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31:39Welcome back. I am joined by someone who, for a portion of our audience, will not need an introduction, but will do one anyway. I'm here with Mark Lavoie. Hey, Mark. Hi. Nice to be with you. Thanks for joining. Mark Lavoie is a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford. But right now, in what we're going to be talking about, he is a VP and fellow at Adobe, where he has been working on a new camera app, also known to a lot of people in our audience in particular for his work on Google Pixel Camera for many years. So thank you for joining me. It's great to be here. So I was wondering if you could give us maybe a shortened version of your bio.

32:23There's a lot of interesting stuff on there, you know, some of which I just touched on. But then catch us up a little bit on what you've been doing since you've been at Adobe. A shortened version of the bio. Well, I seem to have wandered from topic to topic roughly every 10 years. So in the 70s, I worked on computer-assisted cartoon animation at Cornell. In the 80s, I worked on medical imaging at University of North Carolina. And then at Stanford in the 1990s, I worked on three-dimensional scanning, including the Digital Michelangelo Project. In the 2000s, I worked on light fields and camera arrays, built some big camera arrays at Stanford.

33:06And in the 2010s, largely at Google, I worked on computational photography. including, as you said, for the Pixel phone. Yeah. You joined Adobe in 2020, is that right? Right. During the height of the pandemic. Ah, an interesting time to switch jobs. I did it too. Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. So, and you spoke to our editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, around that time. And the stated goal was to create a universal camera app. And it's been five years since then. You've released that camera app called Project Indigo. Can you give people the quick elevator pitch if they're not familiar with it? I know a lot of our audience is.

33:50It depends how long the elevator is. So the basic idea there is there are a number of limitations of most smartphone camera apps. I'm certainly familiar with those limitations. There's a smartphone look that a lot of people don't like that might look okay on the small screen or in bad lighting, but don't look okay if you look at that same image large. It's very bright. It's contrasty. The shadows have been raised a lot. The edges are very sharp. The saturation is boosted. It's a certain look. As I said, it might look fine on your screen, but not if you're trying to make something larger out of it or even look at it on a large screen.

34:29Another issue with most smartphone camera apps is they don't offer much in the way of manual control. Some of the third-party apps do, but then they don't offer the third thing, which is computational photography. So our computational photography, meaning combining multiple images to make a better quality image, regardless of the look. So we wanted to combine all three of those things, a more natural look, full manual controls, and the best computational photography the state of the art allows. We also wanted to release some fun stuff on the side. So we have synthetic long exposure. We have removing window reflections, which also ships in Lightroom and Camera Raw.

35:10You call this look kind of HDR-ish, which is, I think, a different thing from HDR as a term. Am I right in thinking that? Do you have that same kind of sense of it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little bit confusing. So HDR just means that there's some way you can display stuff that's really bright. And to some extent, just the hardware of the phones allow this. They are very, very bright. And certainly some display screens, computer monitor screens are also very bright. There are these great ads or reviews where someone puts on a pair of sunglasses before they even look at their screen. So that gives the capability to display HDR.

35:51But the real world can be even brighter. And not all phones can display HDR as being really bright. So in either one of those cases, a scene that's really bright or a display that's not so bright, you need to tone map it in a way that fits all of the dynamic range, meaning the range from black to white, into whatever the display can do. That usually involves lowering the highlights and raising the shadows. If you do too much of that, that's what people call the HDR-ish look. Mm-hmm. Can you talk a little bit about, like, how we ended up here with this look? Well, they want the whole image to be readable.

36:34And they want people to be able to take photographs in very challenging lighting. So they'll take a backlit portrait with a sunset in the background at the beach, but they still want to be able to see the features of the person who is silhouetted. That's a very high dynamic range situation. And they'd like to be able to share it, so they want it to look readable. And so they'll raise the shadows a lot. And that can lead to this HDR-ish look. In particular, if you're looking at a small screen in bad lighting, so bad lighting might, for example, be a very bright day where there is glare on the phone's surface, then they want to make sure it's readable there too.

