Camera manufacturers are institutionally incapable of writing good software.
I have experience with Sony, and their firmware barely changed in the last decade. Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work. Touch screens are from a bygone era: laggy, imprecise, and without multi-touch. They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos came out sharp. Their phone apps are a clunky afterthought.
Smartphones are running circles around them with computational photography. "HDR" mode on Sony cameras is slow and primitive. I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time.
I can't speak for cameras specifically, but my partner is Taiwanese and apparently this hardware/software dichotomy is extremely prevalent there as well. Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke. Thus, the best and most talented engineers go into hardware, and the jokers work in software, leading to this "good hardware, bad software" observed outcome and reinforcing the stereotype further. Rinse, repeat, and you eventually end up with decent hardware running absolutely garbage firmware.
Given the social cross-pollination between Japan and Taiwan, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar pattern held true there as well.
> Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke.
Yup. Not just in Asia. The US suffered from that, as well. It may have changed (for the US), by now, as I spent 27 years at a Japanese hardware company.
I spent most of my career, as a software dev at hardware companies, and got the brunt of that crap. It was infuriating.
During my time, I wrote some very good software. In the early days, when my team was given a lot of leeway, it was sent out, and got [mostly] positive reviews.
As time went on, Japan got more and more involved with/in control of the software development that we did, and threw more and more restrictions at us.
We were forced to do a standard hardware-centric waterfall development process. If I even mentioned the word "agile," I might as well have just gotten up and left the meeting, because everything I said, after that, was ignored.
They took away all of the user interface from us, and we were just doing "engine" work, which was actually pretty cool, but, they sucked at UI.
Towards the end, I was reading terrible reviews about our software, and tried writing stuff that would directly address these gripes.
My work, and any similar work from my team, was ignored. Instead, they had some disastrous relationships with external companies, under (I assume) the impression that we were not capable of writing "modern" software, and these folks were (they were able to write "modern" software, because their work was terrible, and I have issues with the Quality of "modern" software, in general).
> Namely, there is a broad social perception that hardware design is "real" engineering, and that software is a joke. Thus, the best and most talented engineers go into hardware, and the jokers work in software, leading to this "good hardware, bad software" observed outcome and reinforcing the stereotype further.
Curious. In the US, the software people can usually make a lot more money so even many EE’s end up in software. I wonder if it’s the opposite in some of these countries, where software people are paid less than hardware people.
Anyone who's worked with software management of commercial hardware like cameras, digital signage, time clocks, door controllers, I don't know 1,000 other products types, can attest to the horror-show software you're provided by these manufacturers.
Think: Windows only, often IE/Edge only, ActiveX, crashes constantly. Random UI strings are in Chinese. Barely, barely usable.
Why is this still true? I can understand in the past, but after the rise of all the tech companies and obvious important software they use everyday (Android and iOS) how can anyone at this point think software is a joke and lesser than hardware?
That's a bit odd. Are they unaware of the last 30 years of computer history?
Even as someone with a background in mechanical engineering the degree of complexity behind some software products, such as Windows, is really impressive.
The worst part is that, despite treating their software like a joke, every damn business guards their source code, protocols, etc. as if it were their crown jewels.
So end users end up having to reverse engineer it just to fix issues that the manufacturer should have addressed.
And - the real kicker - far too often it turns out to be based open source work, with a few random modifications, distributed in violation of the license.
Isn't that exaggerated by semiconductor manufacturing (TSMC et al) dominating the Taiwanese economy? If your nation's existence is driven by EE-type concerns, software engineering doesn't seem important.
I couldn't agree with this more. My small child received a compact camera as a gift. While it was a decent camera for a kid, she was very frustrated with how small the screen was and how non-intuitive it was to her compared to a smartphone. I too was very frustrated with it as it was slow, configuring the software on it was a massive pain and the process of quickly getting photos from the camera to a computer was laughable. So, what did I do? I put the camera on a shelf and bought my daughter an older smartphone. I proceeded to lock it down and remove everything I could with the exception of the camera and gallery app. My daughter is now happier than ever and taking non-stop pictures. She can also almost instantly see those pictures on a computer now too!
Thanks for the hint. I was just about to buy an old compact camera for my daughter as she sees me taking pictures with my sony a7. Maybe you are right compact cameras are awful usability.
What software did you use to lock it down? I have some older iPhones laying around.
Before there were smartphones it was universal that anything other than a PC had a cheaper CPU but it was maybe 1/3 the price for 1/30 the performance. That is, off-brand CPUs of all kinds were a terrible bargain.
Then smartphones came along and there was another commodity platform that gave good price-performance. Around that time Intel also got interested in making low-performance parts with low sticker prices but that were highly uneconomical if performance or user experience mattered.
I am one of these luddites that still use a compact camera.
The firmware may be bad, yet I take a picture faster on my Sony compact camera than I do with my smartphone thanks to the physical buttons. I can also do it while cycling while doing the same with my smartphone is annoying as fuck in winter with gloves, in summer with sweat and expose the risk of losing and destroying my precious pocket computer.
Also for some my phone screen show as a black screen when using my polarized sunglasses while the lcd of my camera is still visible and allow me to point and shoot quickly. No idea what is the difference in tech on both that would explain that difference.
Most flagship smartphones may be super responsive but the average sub 200usd smartphone won't necessarily fire up the camera app faster than my Sony compact camera. And there is no way I will buy a 600 to 1000usd smartphone. I'd rather repair/replace either a 200usd smartphone or a second hand compact camera in the event I drop it and break it than a single 1000usd one.
Also from my experience with friends using flagships and apple ones, even the best smartphones are crappy under low light. Smartphones are great during the day, once it is dark they are pretty much useless.
> ...take a picture faster on my Sony compact camera than I do with my smartphone thanks to the physical buttons.
I will encourage you to check out the Google Pixel line of phones! A double tap of the power button starts up the camera immediately even if the phone is off and then a press of the volume button takes a shot. Can easily do it in gloves!
I've been carrying a Sony TX100V in my work bag for I suppose 11 years now. I'm on my second one. It has staggeringly good macro capabilities. I've had two 8x10 prints done this year and they're amazing.
It's a 2011 model and AFAIK the latest in the line. You have to go much bigger to get better quality. I'd buy an updated model in a heartbeat.
There is still a small market, but not enough to support many players.
I've got a compact around here somewhere, specifically because it can take getting dunked. With the pandemic my intended use case has gone away and I'm not sure where it is now.
I think that last bit has been true until recent flagships. Recent iPhones are sluggish in the dark, but take pictures that are better than my eyesight.
YES YES YES. And they don't support such basic use cases as "open an access point and let the connected device do the work of selecting pictures" - no, you have to select the photos on the camera and then call them down from the mobile app. Super "great" when you're in the field that I am and document rallies etc. so you need to get a photo up to social media as fast as possible.
> They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos came out sharp.
Yeah, same for lighting, another annoyance from hell. Personally, for shots in complicated conditions I've grabbed an used Blackmagic VideoAssist 4K... works way better.
> I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time.
Problem with smartphones, even modern ones, is the quality goes down dramatically in low-light scenarios. That's simple physics, the pixels are like 100x smaller. AI can cover for a lot of that, but it's noticeable enough to not make it worth my while - and for what it's worth, there are no Android tablets on the market with a halfway decent camera.
Sony's hardware is the best in class, there is no match at all for the A7S series from anyone in low-light, but the sorry state of their software is laughable. And the best of it is: it's all Linux under the hood. The older A7/A6000 series actually exposed parts of it via an Android subsystem layer where one could write apps for it after jailbreaking - too bad that the Android layer was/is fossilized (IIRC, Android 4-ish?!) and so they ripped it out after the A7S3 :/
If you don't want to pull with their app, your other option is UPLOADING TO AN UNSECURE FTP SERVER. I have a linux server hanging around (that's also the NAS where I store the raws) so this wasn't a huge deal, but like WTF.
I bought the camera (A7 IV) because it has ethernet support, which I thought, great. I'll just be able to scp or samba them off or something. Absolutely not.
Yep - that was an annoying own goal move on Sony's part. Having some sort of scripting layer in the OS would have made a big difference - they should have expanded the layer rather than abandoning it : (
Smartphones definitely beat cameras at night though. iPhones and Google Pixels in particular can make photos simply impossible with any kind of DSLR thanks to their computational magic.
I’m a photographer and your comment made me laugh. Everyone in photo circles hates the Sony menus on their cameras because they’re the worst.
Canon, Panasonic, and Fuji have substantially better menu systems that we all far prefer.
I find it funny your opinion has been informed by using the worst the camera sphere has to offer!
That being said, these menus and UIs are aimed at pros who do nothing else but take photos. It’s a coding IDE, not a simple text editor. It’s going to be foreign to the casual user. That is by design.
Also, the computational photography is a nuisance for our work. We want the LEAST edited photo file possible every time.
I understand your lack of interest in editing, it’s a chore that even we have to do, but it’s also one of our power tools. We choose this, it is not a step backwards for us!
It sounds like “professional” photography just isn’t for you!
However, before I start a bunch of arguments, I will say one thing. There is always room for improvement and they could likely do UX/UI analysis to further improve things. Though, from my use, I do find it to be very hardware focused which feels intuitive to me and those in my photo circles. I think it’s the prerequisite of knowing shutter, ISO, and aperture as well as focus pulling concepts. That makes me “know what to look for”.
