My entry-level mirrorless camera with its kit lens can take photos that blow my recent-model iPhone out of the water.
Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.
However:
- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)
- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine
Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
I agree with your iPhone camera advantages, but to that list I'd add that I'm already going to buy an iPhone, which means any comparison of value for the price is effectively between the price of a camera (which for even an entry-level mirrorless isn't exactly cheap) and literally zero dollars. You could argue that the phone would be cheaper without the nice camera to make for a fairer comparison, but such a product doesn't really exist.
This applies only if you assume that you are not willing to spend more on a phone with a better camera and a lot of people do. I have friends who decided to buy an iPhone over way cheaper Android phones in the past, because "the iPhone camera was so much better". Funny enough, the differences were obviously negligible when compared with any actual camera.
Not only is the iPhone always in your pocket, but it’s easier to carry and deal with.
I remember hearing a story from a well known photographer about a trip he took with a few others, including his wife. They woke up early to head out on a small boat in a lake or something. He was lugging all this gear and having to put a lot of focus into tuning the settings on his camera, he was pretty miserable. Meanwhile, his wife was enjoying morning with no baggage and snapping pics with her phone. She ended up having the best picture of the day, while actually enjoying herself, by not being bogged down by the gear.
Dedicated cameras have their value, but it’s been decreasing for years, and requiring higher and higher levels of skill to make it worth it. Most people could improve their photos dramatically by learning about framing and light, while just using a phone. These things have a much bigger impact on the resulting photo. A professional with an iPhone will always take a better and more interesting picture than an amateur with a DSLR for this reason.
Those sound like the 2 extremes, though. You don't have to take a lot of gear or tune a lot of settings manually with dedicated camera if you don't want to, but it's an option if you want to have more control or go for the ultimate quality.
I get sent a lot of photos of me cosplaying at conventions, and something I've noticed is that the phone photos are almost always nicer in general. The people who do photography as a hobby seem to always edit the photo too extreme and you get whack HDR type effects or they just aren't as skilled at manually setting settings as the iphone auto mode.
But, the dedicated camera photos are always massively higher resolution. You can zoom in on details and they look great, while phone photos seem to use AI upscailers and they look bad
Wack HDR is usually the sign of a novice photographer, assuming it's not the phone (my experience is that phones go absolutely insane with the HDR and saturation).
We all go through a period of abusing HDR and saturation, but we usually get over it.
Which only holds true if you don't care much about the result.
I've seen people trying to take photos at an airshow using their phone camera. A small black dot in the centre of frame, rendered as an Impressionist oil smudge by post-processing. Was that worth even trying?
The best camera+lens combo is the one suited to the scene. Anything else isn't.
I always take a few snaps at events like that - not to capture the picture, but to capture the moment in my “digital memory” - if I’m on the ball, I later get some of the “official photos” and add those; but the phone camera snaps remind me that I was there, which turns out to be surprisingly useful.
Not really, because the scene you want to capture is there at that moment and probably wouldn’t be there anymore if you went back to the apartment/hotel/camera store and swapped out for a technically better kit. That’s what the “best camera” saying is about.
I put a 90mm prime [1] on my Sony, set it to aperture priority, put the strap over someone's head and deputize them to get headshots ("frame it up with the viewfinder and push the button") and they do OK so long as the light is predictable. I wish I could tell the auto mode to let the ISO go higher than it will because I do noise reduction in developing such that there is no real quality loss at 6400.
[1] takes lovely portraits and no focus to deal with
Viltrox, Sirui, Sony themselves, and Samyang have all kicked out really nice 85mm fast primes. $600 down to $400, listed in decreasing weight order (down to 270g!). Yes, whatever you have: it's a massive amount of gear to carry compared to a phone. But what results!
The past 2-4 years have been amazing for lenses: Sony's willingness to let other people make lenses has been an amazing win for photography.
What has changed is the last four years is that Chinese and Korean lens makers have caught up in a big way, and are now producing excellent optics at a fraction of the price with AF and weather sealing (as of now, primes only). For example, the Viltrox Lab and Pro series, or the Samyang 135/1.8. The other Chinese manufacturers are a cut below.
