What brought it all home was when I sent a copy of the almost-finished manuscript to my mom. She called long-distance (an absolute luxury for her) and said, "I really like it -- I couldn't put it down"
I've received accolades and awards, but there's nothing like hearing praise from your folks. Forty years later, that phone call still echoes.
Solid overview, but it underweights what's arguably the single biggest determinant of whether a phone camera produces a "good" photo: ISP tuning. The post frames software processing as a short list of named features (HDR, Night Sight, AI moon shots), when in reality almost every pixel has already been through dozens of tuned pipeline stages before any of those "features" run.
The ISP pipeline that turns raw Bayer data into a JPEG includes black level correction, lens shading correction, defect pixel correction, demosaic, auto white balance, color correction matrix, tone mapping, multi-stage noise reduction (raw domain, luma/chroma in YUV, temporal across frames), sharpening, local contrast, and multi-frame fusion. Each stage has dozens of parameters and most of them are scene-dependent.
"Tuning" means months in a light booth shooting color charts at every CCT from roughly 2300K to 7500K, then more months outdoors capturing skin tones across ethnicities, foliage, sky at different times of day, neon, candles, fluorescent shop lighting, mixed lighting. Every sensor + lens module gets its own calibration. Then you tune the perceptual layer on top: skin tone preservation, sky and foliage segmentation feeding AWB, AE metering weights with face priors, highlight roll-off, the chroma vs luma noise tradeoff across frequency bands.
This is why two phones with the same Sony IMX sensor look completely different. Sony ships a reference tuning. Apple and Google throw it away. Pixel phones famously have small sensors and beat phones with 2-3x the sensor area on real-world output, almost entirely on the strength of ISP tuning and computational photography stacked on top.
The headcount is genuinely large. Apple and Google each have camera organizations in the hundreds, with a substantial fraction doing nothing but tuning: color scientists, ISP tuning engineers, perceptual quality engineers running blind A/B against competitor output. It's why nobody else -- not Samsung, not Xiaomi, not the smaller players -- quite matches them even when they buy the same or better sensors. (Disclosure: I run a camera company and we live this problem.)
The sensor size advice in the article is correct but easy to misread. A small sensor with great tuning regularly beats a big sensor with mediocre tuning, and the gap is bigger than people expect.
where can i learn more about what you know (besides LLMs): books, wikis etc. ?
For reference, I have a ok-to-mediumish background in image signal processing.
Years ago I had found his channel and liked it, and then some video (I don’t remember the title or even subject at this time) came up on a subject I happened to know quite a bit about. He got to some point in an explanation, bungled it, and then hand-waved it away, saying the details were unimportant.
Stopped caring about anything he had to say after that, and I also then realized that there was a an entire genre of “person with no actual expertise reads Wikipedia articles and explains them with good lighting and high production quality.”
Same. It was the "How The U.S. Ruined Bread" video for me after which I started watching critically and found the editing style to be over the top and makes it harder to think about the content while it's being presented. So I eventually stopped watching.
Interesting. I had a similar experience with Veritasium’s video on kinetic bombardment, where I think they dismissed the concept based on tossing bowling balls out of helicopters onto sandcastles.
Comments here should be read as opinions, not as facts. I see it every time there is a subject I know deeply about, 90%+ of the comments are either factually incorrect or just bad opinions.
Most things? That's a really strong claim, do you have anything to back it up with? Just a couple videos here and there wouldn't cut it, given how strong your claim is.
For what it's worth I watch his videos and he seems to touch on incredibly valuable topics I would never hear about otherwise, like [1].
> The quick cuts and dazzling montages, as well as the dramatic shots of Harris absorbed by a document he’s unearthed, highlighting it suspensefully in tight close-ups, all lend credence to the often-excellent work he does. But it also makes it easy to mask his mistakes. And for someone who takes journalism to heart, his mistakes are big, leading to oversimplification and an occasional lapse in skepticism.
[...]
> In a video that garnered 8.5 million views and which Harris thumbnailed with the words “WE HAVE PROOF,” Harris explores the recent craze over UFO sightings—sorry, UAP sightings, meaning unexplained anomalous phenomena. In passing, he mentions Mick West, who has done excellent work debunking a lot of blurry footage of what is alleged to be high-tech spy drones or aliens.
> But the bulk of the video is spent leering at report after report—a total of 144 are being investigated by the U.S. government right now!—while original music amps up the mystery. The emphasis on evidence over context is key to Harris’ style: flood the space with visuals that keep your attention and elicit questions and only occasionally pull back to explain.
I think Trump will either invoke the insurrection act in response to protests against ICE Gestapo tactics or invade another country, and use either as an excuse to cancel elections.