37:15And so they'll raise the shadows and lower highlights. But if you take that same image and look at it in a slightly darkened room or on a larger screen, then that's where it begins to look, as you said, grayish or too squished toward the middle. In the past few years, maybe it's been kind of brewing longer than this, you know, the Ultra HDR format has kind of come to prominence, which is related and sort of in the mix here, but is a different thing than the two things we were just talking about. Can you explain what that is? I know, you know, Android supports Ultra HDR. Apple has a version they support.

37:54Just what is this at the basics? So both of those are closely related to and were co-developed with Adobe's format for representing high dynamic range images. As a matter of fact, Apple's Paul Hubel and Adobe's Eric Chan presented the format together at a conference. Okay. So it's really a co-development. Ultra HDR is just a brand name. The basic idea is that a file ought to contain two images. a base image, which is what you would display if you only had a standard dynamic range display. In other words, not a super bright display. SDR for short. And a separate image, which is what's often called a gain map, meaning how much would I add to that if I had a brighter display?

38:46And that's the highlights part of it. Now, it's a little bit more complicated than that. can be done as either an addition or a subtraction, but that's kind of the basic idea, that there are these two images. And if you have an HDR display, then the idea is that the viewer, meaning, for example, the browser software, would have the two together and then display that. So that's what all of these HDR formats have. There are other HDR formats. AVIF has one. But the world seems to be moving gradually toward either the Ultra HDR or Apple's HEC format or ours, which is this JPEG that has a base image, which is SDR, and a base plus gain, a gain map, which gives you HDR.

39:29Why does this one seem to be the one we're landing on? And does it solve our problems with HDR and HDR displays and HDR-ish photos? It's arguably better than the other ones because it really kind of separates out. Here's what you would see if you had only an SDR display, and here's what you would see if you had an HDR display. And it also means that in image editors, like Lightroom, you could separately tune the two looks. Because you might want a different crushing of shadows or lowering of highlights for standard dynamic range display and for high dynamic range display. or you might just want an SDR image and you never want the highlights to be bright.

40:12And so in Lightroom, again, you could toggle off the HDR and just sit there and adjust for SDR. So it's a good format. I don't know if it's the best ever, but it's a good format. And it's nice to see that it's being gradually adopted. Gradually, of course, is very gradually in this fragmented world of ours. So social media apps are only slowly coming on board with this format. Yeah, there's so many components to it. There's the, you know, the camera, there's the display on the camera, there's where the photo eventually ends up, the display of the person who's looking at that photo on Instagram.

40:52And I think something I've seen in me, you can let me know if you've seen this too or not, but I'm seeing kind of an association from photography kind of like literate people where they have just gotten a bad taste in their mouth with HDR and they sort of say HDR is a bit like a dirty word. I'm trying to evangelize the ultra HDR a little bit, you know, like this is a different thing. Do you see that conflation happening? Absolutely. I think you're right. But what they're conflating is the ability to display HDR and the particular tone mapping and look that has been used on HDR-capable photographs.

41:38And that's this over-tone mapped thing. And so I think it's possible to display HDR images in a way that doesn't have this look. Interestingly, it's also possible to overdo the look on purpose in a way that's actually artistic. And one person I think of there is Trey Ratcliffe in Stuck in Customs. He's got this great image, one of his signature images, of the landscape around Guilin in China that is ultra-wide angle and very over-tone mapped on purpose and made saturated in a way that makes it look like a fairy tale landscape. So that's art. Right. That's obviously not the way it looked, but everyone knows that when they look at it.

42:22So I'm separating out this art from it. But for ordinary photography, I think you're right. But the answer is that it's in the tone mapping. There's nothing inherently wrong with the HDR capability. Okay. Well, I'm telling everyone that Mark LaVoy says I'm right, and I will take that to my grave. You know, one funny thing about this is there were videos made while I was at Google about, oh, the look of pixel phones is learning from Italian art. And I talked about my preference for Caravaggio and so on and so on. Well, those are all standard dynamic range images. They're just reflective. They're not luminous.

42:59They can't do anything brighter than the white of the gallery wall. And so we sort of do need different models and artistic models and a different artistic exploration as we start to do high dynamic range. And I think the world is still experimenting with what it ought to look like. Yeah. How far is too far? What do we all like and dislike? Yeah. How did you think about that going into developing your camera app? You know, I've used the app certainly quite a bit. I know a lot of our readers have, but the kinds of things that people can expect, maybe as far as HDR processing when they use Project Indigo.

