The phone seems to have completely replaced the point and shoot type camera. The SLR on the other hand still takes superior pictures compared to any phone. I have a Nikon D3100 and it sits on the shelf because I am not gonna lug it around.
How does everyone else feel about this? Do you own or would you buy a real camera today when the one built into the smartphone is not only excellent but also super convenient as you always are gonna have your phone with you.
We hike weekly. Almost everyone carries a phone. A few of us carry a phone and compact. One of the best hikers would carry a top end Canon PnS, on some hikes a Nikon DSLR+zoom, and his phone. He upgraded his iPhone to a 13. Now the Canon stays home, and the Nikon only comes along for the more “photogenic” hikes.
I have a mid-grade Canon with a 20x zoom. Phones simply cannot do that, none of them. But, for a lot of situations the iPhone simply does a better job with dynamic range with the HDR setting. I’m using the phone more, and the Canon for more special shots where it shines.
I have a mirrorless Olympus and a couple good lenses I have taken, but even that is large and something to deal with all day. Hiking can be hard on cameras.
For point and shoot in good conditions phones are indeed better.
As a result, the camera market shifted to cameras geared towards professionals and serious amateurs and cameras are becoming more expensive.
But will the smartphone make DSLR and SLR cameras obsolete? No way.
Smartphones take pictures that look good only on a smartphone screen and are heavily processed.
If you compare a RAW picture from a phone to the RAW of a modern camera the difference in quality is huge.
If someone is serious about photography eg. for wildlife, events, or astrophotography a DSLR/SLR is still the way to go.
I agree, my Nikon SLR takes incredible pictures.
Smart phones only really take good pictures with excellent lighting conditions. Whereas an SLR can take little light and take advantage of it.
Try taking a picture with your phone in low light conditions.
Some phones do have 1 inch sensors now and can take decent low light pictures. For most people phones are probably good enough.
I’m probably going to use the D850 for the rest of my life. There is no reason for me to switch to anything else when the results are this good.
I think it’s a question of convenience vs quality and the expectation weight+value
applied to those 2 factors.
Our hiking buddy had a full size Nikon DSLR + lenses. Too much to carry. So he invested in a mirrorless Nikon to still use the lenses. Carried it once. Uses his phone. He likes pix, but he’s not “into” it. He would have been MUCH better off throwing that money at a phone upgrade.
He’s got a GoPro he’s carried a few times but is not willing to do any real editing. So…in a drawer now.
I’ve run the gamut, trying everything from point and shoots, to mirrorless m43, APS-C, full frame, and DSLR APS-C and full frame. Pentax, Canon, Fujifilm, Sony, Olympus, Panasonic, and Nikon. After figuring out what I like, I’ve finally settled on a Nikon D3S with a prime lens trio of 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm.
Photography is fun, frustrating, and rewarding.
On a hike I always carry mirrorless APS-C with 18-135 lens, 670g total weight.
I use phone camera too. To take picture of cabling in machine I’m disassembling, document to email etc. That is what those cameras are good for.
Mike
Falling in line with the saying about so many devices:
the [thing] you have with you is better than the [better thing] you don’t have
Phones are handy and always on your person. A point’n’shoot less so. A SLR even less so.
Nikon mirorrless are garbage so good choice
I mostly use a low-end 11-year-old Canon snapshot camera, an Elph 110 HS. It’s small enough to leave in my purse until I need it. I also got a brand new phone recently with a really fancy camera in it… but the old Canon beats the new phone in virtually every situation – usually by a wide margin.
There’s no substitute for real optics. A tiny camera phone is limited by physics, and doesn’t get pictures as nice as a full camera with bigger optics. Even a full decade of technological improvements doesn’t change that.
The Elph gets dramatically better pictures in both macro mode and zoom mode, since it’s able to zoom about 5X farther and 5X closer. So it absolutely wipes the floor with the phone camera in both cases. The Elph also gets massively better photos any time the lighting conditions are dark or even just moderate indoor lighting. The Elph seems to get more natural colors most of the time, too.