(Canon user here) This response is very misleading. They're all bad. Other camera manufacturers are not substantially better than Sony in this regard. If Sony is a 1 and smart phones are a 10, the other camera manufacturers fall somewhere between 1 and 3. GPs comment is still spot.
edit: Please indicate when you make edits to your comments. Your comment is now very different to the one I responded to.
Something that really frustrated me with my camera purchase was how the hard interface was used to upsell higher priced models. I bought a D3500, the low end of that sensor line, and there's a lot of options I have to change through the menu. Things like ISO or timer delay (I also have to re-set this for every shot), things that typically are accessed through a dedicated or function button. The crux of it is that moving to a more expensive model with those buttons is not a strict upgrade: the camera is larger, heavier, and has worse battery life.
Right, but TFA is talking about the compact camera market. I agree with the comment that cameras haven't kept up with the ease of use and convenience of phones in any way.
The funny thing is that this translates over to Sony Xperia smartphone cameras too. On one hand, their custom camera app's UI feels like a Sony A7 variant. On the other, basic expected computational features such as night mode are missing.
> On the other, basic expected computational features such as night mode are missing.
Oh, how fast is progress in the world of technology.
I remember 6 years ago when google showed some prototypes of night photo from a smartphone using long expose. Meanwhile my Galaxy Note 4 made blurry unusable mess during the 14th of july nightly event I tried it at, while my gf DLSR were clear and great. Ah ah, smartphones will never be able to do that.
How 4 years ago Night Sight blew me away with their demonstration and almost made me go pixel.
How 3 years ago Samsung added a Night mode to my S9+ through a regular update and while the photo took a whole second to take the result was usually clean and crisp compared to the noisy mess on my previous Note 4, making it actually usable for static scene or portrait shot.
How the night mode on my Note 10 was genuinely great to the point it was just another mode as long as you avoid the usual night tricks like light sources.
How my new S22 Ultra for the first time passed my "smartphone will never really be good for night event shots" by taking picture during the 14th of july fireworks the quality of which I would scientifically classify as "pretty fucking great".
And now it's just a basic expected computational feature.
Sometime we forget how much progress is being made due to how incremental they all are, but damn, and that's just one feature on a piece of glass and plastic that's insanely powerful and filled with features in my pocket.
PS: the lack of Apple mention is merely because I'm not an Apple guy, I'm sure they had the same insane path
This is why the iPhone is actually a good split here: The default camera App is bleeding edge on computational photography but then when you want the pro experience there is the app Halide which is just an incredibly well designed pro camera interface that would thrive on a Mirrorless body. I'm kinda shocked that no small camera manufacturer hasn't reached out to the team.
>"I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time."
As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking. And you do not even have to dick with raw files to see the difference. Plain JPEG coming out of my relatively ancient D800 puts best smartphone cam to shame. Size matters and full frame sensor vs one in smartphone are incomparable.
That is not to say that smartphone can not take decent photos and in many cases what is being photographed matters way more than the picture quality as long as it is not atrocious.
The issue is that the average person doesn't consume photos and videos on their large 4k monitors. That's an enthusiast niche at best. That alone a market sustaining a large multinational co does not make.
Sensibly, workflows optimize for the smartphone consumption use case.
And yes, that hurts as photographers who obsessed over sharpness and pixel-level fidelity since the invention of digital cameras, but that just doesn't seem to be where the zeitgeist is at anymore. People never really cared in the first place.
It's similar to how music producers obsess over whether a particular synth sound was made with analog gear or was a "cheap digital knockoff". The listener never cared in the first place. They just want to be moved wherever it is that they are, which happens to be on the phone 99% of the time in photography.
I've noticed recently that a lot of smartphone cameras are doing a lot of heavy software upscaling and smoothing that erases details worse than simply low resolution. Everything is starting to look airbrushed. Having a real lens to do a lot of the optical heavy lifting and letting the sensor sense makes a huge difference if you really care about detail.
I'd be nice to have normal-sized lens, but it's hard to justify lugging them when the rest of the camera is so primitive.
Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus. May screw up exposure. It's harder to check the photos. Extra steps are needed to get the photos out of the camera. And it annoys me to no end that my dumb camera can't automatically adjust its clock and the timezone.
> As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking.
Exactly. Or when you print them out.
On the wall here I have a printed photo about 4ft wide, taken from a cropped section of a photo (not even the full frame) and it looks stunning. And this isn't even from a newer pro camera, it was taken with a ~15 year old Nikon D40.
It's a shame how well-designed and fun-to-use Fujifilm cameras are (I've owned several and they are the only digital cameras I use, apart from my phone) but how garbage their mobile app is. From what I've seen, Leica is the only company with a usable first-party app.
This is a cultural issue: programming is a low status blue collar job in Japan, especially in existing industry. This is especially weird to me given the number of great Japanese computer scientists, but so it goes.
One exception is the gaming industry: Sony Computer Entertainment in particular treats its developers similarly to the US (Ken Kutaragi drove this) while the rest of Sony follows the standard Japanese model. Bandai and Nintendo are similar, though not quite as much as Sony, and Sega a bit more traditional.
I think they’re actually trying to solve different issues.
Cameras are designed to capture & store the light in a way we can interpret later. They intentionally weren’t designed to edit or interpret the light and make corrections.
Smart phones automatically do interpret and “correct” images. This can lead to artificially created artifacts in the image files. Professional photographers will often prefer the raw because they can apply their own edits without said artifacts.
Now sure, camera photos are good for 99% of people, 99% of the time. BUT because the software on cameras were never designed to do those corrections, they just don’t. This makes night images worse, unless you decrease shutter speed.
On a side note, it’s this very fact that I find it difficult to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if you’re looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify / generate the fine detail.
> Cameras are designed to capture & store the light in a way we can interpret later. They intentionally weren’t designed to edit or interpret the light and make corrections.
That's one thing, but still there are many features of the camera firmware that people want to have, and cameras failed to deliver. One of such thing was apps - Sony provided few in some of their camera, but next model removed them, because they couldn't implement that in a model-agnostic way. They just don't get software.
>On a side note, it’s this very fact that I find it difficult to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if you’re looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify / generate the fine detail.
Are there examples of this? The only example I can think of was an accusation a while ago that huawei phones were compositing a stock photo of the moon when taking moon pictures with their phones. They denied the accusation and it wasn't really clear whether it was actually happening or not.
You’re right that cameras never adapted to a world where users want cars, not faster horses.
But I think you may be playing a bit loose with the ideas of evidence and details. Yes, smartphones “invent” details, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where those changes produce false evidence. You might find details of leaves rendered as watercolor brushstrokes; you won’t find a suspect inserted into a scene.
And remember that film annd magnetic tape cameras also invent details. All of that film grain that we find artistic is not really there. Should we also question what we see on those videos because they aren’t pixel-perfect?
1) Fact that whereas camera technology in smartphones has & is continuing to develop rapidly (computational photography as mentioned is latest major jump), it has largely stagnated within the mid-low tier camera market. Makes sense Panasonic is exiting the market, and other major players like Sony and Fujifilm focusing on the high end.
2) Vast majority users value convenience and ecosystem integration over pure photo quality. In most cases the latest smartphone take "good enough" photographs, so who wants to fiddle with having to transfer images from your standalone camera to your photo before sharing on social media? As the adage goes, "the best camera is the one you have on hand".
Personally I'd love to see something like the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom or Nokia Lumia 808/1020 being revitalized - a camera-first smartphone. How long before Apple or Google enter the DLSR or mirrorless market? Seems inevitable given the large investments both companies already make in smartphone camera photography.
It's not a problem with camera manufacturers, it's a problem with hardware companies.
Even chip vendors, who you would would think understand the importance of software, will de-prioritize their software side.
I wonder if it's a sort of macho thing; anyone can learn to write software, but not everyone can get an EE degree.
It also could be that the idea of incremental releases doesn't really exist on the hardware side. Hardware, because it's physical, requires a coordinated release. Then you do the next revision once the inventory gets low. The idea that you can ship on a flexible schedule is alien to the hardware side.
please contain this to twitter. What does "macho" have to do with comparing the relative difficulty of two things and attaching status to the most difficult?
Digital cameras is ALL about post processing. I used to have Minolta, Panasonic, Sony, and Canon point and shoots. No matter what, Canon pictures always come out much better out of the camera even if it has inferior lens, sensor, or is much older. Basically all sensors of Sony now, so the magic is all about the processing. The rest is really up to the photographer, that is where the art is.
I don't understand why phone manufacturers don't just get into the camera business, then. They certainly all seem to love making phones that brag about having large sensors and fancy (tiny) lenses... so why not just go one step further and make a "phone" that only runs a camera app, with a lens mount rather than a fixed lens, hardware mode switches, and a tripod screw mount?
The camera market small, quite crowded (before Sony kind of created the mirrorless market the only serious contenders were Nikon and Canon, now you got Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji and Panasonic), smartphones already killed the entry level and compact camera markets and the tech is quite different from smartphone cameras.
Phone cameras don't have sensors or optics at a quality comparable to basic point and shoots. They have to fit into a tiny space and performance is necessarily compromised. They're making it all up on software processing.
Based on this thread and my own corroborating experiences, this feels like a field ripe for harvest—if anyone sold a camera with DSLR-grade optics and smartphone-grade usability and computational abilities, they'd be rich! For those in the know, what makes this more difficult than it seems? Why has nobody done this yet and what challenges are standing in the way?