43:41Right. So I led a team of people who determined the taste for the early pixel cameras. I don't know if I would go so far as to say I was the tastemaker, but I was one of them. Here at Adobe, I've let Florian Kynes, who co-wrote the blog with me, be the lead tastemaker. And you can see his taste in all the photographs that are on the blog. They look natural. They look like, oh, if I were there, I know what I would have seen. They don't look like there's been some deliberate adjustment in tone mapping. They look like if I had an SLR with enough dynamic range, that might have been what the picture looked like.

44:20And so one of the characteristics is let dark shadows be dark. And I think a lot of people just like that. Yeah, I know I do. There's, to be honest, we've kind of fell into this moment of a trend toward retro and toward film looks, which are more natural looks because there's no adjustable tone mapping. Or there are fewer ways of doing adjustable tone mapping in film, and people like that. And they sort of heave a sigh of relief, like, okay, you know, that looks like a plausible scene, and the darks are dark. And we like dark because it's the et cetera principle. You know, what's the mystery in that dark area there?

45:07And I like that and Florian likes that. So that's kind of what we allowed to happen on Indigo. I should point out, though, that it's a profile. If you load it into Lightroom or Camera Raw, it shows up, says Indigo, and you can change it. In particular, if you've been capturing DNGs, which means raw images, you can change it to any profile you want. You can add presets to it. You can make your own look. So it's not like we're demanding that this is the look that you would produce with that app. It's our suggested look, but you can change it. Yeah. And kind of along the same lines, I wonder if you can talk about the raw capabilities.

45:49I'm someone who kind of poo-poos shooting raw on a smartphone. I tend to want to let it just do its thing. And that might be maybe an older way of thinking about smartphone photography, especially with computational RAW, which you've brought into Project Indigo. Could you explain quickly what that is and why that was important to have? Right. So if you do JPEG only with Indigo, you'll get our look. if you bring it into an image editor, Lightroom or any other editor, you can make minor tweaks on it, but you can't do anything really major. Because the characteristic of any of these tone mapping methods is that the highlights in one part of the image might be the same pixel value as the shadows in another part of the image.

46:42And so if you use sliders or tone curves or anything to raise one or lower one, you might raise or lower other things you didn't want to lower or raise. Even though they were actually different brightnesses in the original scene, they got tone mapped to be the same pixel value. So this is the main reason why people like shooting RAW, because the numbers that are in the file represent relative scene brightnesses just as sensed. And then you can keep the shadows separate from the highlights if you wanted to. So that's the main reason for shooting RAW. Now, you say you don't really like or have not really shot RAW on smartphones.

47:25So the reason for that is that the RAWs have not been very good. They both don't come with a very good look, and they often don't come with computational photography or enough computational photography. So in low light, they look noisy. On some phones, which I won't name, if you switched into RAW mode, it would take a single frame. And end up being very noisy because the smartphone sensors are small. So the right thing is do this computational photography where you align and combine multiple frames even to produce the RAW. Now, some purists would say, well, that's not RAW anymore because it was captured over a number of frames.

48:06That's true. But it still has the major characteristic of RAW that it's proportional to scene brightness. and you can do any editing you want without worrying that you're adjusting both shadows and highlights at the same time. Yeah. So I do recommend that you try RAW in Indigo. I think you'll like it. Yeah, yeah. And I've made an exception for Indigo, definitely. Just knowing I'm not throwing away a bunch of extra frames and extra data. Yeah, it's been a totally different experience shooting with the phone. I use the phone cameras on every major phone, you know, released in this country. And this app really made me think about it differently.

48:47One characteristic. I mean, there are tradeoffs. You know, why didn't everyone else do the same thing we did? Well, we're capturing more frames. It takes longer to put them together. You have to be a bit more patient between shots, particularly in low light. So there are tradeoffs to be made. And we made a particular trade-off favoring the more serious photographer, the one who cared more about image quality and adjustment after the fact. I think someone who really wants to get into the nuts and bolts of photography, it sort of speaks that love language where just right from the onboarding screens, you know, you learn a lot about what the camera's doing and how things will be processed.

