Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Sony Xperia Pro-i, a USB-C iPhone, and Twitter Blue!

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

This week Marques and Andrew discuss some of the bigger headlines in the world of tech from the past two weeks. They go over the first ever USB-C iPhone, Pixel 6 and 6 Pro fingerprint scanner issues, and the new Sony Xperia Pro-i phone that Marques just reviewed on the channel. Marques also has a chat with Dan Seifert from the Verge to get to the bottom of the weirdness surrounding the Xperia Pro-i image sensor as well as to discuss the future of smartphone photography. Get ready to dive deep! Links to articles: Pixel 6 Fingerprint scanner issues: https://bit.ly/30rB8ua iPhone with USB-C video: https://bit.ly/3C2A0tW Sony Xperia Pro-i review: https://bit.ly/3Hbm3hb Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/dcseifert https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Shop the merch:  shop.mkbhd.com Join the Discord:  https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl:  https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Yo, what is good, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And we've got a couple things today to 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 about

why it's not actually a one inch sensor we'll get into that uh and then we'll wrap it up with a little story time from andrew no idea what that is that's all you've told me yeah yeah is that you have a story first off I am wearing you can tell a little one of the new

merch pieces you can't see the back flexing flex here's the thing you can see it yeah it's the the peach

the retro piece the back is way cooler but yeah we have a bunch of new pieces live one is a waveform one it's like a retro six color waveform shirt.

It's sick. We'll throw it up on the screen. Neither of us are wearing it because I didn't think that through very well, but it's sick. Shop.mkbhd.com. I love the long sleeve so much. The long sleeve is really sick.

It's our first sleeve print. We're excited about it. All in time for the holidays. So check it out if you get a second. But first thing I have written down here is a Pixel 6 fingerprint scanner issue. Now- Yeah, 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 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 at like 20%. Yeah, so I like- I haven't let it get to zero. So what's going on is we, so we got 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 issue. No one else is having that issue. This is one of the first times I've seen that Reddit thread where there are like 20 comments of everybody having the same issue is on our Google Pixel. And essentially what was happening was if you let your Pixel 6, I saw mostly Pixel 6 Pros, but it seems like it's on both of them. If you let the battery die all the way, you restart the phone after it's charged. There's no animation for your fingerprint, which is like pretty normal. You do a code usually to get in.

But then after that, it was just gone. There was no animation icon to put your fingerprint on. So letting the phone's battery deplete to zero would disable the fingerprint reader. 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 go through the whole stage, say it was scanning, and then at the end it would say fingerprint enrollment did not work and you were stuck. You just didn't have it. So it's a very, very weird, very specific bug. But I mean, battery dying isn't that uncommon of a thing to 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 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 i'm not sure i would guess not guaranteed some people are thinking it might be a security patch but then there are other people who have the old security patch that it's happened to um there's also a really big thread on the 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 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 this is clearly a software thing so it should be able to get fixed okay yeah because it's working again once you factory reset and you can put your fingerprint in and it's all working so it's not like bricking something in the hardware completely shutting it down forever but then if you let it die again is iticking something in the hardware, completely shutting it down forever. But then if you let it die again, is it going to disable the fingerprint reader again? Yes. And you have to hardware reset again? Until they fix it.

Okay, yeah. I hope they patch that. But it is something that will definitely be patched, but just kind of want to do a PSA where if you have the chance, don't let your Pixel 6 die. And if you do, you're going to have to factory reset it,

but it will work again. I will not let my Pixel die. I kind of want you to, though. Little buddy, you'll never get past 5%. Hey, Adam, when we're recording, can you sneak over and just play some really high-def video the whole time? Just benchmark it to death.

No, that's weird. I hope they fix that. I'm sure they will. Speaking of phones, though, this is something I found kind of interesting. There was a USB-C iPhone in the wild, and all of the headlines i mean they had a field day with this it's like there is finally a usbc iphone but really what

it 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 10 and he's gone through github and he's he's been building code and sourcing parts and putting together this reconstructinging this iPhone X with a USB-C port. And he's gotten one to work. And by work, I think he just means charge. Yeah, so it is a USB-C iPhone with a bunch of asterisks on it. Like you said, it's a X.

Like you said, it's probably only charging. There's also like some other things where if you 10. Like you said, it's probably only charging. There's also like some other things where if you buy it for the low, low price of current bid of $90,000. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. So he did finish the project and he built one. And now there is one fully working and he's 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 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 isn't says you are not allowed to use this as your daily yeah if you do you definitely won't have a good time um it's obviously not completely fully functional but it is at least physically complete it's like feature complete it's like when it's like when el complete. It's like feature complete. It's like when Elon says something's feature complete. Like, yeah, it's done. So it is on eBay. It's been there for a couple of days. I think he had like an eight or nine day listing.