Also, Sigma and Tamron (both Japanese) are putting out more higher quality lenses compared to a decade back. With optical quality rivaling Sony's own G Master series and the Zeissen.
I would love to do:
- set aperture priority (fully open for most cases)
- set shutter speed to AUTO with a limit (never open for longer than 1/100 s)
- set ISO to AUTO with a limit (never go above 6400)
If there is insufficient light, then by all means, the camera should adjust the shutter speed past the limit, but not until it has used all the available "reasonable" ISO range.
It's a shame I have to wrestle my Sony a6400 to get something even remotely close to this.
My entire photography career I was incredibly frustrated that there was no good way to change the minimum shutter speed in aperture priority.
Sure, I could go into a menu and change it from the range of 1/60 or a second to 1/200th (or 1/250th, depending on the camera), but that was it. This is on Nikon, btw.
But yeah, give me more options damnit. It’s something that comes up so frequently when shooting that it blows my mind it’s not an option.
But usually when I have passers-by take photos, the context is that we are posing in front of a church in Europe or something, and space can be limited.
I can't very well ask people to take a photo and but first to take 20 paces back and then do a crouch!
My wife wants to see our shoes as well as the church spires in the same photo. Maybe a 35mm or even 28mm would work well in our case.
Definitely thinking of getting another prime but a ‘normal’ one with autofocus doesn’t really do anything I can’t with my zooms, I like 7artisans primes and might get one that is crazy wide but those are manual focus and take more skill —- I was so happy to get home and see I nailed this one
I find that photos from a prime look better in some undefinable way. Maybe it's because there's more light coming through, or maybe it's just easier for them to make a prime with great optics than a zoom with great optics.
I shoot on manual with auto-ISO straight to JPG (I don't have time for RAW editing), so my prime photos tend to have lower ISO's and I end up with a faster shutter.
I’m suspicious that a lot of the apparent inherent benefit of a prime lens is that it can’t zoom, which forces the person holding it to think a little bit more about composition.
It would be an amusing experiment to compare a prime lens to a zoom lens that it somehow fixed to the same focal length. Maybe level the playing field a little bit by applying distortion correction to both lenses.
There’s a lot more to it, but I attribute a lot of ‘better in some way’ to microcontrast followed by how the lens handles the transition to out of focus detail.
Yeah, back when I had a Canon my only lens was a wide angle prime. I really like that Sony 90mm prime, DxO says it is Sony's best lens and I think it is.
Ever since I started shooting sports indoors (often w/ that 90mm prime or a 135mm prime) and started to depend on noise reduction I process everything with DxO and tend to use a lot of sharpening and color grading. One day I went out with the kit lens by accident and set the aperture really small and developed the "Monkey Run Style" for hyperrealistic landscapes that look like they were shot with a weird Soviet camera.
The lens I walk around with the most and usually photograph runners with is the Tamron 28-200 which is super-versatile for events and just walking around, I used it for the last two albums here
but for the Forest Frolic I used my 16-35mm Zeiss but it was tough because it was raining heavily -- I was lucky to have another volunteer who held an umbrella for me, but I couldn't lean in. The last one (Thom B) was not color graded because I'd had some bad experiences color grading sports when I got the color of the jersey wrong but now I use color grades that are less strong -- at Trackapalooza the greens just came out too strident and I had to bring them down.
To give you some idea of how powerful noise reduction is, this shot
was done in ISO 80,000 with that Tamron -- I wouldn't say it looks perfectly natural for a picture of cat that was not standing still in a room in a basement that is amazing.
Incredible, in the 90's I could barely take a picture of my dog in broad daylight, and it cost money for the film, and I had to wait forever to get the photos back, and then the dog was blurry.
I have no nostalgia for film, I could not afford to take 1500 film photos at a sports event -- even a photo like this which doesn't seem that remarkable
All your points are true, but primes tend to have more character as well. I’m no optical engineer so I can’t speak as to why, but it seems like they have more choices on prime design than they do on zooms.
