00:00:00
[Music] yo what is good everybody welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez and
00:00:11
i'm andrew and we've got a couple things today talk about we've got the usbc iphone of course we've got uh the new sony phone with a one-inch sensor and then a conversation
00:00:23
about why it's not actually a one-inch sensor we'll get into that and then we'll wrap it up with a little
00:00:29
story time from andrew no idea what that is that's all you've told me yeah yeah is that you have a story uh first off i
00:00:34
am wearing you can tell a little uh and one of the new merch pieces oh you can't see the back
00:00:39
flex but here's the thing you can see it yeah there's the uh the peach the retro piece the back is
00:00:45
way cooler but yeah we have a bunch of new uh bunch of noises live one is a waveform one it's like a retro six color
00:00:52
waveform sure it's sick we'll throw it up on the screen neither of us are wearing it because i didn't think that
00:00:57
through very well um but it's sick shop.mkbhd.com i love the long sleeve so much the long
00:01:03
sleeves are really sick it's our first sleeve print we're excited about it all in time for the holidays so check it out
00:01:08
if you get a second but first thing i have written down here is a pixel 6 fingerprint scanner issue now
00:01:15
you asked me about this this morning because you're using the pixel 6 pro yes and have you let it fully die so as
00:01:23
weak as my battery life has been no i have not let it fully die because i preemptively start to charge it when i'm
00:01:29
at like 20 percent yeah so i like i haven't let it get to zero so what's going on is we so we got
00:01:35
an email about somebody from a linking us to a reddit thread and now normally we get emails like this all the time and usually it's a reddit thread with like one person in it having an
00:01:45
issue no one else is having that sheet this is one of the first times i've seen that reddit thread where there are like
00:01:50
20 comments of everybody having the same issue as on our google pixel and essentially what was happening was
00:01:57
if you let your pixel 6 i saw mostly pixel six pros but it seems like it's on both of them if you let the
00:02:04
battery die all the way you restart the phone after it's charged there's no animation for your
00:02:09
fingerprint which is like pretty normal you do a code usually to get in but then after that
00:02:15
it was just gone there was no animation icon to put your fingerprint on so letting the phone's battery deplete to zero yes would disable the fingerprint reader
00:02:27
interesting and on top of that when you would go to re-enroll your fingerprint to try and get it to work again it would
00:02:33
go through the whole stage say it was scanning and then at the end it would say fingerprint enrollment did not work
00:02:39
and you were stuck you just didn't have it so just it's a very very weird very specific bug yeah i mean battery dying isn't that uncommon of a thing to
00:02:51
completely lock you out of your now biometric security yeah that's a i guess my question would be what percent of people have their phone die and this doesn't happen to them versus
00:03:04
their phone dies is this like gonna if i let my pixel 6 pro die is this guaranteed to happen i don't really know
00:03:09
i'm not sure i would guess not guaranteed some people are thinking it might be a security patch but then there
00:03:14
are other people who have the old security patch that it's happened to um there's also a really big thread on the
00:03:20
like google support ticket website um all people same issue the issue tracker website or whatever um now the good news here is maybe not the best news if if it happens to you you can
00:03:33
factory reset and it will work again that's a pain in the neck nobody wants to do that but what it does show is that
00:03:39
this is clearly a software thing so it should be able to get fixed okay yeah because it's working again once you
00:03:44
factory reset and you can put your fingerprint in and it's all working so it's not like bricking something in the hardware
00:03:50
completely shutting it down forever but then if you let it die again is it going to disable the fingerprint reader again yeah you have to hardware reset it until
00:03:56
i fix it okay yeah i hope they patched that but it is something that will definitely be patched but uh just kind
00:04:01
of want to do a psa where if you have the chance don't let your pixel 6 die and if you do
00:04:07
you're gonna have to factory reset it but it will work again i will not let my pixel die i kind of want you to though
00:04:12
little buddy you'll never get past five percent hey adam when we're recording can you sneak over and just play some
00:04:18
really high def video the whole time bench market to death no that's weird i hope they fix that um
00:04:23
i'm sure they will speaking of phones though this is something i found kind of interesting there was a usbc iphone in
00:04:30
the wild and all the headlines i mean they had a field day with this it's like there's finally a usbc iphone but really what it
00:04:36
was is one enthusiast got really really into the weeds he's been working on this project for a long time he has an iphone
00:04:43
10 and he's gone through github and he's he's been building code and sourcing parts and putting together this uh reconstructing this iphone 10 with a usb-c port
00:04:55
and he's gotten one to work and by work i think he just means charge yeah so it is is a usb-c iphone with uh a bunch of asterisks on it um
00:05:07
like you said it's a 10. like you said it's probably only charging um there's also like some other
00:05:12
things where if you buy it for the low low price of current bid of ninety thousand dollars yeah that's what i was
00:05:17
going to say so he he did finish the project and he built one and now there is one fully working and he has he's
00:05:24
listed it on ebay so you can actually buy it or at least bid on buying it and there's a whole bunch of disclaimers
00:05:31
like hey all right if you do buy this this isn't like a fully functional like this isn't your daily driver iphone this is it says you are not allowed to use this as your daily yeah if you do you
00:05:41
definitely won't have a good time um it's obviously not completely fully functional but it is at least physically
00:05:48
complete it's like feature complete it's like when it's like when elon says something's feature complete like yeah it's it's done
00:05:54
um so it is on ebay it's been there for a couple days i think he had like an eight or nine day listing and in the
00:06:00
first day it went up pretty quick it started at like a dollar because you can start it at whatever price you want the
00:06:05
iphone 10 is already a pretty good value holding phone you could probably sell it for a thousand dollars and i just sort
00:06:10
of casually said at the studio like we should try to get this like this would be cool to have would be a fun video and to tear apart and to explore and maybe
00:06:17
you're not allowed to do that oh sorry won't tear it apart but would talk to the guy who made it yeah and uh it
00:06:23
pretty quickly shot up to like two thousand dollars and then it was five thousand dollars and then it was at like
00:06:28
eight thousand dollars in a single day and i was like all right well if it gets past ten thousand dollars maybe we won't like jump right in
00:06:35
