 mm section of the iPhone 17 sensor enlarged about 18,000 times. It's about that area in the sensor. And this is the exact same area size on my pro camera sensor. Each of the photo sites in this thing is huge. Huge by comparison. Again, it's the same area just huge photo sites in comparison. We actually couldn't even 3D print this in one piece. We have to like glue it together. And even though there are fewer photo sites in the larger sensor of my Sony camera, each of them can of course catch way more lights because
there's just much more surface area. So, what matters more, 48 million small photo sites or 24 million slightly larger photo sites? Is it a matter of pixels or a matter of light? It seems that smartphone companies have kind of figured out that light is much more important than pixels, even if that means sacrificing some of the extra sensors or photo sites that they're putting in every camera. Now, remember, each hole in this thing, each frame is a photo site. There are 48 million in a 48 megapixel sensor, and you need four of them to make up one pixel of full color information using your standard buyer filter. But starting with the iPhone 14 Pro, the buyer filters in iPhone don't
look like this anymore. Now they look like this. This is called a quad buyer filter or a quad buyer sensor. And Apple loves to talk about it without really telling you what it is and why it could be useful. What this thing does is it merges four photo sites so they can work together as one to catch more light. It's four times more light for each of the colors in the buyer filter. It's basically trying to mimic what happens in my Sony camera with the larger sensors. But if you need four of them to work together, actually need 16 of them to make up one of the old pixels. Is that camera truly 48 megapixels now? Like this image is not technically 48 megapixels. At least not in the same concept of pixels as with every other camera. It's a fourth of
that because you need 16. So, is this camera actually 12 megapixels? That's actually the reason why despite these phones being advertised as 48 megapixels, the default in the camera settings is usually 12 or 24 cuz the phone knows that it performs best at that lower resolution. And then the 48 ends up being a bit of a marketing number. By the way, underappreciated production factoid. I had to drive up here twice to snatch this photo without any clouds because the first time let's say uh the photo wasn't YouTube video worthy. Also, by the way, Pro Camera app, guys, don't like fix your app so it doesn't bug out when there's no internet. Like, I've already paid for the subscription. You don't need to charge me again.
But the buyer filter is fixed. It doesn't change regardless of the camera resolution that you're using. It's still a quad filter. So this 48 megapixel photo is not the same as a pure 48 megapixel photo. And yet whatever computational magic happens here, the iPhone photo does seem to have more pixels. So much so that most people, I mean by a small margin, but most people got this one wrong. Let's break the rules for a sec. Let's actually zoom in this time. You can tell, you can see more detail in the rocks, in the sand in this photo because whatever software, bells and whistles, processes that compensate for that quad filter, whatever they're doing, it works. I think we have to give this one to the iPhone. I'm going to upload both of
these to our channel members. Both my edits and the full raw file if you want to download them, if you want to break more rules or maybe make them your wallpapers. Now, after nerding on those sensors for maybe too much, I remembered my honeymoon and my wife, who's been a bit confused about this rehearsal honeymoon project I've pitched her. And to be honest, most of my honeymoon is going to be food photos and photos of my wife. So, let's get photos of food and people. Okay, so the food is gone. The wine is gone. But don't worry, I've done my homework. Part of the team tagged along. We have some gear and some tripods and some cameras here, lights, but none of that stuff was here when I actually took the photos.
So, here's my food photo. Both cameras respecting the rules. This might be the easiest one to tell apart. It's It's honestly too obvious. Can you guys tell? I haven't really edited these photos, but just looking at the camera, something is very different about these photos. And notice how blurry the background is in one versus the other. Now, what I learned, the basics I learned in school is that background blurriness, right? This comes from aperture, right? And but both of these cameras, both the iPhone and the A7C, they're both 1.6 aperture. So, why is one much blurriier than the other?
