Why it's handy to have a 'phone with you...but

totally agree a 50watt stereo amp i built 50 years ago is still going strong and still my go to amp. my old oscilloscope is cactus had a look and capacitors are leaking, but it hasnt been used for 40 years.

Hi,

I have a 1970 vintage Tektronix 454A which is a retired IBM field service o-scope. I have had it since the early 1980s when IBM was still selling their surplus test equipment at employee sales. It had one problem in all those years I have had it. It developed a ticking sound which was a slight arc from one of the Tripler diodes that made the HV for the CRT. Cracked solder joint,.easily found and fixed.

Tek must have used top notch caps in that one. Which makes sense given who the original customer was.

It has outlived at least six newer o-scopes both analog and digital. Newer scopes which have died for one reason or another. Bad caps being one. Dendritic growth inside ASICs being another. Cap issues can be fixed. The failing ASICs not so much.

Stan

Hi,

Ah, yes. The newer line. 465 is 100 MHz and the 475 is 200 MHz. And with larger CRTs. IBM went to them from the 454A (150 MHz) and 485 (300 MHz). And went for the DMM option atop the scope case. So now a service engineer didn't need to carry more than the instrument in one hand and the tool kit in the other.

I have one around here someplace. Can't recall if it is the 465 or 475 now. That's buried on the Shelves of Obsolete Electronics. I have a 750 MHz modular 7000 series in the analog equipment racks. The 454A lives upstairs in the ham shack along with a HP 8920A RF Test Set. That way I can check stuff in situ and not have to pull anything to go downstairs until I know I have a problem.;)

Stan

This convo, as interesting as it is, got quite far away from the original topic. I think I may have a different view on the topic of phone cameras than a lot of people here, due to my age. I'm in my mid 20s and I didn't start using a "proper camera" until about a year ago, when I suddenly needed the resolution of a good camera. I had suddenly become responsible for the social media presence of a club I was in and a phone wouldn't suffice anymore. Over the course of the last year I have been familiarizing myself with my dad's olympus and I've learned to love it immensely.

But I got into photography a year before that. I had always kind of enjoyed it, but when I spontaneously had to buy a new phone in Feb. 2024 in Berlin (i needed it for all my tickets for the rest of the trip, esp. in Sweden), I was suddenly in the posession of a phone with a much better camera than I was used to. (It was a Xiaomi Redmi 13Pro for around 360€ new)

That phone camera is what I cut my teeth on and I would vager that seeing it as inherently worse than a "proper camera" is limiting to your own creativity. I will concede of course that a phone camera will have certain physical limitations that are owed to it being a small component in a very flat device with many other functions (resolution, depth of field, reliance on digital processing, etc.).
However, a phone camera has a lot of benefits too. Namely, convenience and customizability.

Convenience: The amount of pictures I have taken, that I genuinly deeply love, especially the strange abstract ones, happened extremely spontaneously. Sometimes, it was the way the light hit my waterglass at 3am in the morning and I just grabbed my phone and captured it. I cannot overstate how beneficial ease of access can be in realizing spontaneous artistic vision.

Customizability: the "pro mode" of phone cameras has gotten really quite good. I have experimented so much with the pre-built filters, the picture format and the pro-settings on my phone, with an ease of access that is far more approachable than a mirror reflex and therefore an incentive to get experimental.

I like to think that a phone camera is just another tool with strengths and weaknesses and a good photographer will learn to appreciate those in any chosen medium. A phone camera can still help you train your artistic eye and attempting to take pictures with a medium that is not custom made for photography can help you develop your problem solving skills. I see it similarly to people using cheap film cameras to great effect by utilizing that medium's specific quirks to enhance your artistic output. You just need to find out what that is for your phone.

I don't think a phone is a replacement for an actual camera and I have been loving the opportunity to get into my dad's Olympus, but I personally wouldn't have had the money to afford that Olympus on my own. Meanwhile, I'd need a phone either way, so I might as well use it.

Here's a collection of some of my phavourite phone photos I've taken (including 2 of the 3am waterglass ones 😂):

Yes! Exactly! I think that not having the ideal materials or mediums should never stop you from following your creative drive. I firmly believe that making imperfect art, creating art at all, is always better than not making art. Of course there are techniques that necessitate specific tools to be executed, but necessity is the mother of invention. Sometimes limitations can act as a catalyst for artistic progress.
That example of David Hockney is very good!