the next day it was at i believe um uh 99 million dollars it hit like a insane it was like went to a couple tens and then it went to like 70
00:06:47
and then it was just like a million all of a sudden yeah and so i think if you look at the bid history on ebay there's
00:06:53
some shenanigans going on there's a lot yeah a lot of those bids have been retracted or removed whether they're
00:06:58
fraudulent or whatever but it does sit right now at i think right under ninety thousand right
00:07:04
yeah with about 22 hours left uh as of recording this right now okay so that whoever you know obviously kenny from switzerland he's gonna have a good time selling that shipping it to somebody one
00:07:15
lucky person is gonna have the only usbc iphone in the world and we'll probably have a good time milking that for all
00:07:21
it's worth yep great um but my my snarky comment on twitter was oh apple all you had to do to make way more money was just put a usb-c port in the iphone and people will pay a lot of
00:07:32
money for it uh no this is spline demand obviously but there it is he did it i'm still convinced apple's the ones buying it so
00:07:39
no one ever gets to experience it you think like tim cook is like dating on ebay somewhere that's my like conspiracy
00:07:45
theory um apple doesn't want anyone to ever get to actually experience the the usbc iphone
00:07:51
so let's make sure it never goes anywhere i bet there's you know how when sometimes you see like a
00:07:57
you'll you'll see like a final design from a company and then sometimes they'll show you like here's some of the prototypes we went through here's some
00:08:02
of the other versions i bet there's a working usbc iphone somewhere in apple campus yeah i don't know how
00:08:09
well protected it is i bet it's never going to leave a certain room i still think somebody needs to now hop on this
00:08:15
and make the like s21 ultra lightning port i posted that on twitter and some people
00:08:21
got really upset about it just like it's a joke everyone that obviously doesn't make sense we don't actually want that
00:08:27
to happen um but yeah i i highly suggest watching the video he put on his channel we'll put in the show notes of like how
00:08:33
he's gone through and constructed this frankenstein of a phone which is it's pretty interesting to watch it's like 25
00:08:39
30 minutes or something like that um but it's really good and that's the type of that's the type of fun actual
00:08:46
engineering that i like to see go into a hilarious headline like that so well done uh all right twitter blue can i
00:08:54
talk about twitter blue for a second yeah i don't want to rant too hard like there's some guys there's some good things about twitter
00:09:00
blue but everyone was sending me twitter blue headlines when it first became widely available i think mostly for
00:09:06
iphone users but you can get twitter blue now it's like five bucks a month and everyone was sending it to me like
00:09:11
hey look you can edit tweets there it is marquez tweets are editable they're not i just wanna be very clear
00:09:18
it's kind of like when you have the undo send button in gmail it's not actually sending your tweet so what's happening with twitter blue
00:09:29
is there's an undo tweet button yeah you can construct your whole tweet you can hit the tweet button and then it'll sit
00:09:36
there at the bottom and this little countdown ring starts to fill up and before it
00:09:41
fills up you can undo the tweet edit it and then tweet it again and send it but when it's sitting there at the bottom of your screen it hasn't actually tweeted yet you're not actually editing
00:09:53
your tweet or undoing your tweet you never tweeted like a queue yeah yeah so just to be perfectly clear that's that's the one feature i would not pay five bucks a month for for twitter blue
00:10:04
there's other cool stuff to it but yeah it's it's not the editing tweets thing that i was hoping for if i'm being honest i didn't know it had the circle i think that would
00:10:14
increase the chance i don't find a spelling anxiety because like the whole thing is the reason we we find spelling
00:10:21
errors in that is when you're typing a tweet you have it in your head already type it out and even if you proofread it
00:10:26
afterwards if you're not like very very specifically paying attention you know what you just wrote 10 seconds ago right
00:10:32
so you're just reading it as that anyway yeah yeah if i then saw something ticking down on it i would just be trying to read it as fast as possible
00:10:38
before that finishes ticking down and then i would just miss it again yeah and we're in the same place it just took
00:10:44
20 seconds longer to mess up yeah there is something slightly psychological like this will help a couple people like the
00:10:50
undo send button in gmail i'll send i'll like type a really quick email like someone goes what's the best shipping
00:10:56
address and i'll just go and just send it real quick and then i'll look at it and i'll go oh wait i
00:11:02
just i'd spelled that wrong and i'll like undo it real quick correct the thing and send it and so
00:11:08
it's cool if you do get that chance where you actually do catch your own typo but for me and i'm guessing for a
00:11:14
lot of other humans you don't catch the typo until the tweet goes out and then someone replies saying you spelled this
00:11:20
wrong or you said this thing is backwards then you get to edit the tweet that's what i would hope it would be cool and it would
00:11:26
obviously need a lot of ai involved but how gmail when you write like attached is blah blah blah and then you
00:11:33
forget to attach something it knows the word attached is in your and it says you meant to attach something or did you
00:11:38
mean to we didn't send it do you want to add something if twitter had enough ai to be like you used the wrong version of this
00:11:44
word or you misspelled this or it could somehow catch a simple mistake like that and be like are you sure this is how you want to send it here is the issue
00:11:57
yeah i mean that would catch like syntax errors or like autocorrect type things that's what would have to do yeah but it
00:12:03
still wouldn't catch like if you just like had like a like a fact check thing or like you type the wrong number like
00:12:10
when something is 300 feet high and you type 3000 like it won't catch that it'll just think yeah i mean you can also use the wrong word that's still a word that's spelled correctly and then
00:12:20
it doesn't catch it so yeah in other words twitter needs to build a robust ai system for catching all typos or just
00:12:29
an edit button or an edit button one of them is easier weird yeah just a suggestion
00:12:34
um yeah that's those are sort of the two like interesting headlines or things that came out in the past like two weeks
00:12:40
obviously we had colin samir on last week so we didn't really tackle any headlines but there weren't really any crazy huge things um i do have the the
00:12:47
sony phone videos now out yep um and we were gonna talk about that a little more we're going to have dan seaford on from
00:12:53
the verge and we're going to talk a little bit more about these like huge sensor smartphones and what they actually mean but
00:12:59
the fascinating part about this sony smartphone if you watch that video was like okay we've got a couple of
00:13:05
these one-inch sensor smartphones now and that's really impressive in theory but the