49:30And with your background as a teacher, I wonder how that, did this feel like a natural kind of fit? Did you find as you were developing this app, you were sort of bringing that part of your background along too? Yeah, I love teaching. Maybe I sometimes talk too much, but I want people to understand. And so the last course I taught before I left Stanford, first for Google and then for Adobe, was a course on digital photography. And I would teach both the art and the science. You know, why do we want to combine images? Where does this noise come from? What are aberrations on lenses and things like that?

50:11And so that kind of spilled over onto the explanations that I made both in the blog and on the opening screens in Indigo. I want people to understand. How do you think about that? Maybe line is the wrong word, like a line between the art and the science. I think in photography especially, people can get kind of, they'll want to dive into one or the other and they'll see, you know, they want to know everything about how the camera's working and they get into the nuts and bolts. Or they don't want to get into all that and they feel like it detracts from enjoying the art. How do you see that? Are those two opposing things?

50:51Can you exist in two different states at once? I don't consider them opposing at all. I do understand tastes that some people are just nerds about the science and some people are nerds about the art. One of my heroes is Ansel Adams. So Ansel Adams, first of all, was a teacher in addition to being a great artist. But he also embraced both the art and the science of photography. He wrote three amazing books, The Camera, The Negative, and The Print, which are quite scientific and full of careful illustrations of how perspective works and the zone system for exposure and so on. I had a chance once to ask one of his assistants, his longtime assistants, would he have embraced digital photography?

51:39He did have a chance to test a very early digital camera, but would he have embraced it for his photography? Without a moment's hesitation, the assistant said, of course he would have. Just look at his work and his books. Yeah, it makes sense. And I think a lot of photography conversations go back to Ansel Adams sort of inevitably when you talk about processing, Photoshop, you know. So maybe even the moment we're in right now with generative AI, you kind of can trace back to like, well, we think of photography as this, you know, it's just photons hitting a piece of film or a sensor. But the way Ansel Adams, you know, manipulated images and the things he did in the darkroom, people are maybe not aware of.

52:31Exactly. And not only that. So first of all, you're exactly right about the manipulations in the darkroom. His dodging and burning, which many photographers know about, is local tone mapping. It's the same as this raising the shadows in one part of the image and lowering the highlights in another part of the image, but maybe not in all parts of the image. That's just dodging and burning. But more than that, he was open about it and taught about it. He has one great book that is The Making of 40 Photographs, I think it's called, and he shows the original. and the version after he has fiddled with it in the darkroom or interpret it in the darkroom.

53:07In fact, one of his most famous pictures, The Clearing Winter Storm in Yosemite, is a great example that I used to show in my photography course at Stanford of the original, which is surprisingly, I wouldn't say bland, but fairly even-toned and not nearly as exciting as his version after Dodging and Burning. And he would explain what he did and why. It's such a joy to hear someone who is so immersed in what they do and has such a love for it and the technical mastery, I think. So, yeah, I definitely need to check more of that out. I have some other questions about Project Indigo before we stray too far into philosophy of photography and art.

53:52I'm wondering your thoughts on generative AI. And particularly, it's on my mind because I've just been using the Pixel 10 Pro. And there is a zoom feature on the camera that instead of using just digital zoom, which has a lot of limitations, takes your image and uses a diffusion generative AI model to kind of fill in the gaps. And as your former colleague, Isaac Reynolds, said, squash the artifacts. So that's sort of out there now. Is that something you would consider bringing into Project Indigo? A lot to unpack there. So first of all, in general, generative AI definitely has a place in the future of art, the future of photography.

54:45The GenRemove feature in Lightroom is generative AI, and I use it to remove distractors in many of my personal photographs. It's very useful. Of course, it can be used to make entirely new stuff, and there's a place for that as well. So as far as digital zooming goes, I don't want to talk specifically about Pixel, but there are other smartphone vendors who have explored extreme zooming like that. Any smartphone that does say 100X is, of course, using digital scaling of one kind or another. So maybe I can answer it by giving a general way to think about this. If they are claiming 10X zoom over what the lens can do, or 20x over what the lens can do if it is a native resolution that's a 5x lens, but let's take the 10x case, then the way to think about it is every tenth pixel, horizontally and vertically, is real.

