NO BRAIN needed to use Samsung's next flagship mobe

Re: If you buy it do you own it? ...or... Will the device start overlaying Ads over the photos?

> So will the device start overlaying Ads onto my photos?

Hopefully the TV backlash will steer them away from that.

>do I really just 'rent to own'

Own? You never own it, you just pay for privilege of holding the hardware for them. :)

Give me a mobile with decent hardware, local maps (with rsync to update them), Firefox browser, VLC and a decent imap mail client. I'd be happy to run Android as an app, or indeed, two versions of android as apps. One can be google's, one can be rooted.

With the new ARM core design, I'd like a hypervisor please! Failing that, (and given that the screen and battery are the expensive bits) put two phones in one case, with two screens, one e-ink, one normal and give me a hardware button to switch screens around. With ARM's on-board ethernet, you could have a little network running on the phone. Just do something creative! How about an expansion pack to go on the back of the phone which adds more CPUs - maybe even an intel CPU which can talk to all the peripherals over an internal network. I don't know why you'd want that, but maybe it would encourage more Linux development for phones.

Re: If you buy it do you own it? ...or... Will the device start overlaying Ads over the photos?

If you bought another Android device, you still have the biggest ad pusher in the world on your phone!

...users will appreciate the chance to disengage their brains when taking photos...

Why, it's been like this since the invention of the selfie stick.

Re: Mobile users trailing behind web surfers?

If you actually hit the monkey though, you win a prize.

Re: So?

"the many-megapixel cameras..."

Now I may be wrong here but is the fact that a camera has a lot of pixels less important than the size of the detector?

Given the size of a smart phone against that of a DSLR which one will have the larger detector?

My vote is for the DSLR, so why do DSLR owners "... occasionally sigh in frustration when they see its output." Perhaps because they don't know how to get the best out of their DSLR?

I may be biased as an owner of a DSLR but not a smart phone but I can see no reason why a camera in a smart phone should be able to out-perform a dedicated DSLR camera, if the owners have a comparable skill in using them.

Re: So?

>By the way, the famous S5 camera gives very nice photos in bright sunshine but is dreadful in dim light.

Most reviews - including dpreview.com's - suggest the S5 camera isn't too bad in low light... but that there is a knack to getting reasonable low light pictures from it.

Samsung might be communicating to its existing user-base that the S6 will not ask them to spend as long in funny menus.

An experienced human photographer will decide what 'human/aesthetic content'* in the scene is the most important to them, and make their compromise accordingly (e.g, trade subject motion blur for lower noise, or trade depth of field for a lower shutter speed). Though a camera will never know what in the scene the photographer want to capture, it can take a fair guess that most of the time a photographer wants human faces to be in focus, and for sunsets to look red and orange. These are normally called 'scene modes', and the next logical step is to have the scene mode selected automatically- Panasonic's compact cameras have an 'Intelligent Auto' mode that is usually well reviewed.

It was good to see the 'Megapixel race' peter out a few years ago, and the rise of 'premium compact' cameras - For the same reason many people choose a DSLR over a Medium Format camera (size), I prefer to carry a good compact to a DSLR. You have to choose your own compromises.

from http://connect.dpreview.com/post/5533410947/smartphones-versus-dslr-versus-film?page=3

> Unsure of how to judge the noisy, detailed DSLRs against smoother, less-detailed phones, we asked 15 non-photographers to do it for us. They ranked the iPhone, Nokia, film and Canon EOS 10D from best to worst, without knowing which was which. The Nokia emerged as the popular favourite, but more striking was how much people disagreed. We got every possible ranking, based around peoples' preferences for smoothness versus detail. People who liked the Nokia picture also tended to like the iPhone, while people who liked the 10D also tended to like the film. It seems that we're all either smooth people, or noisy people.

That's with a $1700 lens attached to ensure even better DSLR pictures.