> So I remember very clearly at the 2012 Olympics in London, if you looked around the stadium, you saw a lot of people using an iPad as a camera and generally that was people that just needed to have a bigger viewfinder for vision reasons, etc.
For sporting events we use iPads for videos and photos. The reason is that the quality is "good enough" and the large screen makes it so much easier to actually follow the action on the screen. When we tried to use phones, people were much more likely to watch the action not using the screen, and then would miss the shot because they couldn't get the camera aligned with the shot fast enough.
When you say "we" do you mean a professional outfit, or just as a group of consumers at a sports event? I thought pros were all about DSLRs and long lenses at sporting events. What kind of action can you actually detail with an iPad's lens?
For my mom, her iPad (Mini) is her only computer, including for taking photos. She much prefers the large screen (vs a phone or camera-sized screen) and wouldn't know how to transfer photos over from a traditional camera.
I imagine my mom is pretty close to the average demographic that goes to theme parks in this way.
My coach uses it to film climbing and it's really helpful for instant feedback. There are also apps to do more in depth analysis to for instance draw geometry on your movement to understand and improve.
A long time ago before iPads we had this fancy slow motion camera it felt pretty awesome at the time. But the cameras on apple devices now are so amazing. high FPS and super high quality it's crazy to look back what we used to have!
This other app link also looks interesting; the idea of having a team repository and archives would bring value to small teams I think. Like Football (europe) has this where their players spend time each day and they have program that tags parts of game etc on timelines to view, annotate etc which is super cool.
I saw on HN a while back about ML that trained the most optimal pole jump body position. That would be super cool for other sports. And maybe pro-am apps which analyze for instance your running form with some ML autodetect spine tool. There's the obvious team strategy math that's been done before ML, but more for movement and body position. I hate it (and a lot of other climbers do too) but speed climbing could probably get faster with some new tricks to get a straighter center line up the wall.
In photography you’ll hear similar arguments about people using the camera display instead of the viewfinder. The viewfinder provides the best view of what the image will look like, but people would rather hold their camera out in front of them then stick their eye up to the viewfinder.
I think the argument can be made that the pro-view offered by halide would be better for image composition than the iPhone, but as mentioned using the whole screen won’t allow you to truly see everything.
Taking a photo with an iPad is somewhat surreal. Typically when you take photos with anything else you need to bring it back to your PC and open it in a large screen to realize it's slightly out of focus or everything is just too noisy. With the iPad especially post retina display you get an almost 1:1 relationship between what you preview and what you get finally. If you try to take it in that perspective an iPad is a better method to take a photo if camera quality is the same.