People needing and wanting DSLR grade optics, or mirroless as optics are more less the same thing, don't want or need shiny clicky smartphone apps. They need and want a professional tool that produces the least edited picture possible for post-processing later on. I wouldn't touch a camera that runs on Android with feet pole.
Camera manufacturers are very capabale of making hardware, incl. optics, that run sophisticated embedded software to take pictures. For editing, go to Adobe or one of the alternatives. Different use cases, different products, different markets. And not everything in the world can be solved by some consumer grade app.
Professional photographers require good reliable connectivity. Nikon cameras are extremely clunky in this regard.
Similarly, their menu system is atrocious. I am not saying this as somebody who looked at a camera once and said "this is too hard". I ran a photo business from 2008 to 2018, read all the manuals intimately and worked with Nikon cameras daily, and came to it from techie nerd perspective and knew what every button option and mode does in intricate detail.
"Great hardware, horrible software" is well understood state of camera business last 2 decades.
I now have two young kids. I have 4 dslr and two mirrorless cameras at home... And take kids photos with my cell - because it's convenient accessible and fast to transmit. Why can't I have an efficient sharing work flow with my $3000 camera? Because they make sucky closed systems and refuse to change open or learn.
This has nothing to do with editing. Modern smartphones combine multiple pictures for each picture you take, and have very sophisticated demosaicing, noise reduction and color grading. No app needed.
I prefer manual buttons when taking photos the traditional way. Too many digital screens these days deviate from a good solid device that does a few things really well.
I've sworn off Sony cameras after paying ~$1500 for a NEX-6 and having them abandon the firmware at version 1.03, 18 months after the camera was released.
I don't even remotely understand how that's possible. Did they just contract all of the work out?
I never had a firmware upgrade for any of the compact digital cameras (Canon) I had between ~ 1998 and 2012. I did not even think that this should exist, they worked well from the beginning.
There's also an issue with camera UI that phones managed to largely bypass. I remember getting a Canon t4i with a touch screen. The touch interface was actually pretty decent and this was probably ~10 years ago! But a lot of "camera people" hated it. They'd complain that it would inevitably lead to smudges on the screen and they wanted physical controls instead.
So who do you sell a dedicated camera to? A new UI will largely alienate the small market that still exists. The old UI guarantees an unappealing product for the smartphone user.
Ultimately all interfaces have to be easily navigable with buttons and this has consequences.
Wifi and Bluetooth... Yeah. It's not good on DSLRs either. My Pentax K1 has WiFi option, and, otherwise being an excellent camera in terms of imaging quality, build, ergonomics, good UI, it has somehow unreliable and cumbersome wifi - hard to set up and the mobile app is average at best. As if different people designed the wifi subsystem.
And interestingly my Tascam 44dw (not a camera, but sound recorder) has also abysmal wifi. Low range, unreliable and seems to be using single TCP connection for sending realtime data which suffers from head-of-line blocking. As if noone there heard about UDP.
Sony has a stupid update app as well, but Nikon and Pentax? Download a firmware file, put it on the root of the SD card, and boot itin a particular way or goto some menu and runu the update. Its a very 90's process but easy and simple compared to Olympus and Sony.
My Canon has locked up hard only once in half a decade of hard use, generating ~8TB of images in adverse conditions. It is sometimes left turned on for months at a time. I sometimes accidentally do terrible things with the power switch and SD card. Lenses are attached/removed without a care in the world. I've never seen a flaw in the function of menus or the corruption of a single image.
I cannot state the same for almost any other software product. I can use it like a tool, not like a computer. That's a sign of good software.
Nikon do very well with the Z series. I have a Z50 and it's closer to smartphone than DLSR. BT and WiFi work, decent quality viewfinder and articulated multi-touch screen. Also with the 16-50 lens it still goes in your pocket but is a proper camera.
I disagree with smartphone quality. I have what could be considered a close to best of breed in quality iPhone 13 Pro and it's crap. It's a 2009 DSLR with three crap prime lenses stuck to it. It's mostly usable if you shoot ProRAW with it but the processed images (HEIC/JPEG) are really quite fucked up.
It's so bizarre that camera manufacturers never figured out that the camera should be treated primarily as a smartphone peripheral. When I take a picture on the compact camera it should automatically sync to the smart phone camera roll with geotagging. All of the camera's settings and shutter should be controllable through a smartphone app. This lack of integration was a real failure of vision by camera manufacturers.
In case of DSLRs, and their mirrorless offspring, the purpose and the target audience's need is to capture light as good as possible, using a combination of precision electronics, optics and mechanics, to be edited later. They threw in some basic editing functionalities, various image formats and what not, but those are not mission critical.
Smartphones are lacking the optics, sensors and some other things a real camera has. As a result, they are still a far cry from replacing mid-level and up cameras. Smartphones, as the article points out, are perfectly sufficient for the compact and point-and-shoot market, and as a result killed it / took it over.
And heck, the ergonomics of Nikon blow any smartphone / app way of setting up a camera out of the water ever since before Nikon got serious about DSLRs.
The technology lifecycles haven't lined up. 10-15 years ago there were phenomenal DSLRs coming out, and honestly there weren't any good enough smartphones worth connecting them to. The iPhone App Store was in its infancy (it's only 14 years old); there weren't / still aren't any good, widespread standards for fast, personal-area-network data transfers of photos. Smartphones didn't have a lot of memory either: the iPhone 4 baseline model in 2010 ran with 4 GB, and the top of the line was 32 GB, with no slots for memory swapping - not something you can sync a lot of photos to at all.
I don't think, 10 years ago, camera manufacturers could've adopted a meaningful integration strategy. They could perhaps have entered the fray as Android phone makers and try to solve it, but it would've been a bigger jump than just integrating.
Sounds like you're complaining about a lack of vision because they couldn't mix technologies from different years, or have the budget to make a phone as well as a camera...
But it does seem to be a clever idea, I'm imagining a phone that has surface contacts on its back, and a Go-Pro-sized camera module that you can attach to the phone (with precise magnets, so the surface contacts on both devices would connect both devices electronically as well) and be recognized as a peripheral for the phone.
But I guess if already have a pro camera, you don't want to need to slap your phone on it to get it to work.
I agree on all points with my sony a7. Especially the Bluetooth connectivity was a great start but no updates and constantly dropping connections make it look laughable in 2022.
I guess there is a perception that it is like hardware « once its out its sold and we don’t care about it ».
At this stage I am seriously wondering if I will ever replace my camera with a new one or just be happy with a new smartphone. Maybe the camera will just stay a a sidehobby.
and lets talk about how increasingly out of touch photographers are about all of that!
A whole decade of people in enthusiast photography communities collectively playing devil’s advocate “why do you want that feature, whats a UI have to do with taking a photo, I never understood the point of a Live Photo, bluetooth? Thats what tethering and an external contraption is for….”
meanwhile the rest of the world just turned around and walked away
I have a mirrorless camera that I still use regularly. Three events in the last year have called my attention:
* While I was taking pictures at night, two teenagers came to me and asked me to take a picture of them. Apparently one of them wanted to know what it would look like, since the fact that I had a camera clearly indicated that I knew what I was doing (it didn't). I didn't have the heart to tell him that it would look pretty much the same as the phone he definitely had in his pocket, but luckily he gave me a wrong Instagram address so that problem solved itself.
* On that same night, one guy started yelling at me (pushing his head against mine) because he thought I had taken a picture of his car.
* I was interviewed in a popular tourist destination, and the interviewer explicitly asked me about why I had a camera instead of a phone.
Depends on the camera and other such features. But you're right that it's not a given.
> often wrong timestamps
I'm confused by this. I suppose if you leave your camera off for years at a time, have dead batteries and don't bother checking it - then sure. But in general the RTC on cameras is very good and not an issue. Even if it clock drifts by a minute or two, does it really make a difference?
> slow startup time
Incorrect with modern cameras. If I have both my Nikon in my hand and my phone - I can take a picture with the Nikon WAY faster and more reliable than my iPhone. The Nikon can go from off to taking a picture in half a second. The phone you need to press the camera button on the lock screen for a full second before the camera app even launches. Then it takes it a little time to launch the app and warm up the camera.
Are either slow or problematic? No. But the Nikon is way more reliable, sometimes the iphone just derps out.
> useless tiny batteries
Again, I suppose it depends on the camera. My Nikon is rated for a thousand shots a battery, I think? Even my smallest and oldest handheld is rated for 300 shots a battery. Unless you're going way crazy, that is a lot of photos in a single day. It'd run down your iPhone quite significantly as well.
One area that is a big difference overall... Video.
Slow startup times really shouldn’t be an issue in this decade. This is something that was an issue maybe in the early 2000s.
You will generally be able to turn on the camera more quickly than you can navigate to the camera app. (Physical switch plus sub one second time to turn on).
A camera is far faster in "startup time" (there's nothing to start up, just press the shutter to take a photo). And a DSLR will outlast battery life of a phone at least 100x.
If you're using something with a protruding lens, people have always been suspicious and/or thought you were some sort of professional. Back in 2008 I was using a Nikon D70 and generally just roamed my area of the world taking pictures to be uploaded to Wikipedia.
I had building security guards question me when I took a picture of their building (From the sidewalk).
I had mall security (outdoor mall) demand I cease and desist and get a permit.
I had transit workers threaten to call the police on me, even though photography is legal on public transit AND explicitly allowed in that particular transit agencies policies.
In 2008 the iPhone (original) was just out and had potato for camera, so everyone was still using SLR's and "normal cameras". But yet... people still got upset.