And in the first day, it went up pretty quick. It started at like a dollar because you can start it at whatever price you want. The iPhone 10 is already a pretty good value holding phone. You could probably sell it for a thousand dollars. And I just sort of casually said at the studio, like, we should try to get this. Like, this would be cool to have.

It would be a fun video. And to tear apart and to explore and maybe even talk to. Well, it says 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 it pretty quickly shot up to like $2,000. And then it was $5,000.

And then it was at like $8,000 in a single day. And I was like, all right, well, if it gets past gets past ten thousand dollars maybe we won't like jump right in 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 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 some shenanigans going on. There's a lot, yeah. A lot of those bids have been retracted or removed,

whether they were fraudulent or whatever, but it does sit right now at, I think, right under $90,000. Right under $90,000, yeah, with about 22 hours left as of recording this right now. Okay. So whoever, you know, obviously Kenny from Switzerland, he's going to have a good time selling that, shipping it to somebody. One lucky person is going to have the only USB-C iPhone in the world and will probably

have a good time milking that for all it's worth. Yeah. Great. But my snarky comment on Twitter was, oh, Apple, all you have to do to make way more money was just put a USB-C port in the iPhone and people will pay a lot of money for it. No, this is supply and demand, obviously. But there it is. He did it. I'm still convinced Apple is the ones buying it. So no one ever gets to experience it. You think like Tim Cook is like bidding on eBay somewhere? That's my like conspiracy theory. Apple doesn't want anyone to ever get to actually experience the the USB-C iPhone so let's make sure

it never goes anywhere I bet there's you know how when sometimes you see like a 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 of the other versions I bet there's a working USB-C iPhone somewhere on Apple campus yeah I don't know how 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 and make the like s21 ultra lightning port i posted that on twitter and some people got really upset about it just like it's a joke everyone that obviously doesn't make sense we don't actually want that 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 he's gone through and constructed this frankenstein

of a phone which is it's pretty interesting to watch it's like 25 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 engineering that i like to see go into a hilarious headline like that. So well done. All right. Twitter blue. Can I talk about Twitter blue for a second? I don't want to rant too hard. Like there's some good things about Twitter blue, but everyone was sending me Twitter blue headlines when it first became widely available. I think mostly for iPhone users, but you can get Twitter blue now it's like five bucks a month. And everyone was sending it to me like, hey, look, you can edit tweets. There it is, Marques.

Tweets are editable. They're not. I just want to be very clear. 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 is there's an undo tweet button. You can construct your whole tweet 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 there at the bottom and this little countdown ring starts to fill up and before it 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 your tweet or undoing your tweet. You never tweeted. It's putting it in like a queue, yeah. Yeah, so just to be perfectly clear, that's the one feature I would not pay five bucks a month for

for Twitter Blue. There's other cool stuff to it, but yeah, it's not the editing tweets thing that I was hoping for. If I'm being honest honest i didn't know it had the the circle i think that would increase the chance i don't find a spelling the anxiety because like the whole thing is the reason we we find spelling errors in that is when you're typing a tweet you have in your head already you type it out and even if you proofread it afterwards if

you're not like very very specifically paying attention you know what you just wrote 10 seconds ago right so you're just reading it as that anyways yeah yeah if i then saw something ticking down on it i would just be trying to read it as fast as possible before that finishes ticking down and then i would just miss it again yeah and we're in the same place it just took 20 seconds longer to mess up yeah there is something slightly psychological like this will help a couple people like The undo send button in Gmail, I'll type a really quick email. Someone goes, what's the best shipping 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 just spelled that wrong. And I'll undo it real quick, correct the thing and send it. And so 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 lot of other humans,

you don't catch the typo until the tweet goes out and then someone replies saying you spelled this wrong or you said this thing is backwards. Then you get to edit the tweet. That's what I would be hoping for. It would be cool, and it would obviously need a lot of AI involved. But how Gmail, when you write, like,

attached is, blah, blah, blah, and then you forget to attach something, it knows the word attached is in your, and it says, you meant to attach something, or did you 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 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. Send or go edit. That would be awesome. Yeah, I mean, that would catch like syntax errors or like autocorrect type things. That's what it would have to do, yeah.

