This is the perfect distillation of what's wrong with modern tech and it's making me slowly lose my mind. A feature that takes a clean photo and makes it objectively worse. Side by sides where the "original" wins every single time lmao. They call it "expressive." they put it in their own ad, they hit post. This didn't happen because sony is dumb. Sony makes some of the best camera sensors on earth, they build in everyone else's phones too. This happened because somewhere between the engineers and the launch, an entire layer of PMs and MBAs decided they knew better and the engineers/technical people, who DO know better, sat in their seats and watched it ship. Think about 60s-80s tech. Primitive, super tiny budgets, constraints everywhere and yet sony walkmans, thinkpads, hp calculators, apple IIs, nintendo handhelds. Things with fingerprints on them. things where you could feel that a specific human had cared about a specific decision. Because technical people ran technical companies. Engineers, designers, builders were in the room. Founders had built things, the person approving the product could read the spec. Now the person approving the product is reading a deck.