Just another recycled, cloned feature from an existing application. Consumers simply don't care about "hardcore technology" - Ethernet switching? That's like telling a consumer that Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet - they'll look at you and say "Facebook is the Internet."
I couldn't agree more with the "less app please" statement - but we live in a very skewed reality these days. Apps like Vine take off in weeks from people posting the dumbest, worst, lowest quality videos of their cats and themselves eating food. Instagram destroyed photography by making an 8MP smartphone camera <1MP with a square polaroid-like frame and the worst destructive filters of all-time. It's just a vicious cycle of bullshit. When will it end?
The state of technology, rather consumer technology, is indicative of the consumer - and unfortunately, the average consumer isn't very bright.
It doesn't make you dumb or a hipster or anything like that. It's simply how you like your photos - and there's nothing wrong with that.
As someone who has been involved with photography since the days of 35mm film and someone who has developed their own B&W in a lab - Instagram (and Vine) are regressions of the art. They utilize and encourage poor quality images, poor ratios, and poor choice in taste (cats and food pictures and people flexing in gyms).
But it DOES NOT matter - the consumer wants this, demands it, uses it, so it works. That's an entirely different problem than the photo/video quality issue.
If you look at a platform like 500px, you'll see immense quality - but again, doesn't matter, >90% of people are incapable of creating photos like that. So they don't some crapware to share their food. More power to them.
> As someone who has been involved with photography since the days of 35mm film and someone who has developed their own B&W in a lab - Instagram (and Vine) are regressions of the art.
What can we do to improve the default pictures taken with smartphone cameras? The picture you get with that tiny camera isn't very good, even now, though I think that Instagram is an improvement.
Not sure how you think a <1MP highly filtered IG photo is better than a 8MP+ smartphone camera photo. It isn't.
The "default" smartphone photos are leaps and bounds better than IG, the only thing that will "improve" them is higher res cameras, I'm sure the iPhone 5S will see an 18MP camera with better software. Just look at panorama - that's a serious achievement in smartphone cameras.
Sharing photos is a different question/issue all together.
500px is a perfect example of an application that takes advantage of high-quality images, whether taken with a dSLR or not.
I couldn't agree more with the "less app please" statement - but we live in a very skewed reality these days. Apps like Vine take off in weeks from people posting the dumbest, worst, lowest quality videos of their cats and themselves eating food. Instagram destroyed photography by making an 8MP smartphone camera <1MP with a square polaroid-like frame and the worst destructive filters of all-time. It's just a vicious cycle of bullshit. When will it end?
The state of technology, rather consumer technology, is indicative of the consumer - and unfortunately, the average consumer isn't very bright.