But it still wouldn't catch like if you just like had like a fact check thing or like you type the wrong number. Like when something is 300 feet high and you type 3000 like it won't catch that it'll just think yeah that's i mean you can also use the wrong word that's still a word that's spelled correctly and then it doesn't catch it so yeah in other words twitter needs to build a robust ai system for catching all typos or just add them in an edit button or an edit button one of them's easier yeah just a

suggestion um yeah that's those are sort of the two like interesting headlines or things that came out in the past like two weeks 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 and i do have the the sony phone videos now out yep um and we were going to talk about that a little more we're going to have dan seifert on from the verge and we're going to talk a little bit more about these like huge sensor smartphones and what they actually mean but the fascinating part about this sony smartphone if you watch that video was like okay we've got a couple of these one inch sensor smartphones now and that's really impressive in theory,

but the image circle from the lens of the phone doesn't fully cover the sensor inside, so you actually don't get a lot of the increased benefits you would typically have from a larger sensor. So it's an odd quirk slash feature of an $1,800 phone. Now even funnier that 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 well okay yeah that that whole thing's confusing everything we said in the video is still true it's just a relative scale of those things is shifted when you understand the equivalence

and that we'll get into in a second but the bottom line is the actual size understand the equivalence and that we'll get into in a second but the bottom line is the actual size of the sensor that is being used is about the same size as the pixel 6s sensor yeah and it's an f2 wide open instead of f 1.7 which the pixel is 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 the sony xperia pro i like i for imaging terrible name by the way but i would like to talk about that all of the all of the wow 1 800 for a phone with a great camera all of those things are now suddenly like not actually realized nearly as much as you thought they would be so it's an odd quirk do you

want to rant on the name? I could. I mean, like, come on. Let's just for one talk about how it's just the most Sony thing possible. 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 like another month.

So get you hyped. It's better than the six months from before. Okay, cool. That's I'm sure it's 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, when we're talking a lot about cameras and stuff,

you call things like the Sony A7R Mark III. And the way you show the mark number is with lowercase i's. So to me, I read this originally as they xperia pro and just like mark one and that's because they also have a phone called the sony xperia one mark and then they have a mark two and then they have a sony xperia one mark three with three lowercase i's exactly i mean i guess like you don't normally show Mark I. It's just the original name. So I thought this was just like Xperia Pro and for whatever reason they added the I.

But this is, so like. Well, because they also have an Xperia Pro. What's the? Oh. Yeah. Oh my God. It somehow got more confusing. But like, so when the Sony Xperia Pro I

gets a second iteration. Oh no. What is it called? The Sony Xperia Pro i Mark II so then it's just i mk ii it's insane yeah like I guess so yeah or 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 that has to be known to an average consumer because this is an $1,800 phone. This is not something that's going to be on the Verizon shelf.

If this were on the Verizon shelf and someone walked into it and looked at that name on the little card under it, they would just be like, nah, I give up already. You know what's funny? There are, again, some really great things I really like about this phone. I wanted to daily it from 9 out of the 10 things that are great about this phone. Like I wanted to daily it from like nine out of the 10 things that are great about this phone are like better than the Pixel 6.

The display is better than the Pixel 6. So just for people who wondering, I am dailying the Pixel 6 Pro, as we mentioned with the fingerprint stuff. The display on the Sony Xperia Pro-I 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 guess, a bit annoying that the Pixel isn't as responsive. But it is. It's running older software too, but Sony's got their display responsiveness down. Looks phenomenal. It's 21 by nine.

It's tall. The phone is thin. It's got a 4,500 milliamp hour battery. 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 this separate dedicated camera shutter button on the corner for taking photos.

It has a separate custom button next to that button for launching whatever you want. It's mapped automatically to their Video Pro app, which is sweet. It's got a lanyard cut out on the corner. Everything about this phone is, it has the tool-less SIM card tray, which has a back-to-back tray for a micro SD card slot.

It has a headphone jack. This phone is sick. Do you know what this kind of reminds me of? These, and Sony did it last year too, these over-the-top phones that are more made for camera. This is obviously a camera-forward phone with insane specs and a crazy price tag. It reminds me of when 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 of paper, it looks like it should be the best Android phone out there. When I just look at these specs, if you just posted these specs, Android fans would lose their mind for it. Yeah, and it's not even like

that it has to have the great numbers, but when you actually use the phone, it's the little things that are really nice. Like having a headphone jack, it's not like a spec necessarily, but it's just really nice to just have it. 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's a nice usability thing. So there's a lot of things about this phone that are like that. Again, the responsiveness, you could tell me it has a 120Hz display, but when I'm using the software, I can feel that more. So it's not on the spec sheet. I really like the phone.