00:13:12
image circle from the lens of the phone doesn't fully cover the sensor inside so
00:13:18
you actually don't get a lot of the increased benefits you would typically have from a larger sensor
00:13:24
um so it's it's a it's an odd quark slash feature of an 1800 phone now even funnier that
00:13:32
it doesn't correctly use the whole sensor and the sensor isn't as big as we thought but still yeah kind of how we
00:13:40
well yeah that that whole thing is yeah everything we said in the video is still true it's just the relative scale of
00:13:46
those things is shifted when you understand the equivalence and that we'll get into in a second but
00:13:52
the bottom line is the actual size of the sensor that is being used is about the same size as the pixel 6's sensor
00:13:58
yeah and it's an f2 wide open instead of f 1.7 which the pixel is um the actual pixel size is also about 2.4 micron pixel pitch it's about the same as pixel 6 also so like all the holy smokes it's
00:14:12
the sony xperia pro i like eye for imaging terrible name by the way but yes i would like to talk about that all the
00:14:19
all the wow 1 800 for a phone with a great camera all of those things are now suddenly like not actually realized
00:14:26
nearly as much as you thought they would be so it's an odd quirk do you want to rant on the name
00:14:31
i mean like come on let's just for one talk about how it's just the most sony thing possible
00:14:36
it's like let's make this name as confusing as possible and then let's also release it but not really release it for
00:14:42
like another month so yeah get you hyped it's better than the six months from before okay cool that's i'm sure it's
00:14:50
better than half a year later but so like my issue with the naming here is it is called the sony xperia pro i now
00:14:58
when we're talking a lot about cameras and stuff you call things like the sony a7r mark iii and the way you you show
00:15:05
the mark number is with lowercase eyes so to me i read this originally as the sony xperia pro and just like mark one
00:15:13
and that's because they also have a phone called the sony xperia one mark and then they have a mark ii and then they have the sony xperia one mark three with three cases
00:15:26
i mean i guess like you don't normally show mark one it's just the original name so i thought this was just like
00:15:33
xperia pro and for whatever reason they added the eye but this is so like well because they also have an xperia
00:15:38
pro what's the oh yeah oh my god it somehow got more confusing but like so when the sony
00:15:46
xperia pro eye gets a second iteration what is it called the sony xperia pro i mark ii so then it's just i m k i i it's insane yeah like i guess so yeah or
00:16:01
they're just incredibly confident that there will be no second version of this phone i guess i mean luckily like this isn't a name
00:16:08
that has to be known to an average consumer because it's an 1800 phone like this is not something that's going to be
00:16:14
on the verizon shelf and that somebody like if this were on the verizon shelf and someone walked into it and looked at
00:16:20
that name on like the little card under it they're just like yeah yeah i give up all right you know what's funny there
00:16:25
are some again some really great things i really like about this phone like i wanted to i wanted to daily it from like
00:16:32
nine out of the ten things that are great about this phone or like better than the pixel 6. the display is better than the pixel 6 so just for people who
00:16:39
wonder i am dailying the pixel 6 pro as we mentioned with the fingerprint stuff uh the display on the sony xperia pro i
00:16:45
is a 4k 120 hertz oled display it looks incredible and i do think it's more responsive than the pixel 6's display which is i i guess a bit annoying that the pixel isn't as responsive but it is
00:16:58
it's running older software too but sony's got the display responsiveness down looks phenomenal it's 21x9 it's
00:17:04
tall the phone is thin it's got a 4500mah battery um it has dual stereo front-facing speakers at the front that's awesome it obviously has all the camera stuff on the back it has the
00:17:16
separate dedicated camera shutter button on the corner for taking photos it has a separate custom button next to that
00:17:23
button for launching whatever you want it's the it's mapped automatically to their video pro app which is sweet it's
00:17:29
got a lanyard like cut out on the corner like everything about this phone is it has it has the tool-less sim card tray which has a back-to-back tray for a
00:17:40
micro sd card slot it has a headphone jack this phone is sick do you know what this kind of reminds me of these like
00:17:46
and sony did it last year too these over-the-top like phones that are more made for camera
00:17:53
like this is obviously a camera forward phone with insane specs and a crazy price like it reminds me of like when
00:17:58
the rog phones were coming out they were like this is a gaming phone but holy cow if i just look at those specs on a piece
00:18:04
of paper it looks like it should be like the best android phone out there yeah that's when i just look at these
00:18:10
specs if you just posted these specs android fans would lose their mind for it yeah and it's not even like that it
00:18:16
has to have the great numbers but like when you actually use the phone it's the little things that are like really nice
00:18:22
like having a headphone jack it's it's not like a spec necessarily but it's just really nice to just have it
00:18:28
um you could plug a mic into the headphone jack so if you're shooting video on the phone and you plug a wired mic in it's like that that's a nice
00:18:35
usability thing uh so there's a lot of things about this phone that are like that again the responsiveness you could tell me it has
00:18:40
120 hertz display but when i'm using the software i can feel that more so it's not on the spec sheet so i really like
00:18:47
the phone i i obviously can't recommend it to almost anyone because it's 1 799 and it doesn't even have the newest version of android um it also doesn't come out till december so you know maybe
00:18:59
they'll update the software between now and then but you can see the video that's the details it also has a couple other cameras but
00:19:06
the main camera was what we will talk about so what is the reason you wouldn't use it
00:19:11
as a daily or why would you pick pixel over it yeah so the newest version of android has a lot more features that i
00:19:17
really like from the pixel okay okay and then just the the versatility so i took a lot of side-by-side stuff from the
00:19:23
xperia pro eyes camera alongside pixel 6 and iphone 13 pro specifically because that's what i had in my pocket i wanted
00:19:30
to do more with the samsung s21 ultra but similar enough sensor size that that's mostly i was testing with pixel
00:19:36
six so in my side-by-side testing i really liked the white balance of sony's shots usually more than the other two the iphone is this is going to come back
00:19:47
to bite them i think again the blind smartphone camera test they're still blue i found it so yeah they're still really cool on a lot of the shots and
00:19:53
sony was nailing that over and over again but everything else about the shots i preferred pixel 6 and iphone
00:19:59
every time they would get exposure a little bit more accurate they would obviously have more contrast but they'd