On many Sony models, you can set the camera to aperture priority instead of auto, set ISO to Auto ISO, and then change the max ISO to whatever you want; this is what I do in your situation.
If I set aperture priority to "maximum possible light in", I often have an issue that when there is insufficient light, the camera decreases shutter speed instead of cranking up the ISO (to the set upper limit), which would be much more desireable. This results in blurry images due to the longer exposure. I would much more prefer a grainy image over a blurred one in this case.
Do you know if there is any option of setting a limit on shutter speed while in aperture mode?
(I understand I can go full manual, but that just doesn't allow for the same point-and-shoot experience in changing light conditions.)
There's always micro four thirds. I think it's a bit of an underappreciated format, really. It can have really compact cameras, and also they tend to have quite a lot of fancy tech in them.
If one compares body size of early Sony APS-C cameras (NEX-5, a5100, even a6000), to the newer models (a6400, to ignore OIS models), the difference is staggering.
Size is approaching full frame models like 7M2. But yes, lens is where it baloons further, yet good all-purpose zooms are chunky for APS-C too. I sometimes carry multiple cheaper primes on several bodies because that's easier to pack.
So really, body sizes have grown due to processing and cooling needs (and in-camera OIS), but lenses still bring more heft (even with FF: look at the size of A7C series).
An APS-C lens is just going to be bigger than an M43 lens. That means you can carry more lenses for an M43 camera. I have an Olympus/OM camera plus three lenses and charger, and it all fits in my flight carry-on luggage together with a laptop, underwear, and an extra set of clothes. APS-C and full-frame are cool, but they're annoying to carry around. For travel, nothing beats M43.
They are a bit smaller but, to me, not that much of a difference when I compare my old Olympus M43 setup to my current Fuji X ones. Haven't really experienced any portability issues (also tend to carry the camera + 3 lenses when traveling), at the same time I do not use long lenses so I can agree with you there might be size advantages for those cases.
If I transition from semi-pro to pro I am thinking of picking one of those up because the 300mm lens is the equivalent of a 600mm and good for taking pictures of birds but fits in a reasonable backpack. Built in focus-stacking is another advantage over my Sony.
I think these are good points. It boils down to: are you interested in photography or do you just want to have photographs? If it's the former, get a camera. If it's the latter, stick with the phone.
I sort of agree, but I also think there is lot that goes into taking interesting photos as an art beyond the technical capabilities of the camera you are using. Certainly a good camera can produce a better end product and can enable dimensions of creative freedom that's more difficult with a smartphone. But the process of picking an interesting subject, figuring out the angle and composition of the frame, finding the right light and time of day, etc, are all independent of the camera you're using and something you can explore with just the smartphone you already have in your pocket.
> are you interested in photography or do you just want to have photographs?
If it's the former, take the time to understand not only your gear but also light and image processing (whether digital or film). If it's the latter, and you are a stickler for pixels get a digital camera, if not stick with the phone.
I'm interested in photography, but I won't buy a digital camera. My last film camera was a Minolta 700si (in the 90's) and a camera bag full of lens and flashes and other gadgets (filters shades etc), but was a far cry from the $10k professional camera with professional studio film processing. If you understand your gear, light, and how the images are going to be output (film or digital processing) you can get great images from whatever you are woking with.
Photography vs Photographs isn't about how many pixels a camera has or other limitations of a camera. It's what you do with it. Back in the day I preferred black & white film because I could control the entire processing cycle (I wasn't very good at color processing when the local camera shop could do it faster and better). Now I like the challenge of Photography with the limitations of a phone. Does that make it not "real" Photography? or not a real interest in Photography?
To me that where the difference is for "photography", a phone and dedicated digital camera are still digital. They are still processed and captured with the same medium, so learn it and understand it.
One might have greater ability to capture more light and thus not need the same amount of processing or setup, but it's still processed and produced from digital pixels. Both allow for any amount of post processing, but you have to know how to shoot with the device especially if there are more light capture limitations like a phone. If you just want photographs, put either in auto mode and you get what you get. Paying more for a dedicated camera just makes it easier to do, that doesn't make it "photography" over a more physically limited but still digital, phone camera.