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. It also doesn't come out until December, so maybe 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 the main camera was what we will talk about. So what is the reason you wouldn't use it 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 really like from the Pixel. Okay, okay. And then just the versatility. So I took a lot of side-by-side stuff

from the Xperia PRO-I's camera alongside Pixel 6 and iPhone 13 Pro specifically, because that's what I had in my pocket. I wanted to do more with the Samsung S21 Ultra, but similar enough sensor size that that's mostly what I was testing with Pixel 6. 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, this is going to come back to bite them, I think, again, the blind smartphone camera test, they're still blue. The iPhone's still blue? Yeah, they're still really cool on a lot of the shots, and Sony was nailing that over and over again. But everything else about the shots,

I preferred Pixel 6 and iPhone every time. They would get exposure a little bit more accurate. They would obviously have more contrast, but they'd have more dynamic range, too, because they'd bring in all that multi-frame HDR processing much more often. So I could bring in more details and then I could edit the photos later.

So I liked, you know, that it was neutral and that the white balance was correct. But then also like just using the camera button on the side of the phone, I would have a lot more like missed focus and slow shutter speeds. When I was just pointing and shooting, I would have just like a photo of the horizon

and it would be like slightly blurry because I was like squeezing the phone with the shutter button, which is like a photo of the horizon and it would be like slightly blurry because I was like squeezing the phone with the shutter button, which is like a small thing. I can just use the button on the phone, but a lot of little usability things still push me towards the Pixel. So yeah, it's going to be 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 picking the phone when it comes to somebody actually putting their money down, I mean, like, unless you're willing to spend an extra $1,000 for the headphone jack that the Pixel definitely doesn't have,

it feels like. Selfie camera is way better on the other phones. Sony does not have a good selfie camera. So, yeah. We'll see if that phone ends up being the one that saves Sony's smartphones, but I don't feel like that matters to Sony that much at this point. There's no way an $1,800 phone is saving the smartphone industry

of anybody. Alright, let's take a quick break though. We're going to come back. We'll talk. I want to talk with Dan about these one-inch camera sensors in smartphones, drones, and action cameras. Be right back. The all new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves?

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But now is the time to aim even higher. You can help create a world where no one is left behind. Donate at camh.ca slash donate now from December 23rd to the 31st, and your gift will be tripled for three times the impact. All right, Dan, thanks for joining me. We've both been in the camera world for a while. We've talked about a lot of different cameras,

whether it's dedicated cameras 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 does have a one-inch sensor in the back, which I want to talk to you about. But as many have pointed out, there are a couple other one-inch sensor smartphones and then a couple other like huge sensor devices

that also have some of these weird quirks. And, you know, I talked briefly, but like some of these weird quirks and you know i talked briefly but like 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 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 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. But in the past decade or half decade, really, like computational photography has really changed that dynamic a lot. And to me, it's not like a straight software better or hardware better. It is absolutely a combination of the two. And I think that's what we're seeing pretty acutely this year, especially from like Apple and Google.

They are stepping up the size of the hardware sensors in their cameras, but they are not leaving behind the software processing at all. And in fact, they're using that hardware advantage to make their software processing better because it's just like better data coming in that the software can work with.

And so the Sony camera that you mentioned, or the Sony phone, it's a camera with a phone attached, right? Like that's what you called it, right? Yeah. So like what's interesting there is they are just doing the full hardware approach, right? Like, yes, Sony does process the image. It spits out a JPEG jpeg you know it is doing it's got the bionz processor in there but it's not doing the same level of computational photography that google and apple and samsung and

huawei and all the other like phone first makers are doing uh and and you can see it in the results like like the evidence that you showed in your videos, like it's not demonstrably better. Sometimes it's worse. And when we're talking about a phone that's $1,800, do you want it sometimes to be worse? True, true. Have you played at all with the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro cameras? Yeah, yeah.

That's one of those. Using Corbett. Yeah, that's one of those lots of software help going on with those images and they're very processed. But I kind of still find that they're a little bit overdone. The processing is so turned up, maybe as a legacy thing where they were overcompensating for less hardware. Now that they have all this hardware and all this information, they might be able to turn that down a little bit. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think you can, you can like prove that theory out by shooting in raw with the phone, right? And then see what you can do with the raw image. And yes, you can do a lot more with a raw file from a pixel six than maybe you could have done with a pixel three or four or five, because they were all using the same hardware, right? And you do have more more flexibility to play there. But I do think that even with these larger sensors we're still talking about a small sensor like even when we talk about like the one inch sensor in the sony phone that is still 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 raw processing there's limits to