> In 2008 the iPhone (original) was just out and had potato for camera, so everyone was still using SLR's and "normal cameras". But yet... people still got upset.
Yes. It seems the social memory of this is being lost, but I heard LOTS of stories back then of people getting upset at someone with a camera. And also earlier, before smartphones even existed. The idea that it's the existence of smartphones that's made people defensive about cameras seems to be merely plausible but not actually true.
My biggest issue (besides lugging away one extra thing on trips) was that often pictures will just sit in camera until I take time to get them out and thenput them in NAS/Cloud & then share that location with wife and then have a round about forgotten passwords on her phone/tablet. Then she would be able to post those photos. With smartphones they are there in clould already, I just need to make a shared album and add everybody. and yes cameras have started doing this now but its all done so poorly that its almost same amount of effort. Nope!
> With smartphones they are there in clould already
What? I would never trust my photos to automatically go to some cloud storage. Who knows who would have access to them?
Instead I download the photos from all the family phones on a regular basis. I copy them to an external drive in my house. Then they backed up to a cloud service, but they are encrypted before they are backed up and the cloud service is only a backup. We can't actually see the photos on that cloud service. It is just fire protection (and yes, I have pulled the photos and videos back down from the cloud service to make sure it is backing them up correctly).
While I love my mirrorless, the ease of "exit" is definitely something that pulled me away from them for quite a while. But times have changes. There are accessory units like the Arsenal Camera Assistant that give you wifi access to the camera. Also a lot new cameras (like my new Nikon) have wifi built in.
Can take photos with the Nikon and beam them to my phone fairly quickly. Is it as quick and seamless as using the iPhone directly? Nope. But good enough that I'm ok with it now. It also gives me access to typically a much higher quality photo that I can crop way farther than I can with the iPhone.
i had a dude get aggressive with me recently when i was using an actual camera. he wasn't even in the frame but he thought i was taking a picture of him. made me realize how abnormal it is these days. now i can just take a picture with my phone and people won't care?
Probably wiped out the gps market also. My map supplier for my phone gave up and I assume it was from trying to compete with google maps. Was a loss for me as the maps worked offline…. “Good enough” and only one thing to remember.
Nailed the pager, voice recorder and related markets as well.
Where X has been things like keyboard, screen, disk drives, modem (now network adapter), speakers, microphone. All were originally separate devices. For historical reasons we now call hand computers phones, but the basic insight that these things just voraciously absorb peripheral and related functions is still just as true.
> For historical reasons we now call hand computers phones
Recently, I've been wondering why the name "phone" has stuck around for a device that has evolved with many more features than that of a telephone. I'm not going to pretend I know a lot about the history of these technologies, but I just find it fascinating that we've kept this identification to something that really provides so many core utilities. I'm curious to know more about the historical implications you alluded to.
Alternatively (and maybe quite a stretch), could I argue that our smartphones are just providing telecommunications to other services, namely, the APIs that they interact with to serve us things like GPS functionality, audio, etc., hence the name "phone"?
I don't think we've fully appreciated yet that "phones" are really the true embodiment of the original Personal Digital Assistant, i.e. an external brain that will augment yours in any circumstance.
Any portable device has been (or will soon be) replaced by "phones".
I'm on the other side. My father used a Garmin GPS in his vehicle for 15+ years.
The phone is a much better experience! Every time he had yet another issue, I wanted to be like "just use your phone!"
- Maps are out of date: Garmin required manual wired updates, Google Maps was always up to date
- Traffic costs: Garmin charged $10/mo for traffic data, Google Maps did it free
- Screen quality: Even in the early 2010's, smartphone screens were bigger and clearer than most car GPS units
- Attraction data: Google's was way more up to date than Garmin's third party attraction data, and Google quickly added multi-stop trips, business hours, busy-level of destination, etc
- Data Entry/voice: Google's voice entry and on screen keyboard were way better than Garmin
I was so happy when he got rid of that GPS and I finally got to stop supporting it.
With car play and android equivalent it’s so much better than a standalone device for navigating.
I do have a garmin watch with offline topographical and trail maps for hiking off the grid but I only use that a few times a year. I could probably get those on a phone too
Organic Maps is a very good and low resource offline mapping app that includes trails, point to point elevation mapping, and very low storage footprint. All built on top of OpenStreetMap. Definitely recommend for camping/travelling etc where you might be out of service for days.
Wiped out most of the pocket-sized handheld gaming market too. Not because phones are better at gaming, but they're "good enough" entertainment with social media, streaming, music, etc.
I really really wish that apple / google / samsung came out with official hardware game pads that snapped to the phones and had direct support at the os level for game developers to easily support. We're missing out on so many good handheld experiences by being limited to touch only.
Did it? The Nintendo Switch sold 114 million units since its release in 2017 [0]. The original Gameboy (a reasonable guess as the most popular handheld gaming device of all time) sold 118 million units [1] in 15 years.
Phones are better at gaming. You can emulate pocket sized handheld gaming devices as well. Perhaps you are only talking about popular games like Candy Crush and the such but there are a lot of heavyweight titles released for mobile platforms as well.
I don't know, I have more flashlights now that smartphones are available.
Thanks to LEDs, flashlights are now cheaper, brighter and last longer than ever. Even cheap flashlights are better and more convenient than phones at lighting. Because they are cheap and small, you can have one in every place you might need it. And the slightly more expensive ones can be powerful enough as a substitue to mains powered light bulbs for places like garages and storerooms. Also, smartphones don't replace headlamps.
So maybe some people don't get a flashlight because they already have one on their phones, but some people (like me) actually buy more, because they are so cheap and effective.
At the very least drove it into a niche, same as with GPS devices (Garmin still makes devices for triathletes, boats and packs of dogs), and cameras. Flashlights just have to be tacticool now, market's flourishing.
You can still buy alarm clocks too, even though your phone has one, just like it has a flashlight. Cheap alarm clocks are so cheap that only a slight benefit like always having it on your shelf is enough of a reason to buy one. (Expensive ones are decorations and not mainly bought in order to tell time.)
There was a silly horror movie called Crawl that came out a few years back. It's about killer alligators during a hurricane in Florida.
The least-believable part of this very silly movie was that, at the beginning, the main guy in it left his cell phone upstairs when he went to the dark basement to work on something in the house (pipes? I don't remember), which ended up causing the rest of the movie to happen. Of course he'd have taken it with him, for the flashlight if nothing else (and there are lots of other aspects of a smartphone that are super-handy when doing that kind of work).
The gps market is alive and well for marine, aviation and outdoor/offroad/motorcycle niche markets.
fwiw, google maps has download & offline functionality. Click your profile icon top right and select the area you want offline. I use it all the time for backcountry hiking (along with OSM apps) and going abroad where I dont have data.
More and more boaters are using tablets & phones as the apps give you access to charts and your instruments (e.g. wind, AIS).
Antennas solutions are increasing to get cellular reception farther offshore that feed into a wifi router.
At anchor, I personally use Organic Maps and drop a pin after I'm properly at anchor. There are specialized "anchor watch" apps but this works for my purposes.
Isn't Google Maps limited to a tiny little 100MB chunk or something? Fine for hiking, less fine for cross country road trips. Here Maps has free offline maps that will let you grab entire countries/continents if you have the space for it.
I dunno if this is as true for Aviation as it was 5 years ago. With Foreflight and the Stratux external GPS/ADS-B in boxes, it's becoming harder and harder to justify in panel GPS for light-sport/hobbyists/GA. I'm willing to bet that in the next 3-5 years we'll see a shift in general aviation to panel mounted "headless" GPSes that communicate with your iPad via GPS and are still coupled to a glass MFD/autopilot, but all the management would be done with an external device.
Google Maps without internet is barely usable. It only has driving directions which is pretty useless if you are on foot or a bike. It's actually astonishing that Google Maps can create an offline navigation plan for a vehicle that weighs thousands of kilos while walking directions always need internet to work.
There's an upper limit on the size of the area (although not their count), so it gets rather tedious if you want to cache a lot. It also expires eventually. with no way to block that.
OsmAnd+ is the only sane option for reliable offline maps w/navigation on smartphones, IMO.
There's a Tom Tom that I've wanted to buy that has a similar motorcycle version. I believe it scores roads but how fun they are, the amount of twists, hills, vistas.
Spying-ad-supported "free" services are suppressing a bunch of markets. Also suppressing open source (why work on a free open source messaging app, say, when none of your friends and family will want to use it since they have 20 "free" options already, funded and promoted with shitloads of ad dollars so you can't hope to have much adoption even with volunteer labor and a "product" that costs $0?)
Here maps was way better than Google (at least in the EU) since it always had offline navigation and would notify you of breaking the speed limit and the presence of speed-cams.
If you are on Android I can recommend either Maps.me with great 3D view or Maps.cz for great tourist trails, Google Maps content is horrible in Europe. Of course any decent app can download offline maps for whole countries and not some GMaps parody with small section of map.
You can get a Fuji X-E4 + XC 35mm f/2 for ~US$1000 new, and I'm yet to see a phone camera that can shoot something like this https://img.photographyblog.com/reviews/fujifilm_xc_35mm_f2/... - it's an enjoyable setup that will continue being ahead of any flagship phones for years to come. Not to mention that it's a hell of a rabbit hole and a great hobby.
I have the Fuji X-S10 and the fantastic XF 56mm f/1.2. I love the sharpness and bokeh that this combo delivers. Definitely no match for a smartphone.