00:20:04
have more dynamic range too because they'd bring in all that multi-frame hdr processing much more often um so i could
00:20:10
bring in more details and then i could edit the photos later so i liked you know that it was neutral and that the
00:20:16
white balance was correct but then also like just using the camera button on the side of the phone i would have a lot
00:20:21
more like missed focus and slow shutter speeds when i was just pointing and shooting i would have
00:20:26
just like a photo of the horizon then it would be like slightly blurry because i was like squeezing the phone with the shutter
00:20:32
button which is like a small thing i can just use the button on the throne but a lot
00:20:38
of little usability things still push me towards the pixel um so that yeah it's it's going to be
00:20:43
personal preference but when the phone costs three times as much it kind of is a no-brainer that's the thing when we're doing review units and you're still
00:20:49
picking the phone when it comes to somebody actually putting their money down i mean like unless you're willing
00:20:55
to spend an extra thousand dollars for the headphone jack that the pixel definitely doesn't have yeah it feels
00:21:00
like selfie camera is way better on the other phones the sony does not have a good selfie camera um so yeah we'll see if that phone ends
00:21:07
up being the one that saves sony's smartphones but i don't feel like that matters to sony that much at this point
00:21:13
there's no no way an 1800 phone is saving the smartphone industry of anybody yeah yeah
00:21:18
all right well i think we've pretty much covered that i think what we want to do now we'll have dan sieffert come on yeah
00:21:23
um he is a reporter for the verge he runs the reviews program but we're going to talk about these one-inch camera
00:21:28
sensors in smartphones in drones in action cameras there's a little extra info to unpack so a lot of extra info on yeah let's dive into that all right dan thanks for joining me uh we've we've
00:21:41
both been in the camera world for a while we've talked about a lot of different cameras whether it's dedicated cameras
00:21:48
or phones with cameras on the backs of them and i just reviewed the sony xperia pro i which has a couple weird quirks but it
00:21:56
does have a one-inch sensor in the back which i want to talk to you about um but as as many have pointed out there
00:22:03
are a couple other one-inch sensor smartphones and then a couple other like huge sensor
00:22:09
devices that also have some of these weird quirks and you know i talked briefly but like
00:22:15
some of these same problems are attacked by software instead of hardware i'm curious what your overall take is on like if you have a preference between like maybe the google purely computational photography approach or
00:22:27
just like hey let's go throw as many megapixels as we can at something ha so like you know 10 years ago it would have been a hardware answer right it would have been like let's get the
00:22:38
biggest sensor we can get in there let's you know make those pixel pitch as big as it can be this is how we solve this problem
00:22:45
uh but in the past decade or half decade really like computational photography has really changed that dynamic a lot
00:22:51
and to me it's not like a straight software better or hardware better it is absolutely a combination of the two and
00:22:58
i think that's what we're seeing pretty acutely this year especially from like apple and google they are stepping up
00:23:05
the size of the hardware sensors in their cameras but they are not leaving behind the software processing at all
00:23:10
and in fact they're using that hardware advantage to make their software processing better because it's just like
00:23:17
better data coming in that the software can work with um and so the the you know the sony camera that you
00:23:22
you mentioned or the sony phone yeah it's a camera with a phone like that's what you call that right yeah so like what's interesting there is
00:23:29
they are just doing the full hardware approach right like yes sony does process the image it spits out a jpeg
00:23:35
you know it is doing it's got the bionz processor in there but it's not doing the same level of computational
00:23:41
photography that google and apple and samsung and huawei and all the other like phone first makers are doing uh and
00:23:49
and you can see it in the results like like you the evidence that you showed in your videos like it's it's not demonstrably better sometimes it's worse
00:23:56
and yeah and when we're talking about a phone that's 1800 do you want it sometimes to be worse
00:24:01
true true have you played it all with the pixel 6 and 6 pro cameras yeah i yeah that's one of those using
00:24:08
chord bit yeah that's one of those uh lots of software help going on with those those images and they're very
00:24:14
processed but i kept i kind of still find that they're a little bit over overdone the processing is so turned up
00:24:21
maybe as a like a legacy thing where they were overcompensating for less hardware now that they have all this
00:24:27
hardware and all this information they might be able to turn that down a little bit would you agree with that
00:24:33
yeah you know i mean i think you can you can like prove that theory out by shooting it raw with the phone right and
00:24:38
then see what you can do with the raw image and yes you can do a lot more with the raw file from a pixel six then maybe you
00:24:45
could have done with a pixel three or a four or five because they were all using the same hardware right um and you do
00:24:50
have more more flexibility to play there but i do think that even with these larger sensors we're still talking about
00:24:57
a small sensor like even when we talk about like the one-inch sensor in the sony phone that is still
00:25:03
a small sensor and there's like limits to what you can do with manual controls there's limits to what you can do with
00:25:09
raw processing there's limits so so like you they're the computational level side
00:25:15
of things really is what expands those limits right and it allows you to do more and it allows you to
00:25:21
capture things that you can't do and so now we're at a stage with a lot of like smartphones where
00:25:27
if you have a mirrorless camera that's got a legitimately large sensor in it whether it's aps-c or full frame or
00:25:32
whatever and you go and take a picture of a sunset and you go and take a picture of a sunset with an iphone like
00:25:38
you're going to do a lot of work to that photo that you dick with a mirrorless camera to get it to look as good as what the iphone just spits out right and part
00:25:46
of that is because they are capturing multiple frames and layering them and doing all of that hard work behind the
00:25:51
scenes to to make up for the fact that their hardware is inferior to what the hardware that you're using and so
00:25:58
yeah they could probably like adjust that and tweak that but i don't think it's ever going away i think you know
00:26:04
from here on out like computational photography is the way it's gonna go and it's only going to spread more and we're
00:26:10
going to get to a point where those large cameras would hopefully have that ability and then it'll be really exciting yeah i like that better like i
00:26:16
keep picturing like computational photography getting so good that it catches up to what we have now with our