so like you they're the computational level side of things really is what expands those limits, right? And it allows you to do more and it allows you to capture things that you can't do. And so now we're at a stage with a lot of like smartphones where if you have a mirrorless camera that's got a legitimately large sensor in it, whether it's APS-C or full frame or 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, you're going to have to do a lot of work to that photo that you took with a mirrorless camera to get it to look as good as what the iPhone just spits out, right? And part of that is because they are capturing multiple frames and layering them and doing all of that hard work behind the

scenes to make up for the fact that their hardware is inferior to what the hardware that you're using. And so, yeah, they could probably like adjust that and tweak that. But I don't think it's ever going away. I think, you know, from here on out, like computational photography is the way it's going to go. And it's only going to spread more. And we're going to get to a point where those large cameras would hopefully have that ability. And then we really excited. i like that better like i keep picturing like computational

photography getting so good that it catches up to what we have now with our 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 couple people pointing out in the comment section that I wanted to talk to you about is the phrasing one-inch sensor. The one-inch camera, one-inch sensor, there's a bunch of different versions of saying it.

These cameras with one-inch 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, the archaic way of explaining that is a little bit odd. So I'll give it a stab. Basically, 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 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 about 16 millimeters diagonal we're referring to them for some reason still as one inch sensors even though they're not actually one inch in any reason am i is that about right i feel like i've i had to do i honestly think you know more about that than i do it's weird it's like it's very frustrating because obviously like okay all the stuff that i still said in that video still is true it's just like shifted down a dimension because all this stuff is relative to each other um but i found that fascinating so when you look now at all these uh like press kits or like image especially like advertising from a lot of these companies they're telling people these are one

inch sensors and they're not but we all just kind of say that anyway. Yeah, I mean, the thing with like image sensor measurements is it's always relative to like something else. And it's always a very hard thing to articulate. Like when we talk about smaller sensors, they might be one over 2.3 inches. Like, can you visualize that in your head? No, like nobody knows what 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.

Maybe that can like help you out and see, figure out what it is. But like until you get to like actual tangible sizes with like what we call full frame, which is 35 millimeter, right? And that's, that's 35 millimeter diagonally. And like, that's the size of a postage stamp or maybe a little bigger than a postage stamp. And, but it's all, it's all kind of weird weird and these like nebulous things 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 it's so, like you said, it's very much just in this industry because I was trying to make this parallel. I don't know if I've shrunk it down enough to tweet it yet, but it's basically like if I bought a TV 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 it's if it's a hundred millimeter equivalent by some old weird tube standard then that would be okay it's like no i i can i can see the tv in front of me i can i can physically visualize if it's the right size but with camera sensors they're sort of uh buried in this piece glass here. So maybe we don't know exactly how big it is, but you're right. It's all relative. And I also find it weird that we mix imperial and metric so often in the camera world. There's

millimeters, there's inches. It's a lot. I mean, what we're writing about it is just like a nightmare for like our style guy and our poor copy editors. I'm sure when you were putting graphics together for the videos, it's just like, how do I express this in a way that humans can read it? Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. So, I mean, if you look at the future of computational photography now, I've seen these features, especially with the pixel, get better and better. And the theme with all of these features is it's faking something

that you would be doing with hardware, with really good software, to varying levels of success. I think portrait mode is the obvious one. If you have a bigger sensor and a bigger lens, you have a shallow depth of field background. And so now they've decided, okay, we can do edge detection and blur the background for you and give you the big sensor look. I think that's the most evolved one yet. But the pixel also has this feature where there's a long exposure simulation. They also have action pan where the subject moves through the frame and like detects the speed of the thing moving and the direction and then blurs the background. It's hit or miss. It's kind of cool when it works, but it's not as evolved as portrait mode. The thing that gets me excited about features like that, and I actually, I really like the

motion pan one, which again, it's hit or miss. Obviously, the more light you have, the better it's going to work. It works really well in my experience with like cars moving at like 20 miles an hour, but you know, humans running, it doesn't do well. But the thing is like where the portrait mode was using computational things to make up for hardware deficiency, that like this is not as big of a lens, it doesn't have the depth of field control that you get with a larger camera. These are like making up for skills deficiencies. And so in

order to 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 kid but you need to know how to use your camera equipment really well and it takes years of practice to get panning good yeah and like to 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 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 snapping a selfie. And like, so like, that's like democratizing that skill in a very interesting and exciting way to me.