I get what you’re saying, but I was a wedding photographer for ten years and that’s a job where ideally you’re doing both. That carried over to my personal life.
Not that I don’t ever take snapshots - I do - but instead of just taking a picture of your kid from eye level, you can get down on their level and wait until their head is turned so they’re shortlit from light from the window.
Of course, in that job you also quickly learn that the moment trumps everything. A technically awful photo of a great genuine smile or someone falling in the lake or whatever is usually better than an incredibly composed and lit photo of a person just sitting there…usually.
> but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in
And so, the reasons why Fuji and point-and-shoots are popular. Lots of “serious” photography enthusiasts don’t really get this and call Fujis “hype” cameras but it’s like bashing Wordpress because most people don’t want to learn AWS to post cat pics.
> The iPhone is always in my pocket
Rationale for both point-and-shoots as well as Leica (also hated by lots of serious camera people ;)).
I went from a D300s kit with about $10k of lenses to Fuji. I had an X100s, then an X-E2, and now an X-Pro3.
The X-Pro3 especially is light, has excellent physical controls, and very much feels like a vintage Leica. It's what I'd consider an "art camera" -- not what I'd choose if I were shooting weddings regularly, but perfect for street photography, family stuff, and perfectly capable of higher-end commercial work if you're willing to put up with its quirks.
They were popular. Are they still? Just observationally there are two groups left, phone users, and people with very expensive complex setups. Everyone who would have bought those simple cameras moved on to using phones.
By the numbers, the casual cameras are having a quiet turnaround.
Fuji and Ricoh can hardly keep their X100 and GR cameras stocked. Fuji added extra production capacity in China because it exceeded their expectations. I brought them up specifically because the serious camera people rag on them for being hype cameras, but I see plenty of everyday people with them. Go to places like the High Line in NY and there’s folks with A6700s and various X-mount cameras in addition to the serious full-frame mounts. Leica is doing financially well because of their Q series.
I think five years ago you could say it was just two groups, but by the numbers and by what I see in the streets, the point and shoots have been prematurely declared dead. Fuji and Sony are meanwhile figuring out how to sell APS-C to a more casual crowd, after the other old players effectively left that market.
I'm a semi-retired pro and acting like Fujifilm are "hype" is really ignorant. They are a smart company who have a long history of making great pro-grade cameras and lenses.
You’d be surprised. Point-and-shoot cameras have become extremely popular with young people in the past ~2 years or so because of the nostalgia factor.
I see people using weird things like 2000s digital cameras and Nintendo DS cameras for that old look, but I've never seen someone with one of those entry to mid level point and shoot cameras you used to see before smartphones. I only see phones, ancient retro cameras, and hobbyists with high end gear.
100% agree. I went on holiday at the start of this year and took my iPhone 15 Pro with me. I bought a mirrorless camera and went back because I was that disappointed with it. No joke. I regret using a phone for most of my family photos for the last 10-15 years and should have just used my old D3100 instead.
It’s really a night a day difference once you spend just a little amount of time learning your camera. I always show people the difference in quality with two photos of my wife and kids during Fourth of July.
One shot is with my iphone15, the other with my Fujifilm xt5. It’s such a stark difference
Do you show them on a monitor or large prints or on your phone?
I’ve long thought the main “issue” with people not realizing the difference is that they’re just looking at photos on their phones, where the images are so small it’s harder to appreciate the difference. I rarely try to take photos apart from snapshots with my phone because I’ll invariably be really disappointed when I view them on my monitor.
I think the processing is getting worse. I look at photos I took with my Nexus 6P and they look much nicer than my Pixel 7/9Pro photos. At some point everybody decided that the most important thing about photos is preserving as much dynamic range and having no noise. This makes the photos look fake and unpleasant.
Yes, my D3100 took way better pictures than any of my phone cameras, there is no comparison with the output quality. I did find them bulky and it is much easier socially to take pictures with a phone camera.