00:26:21
like maybe rx100s but also i like the idea of adding computational ability to those cameras and also having them accelerate and get way better so another thing that there's there's a
00:26:33
couple people pointing out in the comments section that i wanted to talk to you about is the the phrasing one-inch sensor
00:26:39
the or one-inch camera one sensor there's a bunch of different versions of saying it these uh these cameras with one-inch
00:26:46
sensors don't actually have one-inch diagonal measurements of those sensors and even though it's kind of phrased that way everywhere and we kind of like accept that
00:26:57
the archaic way of explaining that is a little bit odd so i'll give it a stab basically
00:27:05
there used to be tubes in tvs and in camera sensors essentially they were tubes and the front diameter of that tube would be about one inch and that
00:27:16
would result in an image area of about 16 millimeters and so they would call that a one inch tube and because today the sensors have reached
00:27:28
about 16 millimeters diagonal we're referring to them for some reason still as one inch sensors even though they're
00:27:35
not actually one inch in any reason am i is that about right i feel like i've had to do something i honestly think you
00:27:41
know more about that than i do it's weird it's very frustrating because obviously like okay all the stuff that i still
00:27:48
said in that video still is true it's just like shifted down a dimension because all this stuff is relative to
00:27:54
each other um but i found that fascinating so when you look now at all these uh like press
00:28:00
kits or like image especially like advertising from a lot of these companies they're telling people these
00:28:05
are one-inch sensors and they're not but we all just kind of say that anyway um yeah i mean the the thing with like image sensor measurements is it's it's always relative uh to like something
00:28:19
else and and it's always a very hard thing to articulate like when uh we talk about smaller sensors they
00:28:24
might be one over two point three inches like right can you visualize that in your head no yeah like nobody knows what
00:28:30
that there's no reference point for that it's like okay well maybe it's okay that image sensor is like the size of an average pinky nail
00:28:36
maybe that can like help you out and see figure out what it is but like until you get to like actual tangible
00:28:42
sizes with like what we call full frame which is 35 millimeter right and that's that's 35 millimeter diagonally and like
00:28:49
that's the size of a postage stamp or maybe a little bigger than a postage stamp yeah but it's all it's all kind of weird and these like nebulous things
00:28:56
that are just like the industry has like had for years and it's just built on top of itself yeah and it's weird because
00:29:01
it's so like you said it's j it's very much just in this industry because i was trying to make this parallel i don't
00:29:06
know if i've shrunk it down enough to tweet it yet but it's basically like if i bought a tv
00:29:11
and the tv said it was 100 inches and then i got it and it was only 75 inches diagonal i'd be a little confused but if
00:29:17
it's if it's a 100 millimeter equivalent by some old weird tube standard then that would be okay it's like no i i can
00:29:25
i can see the tv in front of me i can i can physically visualize if it's the right size but
00:29:30
with camera sensors they're sort of uh buried in this piece of glass here so maybe we don't know exactly how big it
00:29:35
is but you're right it's all relative i also find it weird that we mix imperial and metric so often
00:29:42
in the camera world there's millimeters there's inches it's all right i mean when we're writing about it is just like a nightmare for
00:29:48
like our style guy and our poor copy editors i'm sure when you when you were putting graphics together for the videos
00:29:54
it's just like how do i express this in a way that humans can read it yeah yeah it's a lot
00:30:00
um so i mean if you look at the in the the future of of computational photography now i've seen these features
00:30:05
especially with the pixel get better and better and the theme with all these features is it's faking something that
00:30:12
you would be doing with hardware with really good software to varying levels of success i think portrait mode is the
00:30:18
obvious one if you have a bigger sensor and a bigger lens you have a shallow depth of field background and so now
00:30:24
they've decided okay we can we can do edge detection and blur the background for you and give you the big sensor look
00:30:30
i think that's the most evolved one yet but the pixel also has this feature where there's a long exposure simulation
00:30:36
they also have action pan where the subject moves through the frame and like detects the the the
00:30:44
speed of the thing moving in the direction and then blurs the background it's hit or miss it's kind of cool when
00:30:50
it works but it's not as evolved as portrait mode the thing that gets me excited about features like that and i
00:30:55
actually i really like the motion pan one um which again it's hit or miss obviously the more light you have the better it's gonna work it works really
00:31:02
well in my experience with like cars moving at like 20 miles an hour but you know humans running it doesn't do well
00:31:07
but the the thing is like where the portrait mode um was using computational things to make up for a hardware deficiency that like this is not as big of a lens it doesn't have the depth of
00:31:18
field control that you get with a larger camera these are like making up for skills deficiencies and so in order to
00:31:26
like shoot a good motion panned photo not only do you need a lot of gear you need you know the right kind of camera equipment you need to set your kit but you need to know how to use your camera equipment really well and it takes years
00:31:37
of practice to get panning good yeah and like to like catch a moving subject if you've ever seen a professional race car photographer be able to like capture that motion in a still frame and they're
00:31:49
like doing it over and over and over again it just takes years of practice and now it's like oh that was as easy as
00:31:55
snapping a selfie like so like that's like democratizing that skill in a very interesting and exciting way to me that
00:32:02
is like the next step beyond just like making up for the fact that you don't have the right or has good hardware so i
00:32:08
again it's very like i hate to say early days but it's very new uh and there's a lot of weird uh improvements to make on
00:32:15
it but it is pretty fun and pretty exciting to see where they're going with that yeah i hadn't thought about it that way but that is super true like if
00:32:21
you've ever tried to take that type of shot with a real camera it's much harder it might be a perfect result one out of
00:32:27
every 10 times which is better than you'd get from the pixel but you'd get a better shot usually out of the pixel if
00:32:32
you don't know what you're doing but then the also one the other one is uh like simulating long exposures so you
00:32:37
just like sort of point it at the moving thing snap and walk away and it again sees the direction either water or
00:32:43
headlights usually work best and then it sort of creates these like paint painted lights where you'd have to