That is like the next step beyond just like making up for the fact that you don't have the right, or as good hardware. So I, again, it's very like, I hate to say early days, but it's very new. And there's a lot of ways uh improvements to make on 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 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 every 10 times which is better than you get from the pixel but you'd get a better shot usually out

of the pixel if you don't know what you're doing but then the also one the other one is um like simulating long exposures so you just like sort of point it at the moving thing snap and walk away and it again sees the direction either water or headlights usually work best and then it sort of creates these like paint painted lights where you'd have to have more equipment to pull that off in any other typical situation. Like taking a photo of a waterfall in the middle of the day, and you want to get that nice, like cascading water look that's nice 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 happen. 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 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 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 could have that in my large format camera that would be incredible it's pretty good too that the water blurring is 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 pocket pretty sweet night sight a lot of the same stuff like you can start to see stars at night which is awesome so yeah i feel like the future of that is is a lot of these computational features getting better and better to the point where they get as good as the larger pieces of

hardware would. The other version that we mentioned earlier is do you see any of these large cameras embracing computational 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 or whatever they're calling themselves now, OM Systems or something like that, they changed their name recently. They have used some computational things to aid their autofocus systems. So now we're seeing the larger cameras can detect an animal versus a person. And so like, it's using computational things to try and do that. And so it's autofocusing, can focus on your dog's eye as opposed to like, I don't know, the bush behind them or something

like that. And so there's very little bits here and there. But what we're not seeing is the multi-frame capture and then stacking and then processing happening inside the 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 camera to do that either. So a lot of photographers who are shooting with larger format cameras are shooting raw anyways, and they are offloading the processing to their computer at home to do their image edits, or maybe they're combining frames together, or what have you. And the camera itself is not 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 JPEG. But it's not doing the level of computational photography that Google and Apple are doing. Like when you think about like Google's face blur feature that debuted with the Pixel 6, where is like telling you like i'm taking multiple pictures here and i'm going to grab the one with the sharpest face and then i'm going to layer it onto that person's face and they're always going to 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 pictures of my kids that means like i'm in continuous burst mode and i'm just rattling away hoping that i get one where they're like

looking at the camera and their eyes are sharp. Right. And what would it take to get there? I think it probably needs faster sensors. It definitely needs faster hardware in terms of processors. But I just don't know if they have the resources on the algorithmic side of things to really get the work done. Whereas like Google and Apple and Samsung could just like throw endless resources at okay perfecting so this is this is where my hot take

comes in i think apple really should make a camera now i'm 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 high high-end hardcore like computational stuff is because most of the people spending that much on a camera have some 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 that's cool but when you think about okay if anyone could pull off like all the processing needed to scan that 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

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 i think you know it is a hot take i'm gonna give you. You're not the first person to like have that that hope and desire. Years ago, Johnny Ive designed 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 make this? And so like, it's a dream that I think a lot of people have thought about. why doesn't Apple make this? And so like, it's a dream that I think a lot of people have thought about. It would be, I think your point that, you know, Apple Silicon is like the inflection point where that could actually maybe mean something now.

Like where, you know, imagine a camera with like an M1 Max GPU in there, just crunching all the data right away. Like that would be super exciting. Is it a business case? I don't know. Like the large format camera world is not a huge like business and it would be like you know a thing that like apple would do to

like placate enthusiasts like yourself and myself yeah because it would probably not sell it would no doubt be like five thousand dollars and like anybody spending that much on a camera is like already in some other lens 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 see it it'd be really exciting if they were able to like partner with a manufacturer right like so if like maybe they were partnered with canon or partnered with sony or whatever uh i mean the funny part is sony is making all the sensors that are in the the iphones and the pixels and what have you um so they're already talking there uh but 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 it would be exciting well i'll keep it i'll keep it in my back pocket i

think that's um i'm looking forward to the future of of computational photography getting better in the phones but i also even more tend to look for like i don't know i'm so used to the software 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 would love to snap a photo and just have it immediately be shareable and editable and have Google photos on the back of the thing. Like I want that world to level up the same way smartphone cameras are. Yeah, I fully agree. And we saw some things you mentioned the Galaxy camera and the Samsung actually had a whole

line of mirrorless cameras that they killed. camera and the um samsung actually had a whole line of mirrorless cameras that they killed uh but one of them was at the time an lte connected mirrorless interchangeable lens camera and that thing was like very cool because you could immediately go into google photos or instagram and upload 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 now but yeah that would be great like you know trying to get photos off of my camera uh if anyone's ever used a mobile camera app that connects to your phone now you probably know that pain yeah it is it is a nightmare and so like someone figure this out that's why the sd card slot means so much to me 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 check out some of these more big screen or big censored cameras but appreciate you joining me dan we'll probably talk again there's a lot of camera stuff and happening in this world so i'll probably link up again and talk about that but thanks for joining me on waveform happy to thank you This is an ad from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. You. Give yourself the gift of better mental health. BetterHelp Online Therapy connects you with a qualified therapist via phone, video, or live chat.