The only times the phone is competitive at all are in bright lighting, for a distance of ~0.5 to ~2 meters away, or when doing wide-angle landscape photos during the day. It has better HDR without a need for bracketing, which can be useful during the day with both brightly-lit areas and dark shadows in the same image. And if I don’t really need much quality, it can be more convenient since I have the files auto-sync to my computer.
But most of the time, if I care about quality, my cheap old snapshot camera gets much better results than a phone.
For example…
First, “normal” camera mode. This is where the two get the most similar results. The Elph gets richer colors and more detail, but results are otherwise pretty similar.
Top: Elph. Bottom: Phone.
Next, “5X zoom” mode. The Elph’s colors are much more true to how the scene actually looked, and the result is a pretty accurate photo. Meanwhile, the phone washed out the highs, made the shadows darker than reality, changed the hue of almost everything, and blurred out details.
Top: Elph. Bottom: Phone.
The difference is much more clear when looking closer to see the details. Everything in the phone picture is a blur.
What really surprised me was macro mode. I thought the phone would perform well here, especially since it has a special macro mode with its own dedicated separate camera built in for this purpose. It’s one of those 3-eye cameras with multiple different physical cameras that it uses to get better photos in more situations, and one is specifically for macro shots. But this is where the phone performed the worst.
The macro shot was quick and easy with the Elph, but I had to try a bunch of times to get a half-decent photo with the camera… and even then, it doesn’t pick up enough detail to be able to see what I was trying to see.
Left: Elph. Right: Phone.
Note: In all pictures above, no color correction has been performed, and the images are not scaled relative to each other. The only post-processing was to crop the pictures, put them next to each other, and then the combined image pairs have presumably also been scaled to fit on your screen. I did not zoom the Elph macro shot in with software, and I also didn’t zoom the phone macro shot out. That’s just how different the images are in their own native resolutions.
For those with a DSLR camera, the differences would be much more dramatic. My little snapshot camera can’t hold a candle to a proper full-sized camera. However, mine has two big advantages: it’s small and cheap. So I can keep it with me… and the best camera is the one you have with you when you need it.
Good write up
What phone do you have? Have you tried to use Gcam? I put Gcam on my Poco X3 and it helped some phones are let down by software.
Nailed it.
This. All the effort thrown at improving phone cameras - mostly software - are workarounds for their inherent limitations and can also be applied to dedicated cameras.
I used to lug around 35mm Nikon film cameras and was delighted when lighter dslr cameras came along. I still have a Nikon DSLR and great xoom, but have not used it in years.
Now I carry my phone all the time, everywhere. So it gets a lot of use for imaging. However, when setting out for a hike in the mtns or other scenic place I may be visiting my Lumix ZS100 is my primary camera. It has a true 10x Leica optical zoom, a 1" sensor and has a traditional type viewfinder as well as an led display panel. One of the things I dislike most about camera phones is that there are many occasions, mostly outdoors, when the phone display becomes pretty much useless for accurately framing a picture. The Lumix ZS100 has a small but very effective electronic viewfinder and a camera back display panel. Hold it up to your eye and a proximity sensor switches from the camera back panel to the eye viewfinder.
That Lumix is a nice camera.
Lumix in general was excellent back in the day.
It’s a OnePlus phone, one of the recent 5G models with a 3-eyed big camera “block” sticking out the back. I haven’t tried Gcam, nor even heard of it before.
Software can’t fix its physical lack of optical zoom though, or its lack of ability to focus at macro distances, or improve the generally poor quality of its raw images. Software could maybe improve the white balance and replace blurred areas with grainy areas, but those aren’t really the main issues.
It works fine for things where quality doesn’t matter, like if I just need a quick picture of something for reference… but for everything else, I use a dedicated camera. Because even a decade-old low-end compact model outclasses what the phone is capable of.
It’s Google’s proprietary camera app. It became famous with the Google Pixel phones because it produced subjectively better photos than an equivalent iPhone despite the Pixel having inferior camera hardware. There’s a whole community dedicated to modding Gcam and making it work on devices that don’t normally support it:
With that said, I still agree with your point that there is no replacement for better optics, and there is still value in a “real” camera.
