Do you want photographs, or are you happy with snapshots?
A phone camera gives you much less creative control over the final outcome. A point-and-shoot gives you a little bit more control, to the extent that it has a variety of pre-programmed settings. A DSLR gives you as much control as you are willing to learn.
So if you just want snaps to remind you “Hey, remember the Great Wall of China?” a phone is probably fine. If you want control over where the point of focus is, depth of field, to decide for yourself the amount of noise vs. shutter speed in low-light photos, etc., you’ll need a camera which gives you more options.
In short, it depends on how much you want to learn about your camera, and how much you care about the final outcome.
I will say that my SO’s phone camera surpasses my 5-year-old point-and-shoot pocket cam. I bought it for convenience for a vacation, and hated the lack of control and picture quality so much (it is pathetically susceptible to camera shake, even outdoors in bright sunlight, wtf?, and I can find no option to manually control either aperture or shutter speed) that I used my SLR for nearly everything anyway.
If the Samsung Galaxy Camera was also a phone, I’d buy one in an instant. Still not a replacement for a DSLR (I don’t actually own a decent camera anyway), but it’s a little step up from a smartphone camera.
It wouldn’t be as convenient in the pocket as a phone, but I’d consider it worth the bulk - as you say though, not everyone would agree.
The camera you have with you is infinitely more valuable than the camera you left at home and/or didn’t feel like carrying around.
In other words, I’d rather have a camera phone shot than nothing. My Android phone has an 8 megapixel camera, I don’t love the photos but they’re not that bad either.
ETA: This is a cool page where you can search for pictures from various cameras/phones: Flickr: Camera Finder
This. My photo subject of choice is cars, as I’m something of a gearhead. My phone is for when I see an Austin Healey 100-4 just sitting in a parking garage or pass a BMW 850CSi on the street. My SLR is for when a bunch of us get up at 5 a.m. on a Sunday, wash our cars, then prowl around posing them in various Chicago settings. It typically doesn’t leave the house without a tripod. And I still take about 50 pictures to get a couple of decent shots.
This is true, and since getting my Galaxy Note II smartphone, I feel I’m not really sacrificing as the photos are quite good, and definitely comparable to many standalone cameras. No, the quality is not a good as a good DSLR, but it’s pretty darned good, and leaps and bounds beyond the output from any other camera phone I have ever seen.
I agree - and this has been true since before digital photography - professional and keen amateur photographers would often keep a compact 35mm camera handy to catch ephemeral shots.
Barring some fundamental shift in camera technology though, smartphones are only ever going to replace that kind of point-and-shoot compact cameras.
while this is true I would posit an idea regarding vacation photos. Most locations that people visit have already been photographed by professionals who spent a great deal of time getting the right shot in the right light using high quality cameras. Those get turned into postcards. If you buy those as you travel than all that is left is a picture of yourself standing next to (fill in the blank). These can be done with a camera that costs well under $200 and in most cases a iphone. Personally I’d still use a camera because they are more versatile than an iphone (zoom lenses and low light capabilies).
I recently got a new phone and the best I could do was 3 megapixal phone in the non-iphone class. I would have gladly paid extra for a camera that was also a phone. I don’t want to play games on my phone but I do want to carry around a decent camera.
I think many people feel the same way and the phone companies know this. The camera is a big enough draw to high-end phones that to give this option to low dollar phones would hurt the data sales which make up the bulk of phone contracts. iphones are not just high tech gadgets, they are sales portals.
The camera on my Droid is horrible, plus with my small hands there is no way I can hold it and take a decent picture. So perhaps that means the camera is not as horrible as I think but hat it doesn’t work for me.
What has changed is the viewing medium as much as the camera. If you’re looking at a picture on a phone or even an ipad, the composition and subject and post processing will generally matter far more than the cameras inherent image quality.
Cameras are becoming like hifis, where the increments in image quality are more important to enthusiasts than your average person in the street, or where it’s more about the other aspects of the camera, eg external flash or the like.
Back when film was the only option, it was discovered that, of all 35mm frames processed, only 4% ever got enlarged above the proof prints that came back with the film at the drugstore.
This amazing fact was discover by some idiot at Kodak (always Kodak) every 10 years. Said idiot realized that 96% of shots were wasting huge amounts of emulsion, and could be more easily handled by smaller film. Starting in the 60’s:
Instamatic (60’s)
Pocket Instamatic (70’s)
Disc (80’s - my all-time favorite idiot format)
APS (90’s)
Try to get an enlargement from any of these formats today.
Now we have digital
P&S
Telephones
?
If you use your image capture technology to create “memory-joggers” (the 97%), then yes, your needs are met - the camera will record faces well enough that your kids will be able to know what everyone at the picnic looked like.
You just might want to print out a couple of copies of the most important ones as well as dedicating a CDR/DVDR and ? as backup.
The issue of backup is what makes film so attractive. We know how to achieve archive-quality prints; will anybody 100 years from now be able to read that CDR? Even if they don’t fail (they will - I’ve found 2 of my own which already have), will there be optical drives?
Dead (non-film) formats:
Have anything on those floppies you’d like to retrieve?
That music on 8-Track? Cassette?
How long is a USB port going to be around?
And uhow many people do I know that have boxes and boxes of negatives or slides sitting out back they never see any more. Not too many slide shows happening either. Sure it can be retrieved, but it isn’t, because most people are viewing pictures on digital devices now, not in books or in pictures on walls.
Digital and online storage have changed the game, and its been more than a decade now. We may not be using hard drives by then, but I’ll bet quids it will be viewed on some kind of screen rather than paper or film and that we won’t have any problem viewing jpegs etc no matter how obsolete they are by then.
If your technology is no longer supported, from where are you going to get the jpeg?
My point is that digital may be the future - I don’t doubt that it will be. My point is that more thought needs to go into how you are going to store that image, not how you view it.
Computers used to used paper tape for data. Then mag tape. Then mag disk. Using silicone chips is a huge leap into new, unproven technology. If you think beyond 10 years, the only thing certain is that USB sticks are going to be as useful as floppy disc are now.