Now, that background blurriness is called depth of field. And for the longest time, I thought it was only related to the f setting, the aperture setting in the camera. That's not the full answer. Aperture is the hole in the lens through which light comes in. It's measured in f-stops. That number comes actually from a fraction. That's why it seems to count backwards. Now, a tiny hole in the camera would be an f-22, which is really 122nd, a 22nd part of the sensor diameter. Now, f-22 makes photos really sharp. Notice here that the subject and the background are both pretty much in focus. Compare that to a large aperture, which is something really wide, something like f1.6. Now,
f1.6 six is what I used for both the iPhone and the Sony A7C photos. My honeymoon is in Italy. I want that bokeh in all of my food porn photos. And so a bigger aperture will always mean a blurriier background, right? But the iPhone is fixed at 1.6. I can't adjust it. It's it's fixed, but it's the same one as in the camera. So why are they so different? Now, this is the other photo I shot today. Can you tell? It's it's the same problem. One has a lot of depth of field, the other one doesn't. Why? The answer to that question is that despite these lenses having the same specs,
Apple is kind of twisting the truth to say the least. Let me explain. You've seen that millimeter number in pro cameras and in lenses, right? So, this one we've been using is a 24 mm. Apple advertises their lenses with those same numbers, and it's the same number that they put in the camera app. They have the 24 and the 35 and then the 48, but that's not entirely true. This is the 26 mm image that you're getting out of an iPhone. And compare that to a wider lens that gives us a wider field of view, wide photos, and then compare that to the look that you might get out of the lens on a GoPro. These are sometimes cropped because of the way video formats look compared to actual photos, but you
get the picture. Then we have long lenses. This is a 90 mm lens that makes me look much bigger in the picture. And notice how the background is also blurrier. I haven't moved from where I'm standing. The camera hasn't moved. It's the lens that makes the difference. Now, once again, this is the camera on the iPhone. It's 26 mm according to Apple. And this is the 24 mm lens that we've been using for all of our comparisons. In terms of how much of the bark you can see, they're both pretty close one to the other. But do you notice a difference in the depth of field? It's different. It's very different. Why? We are using the same focal length. We're using the same aperture settings because
the thing is the naming convention that we use that we're accustomed to whether it's 16 millimeter or 24 mm that's kind of inherited from film cameras but it refers to a look rather than the true specs of that lens. Apple advertises their cameras with those numbers but that is not what is actually happening. Let's take for example an old school really old school film camera actually shooting stuff on film with a 24 mm lens. If you put that in this camera with this air quotes sensor size what you get is the look that I've been showing you the 24 mm look that is the lens projecting an image over this piece of film which has this certain size.
Now, in a full-frame digital camera like the one that I've been using, the sensor is more or less about the same size as that piece of negative. Kind of like this or this. So, in this camera, just like in a film camera, a 24 mm lens gets us a 24 mm look. But what if the sensor is a bit smaller? Now, this is my first ever pro or semi-pro camera. It's an oldie, but it still works. But look at this sensor. It's much smaller. This is called a crop sensor. It's actually, if the other sensor, the full-frame sensor was based on the film going horizontally. This one is based on the film going vertically. Now, the thing is, when you plug a 24 mm lens here, which you absolutely could cuz they still fit,
you don't get a 24 mm look from this. The look that you get is this. Notice that it's it's cropped. Look at them side by side. It's the same lens attached to the camera, but a very different look. What's happening here is that we're not seeing the full image that the lens is producing. We're only seeing a small section in the middle of it. We are kind of cropping into it. The sensor is only catching part of that light, only the center of the image that the lens gives us. And this is of course very tricky and very confusing because again this is still a 24 mm lens but it's not giving us a 24 mm look because the sensor is smaller. It crops into it and once you do the math with the crop factor what you're ending up is
a look that is closer to putting a 35 mm lens on this fullframe sensor. So because of the crop factor, we get a 35 mm look instead of the 24 mm look that we should get from this lens. But that's not all. The big trap of this is that despite these images looking similar in terms of how much we can see, right, how wide we can see the image, this 35 mm look, the depth of field in both of these images is going to be very different. Now, if I somehow managed to attach an actual 24 mm lens on top of the iPhone sensor, the image would look like this. It's the equivalent of a 100 mm lens attached to a full-frame camera. Or in other words, we're getting a 100 mm look. So, there's no way this lens is 26 mm. It's
not even close. That's not the look that the iPhone is giving us. So actually the lens on the iPhone main camera is actually technically something like a 6 mm lens. If I somehow managed to put this tiny lens on top of a full-frame camera sensor, I would get this really wide almost 180° image cuz it's a 6 mm look. But with this tiny sensor and a 6 millimeter lens, the image ends up cropped at something like 26 millimeters. And that is why the bokeh is so different. We are basically using a 6 mm lens and just cropping into it. Now, unless I'm getting some mandala effect, Apple used to say on their feature pages that the lenses were 26 mm equivalents, which actually would be correct, but they've just stripped that
now. The specs on this iPhone say 26 millimeter period. And that is simply not true. If you open the photo in a professional tool like Lightroom, it reveals the truth. This is a 6 mm photo. The other smartphone manufacturers, they don't even use the millimeter system at all. They just talk about the field of view in the camera, maybe to avoid this confusion altogether. So, if my wife wants those smooth bokeh background photos in our honeymoon, the only way to do that is with a large sensor. There is no way around it. And before you say portrait mode, portrait mode is just cheating. Portrait mode uses AI information from other cameras to
capture some depth and then it fakes the depth of field. For a small Instagram sized image that you'll stare at for 2 seconds, maybe that's enough to trick the viewer. But the moment you pay attention to stuff like hair outlines, that's when you can tell. There just isn't enough detail to resolve individual hair against the background, especially in low light. By the way, the exact opposite of this happens when the sensor is larger than your standard full-frame or film size. I made the mistake of looking at the Hasselblad website. It's a very dangerous website cuz I can't afford it. I shouldn't buy I can't buy these one of these cameras. The thing with Hasselblad cameras is that they are medium format and the sensor is bigger. But anyway, if
you look at the lens comparisons, you'll see the focal length and the equivalent focal length, which is the opposite of what happens with the Apple sensors. The equivalent focal length is smaller because the sensor is bigger. The same thing happens on IMAX, which is an even larger format. To get a 24 mm look, an IMX camera would need something like a 50 mm lens to end up again with an image that looks like a 24 mm field of view. And still, you get all this extra depth of field because you're using a longer lens. That's one of the reasons why these large formats look better aesthetically because they have to use these longer lenses which have a more narrow depth of field that than their equivalents in a smaller sensor size.
