iPad photos

[Arbalist]

I seem to take a lot more photos on my iPad Pro 10.5” these days as the quality is more than good enough for many purposes. I thought the other day though that I’d give my K5 an outing with a Tamron 90mm Macro and was surprised that the pictures weren’t just not any better than the iPad but actually a lot worse! Today I had to take some pictures of a small object with my iPad and had to trim them as I couldn’t get close enough. The pictures still looked good on screen though so I emailed them to a colleague to be used on a hobby website.The recipient emailed back to say the images were a bit too small so I retook them with the K5 and Tamron 90mm. Edited in Lightroom from RAW to jpeg and reduced to about 3Mb I emailed them again and they were accepted. Comparing them to the original iPad pictures though they don’t look so good. Lack of depth of field was one noticeable thing even though they were taken at f6.3 or f7.1. I’m sure if I use a tripod and supplement the lighting I should be able to match the iPad. My question though is how come the iPad does such a good job and so easily? The only downside on my particular model is I can’t get quite close enough for small objects. Maximum unedited file size seems to be around 2Mb when shot as jpeg. I’m wondering if I should get a cheap compact with macro mode!?

[MrB]

Perhaps it might help some of the boffins here to comment helpfully if you posted a couple of photos (including EXIF data) for assessment and comparison.

Philip

[richandfleur]

The Pentax K-5 was released 10 years ago, so tech has come a long way in that time. There are certain situations where a larger sensor/quality lens can provide huge benefits over cameras in phones and tablets, (such as low light or far away shots), but there are some standard shots where a smaller sensor can actually be more helpful (such as when you want a lot of depth range in focus and the lighting is good). It's very expensive to have a good lens for each style of photography, and there are times when the cellphone or gopro style camera can genuinely be good enough, or better than what you could achieve with your DSLR. Tools for tasks really.