00:32:50
have more equipment to pull that off in any other typical situation like uh taking a photo of a waterfall in the
00:32:56
middle of the day and you want to get that nice like cascading water look that's nice
00:33:02
and blurry and things like that i have a literal camera bag full of gear that i need to lug around with me to make that
00:33:08
happen yeah i need the right lens i need to put filters in front of that lens i need to set up a tripod i need to be at
00:33:14
the location at the right time of day so that the sun isn't too strong and my shutter speed isn't too fast and i'm like fighting all of these things and
00:33:21
then the pixel is like oh you just walk by and click the button yeah it's just like it's like oh my gosh like if i
00:33:27
could have that in my large format camera that would be incredible it's pretty good too the water blurring is
00:33:33
actually i found to be like actually very good so i don't usually take that shot all the time but the fact that you can now and it's just a tool in your
00:33:39
pocket pretty sweet night sight a lot of the same stuff like you can start to see stars at night which is awesome
00:33:45
so yeah i feel like the future of that is is a lot of these computational features getting better and better to
00:33:51
the point where they get as good as uh the larger pieces of hardware would um the other version that we mentioned earlier is do you see any of these large cameras embracing computational
00:34:03
photography at all because i don't you know if we're seeing it in very small drips and drabs and we're not seeing it in the level that we want to see it yet right so like i think olympus
00:34:16
or whatever they're calling themselves now om systems or something like that they changed their name recently uh they have used some computational things to
00:34:22
aid their autofocus systems so now uh we're seeing the larger cameras uh can detect an animal versus a person and so
00:34:30
like it's using computational things to try and do that and so it's auto focusing can can focus on your dog's eye
00:34:35
as opposed to like i don't know the bush behind them or something like that and so there's there's very little bits here and there but what we're not seeing is
00:34:42
the multi-frame capture and then stacking and then processing happening inside the
00:34:49
cameras and part of that to me is that maybe these sensors these larger sensors just don't read the data fast enough to do that they don't have like the imaging pipeline built into the
00:35:01
camera to do that either so a lot of photographers who are shooting with large former larger format cameras are
00:35:07
shooting raw anyways and they are using they're offloading the processing to their computer at home to
00:35:13
do their image edits or maybe they're combining frames together or what have you uh and the camera itself is not
00:35:19
doing it and there's some like rudimentary options for like multi-frame exposures in a lot of cameras yeah obviously you can get it to spit out a
00:35:25
jpeg but it's not doing the level of computational photography that google and apple are doing like when you think
00:35:30
about like google's um face blur feature that debuted with the pixel six where it is like telling you
00:35:36
like i'm taking multiple pictures here and i'm gonna grab the one with the sharpest face and then i'm gonna layer it onto that person's face and they're
00:35:42
always gonna have a sharp face in every single one of your photos there's nothing like that on the larger format cameras and so like for me taking
00:35:48
pictures of my kids that means like i'm in continuous burst mode and i'm just rattling away hoping that i get one
00:35:53
where they're like looking at the camera and their their eyes are sharp right uh and and what would it take to get there
00:35:59
i think it probably needs faster sensors it definitely needs faster hardware in terms of processors but
00:36:05
i just don't know if they have the resources on the algorithmic side of things to really get
00:36:11
the work done whereas like google and apple and samsung can just like throw endless resources at okay perfecting
00:36:16
them so this is this is where my hot take comes in i think apple really should make a camera now i'm
00:36:24
gonna preface this by saying it wouldn't be for everyone obviously and i think part of the reason why we're not seeing as much of this
00:36:30
high high-end hardcore like computational stuff is because most of the people spending that much on a camera have some
00:36:36
level of skill or intent that doesn't involve the camera doing all that processing for you they want to shoot raw they want to do certain things
00:36:42
that's cool right but when you think about okay if anyone could pull off like all the processing needed to scan that
00:36:49
huge sensor multiple times in a split second to get that level of look um i look at apple silicon and i look at what they do with the iphone and i'm like i would think that they could do a great
00:37:00
job with way better camera hardware i think an apple camera would be incredible uh am i missing anything i feel like that would be pretty i mean i i think that would be incredible i think you
00:37:11
know it is a hot take i'm going to give you that you're not the first person to like have that that hope and desire uh years ago
00:37:18
uh johnny ive designed a a very johnny ive camera for leica which was like it didn't look very usable in typical like johnny ive style but it was very pretty and everybody was like why doesn't apple
00:37:29
make this uh and so like it it's a dream that i think a lot of people have thought about uh it would be i think
00:37:36
your point that you know apple silicon is like the inflection point where that could actually
00:37:41
maybe mean something now like we're you know imagine a camera with like an m1 max gpu in there just crunching all the
00:37:47
data right away like that would be super exciting yeah uh is it a business case i don't know like
00:37:52
the large format camera world is not a huge like business and it would be like you
00:37:58
know a thing that like apple would do to like placate enthusiasts like yourself and myself yeah because it would
00:38:05
probably not settle you would no doubt be like five thousand dollars and like anybody spending that much on a camera is like already in some other lens
00:38:11
ecosystem and wants to do a lot of manual things and it's like that's such a small niche thing but i would love to
00:38:16
see it it'd be really exciting if they were able to like partner with a manufacturer right so if like maybe they
00:38:22
were partnered with canon or partnered with sony or whatever uh i mean the funny part is that sony is making all
00:38:27
the sensors that are in the the iphones and the pixels and what have you um so they're already talking there uh but
00:38:33
that would be that would be pretty exciting to see if they were able to do that i think it's i think it's a little bit of a pipe dream but uh it would be exciting well i'll keep it i'll keep it
00:38:40
in my back pocket i think that's i'm looking forward to the future of of computational photography getting better
00:38:45
in the phones but i also even more tend to look for like i don't know i'm so used to the software
00:38:51
being so good that like back when the galaxy camera came out i felt like that was a little ahead of its time because i
00:38:57