55:52Which means that considering both horizontal and vertical, one out of 100 pixels is real. The other 99 have to be made up. Now, how do you make up pixels? You could just interpolate smoothly and make a blurry image. You could try to sharpen edges. Now, why would you sharpen edges? Because you have some prior knowledge that the world is composed of mostly smooth areas and sharp edges. That's prior knowledge. That's a buzzword in artificial intelligence. If you have a large training set, you have more prior knowledge. about the world. And these diffusion models have a lot of training data and therefore a lot of prior knowledge.

56:41So they'll look at every 10th pixel or every 100th pixel in area and say, oh, that looks like a building. Buildings have windows. The windows have sharp edges. I will sharpen all that up and make it a stucco facade and then a dark window. And so they're clearly making stuff up. When you're using a generative AI, I think all of the smartphone vendors will admit that they're making stuff up. The question is, is it useful? What are you doing with the image? And that determines whether it's okay to do that kind of stuff. One thing I will say more about Pixel is they do say they're not doing it for people.

57:22Correct. And that is an admission that it does matter what the Gen AI is used for. But getting back to the general argument, it's useful for some things and not useful or even misleading for other things. And so I think that'll be the discussion that everyone has going forward about the use of Gen.AI in digital scaling is what's it being used for and does it work or does it make up stuff that's objectionable? Yeah, I think there's maybe a parallel to the moment we're in with AI generally. And my framework is what is the features on the phone mostly. And there's sort of a rush to have a bunch of AI stuff and sort of flashy, but not that useful.

58:06And I think, I hope we're getting to a place with it where we can think of it more as a tool that is just sort of there when we need it and is helpful. And then we don't think about it when we don't need it. It sounds like that's kind of what you're hinting to. Let me make one further distinction. There's AI and there's Gen AI. Now, those terms are kind of fuzzy themselves. But when we think of text-to-image or text-to-video, everyone thinks of a certain kind of Gen AI. Let's use that definition. But AI is much more general than that. AI can just help you answer any question where you might benefit from prior knowledge.

58:46So the 10x multi-frame super resolution that Indigo has is using an AI. It's not using an AI to propose what the pixels ought to be, but to help align the multiple frames. The multiple frames all look a little bit different because when you hold your phone, you naturally shake a little bit. And so it gets different views of the world. And that actually provides additional real information about the scene. And the AI helps us align it and predict how we should weight those different images. So that's an AI. It's being used as a tool, but it's not gen AI. So one more thing I'll say about that is, well, why can't you just keep doing that and take more and more frames and get 100x?

59:30And you can't. And the reason you can't is because there is a fundamental limit on how much detail gets through a lens. It's called the diffraction limit. And every lens has a diffraction limit. And for most smartphones, there might be 2x more information in each of horizontal and vertical than the pixels normally allow. There might not, depending on the lens, there isn't 10x more in each of X and Y for each of horizontal and vertical. So at that point, you definitely are making stuff up. Yeah, right. That sort of relates to something I think about a lot with smartphone cameras is the role of hardware versus software.

1:00:15It kind of seems like, especially in the major players in the U.S., that we've sort of leveled out on the hardware. You know, we're not talking about a new, bigger camera sensor every single year. You know, it's sort of like the same sensor with some tweaks to the software, which is not quite the case, I think. If you look outside the U.S., my colleague, Dominic Preston, gets to play with the, you know, the Xiaomi phones that come out. And they seem to be trying some really interesting stuff with the hardware, the really big one-inch type sensor. you were going back to attachments that you put on your smartphone that turn it into more of a camera.

1:00:59So I assume you realize that the major limitation there is the thickness of the phone. That's what it's all about. The fundamental optics of a camera says that if you want a larger sensor, you've got to have more space between the lens and the sensor. And you can do quite a variety of hardware tricks to finesse that a little bit, but not a lot. And so basically a larger sensor means a thicker phone. And yeah, maybe our sensibilities are that we just don't want that and we're going to kind of settle on, you know, we get what we get. Do you think there is innovation to be had in the camera hardware, you know, as within the bounds of what we'll tolerate as, you know, how thick a phone can be, how big a camera bump can be?

