Here is a great article from a deep thinking journalist!

[Your Old Dog]

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Just as earth moving equipment sales are being threatend by bicycles and smart cars, here's one for Leica's CEO! All this in a Science and Technology column.

 

Phone cameras not a threat, says Leica CEO

[lct]

... The smaller the sensor, the lesser the depth of field in your photographs...

Ouch

[Guest Holy Moly]

Ouch

 

++1

[mjh]

Ouch

Oh, but technically he’s right. Everything else being equal a camera with a smaller sensor will produce images with a more shallow depth of field, due to the smaller circle of confusion. Having said that, this is largely irrelevant in this context since mobile phone cameras don’t just have smaller sensors but also lenses with a correspondingly shorter focal length, increasing the depth of field. As depth of field depends on the square of the focal length but only linearly on the circle of confusion and thus the sensor size, the depth of field of mobile phone cameras is actually larger.

 

So while the quote is technically correct, it is also seriously misleading. I wouldn’t discount a misunderstanding on part of the interviewer (who seems to believe that all the mirrorless system cameras are Micro FourThirds cameras, for example, so he may have been out of his depth here).

[AlanG]

That article is dong a very good job at mis-educating its readers. Let's see they get the depth of field concept wrong. (Between small sensor cameras and larger ones - not sensor size alone.) Maybe this was a communication error but it still should have been cleared up before publication. They say that Sony Nex cameras are M4/3rds. They say that the M4/3rds have huge lenses on small bodies when there are quite a few small lenses. Regardless this is a very popular form factor and encroaches on the idea that Leicas are smaller than other cameras. And:

 

"If you look at the picture quality, it's different. You can shoot images with such devices, but (they are) not photos," he said.

 

You could have said the same thing about 35mm camera photos when Leicas first came out and for many years afterwords if you had a particular view of what a "photos" is.

[lct]

...while the quote is technically correct, it is also seriously misleading...

The quotation refers to mobile phones, so there is nothing true in there. Let's call this a typo to be kind.

[Tietje]

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Oh, but technically he’s right. Everything else being equal a camera with a smaller sensor will produce images with a more shallow depth of field, due to the smaller circle of confusion. Having said that, this is largely irrelevant in this context since mobile phone cameras don’t just have smaller sensors but also lenses with a correspondingly shorter focal length, increasing the depth of field. As depth of field depends on the square of the focal length but only linearly on the circle of confusion and thus the sensor size, the depth of field of mobile phone cameras is actually larger.

 

So while the quote is technically correct, it is also seriously misleading. I wouldn’t discount a misunderstanding on part of the interviewer (who seems to believe that all the mirrorless system cameras are Micro FourThirds cameras, for example, so he may have been out of his depth here).

 

Exactly, these journalists have lost touch with the physics of photograpy, if they ever aware of it!

[luigi bertolotti]

"Sony's market share in Japan has doubled after its foray into the Micro Four Thirds market with the Sony Nex series"...Thumbs up !!!

 

... and I wonder why Herr Schopf pointed on the DOF question in his defense of "big" sensors... ... maybe he thought that a journalist with such a good knowledge of formats wasn't worth deeply calibrated answers...

[earleygallery]

Odd choice of interviewee. Leica are unlikely to be affected by the rise in quality of phone cams, but ask the CEO of Casio, Sony or Canon and the answer may be different.

 

If you have your sight it's quite obvious that compact camera sales must have been impacted significantly by phone cams, by looking at what many people are taking their holiday snaps with.

[IkarusJohn]

Odd choice of interviewee. Leica are unlikely to be affected by the rise in quality of phone cams, but ask the CEO of Casio, Sony or Canon and the answer may be different.

 

If you have your sight it's quite obvious that compact camera sales must have been impacted significantly by phone cams, by looking at what many people are taking their holiday snaps with.

 

+1

 

For all the reasons that I have invested so much in the M system, the quality of pictures from my iPhone does impact on any consideration of taking my G10 on holiday. I can't tell you how disappointed I was, for all the electronic options and controls provided by the G10, at the quality of pictures from that camera.

 

It was compounded when I discovered how comparatively good the images from my iPhone were. And it doesn't even have a Thumbs Up!

 

Cheers

John

[luigi bertolotti]

+ 2... smartphones are imho a serious threat to compact - P & S... big and fine monitors, powerful CPUs for basic processing/editing, and the capability to route pictures instantly through the Net are very valuable features. I don't follow so much the phone market... but suppose that some vendors have already in their offer models that are expecially targeted to camera usage.

[salim]

I think he missed the fact about the various focal length that most photographers would want. You can fit that on a phone, otherwise no point

[ohnri]

I have printed a significant number of lovely photographs from my 5 MP iPhone 4.

 

They look very nice at 16x16 inches and would certainly blow up larger without any difficulty.

 

Not every photograph needs 20 MP of resolution or 12 stops of DR to be powerful and effective.

 

Best,

 

Bill