And thank you for your interest in my photos!
1) that was actually taken about 3 days after I got my new phone, at a drag show in Hamburg. So I was actively trying to figure out how to even use this thing. I took many photos during that show and the sharp and interesting stage lighting really made for some dynamic images (though some might be a bit risque for a public forum 😂). The lady was actually suspended from a ring in her hair and doing acrobatics and playing the violin. Crazy stuff.

2) that was at my cousin's wedding. I was in a B&W mood that day. I set the shutterspeed very high, so most of the images are quite moody and contrasty. The whole collection of photos has this very vintage, romantic quality to them, in my opinion. Though I do think that the glittery hanging ceiling decoration is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

3) that was looking down into a viewing tower close to Gmunden, in Austria. I used a high contrast, purple tinged filter and turned the brightness down quite a bit. Which is what gives the image that strange purple tint and like it's spiralling into darkness.

4) that's one of the aforementioned waterglass photos. I loved the way the light refracted in the glass and distorted my fingers, as well as ll the tiny airbubbles. I used a high shutter speed and a high saturation filter and turned the white balance quite high, which is how you get these bright oranges from where my hand is reflected and refracted through the waterglass.
This is the same for Image 7. That was taken at a later date. Similar concept, but I turned the WB even higher and I kept shaking the glass.
I took both without ever leaving my bed.

5) That was at a minijob I did in a shoe store. I was very bored and got fascinated by the way the light came into the room through this single narrow window and how the clutter interacted with the light. I used a hazy, brownish filter for this.

6) That's a picture of one of my friends during a concert. I used that same hazy, softening filter as the precious picture.

8) that was on a walk with my aunt and uncle and there was this incredible shadow of the mountain range projected into the sky and the lake was unbelievably reflective that day.

9) that was on a different day, same route. I used a filter called "blue dream", which shifts all the blue tones towards turquoise, which really brings out the icyness of the frost.

10) that was taken outside during the day. The roses were lit up by the sun, which gave them just enough brightness to still be really vibrant when I turned up the shutterspeed the iso down until the whole background was black. The addition of a high saturation filter also helped.

11) that was taken just the other day. I've been favouring the olympus recently, but that walk was really spontaneous and I didn't have it with me. I used a filter, which muted the yellow tones into a more muted brown/orange pallette.

That was a lot of rambling, but I do think it illustrates how many of these were taken in situations, where working with a camera would have either been a hassle (spontaneous walks, the comfort of my bed), or straight up not possible (my job at the time)

Hi,

The value of a phone camera is that you always have it with you. That is the very reason why they came about in the first place. And, I am the reason why the first phone camera was thought of.

I worked for Ericsson back then, as the top Sustaining Engineer. That's the poor guy that has to own the problems once a product is in full series production. And not only the factory problems, but the field problems as well. One of my tools, besides all that test equipment, was a Nikon CoolPix 100 camera. Used to document things as I saw them.

The CP-100 was really cute. It had the camera attached to a PCMCIA card for easy downloading. That slid into a battery case during use. It was easy to carry everywhere. And I used it several times a day.

Well, we had just popped out the T68i mini phone design and were at the point of it entering production.The first to sport a color screen. And we were in one of several meetings where the design team was handing it over to me to carry on with. And one of the accessory designers was interested in that CP-100 I always had with me.

Two months later, he handed me a pre-series CommuniCam. A small camera module that snapped onto the bottom of a T68i. It used the phone screen as a viewfinder. Shots could be offloaded using Bluetooth. Much handier than the CP-100. And the beginning of cameras in phones because the next step in design was to stick the camera inside the phone.

All that said, I also had a Nikon D1 available in my lab to use with macro lenses and also attach to a microscope. However, it was rare that I would carry that around, preferring to just use the little phone camera outside my lab.

And that is still what I do today. When I carry one of my real cameras, it is planned for. Yet the phone camera is always with me.

Stan

I suspect that a big part of why the phone images might have low flexibility for further editing is that phones often use algorithms which try to emulate human perception, which applies white balance and levels curves differently in different parts of the scene, but when you edit an image globally, with simple color, levels, and contrast tools, the processing for one part of the image is wrong for others.