On the other hand, my old Pixel 3a delivers much better dynamic range in low-light situations with its HDR mode. (Of course, it only looks good on the phone, not on the computer screen, but I sometimes wish the Fuji hat better HDR.)
Fuji has dynamic range settings DR100, DR200 and DR400 which can help for sooc jpegs. I only wish my xt-30 did auto-bracketing, instead of having to combine the bracketed exposures manually on a computer.
The point was most people don't justify put $1000 on a separate camera when they already have one that does maybe 80% of the job in their pocket at all times.
I agree, it's really fun though. Never had great gear, but I used to just drive around my town with a tiny pocket tripod trying to find new spots to shoot with my Canon SX260HS in 2012-2013. Spent some time with borrowed cameras in school a bit later too. There's definitely something soothing about just going around looking at things that look interesting, point, tweak, click, then rediscovering the whole thing on your PC for some editing later. The experience is kind of lost with how instant picture taking has become with phones basically just taking the shot and post-processing it however they like.
Ironically that image is terrible example of why a $1000 camera setup is better than my $1000 smartphone, and a perfect example that the photographer is far more important.
Also most folks these days consume photographs on their smartphones and not on larger screen devices.
I’m a prosumer photographer with a fairly sizable collection of high end Canon glass, and I now vastly prefer my iphone (since the 13pro) to my SLR setup
> I’m a prosumer photographer with a fairly sizable collection of high end Canon glass, and I now vastly prefer my iphone (since the 13pro) to my SLR setup
For what type of photography? Seems hard to imagine you'd "prefer" your phone over a nice lenses, but I guess it's less hassle to just use the phone?
There's a certain irony that the primary feature separating smart phone cameras and traditional cameras is the ability to purposefully make "blurry photographs".
Wait till you hear about cameras which primary feature is the ability to purposefully make photos you cannot even see until days later, much less edit in any convenient way. You must fully replace storage every couple dozen of shots and dynamic range is just awful compared to my phone's HDR. (Sarcasm ofc, love film)
the artificial bokeh in current phones it good enough for most people. It might not be what you want, but the same is true of every part of a smartphone camera. is night shooting as good on a phone? No, but is the computationally enhanced night photography good enough for most people? Yes. Same with bokeh
I'm too lazy to get my DSLR out of the closet but here's a F1.8 shot from a Sony RX100
Artificial bokeh (like in Portrait mode on an iPhone) is getting better and better. It went from looking cheesy to somewhat natural in only a few years. It’ll be a while before it’s close to the example you gave, but I can imagine a future where Camera.app has a “tap to blur” feature using live CV object detection.
Outside, on a clear day? My iPhone rivals my Sony A7ii for SURE.
But in less than ideal situations, I can still do better with the Sony. BUT this is because I'm an enthusiastic amateur with pro-level tools and some modicum of know-how. For an average Joe, those things are probably lacking.
I for one am quite glad that modern AI-powered cameras have increasingly less blur on their images. I know that focusing on one depth is how physical lenses (including our eyes) work, I know that it can be an artistic tool. But for most of my photos, I don't care and I'd rather not have it. If I can get a 'tourist' picture of me and some monument, and have both well visible, I'd prefer that over the 'correct' way of being focused on only one. If I want to put an artistic touch on my photos, I'll use an app that gives me blurs and a million other options, but I'd prefer to have an unblurry version to start from.
> If I want to put an artistic touch on my photos, I'll use an app that gives me blurs and a million other options
most of them wont do it correctly. You need to have full understanding of the debpth to do it which does not seem to work well. E.g look at the edges of the articifical bokeh usually the subject wont be separated properly..
> I'd prefer that over the 'correct' way of being focused on only one.
I don't see how that's more 'correct,' by anyone's definition. It's pretty common to go for wider depth of field for landscapes and a lot of portraits.
The optics depend so much on physical size that phones have to fake this stuff.
Idk why apple doesnt just cut the crap and just release like a m43 with swappable glass rather than all this silly multiple sensor stuff.
They got rid, the story wnet, of a 3.5 mm headphone jack to make the phone slimmer. Only to have the alrwady slim optics stick out. Not sure tge same company would go for replaceable lenses.
Bokeh and long range. My favorite lens was a 24-105 F/4 for a very long time, but that has been replaced with my phone. Now my 150-600mm lens (for wildlife) is the only thing that is ever mounted.
I think you would be surprised just how close to this depth of field look you can get with phone cameras these days. Its mostly digitally enhanced but it takes a real good eye to tell the difference.
Fujifilm on the other hand is exploding in popularity. Sony took the full frame market and has incredible autofocus. Canon has shot themselves in the foot locking down their RF mount, Nikon is doing ok.
I think we're going to see a slow gradual rise in small compact cameras making a comeback, just like vinyl. Phone cameras can only do so much, it's physics, and photography popularity has grown since kids now are born in a world where a phone has a great camera.
i'm looking for one if anybody has a good rec? i ditched my smartphone and now i'm loading up with all these devices that everybody in this thread say are obsolete (they have a point but i don't need an iphone in my life, i'd rather walk around with five devices than one ...)
Fuji XEs are nice, small, relatively cheap bodies with interchangeable lenses. If youre looking for something small and know how to (or are willing to learn to) use a camera, thats what I recommend.
If portability is not a concern, you can pick up used high end Nikon DSLRs and F mount lenses very cheaply right now. Nikon is going all in on mirrorless now so this stuff is "last gen" hence cheap.
Otherwise, just avoid Canon. Theyre becoming increaingly scummy and you probably dont wanna get caught locked into their system.
X100V is super-hard-to-find-right-now, I have an older version X100T and I am very pleased. It is basically the camera that pros using the huge DSLRs everyday reach for when they go on their own holidays or leisure trips. And it's value has nearly doubled in the two years I had it, unheard of in the field of consumer electronics.
No science fiction story I ever read said anything like "It was dark, but it was okay, because I had my personal cellular internet communications device"
Yes, though I would note that the flashlight industry got way brighter in the last 20 years. The good old trusty plastic incandescent flashlight with D cell batteries is what most households had sitting around for years prior and a modern smartphone actually compares favorably to those in brightness (though not focused)
Modern flashlights are insane, they can even be dangerous haha.
Maybe my 2000s knowledge isn't as good as I thought, but were people carrying flashlights back then? My impression was that most people didn't, and therefore the flashlight that came with phones were a nice bonus rather than something that cannibalized flashlight sales.
I remember everyone had a flashlight for around the house. You'd generally need one when changing incandescent light bulbs, which burnt out every 6 months or so. A lot of people would also carry around the pocket Maglights for whatever reason.
Not really comparable unless you're talking exclusively about trashy keychain flashlights. An 18650 powered flashlight for $30 will light up an entire room while your phone will help you read something if you hold it close
I have a Canon 5D Mk III, 5-6 lenses, maybe 4 flashes, umbrellas, stands, a background, etc..
I gotta sell it but keep procrastinating.. 99% of the time these days I just want to not carry stuff and use my iPhone 13 Pro, because 99% of the time nobody cares if I use the fancy camera stuff and the hassle and workflow is a PITA compared to just using the phone. My previous phone was an iPhone 8+ and it kind of started this and then the 13 Pro really really kicked it into gear with having the 3 lenses.
It got hard for me to justify not shooting RAW if I was using all that expensive gear, and then I'd have to sit there wasting time "processing" files to justify using all the fancy gear. I came to really hate that time in front of the computer. (This is after about 15 years of doing it.)
Actual compact cameras forget about it.. the last few generations I had weren't even as good as the phones, because they almost always had crappy zoom lenses. 3 Prime lenses on a good smartphone beats almost all the zoom compact cameras until the zoom compact cameras get annoying to carry.
The phone cameras also have a massive advantage that people are not threatened by them and act more naturally. If you mostly value your pictures of people in your life this is a big advantage.
For me some of this is the ebb and flow of hobbies, but I really don't care about the snob value of the image attributes only possible with a DSLR/MILC anymore.
Sony/Minolta one this game by getting their camera tech/products into most of the smartphones on the market. Kudos to Sony.
One advantage I've noticed to the stereotypical "photographer loaded with cameras" gets people to pose/realize there's a photo being taken. They don't react to a phone in the same way.
That and actual lighting from real flashes (I'm talking multiple flash sources, etc) seem to be the main thing that "real" cameras have left.
Just like Tinder wiped out getting to know someone and taking them on a romantic date. Smartphones are perfect for taking a selfie against a landmark and sharing it on Facebook for likes. Just don't expect your grandchildren to hang it above a mantelpiece. For that you need at least a viewfinder/rangefinder to compose a good shot and a physical shutter button to take a bunch quickly and choose the best one later. Computational logic will also only get you so far without ability to gather and control sufficient light.
At this rate, I see actual silver prints making a comeback for the same reason as vinyl. At least we know they will last a century while your selfie will be forgotten as soon as your "friend" starts a political argument on your Facebook feed.
> for that you need at least a viewfinder/rangefinder to compose a good shot and a physical shutter button to take a bunch quickly and choose the best one later.
I don't know if I agree with this. I've taken some great pictures on vacations, and with friends and family using my phone. I have some of these framed around the house.
I don't think the average person is capable (or really cares that much) about getting the perfect composition. For these people, a phone is a great substitue to a compact camera that would have been used 10+ years ago.
Oh, also most phones have a burst mode that works great.
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I have experience with Sony, and their firmware barely changed in the last decade. Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work. Touch screens are from a bygone era: laggy, imprecise, and without multi-touch. They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos came out sharp. Their phone apps are a clunky afterthought.
