There are a lot of these videos being posted to Youtube everyday but what I found interesting about this particular video by photographer Tyler Stalman is that it’s less about phone camera versus medium format camera and more about software versus hardware. It’s no surprise an expensive Hasselblad is going to out-perform a phone (Youtube commenter was quick to point out it is an older model no longer worth $20k), but I think the more interesting question is whether or not you care how your image is created. Does it mean more if the blur in your image is created by the lens itself or it’s merely a product of split pixels, computations and machine learning?
It will take some time before the “portrait” mode on a Google Pixel (or any smart phone) is indistinguishable from a medium format camera but it will happen, and then the debate becomes purely philosophical.


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