Now, for the next two photos, we're really stretching our cameras to the very edge. First, we're going to get finally get that sunset photo and then we're going to try to capture the Milky Way. So, so the problem with trying to shoot a sunset is that you have this really, really bright object against this, at least by comparison, this really dark environment. So, you have two choices. You can either expose the photo for the sun, which is going to make everything else look really dark, or you can expose for the environment, but this whole area around the sun is going to be really bright, and that area of the photo is going to be lost.
And yet look at these two photos. Can you guess which is which? How could both cameras capture the sun and also the rest of the image without the sun being blown out? There are three nice tricks at play here. Stuff that all cameras support but that people often just ignore. Now, the first one is the format of the file. You may have seen that most modern smartphones let you pick between storing your photo in JPEG format or lately HIC for iPhones versus RAW. So, what does this RAW format mean? Let's say that this is the darkest point in a JPEG photo. It's black. It's completely black. And this is the brightest point in that same photo. It's white, completely white. something like the sun completely blown out the sensor
completely overwhelmed by light. Now in a JPEG file those values will go from zero to 255. So in the black area here the light intensity in this file is zero and in the brightest area here that would probably be 255. But let's go back to that sensor example we used earlier where the minimum was zero and the max was one. In this case we're going to change that notation. And we're going to get into this new system where the maximum is 255. And there are all these 255 steps between black and white. Now that range of 256 numbers comes because a JPEG file is an 8bit file. And this is connected to the literal ones and zeros like the bits that are used to store this photo in your device. So when you
have eight bits of information, eight binary bits, you can store values from 0ero to 255. Now those eight bits also make a lot of sense in JPEG files because most screens in the world are 8 bits. But it's not all the camera sensor can detect cuz the sensor even on an iPhone could potentially capture more information or should I say more stages of light between zero the darkest and white the brightest or the lightest. Now this is called the dynamic range. And how much is there between the darkest and the lightest? Now, the sensor on the iPhone camera can detect something like 4,096 different light intensities. Now, if you store that file as a JPEG, you're going to lose a lot of that information.
You're going to lose those middle ranges cuz it's going to shrink that back down to 8 bits and only 256 different shades of black to white. And that is why raw files are so crucial to this because the raw file actually keeps all of this data because a raw file can store up to 14 bits of data. So 16,384 different values between black and white. But where can we see that image? There aren't any 14bit screens out there to see all this data. There are some 12 bits available for like extreme prices for like professional Hollywood use. And the answer is that we can't see it.
Like there's there's a lot of detail in this photo like more than what this screen can display. There's there's more detail there in the shadows and there's more detail here in the highlights. And we can still extract this detail if we have a raw photo cuz all that information is there. And yes, of course, after we edit it and tweak it, we'll export it into an 8bit version that the screen can display. And that I guess doesn't matter so much if it's a JPEG file. And beyond dynamic range, there's another trick that iPhones use for these sunsets. We can probably credit this dude, Austo Deuca, for bringing attention to this technique. And he did it with analog photos with good old film
negatives. Like in our age, there is a button to do that in Lightroom and there's a button to do that in the camera. It's actually, I mean, it's pretty easy. Now, when the range between full black and full brightness in the real world is so large, the camera can basically do this trick and capture nine photos, each one capturing different sections of that range and then blend them all together into a single image. So, a photo like this in Lightroom in the platform that we use today is a 32bit image. That means that there are 4 bill294,967,296 different steps between the darkest and the clearest part of this photo. And that is a lot of work. Like my the phone overheated and it just didn't let me do
it. So, we're going to have to move to the laptop. But the whole point of this is that we've captured all this huge range of light intensity. We've compressed it into this image that we can now manipulate. Now, our eyes can see about 10 to 14 stops of light. That's what our eyes can detect. Here, this image has maybe about 20 stops of information that we can then again compress into an image that we can see that it'd be impossible to see with our own eyes. That is your high dynamic range. And phones, well, phones do all that HDR mess automatically. To me, it looks like it took one single photo, but in the background, the phone is actually doing that. It's taking all the photos.