would love to snap a photo and just have it immediately be shareable and editable and have google photos on the back of
00:39:02
the thing like i want that world to level up the same way smartphone cameras are yeah i fully agree and we saw some
00:39:08
things you mentioned the galaxy camera samsung actually had a whole line of mirrorless cameras that they killed uh
00:39:14
but one of them was at the time an lte connected mirrorless interchangeable lens camera
00:39:20
and that thing was like very cool because you could immediately go into google photos or instagram and upload
00:39:26
right from the camera and that was really exciting and unfortunately uh i don't know maybe the market wasn't ready for it or whatever uh it doesn't exist
00:39:33
now but yeah that would be great like you know trying to get photos off of my camera uh
00:39:38
if anyone's ever used a mobile camera app that connects to your phone you probably know that pain yeah it is it is
00:39:44
a nightmare and so like someone figured this out that's why the sd card slot means so much to me
00:39:50
it's so much awesome well that's that's pretty much it i was just i'm i'm in the world now so i might as well you know
00:39:56
check out some of these more big screen or big censored cameras but appreciate you joining me dan we'll probably talk
00:40:01
again there's a lot of camera stuff in happening in this world so i'll probably link up again and talk about that but thanks for joining me on waveform happy
00:40:08
too thank you all right we're back thanks again to dan for joining me and talking and clarifying all the stuff
00:40:13
we've talked about with those one-inch sensors and those imperial and metric units it's a good time but on a
00:40:19
completely different topic andrew's got a story time i don't think we've done this before but
00:40:25
story time episode andrew tells me something that's going to have us all riveting on the edge of our seats oh man
00:40:33
you're setting up i'm setting you up um yeah i just have kind of like a rant story that i'm sure a lot of people have
00:40:40
it has to do with my cable company so it's very relatable to a lot of people out there i think who's your cable
00:40:46
company uh comcast xfinity which again like i know comcast is just kind of the meme of being terrible i've luckily never had to deal with it i think all the stuff i've ever paid for was
00:40:57
either optimum or fios which you know have all their own that's actually the trio that i've had
00:41:02
i've had i started with comcast and then i went to college i had optimum and now i have fios i don't say i miss files
00:41:09
already okay you're new to files right yeah yeah you're getting a 50 down 470 up that's the thing man i i was always getting like really good upload speeds too it doesn't matter for me
00:41:20
quite as much but xfinity i'm paying for 1200 down but it caps at 35 up which just feels like such a giant 1200 down 35 up wow okay but so anyways like
00:41:33
in terms of all that my my internet's been totally fine i get great speeds not 1200 but close or
00:41:39
good enough you know stuff i'm happy with now when it comes to my cable i've been having quite a few issues some of
00:41:45
them not exactly xfinity's fault they took away a channel called msg which around here in the tri-state area means you're
00:41:52
losing four sports teams uh devils rangers islanders and knicks which the knicks are like one of the
00:41:57
biggest basketball markets in the country it's insane to me that this many people can have a cable company and not get to
00:42:04
watch the knicks and still getting charged the full like 20 a month for local sports fees but um yeah that's not
00:42:10
quite what my story's about um so i've been getting really into the show called yellowstone which i highly highly
00:42:16
recommend the fourth season just came out claire and i watched all three seasons leading up to this just to get
00:42:22
ready for the fourth season so it comes out on sunday we're busy sunday can't watch it live
00:42:29
we just decided oh well we can watch on demand because like every cable company now has on demand so when you miss a
00:42:34
show it's just available very shortly after yeah monday night rolls around get home super super excited to watch
00:42:40
yellowstone we didn't make any plans turn it on and it starts playing in this awful
00:42:46
quality and i mean like 480p like macbook webcam quality i mean the paramount symbol on the side you couldn't even read what it said that's how bad this is oh boy um
00:42:59
and i'm just at first thinking it feels like it's not buffering correctly like if i just play this for a little but
00:43:04
also like season three ended on a crazy cliffhanger so i don't want to watch too much into this show at this quality yeah
00:43:10
sometimes when you start a show on netflix or a streaming service thing your internet's like being like under high load or something it'll look like
00:43:17
garbage for like 15 seconds and then sharpen up slowly until you're good so i played like the first three minutes
00:43:23
which was the full recap of the previous and then like the intro i just want to distract you super hard oh oh oh by the
00:43:29
way we're about to hit 15 million on the channel totally out of it we're out of this is nothing to do with the story time that's fine i'm distracted by the livestream we're two away it's gonna hit any second
00:43:41
fourteen million nine nine nine nine there it is all right thank you good timing great timing so anyway 15 mil
00:43:48
appreciate y'all back to the story thanks everyone um hey we got we have the sounds loaded i just wanna interesting tidbit i started at the studio at four and a half million
00:44:01
one of the like first things i feel like i kind of helped doing is we set up a live stream for the five million wow um
00:44:07
so i've been here it makes it feel like i'm way more important than i actually am but i've been here for 10 million subscribers
00:44:13
that feels good that's kind of cool um all right back to the story play it for the first three minutes quality is not getting any better and i'm just like
00:44:24
very upset because you and i i'm sure most of the people listening here like i refuse to watch that at that high
00:44:30
quality if a video is available in hd it better be 720p i want to show you and we can put this picture up on the screen
00:44:36
but i took a picture on my phone of how bad this looks yeah how bad is it and the fact that you can tell how bad it is
00:44:43
on a phone is pretty impressive because like a phone already it's got this like weird um
00:44:50
like look at like interlacing look it that's supposed paramount pictures that yeah it's like i can't see anything not only is it low resolution but it looks like weirdly interlaced look at his face
00:45:01
it's the most pixelated garbage i've ever seen yes and this is a this is not a low budget show i think they're spending about five million an episode like previous seasons look sharp
00:45:13
fantastic yeah wonderfully shot like again great great show so i see that i decide to call comcast xfinity customer support go through all the
00:45:24
everything nowadays has all these automations that are impossible to get through go through it it tells me it
00:45:30
wants to restart my cable box i say no so it says thanks will restart your cable box and then hangs up the phone
00:45:35
great finally get to customer support tell them what's going on we troubleshoot a couple things