1:01:49So far, all that innovation has been incremental, but very useful. As a specific example, when I was working on Pixel, we used Sony sensors, and every year the Sony sensors would get better. Just a little bit better, but they really would get better. One of the ways they got better is that what's called the read noise, the extra random stuff that gets introduced when the pixels are read off of the sensor, would get less and less. And so in the last couple of years that I was at Google, we could do astrophotography where it's very, very dark and you need that read noise to be small. We could successfully do it, whereas a few years before we really couldn't.

1:02:31And so these incremental improvements are useful. On the telephoto lenses, many of the smartphone vendors, including iPhone, have gone to what's called a periscope or a bended optics. Yeah. That's an interesting development. So there are hardware developments to be had. They're slow, they're incremental, but they're useful. Yeah. Okay. Well, that gives me hope. I don't know. There's something fun about new hardware as much as, you know, software is important. On the subject of innovations and things coming up, I wonder if you can give us a taste of what you're working on next for Project Indigo.

1:03:09I know it's, would you call it a beta? It's in the Adobe Labs kind of underdevelopment state, if that's correct. Right. I wouldn't, the blog doesn't even characterize it as beta. It says experimental. Okay. Yeah. Meaning this might or might not turn into a product for Adobe. Yeah. So in the blog, we talk about a few things. One of them is I would love to do exposure bracketing, where you, there are some scenes that are so high dynamic range that just underexposing and to reduce clipping of highlights and averaging of more frames to reduce noise in the shadows isn't enough. The example that we have in the blog is a moon over a moonlit landscape.

1:03:51So the full moon over a moonlit landscape, the difference in brightness between those two is 19 f-stops, meaning 2 to the 19th power, meaning about half a million to one. That's beyond the dynamic range of any camera, even an SLR. So if you wanted to capture a full moon and a moonlit landscape, you need to bracket. By bracketing, I mean capturing multiple images with different shutter speeds. And so, of course, SLRs let you do that. There's some of that in the smartphone industry. We would like to do a lot more of it in Indigo. Yeah. Another similar thing that is also mentioned in the blog is focus bracketing, meaning let's move the lens in between captures and then combine them to make what is called an all-in-focus image.

1:04:46So you would think, well, you know, in a smartphone, everything's in focus more or less. Well, that's true for things that are far away, but not for things that are close. So I don't know what your killer app for All in Focus might be, but I know my killer app. It's food. My dinner at a nice restaurant where it's worth photographing. It's very hard to get the whole dinner plate in focus. You can do it if you shoot from above looking down, but not if you shoot obliquely. Yeah. You're so close. And yeah, you're like, is the tomato on the top of the salad or the plate behind it going to be in focus?

1:05:21Yeah. So those are two things that are kind of obvious. There are a number of other things that we're exploring. They basically fall into the same camp of let's take a bit more time during capture, try a number of different things, combine them computationally. What I'd love to do, as the blog says, is to keep all the data, not just one image, so that you could also play with it later in an editor. Yeah. And that's a great example of where the camera app and the editing app can work in synergy. Yeah, a little bit of a nice advantage when you work for Adobe. Exactly. Okay, but I have to ask for my Android people.

1:06:02Is there an Android version come in? It's definitely on the want list. Okay. I used to work on building Android camera apps, of course, at Google. As a matter of fact, the API, the application programming interface for the camera, was something that I and my graduate students at Stanford designed. The so-called Camera 2 programming interface for Android came out of a project at Stanford called the Franken Camera Project. Oh, nice. And it's a great interface, and I would love to address it. But Android has challenges. It's a very diverse and fragmented ecosystem. Mm-hmm. Not every vendor implements the Camera 2 API well, and we'll have to deal with all those challenges if we try to build an Android version of it.

1:06:54Yeah. Okay. That sort of comes to mind if this is a universal camera app. Like, well, I want it on my Android phones. Yeah. I guess I set myself up for this by calling it universal five years ago, didn't I? You did do this to yourself, so. It was deliberate. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Think big, you know. Well, I appreciate this so much. Thank you, Mark. And I know a ton of Verge readers are interested in your work, and we're loving playing with Project Indigo. So they're going to be tuned in to what you're working on next. Good. And for all the Redditors out there who are largely positive, which I'm relieved to see, Reddit is not always positive.

1:07:39But the one complaint they have is, where are the updates? To them, I'll say they're coming. Okay, there you go. Well, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you, Alison. So we've got to take a quick break. And right after that, we'll be back with a hotline question.

