The case in the article is obviously one that any idiot could have taken without these tools.
But "in difficult scenarios", as the GP comment put it, your mistake is assuming people have been taking those photos all along no problem. They have not. People have been filling their photo albums and memory cards up with underexposed blurry photos that look more like abstract art than reality. That's where this sort of technology shines.
I'm pretty reasonable at getting what I want out of a camera. But at some point you just hit limitations of the hardware. In "difficult scenarios" like a fairly dark situation, I can open the lens on my Nikon DLSR up to f/1.4 (the depth of field is so shallow I can focus your eyes while your nose stays blurry, so it's basically impossible to focus), crank the ISO up to 6400 (basically more grain than photo at that point), and still not get the shutter speed up to something that I can shoot handheld. I'd need a tripod and a very still subject to get a reasonably sharp photo. The hardware cannot do what I want in this situation. I can throw a speedlight on top, but besides making the camera closer to a foot tall than not and upping the weight to like 4lbs, a flash isn't always appropriate or acceptable in every situation. And it's not exactly something I carry with me everywhere.
These photos _cannot_ be saved because there just isn't the data there to save. You can't pull data back out of a stream of zeros. You can't un-motion-blur a photo using basic corrections.
Or I can pull out my iPhone and press a button and it does an extremely passable job of it.
The right tool for the right job. These tools are very much the "right" tool in a lot of difficult scenarios.
In circumstances where it really matters having a prettied up image might be worse than having no image at all. If you rely on the image being correct to make some consequential decision, you could convict someone of a crime, or if you were trying to diagnose some issue with some machine you might cause damage. While if the camera gave an honest but uninterpretable picture you would be forced to try again.
- Photographing serial numbers or readouts on hard-to-reach labels and displays, like e.g. your water meter.
- Photographing damage to walls, surfaces or goods, for purpose of warranty or insurance claim.
- DIY / citizen science / school science experiments of all kind.
- Workshops, auto-repairs, manufacturing, tradespeople - all heavily relying on COTS cameras for documenting, calibrating, sometimes even automation, because it's cheap, available, and it works. Well, it worked.
Imagine your camera fighting you on any of that, giving you bullshit numbers or actively removing the very details you're trying to capture. Or insurance rejecting your claim on the possibility of that happening.
Also let's not forget that plenty of science and even military ops are done using mass-market cameras, because ain't anyone have money to spend on Dedicated Professional Stuff.
Can people taking documentary photos can disable the feature? Obviously casual users won't be aware of the option, if it exists at all.
I've often wished for an image format that is a container for [original, modified]. Maybe with multiple versions. I hate having to manage separate files to keep things together.
Man, I just wanna take pictures of my kid when she's sleeping and looks super adorable. It's sucks that me doing so is going to send people to jail and delay machinery diagnostics and cause insurance fraud, but I'mma keep doing it anyway.
That’s a pretty hand-wavy argument. You can just frame a picture however you want to give a very different image of a situation, que that overused media-satire picture of a foot vs a knife being shown.
But "in difficult scenarios", as the GP comment put it, your mistake is assuming people have been taking those photos all along no problem. They have not. People have been filling their photo albums and memory cards up with underexposed blurry photos that look more like abstract art than reality. That's where this sort of technology shines.
I'm pretty reasonable at getting what I want out of a camera. But at some point you just hit limitations of the hardware. In "difficult scenarios" like a fairly dark situation, I can open the lens on my Nikon DLSR up to f/1.4 (the depth of field is so shallow I can focus your eyes while your nose stays blurry, so it's basically impossible to focus), crank the ISO up to 6400 (basically more grain than photo at that point), and still not get the shutter speed up to something that I can shoot handheld. I'd need a tripod and a very still subject to get a reasonably sharp photo. The hardware cannot do what I want in this situation. I can throw a speedlight on top, but besides making the camera closer to a foot tall than not and upping the weight to like 4lbs, a flash isn't always appropriate or acceptable in every situation. And it's not exactly something I carry with me everywhere.
These photos _cannot_ be saved because there just isn't the data there to save. You can't pull data back out of a stream of zeros. You can't un-motion-blur a photo using basic corrections.
Or I can pull out my iPhone and press a button and it does an extremely passable job of it.
The right tool for the right job. These tools are very much the "right" tool in a lot of difficult scenarios.