Smartphones are running circles around them with computational photography. "HDR" mode on Sony cameras is slow and primitive. I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time.
Given the social cross-pollination between Japan and Taiwan, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar pattern held true there as well.
Yup. Not just in Asia. The US suffered from that, as well. It may have changed (for the US), by now, as I spent 27 years at a Japanese hardware company.
I spent most of my career, as a software dev at hardware companies, and got the brunt of that crap. It was infuriating.
During my time, I wrote some very good software. In the early days, when my team was given a lot of leeway, it was sent out, and got [mostly] positive reviews.
As time went on, Japan got more and more involved with/in control of the software development that we did, and threw more and more restrictions at us.
We were forced to do a standard hardware-centric waterfall development process. If I even mentioned the word "agile," I might as well have just gotten up and left the meeting, because everything I said, after that, was ignored.
They took away all of the user interface from us, and we were just doing "engine" work, which was actually pretty cool, but, they sucked at UI.
Towards the end, I was reading terrible reviews about our software, and tried writing stuff that would directly address these gripes.
My work, and any similar work from my team, was ignored. Instead, they had some disastrous relationships with external companies, under (I assume) the impression that we were not capable of writing "modern" software, and these folks were (they were able to write "modern" software, because their work was terrible, and I have issues with the Quality of "modern" software, in general).
Curious. In the US, the software people can usually make a lot more money so even many EE’s end up in software. I wonder if it’s the opposite in some of these countries, where software people are paid less than hardware people.
Think: Windows only, often IE/Edge only, ActiveX, crashes constantly. Random UI strings are in Chinese. Barely, barely usable.
Even as someone with a background in mechanical engineering the degree of complexity behind some software products, such as Windows, is really impressive.
So end users end up having to reverse engineer it just to fix issues that the manufacturer should have addressed.
And - the real kicker - far too often it turns out to be based open source work, with a few random modifications, distributed in violation of the license.
Sure, but you still have to deliver the punchline right.
Deleted Comment
What software did you use to lock it down? I have some older iPhones laying around.
Then smartphones came along and there was another commodity platform that gave good price-performance. Around that time Intel also got interested in making low-performance parts with low sticker prices but that were highly uneconomical if performance or user experience mattered.
For kids, and for other kinds of camera products (ahem, GoPro).
The firmware may be bad, yet I take a picture faster on my Sony compact camera than I do with my smartphone thanks to the physical buttons. I can also do it while cycling while doing the same with my smartphone is annoying as fuck in winter with gloves, in summer with sweat and expose the risk of losing and destroying my precious pocket computer.
Also for some my phone screen show as a black screen when using my polarized sunglasses while the lcd of my camera is still visible and allow me to point and shoot quickly. No idea what is the difference in tech on both that would explain that difference.
Most flagship smartphones may be super responsive but the average sub 200usd smartphone won't necessarily fire up the camera app faster than my Sony compact camera. And there is no way I will buy a 600 to 1000usd smartphone. I'd rather repair/replace either a 200usd smartphone or a second hand compact camera in the event I drop it and break it than a single 1000usd one.
Also from my experience with friends using flagships and apple ones, even the best smartphones are crappy under low light. Smartphones are great during the day, once it is dark they are pretty much useless.
I will encourage you to check out the Google Pixel line of phones! A double tap of the power button starts up the camera immediately even if the phone is off and then a press of the volume button takes a shot. Can easily do it in gloves!
It's a 2011 model and AFAIK the latest in the line. You have to go much bigger to get better quality. I'd buy an updated model in a heartbeat.
https://www.dpreview.com/products/sony/compacts/sony_dsctx10...
I've got a compact around here somewhere, specifically because it can take getting dunked. With the pandemic my intended use case has gone away and I'm not sure where it is now.
If you rotate your phone 90° you'll be able to see the screen.
> Their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mostly doesn't work.
YES YES YES. And they don't support such basic use cases as "open an access point and let the connected device do the work of selecting pictures" - no, you have to select the photos on the camera and then call them down from the mobile app. Super "great" when you're in the field that I am and document rallies etc. so you need to get a photo up to social media as fast as possible.
> They don't have resolution good enough to check if the photos came out sharp.
Yeah, same for lighting, another annoyance from hell. Personally, for shots in complicated conditions I've grabbed an used Blackmagic VideoAssist 4K... works way better.
> I'm not a pro photographer, so I can't justify spending time manually tweaking every RAW file when smartphones do it well 99% of the time.
Problem with smartphones, even modern ones, is the quality goes down dramatically in low-light scenarios. That's simple physics, the pixels are like 100x smaller. AI can cover for a lot of that, but it's noticeable enough to not make it worth my while - and for what it's worth, there are no Android tablets on the market with a halfway decent camera.
Sony's hardware is the best in class, there is no match at all for the A7S series from anyone in low-light, but the sorry state of their software is laughable. And the best of it is: it's all Linux under the hood. The older A7/A6000 series actually exposed parts of it via an Android subsystem layer where one could write apps for it after jailbreaking - too bad that the Android layer was/is fossilized (IIRC, Android 4-ish?!) and so they ripped it out after the A7S3 :/
I bought the camera (A7 IV) because it has ethernet support, which I thought, great. I'll just be able to scp or samba them off or something. Absolutely not.
I’m a photographer and your comment made me laugh. Everyone in photo circles hates the Sony menus on their cameras because they’re the worst.
Canon, Panasonic, and Fuji have substantially better menu systems that we all far prefer.
I find it funny your opinion has been informed by using the worst the camera sphere has to offer!
That being said, these menus and UIs are aimed at pros who do nothing else but take photos. It’s a coding IDE, not a simple text editor. It’s going to be foreign to the casual user. That is by design.
Also, the computational photography is a nuisance for our work. We want the LEAST edited photo file possible every time.
I understand your lack of interest in editing, it’s a chore that even we have to do, but it’s also one of our power tools. We choose this, it is not a step backwards for us!
It sounds like “professional” photography just isn’t for you!
However, before I start a bunch of arguments, I will say one thing. There is always room for improvement and they could likely do UX/UI analysis to further improve things. Though, from my use, I do find it to be very hardware focused which feels intuitive to me and those in my photo circles. I think it’s the prerequisite of knowing shutter, ISO, and aperture as well as focus pulling concepts. That makes me “know what to look for”.
edit: Please indicate when you make edits to your comments. Your comment is now very different to the one I responded to.
Oh, how fast is progress in the world of technology.
I remember 6 years ago when google showed some prototypes of night photo from a smartphone using long expose. Meanwhile my Galaxy Note 4 made blurry unusable mess during the 14th of july nightly event I tried it at, while my gf DLSR were clear and great. Ah ah, smartphones will never be able to do that.
How 4 years ago Night Sight blew me away with their demonstration and almost made me go pixel.
How 3 years ago Samsung added a Night mode to my S9+ through a regular update and while the photo took a whole second to take the result was usually clean and crisp compared to the noisy mess on my previous Note 4, making it actually usable for static scene or portrait shot.
How the night mode on my Note 10 was genuinely great to the point it was just another mode as long as you avoid the usual night tricks like light sources.
How my new S22 Ultra for the first time passed my "smartphone will never really be good for night event shots" by taking picture during the 14th of july fireworks the quality of which I would scientifically classify as "pretty fucking great".
And now it's just a basic expected computational feature.
Sometime we forget how much progress is being made due to how incremental they all are, but damn, and that's just one feature on a piece of glass and plastic that's insanely powerful and filled with features in my pocket.
PS: the lack of Apple mention is merely because I'm not an Apple guy, I'm sure they had the same insane path
The same has been said about some of the PlayStation UI’s.
In my opinion, this is more of a Sony problem and less of a camera problem. Though that may just be me!
As soon as one looks at photo on larger 4K monitor the difference is striking. And you do not even have to dick with raw files to see the difference. Plain JPEG coming out of my relatively ancient D800 puts best smartphone cam to shame. Size matters and full frame sensor vs one in smartphone are incomparable.
That is not to say that smartphone can not take decent photos and in many cases what is being photographed matters way more than the picture quality as long as it is not atrocious.
Sensibly, workflows optimize for the smartphone consumption use case.
And yes, that hurts as photographers who obsessed over sharpness and pixel-level fidelity since the invention of digital cameras, but that just doesn't seem to be where the zeitgeist is at anymore. People never really cared in the first place.
It's similar to how music producers obsess over whether a particular synth sound was made with analog gear or was a "cheap digital knockoff". The listener never cared in the first place. They just want to be moved wherever it is that they are, which happens to be on the phone 99% of the time in photography.
Launched five years ago at $3000.
Cameras usually take longer to start and get ready to take a shot (or run out of battery sooner if you keep them on all the time) and have slower autofocus. May screw up exposure. It's harder to check the photos. Extra steps are needed to get the photos out of the camera. And it annoys me to no end that my dumb camera can't automatically adjust its clock and the timezone.
Exactly. Or when you print them out.
On the wall here I have a printed photo about 4ft wide, taken from a cropped section of a photo (not even the full frame) and it looks stunning. And this isn't even from a newer pro camera, it was taken with a ~15 year old Nikon D40.
I hope I'll view photos on 4K someday...
In general case, you're right, but modern smartphones have come a long way.
I end up just doing SD card -> iphotos which will sync up to my phone later.