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1:09:47All right, we're back. We're going to take a hotline question now. And as always, the number for that is 866-VERGE11. And our email is vergecastattheverge.com. We love the questions, keep them coming, and we answer at least one on every show. So definitely write in or call in. This week's question comes from someone who isn't that concerned about image quality on their phone, but they're a little bit bothered by the camera bump. Hello, I am Osvaldo. I'm calling to talk about cameras on phones. I, for one, don't care much about the quality of the camera, to be honest. And I think that if I want to get the best phone available on the market, I have to basically live with a bump that is almost the size of the overall phone.

1:10:43So I just wonder about where are we going with this? Because it seems that these camera bumps just keep getting bigger and bigger. And somehow the phones get thinner on the other side, but then the size of the bump is not taking into account from the overall size of the phone when things get pretty unmeasured. So that seems pretty weird that, let's say that the phone size is an overall five or whatever, and then the bump is at two on top of that, but then somehow it gets reported that the size of the phone is just the lower number. So I don't know. I'm just wondering if there's like any hope out there for a top of the line phone to just basically start moving away from the bump and then having the having be the case that we can have a phone that has the specs of a top of the line but not the oversized bump that would allow us to at least have the phone sit like fresh on the table so i guess that's just food for thought thank you so i need to start with mostly bad news osvaldo i am so sorry i don't think the camera bumps are going away but i love this question because A, I appreciate the honesty, really don't care about the image quality, just tired of living with a big camera bump.

1:12:04And B, I think is just saying out loud what a lot of us are thinking or bothered by. But I know I, for one, just want all the best image quality I can get. So it's sort of something I've shoved into the back of my head that I can live with. But I think there's a few reasons why the camera bump is not going away, especially on the Pro in the higher tier models that Asfalto's talking about. So these are the phones that tend to have the best camera, you know, the best of the best. And those cameras have bigger sensors. That is a huge benefit when you're taking pictures in low light or really any situation.

1:12:47but a bigger sensor means it needs a bigger lens hence a big camera bump so there's a little bit of a caveat to this that outside of the U.S. this is maybe even a worse problem where some of the Xiaomi's of the world are you know betting on really big image sensors and big lenses and just sort of going all the way into, you know, the heck with it. A camera bump is going to be huge and people will just live with that. So I think what we have to deal with here is maybe a little bit better. And I do think the point about phones getting thinner, but the camera bump kind of remaining a problem is legitimate.

1:13:33I tested the Galaxy S25 Edge, which is a super thin phone, but that camera bump is maybe as thick as the phone itself and something that really bothered me when I tested it is putting it on the table as Osvaldo mentioned does not sit flush on a table and it wobbles like all heck when you tap on it this is made worse by my habit of not putting cases on phones which I think is one of the solutions here so I don't think the camera bumps are going away. Putting a case on your phone, depending on the phone in the case, you know, you can shop around a little bit for something that sort of evens out the camera bump.

1:14:16I think, you know, a pop socket or a case with a built-in stand could help if you're really bothered by setting your phone down and having it wobble on the tabletop. Those would be things to look at if you haven't already. There's maybe good news coming or bad. I can't really tell. The rumors of the iPhone, the impending iPhone 17, show like an elongated camera bump. That might help even out the wobble situation. I just tested the Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel phones have that long kind of elongated oval of a camera bump, and it's big and chunky for sure. But when you set it on a table, it's a little bit of a stable stand for the phone.

1:15:08So it props it up a little bit, doesn't wobble around. So there are trade-offs there. Perhaps the iPhone is moving to something similar. It's still a big camera bump. So I think you've got to look at a case that's maybe going to help. If all else fails, I find a drink coaster is my friend. And I am always putting my phone on a drink coaster when I'm sitting at the table and I'm tired of it wobbling around. So we've always got that, Osvaldo. I'm sorry. I hope that helps. But maybe the help is in just saying it out loud and knowing that you're not suffering alone. So thanks for calling in. All right, that's it for The Vergecast today.

1:15:54To read more about the topics we covered, check the show notes or head to theverge.com. And if you like what we do here, consider buying a paid subscription. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brendan Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Andrew Marino. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Jake Asternakis and the team will be here Friday to talk about the news. Thanks for listening.

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