It's blending them into one. Now, this is probably the most surprising result. I probably broke the rules by doing all of this work with the photo merge, photo stacking, which the iPhone actually just did automatically. And still, despite all that, people in my Instagram actually thought that the iPhone photo looked better. And that is crazy to me. Absolutely. Absolutely a point for the iPhone. Now, you can kind of see it around this trunk where the photo stack just couldn't solve those edges, those contrasts very well. Maybe the fact that I didn't have a tripod didn't help, but the iPhone just did this perfectly. and still cut the sun. By the way, now that you understand, hopefully understand all
of this nerdiness. Maybe this t-shirt makes sense because this is the first proper swag that we've designed for our channel in a very, very long time. We did this one around apertures. It's my favorite, but we also have this one around buyer filters. It's premium, 100% cotton, all the good stuff. I'm going to link our store below. And regardless if you feel like buying one or not, I would love to hear what you think about these. So, now we're almost done. We've learned about sensors. We've talked about fake pixels. aperture, lenses, sensor sizes, and now photo stacking. But there is one type of photo that in my opinion brings all of this stuff together. It's my favorite type of photo, and for that we
need dark. I have no clue if that's going to work, but we'll find out. I'm near volcano in the northern part of Costa Rica now. It's the middle of the night, and we're going to try to capture probably the hardest shot in this project. We're going to try to capture the Milky Way today. Now, you kind of need the stars to align to get a photo of the Milky Way cuz first of all, you need a new moon. If the moon's out or if it's too bright, it's going to outshine the stars. So, that doesn't work. So, that really opens a window only really get about once a month. And then you need that day of the month to be have perfectly clear sky. Uh, and then added difficulty, we need to balance the cameras on this thing for 30 seconds
with the cameras being perfectly still so that we don't have the photo be blurry or shaky or whatever. But see if it works like the app pro camera app which has been working fantastic so far. It won't let me do an exposure above 1 second. Check it out. If I try to go above 1 second on the shutter speed, it just doesn't work. It's it's it stays at 1 second. I don't get it. Now, after struggling for an hour and almost missing my weather star window, I had to break the rules, man. I'm sorry because Apple, for some reason, Apple put in one of the dumbest guard rails I've seen. Apple won't let third party apps do long exposure photos. It caps this at 1 second despite the camera, any camera just having this as a software setting.
Any camera can expose for longer than that. Okay, so at this point I've tried downloading every single one of these apps like and they all advertise like they supposedly support 30-cond exposures. I have Iris Pro, I have Pro Cam, I have Snapflow. All of these like they'll say they support 30 seconds. They make you go through the subscription. I've paid for these. I don't have internet to do so. And they still won't let me do 30 second exposures. Ah damn. What they try to do is they try to stack 31 second photos which ends up looking like this. And again, this compare was not easy, man. Like Apple does not play nice with this stuff. The only way I could shoot a comparable photo here was
using Apple's camera app because if you use that, you can set night mode and set it to shoot for up to 30 seconds. But that still didn't let me choose the ISO rating or set the photo to RAW. And plenty of shots were out of focus because I had no way to focus on this completely dark sky. And every photo here is 12 megapixels. There's no way to set it to 48. And again, that's Apple just revealing these quad bayer filters and their true colors. Get it. Now, deep down, these photos are really only 12 megapixels. Also, notice that despite me picking night mode, and knowing for sure that I set this to 30 seconds, Lightroom says that this is a 10-second exposure. I have no idea why.
But anyway, this photo is just culmination of everything that hopefully you've learned after you've been watching for I don't know 30 minutes. I guess everything we've talked about is at play here. We're talking wide apertures, which are key for astrophotography. We're talking long exposures, 30 seconds of this lens trying to catch light. It's an evolution of what we did with the waterfall. There's light coming into the sensor, but of course, the larger photo sites on the Sony camera have a huge advantage. And the quad pixels, they ended up being useful here. As a matter of fact, that is the exact reason why the iPhone won't
let you take this photo at 48 megapixels. has to be 12. Now, to me, the winner was pretty obvious. To Instagram people, it wasn't. About 40% of people in my Instagram got fooled by this photo. And still, it absolutely blows my mind that the iPhone was able to take two whole points out of my Sony camera. I secretly thought that this was going to be a 7 sort of match. So, kudos to you, Apple, despite your iffy marketing numbers. Now, another big deception around this is in the quality of movies that we stream because 4K in Hollywood is absolutely not what you think. We actually uncovered that in our video from a couple weeks ago. Also, if you want to be on top of the new videos that we're working on, now you know
where to find these things to follow. Catch you on the next one.