One exception is the gaming industry: Sony Computer Entertainment in particular treats its developers similarly to the US (Ken Kutaragi drove this) while the rest of Sony follows the standard Japanese model. Bandai and Nintendo are similar, though not quite as much as Sony, and Sega a bit more traditional.
Cameras are designed to capture & store the light in a way we can interpret later. They intentionally weren’t designed to edit or interpret the light and make corrections.
Smart phones automatically do interpret and “correct” images. This can lead to artificially created artifacts in the image files. Professional photographers will often prefer the raw because they can apply their own edits without said artifacts.
Now sure, camera photos are good for 99% of people, 99% of the time. BUT because the software on cameras were never designed to do those corrections, they just don’t. This makes night images worse, unless you decrease shutter speed.
On a side note, it’s this very fact that I find it difficult to accept cell phone footage as video evidence. Particularly, if you’re looking at fine detail, as the filters often modify / generate the fine detail.
That's one thing, but still there are many features of the camera firmware that people want to have, and cameras failed to deliver. One of such thing was apps - Sony provided few in some of their camera, but next model removed them, because they couldn't implement that in a model-agnostic way. They just don't get software.
Are there examples of this? The only example I can think of was an accusation a while ago that huawei phones were compositing a stock photo of the moon when taking moon pictures with their phones. They denied the accusation and it wasn't really clear whether it was actually happening or not.
But I think you may be playing a bit loose with the ideas of evidence and details. Yes, smartphones “invent” details, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where those changes produce false evidence. You might find details of leaves rendered as watercolor brushstrokes; you won’t find a suspect inserted into a scene.
And remember that film annd magnetic tape cameras also invent details. All of that film grain that we find artistic is not really there. Should we also question what we see on those videos because they aren’t pixel-perfect?
1) Fact that whereas camera technology in smartphones has & is continuing to develop rapidly (computational photography as mentioned is latest major jump), it has largely stagnated within the mid-low tier camera market. Makes sense Panasonic is exiting the market, and other major players like Sony and Fujifilm focusing on the high end.
2) Vast majority users value convenience and ecosystem integration over pure photo quality. In most cases the latest smartphone take "good enough" photographs, so who wants to fiddle with having to transfer images from your standalone camera to your photo before sharing on social media? As the adage goes, "the best camera is the one you have on hand".
Personally I'd love to see something like the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom or Nokia Lumia 808/1020 being revitalized - a camera-first smartphone. How long before Apple or Google enter the DLSR or mirrorless market? Seems inevitable given the large investments both companies already make in smartphone camera photography.
Even chip vendors, who you would would think understand the importance of software, will de-prioritize their software side.
I wonder if it's a sort of macho thing; anyone can learn to write software, but not everyone can get an EE degree.
It also could be that the idea of incremental releases doesn't really exist on the hardware side. Hardware, because it's physical, requires a coordinated release. Then you do the next revision once the inventory gets low. The idea that you can ship on a flexible schedule is alien to the hardware side.
I took a EE microcontrollers class. A lot of EEs struggled writing assembly, and they all had at least an introductory C programming course.
please contain this to twitter. What does "macho" have to do with comparing the relative difficulty of two things and attaching status to the most difficult?
That's how society brought us where we are.
https://bw.vern.cc/chdk/wiki/CHDK
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Professional photographers require good reliable connectivity. Nikon cameras are extremely clunky in this regard.
Similarly, their menu system is atrocious. I am not saying this as somebody who looked at a camera once and said "this is too hard". I ran a photo business from 2008 to 2018, read all the manuals intimately and worked with Nikon cameras daily, and came to it from techie nerd perspective and knew what every button option and mode does in intricate detail.
"Great hardware, horrible software" is well understood state of camera business last 2 decades.
I now have two young kids. I have 4 dslr and two mirrorless cameras at home... And take kids photos with my cell - because it's convenient accessible and fast to transmit. Why can't I have an efficient sharing work flow with my $3000 camera? Because they make sucky closed systems and refuse to change open or learn.
I don't even remotely understand how that's possible. Did they just contract all of the work out?
So who do you sell a dedicated camera to? A new UI will largely alienate the small market that still exists. The old UI guarantees an unappealing product for the smartphone user.
Ultimately all interfaces have to be easily navigable with buttons and this has consequences.
And interestingly my Tascam 44dw (not a camera, but sound recorder) has also abysmal wifi. Low range, unreliable and seems to be using single TCP connection for sending realtime data which suffers from head-of-line blocking. As if noone there heard about UDP.
Why is wifi such a problem? Weird.
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This is offensively stupid and I can’t believe this hasn’t changed in years.
My Canon has locked up hard only once in half a decade of hard use, generating ~8TB of images in adverse conditions. It is sometimes left turned on for months at a time. I sometimes accidentally do terrible things with the power switch and SD card. Lenses are attached/removed without a care in the world. I've never seen a flaw in the function of menus or the corruption of a single image.
I cannot state the same for almost any other software product. I can use it like a tool, not like a computer. That's a sign of good software.
I disagree with smartphone quality. I have what could be considered a close to best of breed in quality iPhone 13 Pro and it's crap. It's a 2009 DSLR with three crap prime lenses stuck to it. It's mostly usable if you shoot ProRAW with it but the processed images (HEIC/JPEG) are really quite fucked up.
Smartphones are lacking the optics, sensors and some other things a real camera has. As a result, they are still a far cry from replacing mid-level and up cameras. Smartphones, as the article points out, are perfectly sufficient for the compact and point-and-shoot market, and as a result killed it / took it over.
And heck, the ergonomics of Nikon blow any smartphone / app way of setting up a camera out of the water ever since before Nikon got serious about DSLRs.
I don't think, 10 years ago, camera manufacturers could've adopted a meaningful integration strategy. They could perhaps have entered the fray as Android phone makers and try to solve it, but it would've been a bigger jump than just integrating.
...Only, as the parent comment says, it barely works, and the UI to get to it is awful, and the WiFi transfer speed is ridiculously slow.
But it does seem to be a clever idea, I'm imagining a phone that has surface contacts on its back, and a Go-Pro-sized camera module that you can attach to the phone (with precise magnets, so the surface contacts on both devices would connect both devices electronically as well) and be recognized as a peripheral for the phone.
But I guess if already have a pro camera, you don't want to need to slap your phone on it to get it to work.
I guess there is a perception that it is like hardware « once its out its sold and we don’t care about it ».
At this stage I am seriously wondering if I will ever replace my camera with a new one or just be happy with a new smartphone. Maybe the camera will just stay a a sidehobby.
A whole decade of people in enthusiast photography communities collectively playing devil’s advocate “why do you want that feature, whats a UI have to do with taking a photo, I never understood the point of a Live Photo, bluetooth? Thats what tethering and an external contraption is for….”
meanwhile the rest of the world just turned around and walked away
They just don't get to put their name on the resulting "camera" in this new world.
* While I was taking pictures at night, two teenagers came to me and asked me to take a picture of them. Apparently one of them wanted to know what it would look like, since the fact that I had a camera clearly indicated that I knew what I was doing (it didn't). I didn't have the heart to tell him that it would look pretty much the same as the phone he definitely had in his pocket, but luckily he gave me a wrong Instagram address so that problem solved itself.
* On that same night, one guy started yelling at me (pushing his head against mine) because he thought I had taken a picture of his car.
* I was interviewed in a popular tourist destination, and the interviewer explicitly asked me about why I had a camera instead of a phone.
Weird.
This, combined with the lack of geo tags, often wrong timestamps, slow startup time, and useless tiny batteries, I use my camera rarely.
Depends on the camera and other such features. But you're right that it's not a given.
> often wrong timestamps
I'm confused by this. I suppose if you leave your camera off for years at a time, have dead batteries and don't bother checking it - then sure. But in general the RTC on cameras is very good and not an issue. Even if it clock drifts by a minute or two, does it really make a difference?
> slow startup time
Incorrect with modern cameras. If I have both my Nikon in my hand and my phone - I can take a picture with the Nikon WAY faster and more reliable than my iPhone. The Nikon can go from off to taking a picture in half a second. The phone you need to press the camera button on the lock screen for a full second before the camera app even launches. Then it takes it a little time to launch the app and warm up the camera.
Are either slow or problematic? No. But the Nikon is way more reliable, sometimes the iphone just derps out.
> useless tiny batteries
Again, I suppose it depends on the camera. My Nikon is rated for a thousand shots a battery, I think? Even my smallest and oldest handheld is rated for 300 shots a battery. Unless you're going way crazy, that is a lot of photos in a single day. It'd run down your iPhone quite significantly as well.
One area that is a big difference overall... Video.
You will generally be able to turn on the camera more quickly than you can navigate to the camera app. (Physical switch plus sub one second time to turn on).
A camera is far faster in "startup time" (there's nothing to start up, just press the shutter to take a photo). And a DSLR will outlast battery life of a phone at least 100x.
I had building security guards question me when I took a picture of their building (From the sidewalk).
I had mall security (outdoor mall) demand I cease and desist and get a permit.
I had transit workers threaten to call the police on me, even though photography is legal on public transit AND explicitly allowed in that particular transit agencies policies.
In 2008 the iPhone (original) was just out and had potato for camera, so everyone was still using SLR's and "normal cameras". But yet... people still got upset.
Yes. It seems the social memory of this is being lost, but I heard LOTS of stories back then of people getting upset at someone with a camera. And also earlier, before smartphones even existed. The idea that it's the existence of smartphones that's made people defensive about cameras seems to be merely plausible but not actually true.