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letting you streamline operations and cut down on costs. With NetSuite's real-time insights and forecasting tools, you're not just managing your business, you're anticipating its next move. You can close the books in days, not weeks, and keep your focus forward on what's coming next. Plus, NetSuite has compiled insights about how AI and machine learning may affect your business and how to best seize this new opportunity. So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform, netsuite.com slash waveform. All right, we're back. Thanks again to Dan for joining me and talking and clarifying all the stuff we've talked about with those one-inch sensors and those imperial and metric units.

It's a good time. But on a completely different topic, Andrew's got a story time. I don't think we've done this before, but story time episode, Andrew tells me something that's going to have us all riveting on the edge of our seats. Oh man, you're setting me up.

I'm setting you up. Yeah, I just have kind of like a rant slash story that I'm sure a lot of our seats. Oh man, you're setting me up. I'm setting you up. Yeah, I just have kind of like a rant slash story that I'm sure a lot of people have. 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 company? 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 either Optimum or Fios, which have all their own... That's actually the trio that I've had. I started with Comcast, and then I went to college and had Optimum,

and now I have Fios. I do have to say I miss Fios already. You're new to Fios, right? Yeah. 800, 850 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 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 in terms of all that, my internet's been totally fine. I get great speeds. Not 1,200, but good enough. Stuff I'm happy with. Now, when it comes to my cable, I've been having quite a few issues. Some of them, not exactly Xfinity's fault. They took away a channel called MSG, which around here in the tri-state area means you're losing four sports teams. Devils, Rangers, Islanders, and Knicks, which the Knicks are like one of the biggest

basketball markets in the country. It's insane to me that this many people can have a cable company and not get to watch the Knicks and still getting charged the full $20 a month for local sports fees, but that's not quite what my story's about. So I've been getting really into this show called Yellowstone,

which I highly, highly recommend. The fourth season just came out. Claire and I watched all three seasons leading up to this just to get ready for the fourth season. So it comes out on Sunday. We're busy Sunday. Can't watch it live. We just decided,

oh, well, we can watch on demand because like every cable company now has on demand. So when you miss a show, it's just available very shortly after. Yeah. Monday rolls around get home super super excited to watch yellowstone we didn't make any plans turn it on and it starts playing in this awful 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

and I'm just at first thinking it feels like it's not buffering correctly like if I just play this for a little bit also like season 3 ended on a crazy cliffhanger so I don't want to watch too much into this show at this quality yeah sometimes when you start a show on Netflix or a streaming service and your internet's like being like

under high load or something it'll look like garbage for like 15 seconds and then sharpen up slowly until you're good so I played like the first three minutes which was the full recap of the previous and then like the intro I just want to distract you super hard oh by the way we're about to hit 15 million on the channel totally out of we're of, this has nothing to do with the story. That's fine. That's fine. I'm distracted by the lives. I have the live counter.

I mean, we're two away. It's going to hit any second. 14 mil. Nine, nine, nine, nine. There it is. All right. There we go. Great timing.

So anyway. 15 mil. 15 mil. Appreciate y'all. Back to the story. Thanks everyone. Hey. Oh.

We got, we have the sounds loaded. I just want to, interesting tidbit, I started at the studio at four and a half million. One of the first things I feel like I kind of helped doing is we set up a live stream for the five million. Wow. 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. That feels kind of cool. All right, back to the story. play it for the first three minutes. Quality is not getting any better. And I'm just like very upset because you and I, I'm sure most of the people listening here, like I refuse to watch that at that quality. If a video is available in HD, it better be at least 720p. I want to show you, and we can put this picture up on the screen, but I took a picture on my phone of how bad this looked.

Yeah, how bad is it? And the fact that you can tell how bad it is on a phone is pretty impressive because, like, a phone already. It's got this, like, weird, like, interlacing. Look it. That's supposed to be Paramount Pictures. Yeah. You can't see anything. Not only is it low resolution, but it looks, like, weirdly interlacing. Look at that supposed paramount pictures. Yeah. You can't see anything.

Not only is it low resolution, but it looks like weirdly interlaced. Look at his face. It's the most pixelated garbage I've ever seen. Yeah, it's pretty bad. And this is not a low budget show. I think they're spending about $5 million an episode. Like previous seasons looked sharp. Fantastic.