00:45:42
everything was updated on my cable box everything looked good on his end he told me to watch a couple other shows
00:45:47
on demand everything looked great previous season looked great he asked me what show it is he goes to
00:45:53
look at it and his i kid you not his response to me was so i just pulled it up on my tv
00:45:58
and it looks like i'm having the same thing i can't even read the text that's on it then he tells me this must just be how
00:46:06
it shot and i said what and he's like they must have shot this on standard definition
00:46:11
cameras and i just started laughing i just couldn't believe that he tried to tell me he probably
00:46:18
thinks that it's that but it his logic makes sense but i would guess if i was in his position that this is
00:46:24
accidentally how it was saved like it was shot and broadcast in high resolution live and the on-demand version got nuked somehow my my theory
00:46:35
would have been that they just like don't feel like either there's a big impact on it and they don't want the server load or
00:46:41
whatever and they're so they're putting it in a lower quality um but of course he's not gonna say that he's not gonna
00:46:47
tell me that hey i'm giving you absolute garbage quality yeah um so i just kind of like
00:46:52
laughed explained to him that that's totally not the case because the three seasons previous look great and they're
00:46:57
clearly not going to switch to a a laptop webcam budget cuts in the series yeah supply chain couldn't get the cameras in yeah so i i went on a long thing with him trying to figure
00:47:10
stuff out wasn't very helpful but i also like i totally understand that level one tech support on most of these get
00:47:16
super super limited knowledge and they're not allowed to do much so i tried to escalate it um pretty sure he
00:47:22
then just told me someone would call me back and no one ever called me back um that didn't happen so pretty much i think just the cherry on the the
00:47:33
top here is the next morning still haven't figured out what what happened this next morning
00:47:39
and still no call but i got a text message that says um hey this is xfinity we're thinking about
00:47:45
the customer service call you had if you were um could you please rate whether you would
00:47:50
like to recommend us to your family and friends press zero for not very likely or press 10 for very likely
00:47:57
press zero nothing happened and i get a text message back that says like we're not able to handle your
00:48:03
request and then a link for so it's just like at no part did anyone actually help figure anything out um i wound up talking to someone else they actually on a twitter dm
00:48:16
recommended the same thing saying or not recommended told me this is how it's supposed to look
00:48:22
clearly not the case but just like through this whole process i'm sure many people have had this before i just no
00:48:27
part felt like they were actually trying to help me felt like they were trying to get me off the phone as fast as possible and just
00:48:33
not deal with it yeah i i've had a lot of i mean everyone's had various levels of unhelpful customer support i i wonder if it is literally them just going you know
00:48:44
what we have so much bandwidth like happening right now like remember when youtube had
00:48:50
such high bandwidth that for um a while they started to default hd videos to like 480p yeah like that was a real
00:48:57
issue because that there were that many people on youtube because of the pandemic i wonder if they just made the
00:49:02
call they're like yeah you know what on-demand viewers aren't really the highest priority we're just going to lower this all to like
00:49:09
360p and just deal with a couple extra calls and whatever and we can take that bandwidth off our shoulders i think
00:49:16
that's the thing and it just made me mad that they obviously some guy in customer support's not going to take the blame for it not going to admit that xfinity is the one
00:49:26
serving me stuff cause it's like paying a lot for that it's not cheap and now i'm missing out the sports teams i
00:49:32
want to watch and the show that i really want to watch is to what i think is unwatchable quality
00:49:38
um but i think the majority of people would just watch it at that quality and never really complain about it um but it was more so i just thought it was very very funny that somebody told me they
00:49:50
filmed it on a standard definition yeah they probably just shot it with a webcam yeah i think the surface duo's got a
00:49:55
pretty good camera yes i think the surface duo may have looked better it looks fine
00:50:01
that's funny you know sometimes i think about when i was editing the videos on the macbook pro and the final cut preview
00:50:06
was really small and i was like this is fine i can totally color in this when i'm usually on like a 30 inch display
00:50:12
it made me think about like how much effort we put into some of these like little tweaks with like color correction in each shot and how people are just
00:50:19
gonna watch it in 480p on their phone on like a perfectly reasonable screen that's thing but i mean like what's also
00:50:26
funny about that is we've brought up our videos on three different browsers and they look completely different but it's different chrome safari and firefox yep
00:50:33
some of them look like old samsung phones with like where the red is burning your retinas out some looks way
00:50:40
more muted but you know if we want to also talk about something that's coming up smart
00:50:45
uh smartphone blind camera test bracket is another thing where everyone wants all these different things but your
00:50:52
phone is gonna everyone voting on that is probably seeing it differently yeah yeah which i think is fascinating yeah
00:50:58
we are one of the few i mean not few but a lot of youtube channels are are seeing like more and more people watching their
00:51:04
videos on phones and some of them are like over 50 mobile viewers our channel has been over that for a long time like we talk about phones obviously people are phone and mobile enthusiasts and ipads
00:51:15
and all that sort of stuff but like as far as the screens people watch our videos on i should be mastering for like
00:51:21
a tiny four inch window instead of like going through all the effort on like a huge cinema display
00:51:26
because most people are watching on their mobile devices most of the time so that was a one of my small realizations when
00:51:33
bringing a laptop around is like oh it's not so bad having a tiny preview window because that's how everyone else sees it
00:51:38
anyway i mean that's how i edit thumbnails as i shrink everything down and then does it still look reasonable so shout out to everyone watching us on
00:51:45
their smart tv big full blown or pro display xtr just some some real ghosty hd i get to i get to see those analytics i get to see like
00:51:55
what resolution tvs people watch these on which is awesome virtual fist bump yeah shout out to y'all
00:52:01
anyway i think that about wraps it up for this week thanks for watching thanks for listening thanks again to dan for
00:52:07
hopping on with us and we'll be back before you know it techvember rolls on catch you guys later peace later waveform is produced by adam molino we are partnered with vox media and our
00:52:20
intra-outro music was created by vane sill [Music] you