What? I would never trust my photos to automatically go to some cloud storage. Who knows who would have access to them?
Instead I download the photos from all the family phones on a regular basis. I copy them to an external drive in my house. Then they backed up to a cloud service, but they are encrypted before they are backed up and the cloud service is only a backup. We can't actually see the photos on that cloud service. It is just fire protection (and yes, I have pulled the photos and videos back down from the cloud service to make sure it is backing them up correctly).
Can take photos with the Nikon and beam them to my phone fairly quickly. Is it as quick and seamless as using the iPhone directly? Nope. But good enough that I'm ok with it now. It also gives me access to typically a much higher quality photo that I can crop way farther than I can with the iPhone.
Nailed the pager, voice recorder and related markets as well.
Where X has been things like keyboard, screen, disk drives, modem (now network adapter), speakers, microphone. All were originally separate devices. For historical reasons we now call hand computers phones, but the basic insight that these things just voraciously absorb peripheral and related functions is still just as true.
Recently, I've been wondering why the name "phone" has stuck around for a device that has evolved with many more features than that of a telephone. I'm not going to pretend I know a lot about the history of these technologies, but I just find it fascinating that we've kept this identification to something that really provides so many core utilities. I'm curious to know more about the historical implications you alluded to.
Alternatively (and maybe quite a stretch), could I argue that our smartphones are just providing telecommunications to other services, namely, the APIs that they interact with to serve us things like GPS functionality, audio, etc., hence the name "phone"?
In a lot of Europe they're referred to as some translation of "mobile" (short for "mobile phone") which I've always liked as a more generic term.
Of course in Germany they call them a "Handy" (using English)
Any portable device has been (or will soon be) replaced by "phones".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJZtMDM6uVc
The phone is a much better experience! Every time he had yet another issue, I wanted to be like "just use your phone!"
- Maps are out of date: Garmin required manual wired updates, Google Maps was always up to date
- Traffic costs: Garmin charged $10/mo for traffic data, Google Maps did it free
- Screen quality: Even in the early 2010's, smartphone screens were bigger and clearer than most car GPS units
- Attraction data: Google's was way more up to date than Garmin's third party attraction data, and Google quickly added multi-stop trips, business hours, busy-level of destination, etc
- Data Entry/voice: Google's voice entry and on screen keyboard were way better than Garmin
I was so happy when he got rid of that GPS and I finally got to stop supporting it.
[0] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/11/the-nintendo-switc...
There are other devices, and other ways to measure the market size, but 114 million of anything is not a niche market.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101888/unit-sales-game-...
Luckily OSM was more than happy to let me download it's maps.
Thanks to LEDs, flashlights are now cheaper, brighter and last longer than ever. Even cheap flashlights are better and more convenient than phones at lighting. Because they are cheap and small, you can have one in every place you might need it. And the slightly more expensive ones can be powerful enough as a substitue to mains powered light bulbs for places like garages and storerooms. Also, smartphones don't replace headlamps.
So maybe some people don't get a flashlight because they already have one on their phones, but some people (like me) actually buy more, because they are so cheap and effective.
Watches have gotten less popular though.
The least-believable part of this very silly movie was that, at the beginning, the main guy in it left his cell phone upstairs when he went to the dark basement to work on something in the house (pipes? I don't remember), which ended up causing the rest of the movie to happen. Of course he'd have taken it with him, for the flashlight if nothing else (and there are lots of other aspects of a smartphone that are super-handy when doing that kind of work).
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fwiw, google maps has download & offline functionality. Click your profile icon top right and select the area you want offline. I use it all the time for backcountry hiking (along with OSM apps) and going abroad where I dont have data.
Antennas solutions are increasing to get cellular reception farther offshore that feed into a wifi router.
At anchor, I personally use Organic Maps and drop a pin after I'm properly at anchor. There are specialized "anchor watch" apps but this works for my purposes.
Sailing used to be so simple...
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OsmAnd+ is the only sane option for reliable offline maps w/navigation on smartphones, IMO.
It's a niche that's keeping them afloat.
I often use OSMAnd software for GPS. Works offline just fine.
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You can get a Fuji X-E4 + XC 35mm f/2 for ~US$1000 new, and I'm yet to see a phone camera that can shoot something like this https://img.photographyblog.com/reviews/fujifilm_xc_35mm_f2/... - it's an enjoyable setup that will continue being ahead of any flagship phones for years to come. Not to mention that it's a hell of a rabbit hole and a great hobby.
On the other hand, my old Pixel 3a delivers much better dynamic range in low-light situations with its HDR mode. (Of course, it only looks good on the phone, not on the computer screen, but I sometimes wish the Fuji hat better HDR.)
https://fujixweekly.com/2017/10/18/fujifilm-x100f-dynamic-ra...
https://www.jmpeltier.com/fujifilm-dynamic-range-settings/
I agree, it's really fun though. Never had great gear, but I used to just drive around my town with a tiny pocket tripod trying to find new spots to shoot with my Canon SX260HS in 2012-2013. Spent some time with borrowed cameras in school a bit later too. There's definitely something soothing about just going around looking at things that look interesting, point, tweak, click, then rediscovering the whole thing on your PC for some editing later. The experience is kind of lost with how instant picture taking has become with phones basically just taking the shot and post-processing it however they like.
Also most folks these days consume photographs on their smartphones and not on larger screen devices.
I’m a prosumer photographer with a fairly sizable collection of high end Canon glass, and I now vastly prefer my iphone (since the 13pro) to my SLR setup
For what type of photography? Seems hard to imagine you'd "prefer" your phone over a nice lenses, but I guess it's less hassle to just use the phone?
I'm too lazy to get my DSLR out of the closet but here's a F1.8 shot from a Sony RX100
https://pasteboard.co/LuNcEAPrjquh.jpg
And here's the same shot from my iPhone in portrait mode set to 2 different levels of fake bokeh
https://pasteboard.co/8cBjb7EoKjhq.jpg
https://pasteboard.co/MR4AnkS8bqfN.jpg
On top of which, most people look at photos on their phones, not blown up to poster size in some art gallery
Outside, on a clear day? My iPhone rivals my Sony A7ii for SURE.
But in less than ideal situations, I can still do better with the Sony. BUT this is because I'm an enthusiastic amateur with pro-level tools and some modicum of know-how. For an average Joe, those things are probably lacking.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0dectlquUI6Ur6vDCWrYw6oHg
Not so bad IMHO.
Edit: this one is more pronounced, again not in portrait mode.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0c9pBN5Fy2yL0fuSYrX4j3BnA
> If I want to put an artistic touch on my photos, I'll use an app that gives me blurs and a million other options
most of them wont do it correctly. You need to have full understanding of the debpth to do it which does not seem to work well. E.g look at the edges of the articifical bokeh usually the subject wont be separated properly..
I don't see how that's more 'correct,' by anyone's definition. It's pretty common to go for wider depth of field for landscapes and a lot of portraits.
I think we're going to see a slow gradual rise in small compact cameras making a comeback, just like vinyl. Phone cameras can only do so much, it's physics, and photography popularity has grown since kids now are born in a world where a phone has a great camera.
If portability is not a concern, you can pick up used high end Nikon DSLRs and F mount lenses very cheaply right now. Nikon is going all in on mirrorless now so this stuff is "last gen" hence cheap.
Otherwise, just avoid Canon. Theyre becoming increaingly scummy and you probably dont wanna get caught locked into their system.
i have a x100v and like it a lot. have shot over 9000 photos so far with it
No science fiction story I ever read said anything like "It was dark, but it was okay, because I had my personal cellular internet communications device"
Modern flashlights are insane, they can even be dangerous haha.
of note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I_fW0dhZn8&ab_channel=Insid...
I gotta sell it but keep procrastinating.. 99% of the time these days I just want to not carry stuff and use my iPhone 13 Pro, because 99% of the time nobody cares if I use the fancy camera stuff and the hassle and workflow is a PITA compared to just using the phone. My previous phone was an iPhone 8+ and it kind of started this and then the 13 Pro really really kicked it into gear with having the 3 lenses. It got hard for me to justify not shooting RAW if I was using all that expensive gear, and then I'd have to sit there wasting time "processing" files to justify using all the fancy gear. I came to really hate that time in front of the computer. (This is after about 15 years of doing it.)
Actual compact cameras forget about it.. the last few generations I had weren't even as good as the phones, because they almost always had crappy zoom lenses. 3 Prime lenses on a good smartphone beats almost all the zoom compact cameras until the zoom compact cameras get annoying to carry.
The phone cameras also have a massive advantage that people are not threatened by them and act more naturally. If you mostly value your pictures of people in your life this is a big advantage.
For me some of this is the ebb and flow of hobbies, but I really don't care about the snob value of the image attributes only possible with a DSLR/MILC anymore.
Sony/Minolta one this game by getting their camera tech/products into most of the smartphones on the market. Kudos to Sony.
That and actual lighting from real flashes (I'm talking multiple flash sources, etc) seem to be the main thing that "real" cameras have left.
At this rate, I see actual silver prints making a comeback for the same reason as vinyl. At least we know they will last a century while your selfie will be forgotten as soon as your "friend" starts a political argument on your Facebook feed.
I don't know if I agree with this. I've taken some great pictures on vacations, and with friends and family using my phone. I have some of these framed around the house.
I don't think the average person is capable (or really cares that much) about getting the perfect composition. For these people, a phone is a great substitue to a compact camera that would have been used 10+ years ago.
Oh, also most phones have a burst mode that works great.