Yeah. Wonderfully shot. Again, great, great show. an episode like previous seasons look sharp fantastic yeah wonderfully shot again great great show so i see that and decide to call comcast xfinity customer support go through all the everything nowadays has all these automations that are impossible to get through go through it it tells me it wants to restart my cable box i say no so it says thanks we'll restart your cable box and then hangs up the phone great finally. Finally get to customer support. Tell him what's going on. We troubleshoot a couple things. Everything was updated on my cable box. Everything looked good on his end. He told me to

watch a couple other shows on demand. Everything looked great. Previous season looked great. He asked me what show it is. He goes to look at it. And his, I kid you not, his response to me was, so I just pulled it up on my TV 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 it's shot. And I said, what? And he's like, they must have shot this

on standard definition cameras. And I just started laughing. I just couldn't believe that he tried to tell me he probably thinks that it's that but his logic makes sense but i would guess if i was in his position that this is accidentally how it was saved like it was shot and broadcast in high resolution live and the on-demand version got nuked somehow. My theory would have been that they just don't feel like either there's a big impact on it and they don't want the server load or whatever,

so they're putting it in a lower quality. But of course he's not going to say that. He's not going to tell me that, hey, I'm giving you absolute garbage quality. So I just kind of laughed, explained to him that that's totally not the case because the three seasons previous look great and they're clearly not going to switch to a laptop webcam to film the new season.

Supply chain, couldn't get the cameras in. Yeah, so I went on a long thing with him trying to figure stuff out. It wasn't very helpful, but I also like, I totally understand that level one tech support on most of these get super, super limited knowledge and they're not allowed to do much so i tried to escalate it um pretty sure he 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 top here is the next morning, still haven't figured out what happens this next morning, and still no call, but I get a text message that says,

hey, this is Xfinity. We're thinking about the customer service call you had. If you were, could you please rate whether you would like to recommend us to your family and friends? Press zero for not very likely or press 10 for very likely. Press zero, nothing happened. And I get a text message back that says like, we're not able to handle your request

and then a link for it. So it's just like, at no part did anyone actually help figure anything out. I wound up talking to someone else. They actually on a Twitter DM recommended the same thing saying or not recommended told me this is how it's supposed to look clearly not the case

but just like through this whole process i'm sure many people have had this before i just no 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 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 what we have so much bandwidth like happening right now like remember when youtube had such high bandwidth that for a while they started to default hd videos to like 480p yeah like that for a while they started to default HD videos to like 480p. Yeah. Like that was a real issue because there were that many people on YouTube because of the

pandemic. I wonder if they just made the call to like, yeah, you know what? On-demand viewers aren't really the highest priority. We're just going to lower this all to like 360p and just deal with a couple extra calls and whatever. And we can take that bandwidth off our shoulders. I think 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's the one serving me stuff,

because I'm paying a lot for that. It's not cheap, and now I'm missing out the sports teams I want to watch, and the show that I really want to watch is, to what I think is unwatchable quality. But I think the majority of people would just watch it at that quality and never really complain about it.

But it was more so I just thought it was very funny that somebody told me they filmed it on a standard def cam. Yeah, they probably just shot it with a webcam. I think the Surface Duo has got a pretty good camera. I think the Surface Duo's got a pretty good camera. I think the Surface Duo may have looked better than that. Looks fine to me.

That's funny. You know, sometimes I think about when I was editing the videos on the MacBook Pro and the Final Cut Preview 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. 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 going to watch it in 480p on their phone on like a perfectly reasonable screen that's the thing but i mean like what's also funny about that is we've brought up our videos on three different browsers and they look completely different looks different chrome safari and firefox yep some of them look like old samsung phones with like where the red is burning your retinas out some looks way more muted but you know if we want to also talk about something that's coming up smart uh smartphone blind camera test bracket is another thing where everyone wants all these different things but your phone is gonna everyone voting on that is probably seeing it differently yeah

yeah which i think is fascinating yeah we are one of the few i mean not few but a lot of youtube channels are seeing like more and more people watching their 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 and all that sort of stuff. But like, as far as the screens people watch our videos on, I should be mastering for like a tiny four inch window instead of like going through all the effort on like a huge cinema display.

Because most people are watching on their mobile devices most of the time. So that was one of my small realizations when bringing a laptop around. I was like, oh, it's not so bad having a tiny preview window because that's how everyone else sees it anyway I mean that's how I edit thumbnails is I shrink everything down and then

does it still look reasonable shout out to everyone watching us on their smart TV big full blown or a pro display XDR just some some real good HD I get to see those analytics I get to see like what resolution TVs people watch these on, which is awesome. Virtual fist bump.

Yeah. Shout out to y'all. Anyway, I think that about wraps it up for this week. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Thanks again to Dan for hopping on with us. And we'll be back before you know it. Tech Vember rolls on.

Catch you guys later. Peace. Later. Waveformer is produced by Adam Molina. We are partnered with Vox Media and our intro outro music was created by Bane Silk.