Phone cameras don't come close to any of my "real" cameras with my decades of experience shooting and composing ... but phone cameras absolutely obliterate anything I was shooting with a film camera as a beginner back when film was a thing. I have also arguably learned far more about photography with my phone, because of its portability and zero cost experimentation, than I have with ANY "real" camera.
But, perhaps most importantly, along the lines of what others have noted: you know, my phone camera may not be as good, but I have zero complaints about the impromptu photos of my kid growing up that I could never have caught with anything else.
i mean, he didn't say that the iphone camera was bad, just that it doesn't stand up to dedicated gear (which it doesn't, but a lot of people will tell you, especially apple's "shot on iphone" marketing campaign, that it will).
> Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.
I got myself a Nikon D800 over a decade ago when they were first released, and left it in 14-bit RAW mode since then. Technically these are "SDR" photos, but the captured dynamic range is closer to 1000-nit HDR. For a decade, I had to crush these to fit into sRGB SDR JPGs, which is throwing away most of the goodness.
A few months ago I took all of my 5-star pictures in Lightroom and used its new HDR processing mode to export them as 16-bit PNG files. I then turned those into a 2160p HDR video and played it on an OLED 75" television.
It blew my tiny mind!
The quality was simply jawdropping. It was like travelling back in time to all of those holidays and looking out through a window at reality itself.
This is why I go on regular online rants about how frustrating it is that the only way to share the full output quality of a modern digital full-frame camera is by uploading a HDR "movie" of the pictures to YouTube.
It's automatic. (If I'm handing a stranger my camera.)
> zoom level
This is maybe the hardest one, I guess, … but I do think most people have seen enough TV cop dramas to instinctively know. Or, they can just take the photo at the zoom I've handed them, and it won't be a big deal. Walking forward a few steps is also like zooming.
Agreed: I usually compose a shot with everybody but me in it, stand until a passer-by walks nearby so they'd end up in roughly the same spot. It's not the same and composition is usually off, but they are passable for what I want them to be (full family photos, usually).
Sometimes you get a stranger looking through a viewfinder and crouching and you know you've got yourself another hobbyist (or pro) as well :) Those compositions usually are better too!
> Sometimes you get a stranger looking through a viewfinder
This happened the last time I gave my camera to someone and I was smacking myself, as I'd put the camera into "LCD screen is viewfinder mode", since then it is closer to a phone for most people. And I'd found someone who knew what a viewfinder was! Of course, it's just black. (The mirror being in the way.)
>> The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
This is why my Canon 80D sits and gathers dust. Too many family moments fluffed, vs my Android's basically 100% hit rate. Yes this is largely a skill issue on my part, which is sad, but modern phone photos are more than adequate these days.
iPhone's picture quality has degraded substantially in recent models. Photos with a newer model look cooler, but fake and unrealistic. There's so much post-processing that photos looks completely artificial.
For example, take a photo of someone standing in front of a landscape. It looks like you took a photo on a green-screen and photoshopped the landscape behind the subject.
2025 Lightroom and Photoshop have a vastly better HDR workflow for working with RAW and exporting to AVIF or JPEG with embedded HDR luminance map that shows up correctly on iOS or in Chrome on MacOS with the display set to HDR. I don’t know about Android or windows.
I have re-exported files that I took in 2007 with the Nikon D7 that I kept the raw files for. They are vastly improved with modern processing (and noise reduction) vs what I exported from the same negative back then. The bit depth was always high enough.
I bought a Canon RP which came with a 24-105mm zoom. I think it was CAD 1000 a couple of years ago, but it looks like that has inflated to around double now.
I have an RP and it's great, but I still reach for my M50 slightly more often, being a fair bit smaller with the 22mm ef-m on it and maybe more familiarity with it by me.
It depends on your budget and interests. In terms of sensor size, Micro Four Thirds (from Olympus and Panasonic) is generally the most affordable, but it comes with a smaller sensor. APS-C offers a middle ground, while Full Frame is the most popular and typically delivers the best image quality.
Personally, I use Sony APS-C the most because of its smaller size, lighter weight, and more affordable lenses. Among APS-C systems, Sony and Fuji offer the widest lens selection. Fuji gear tends to be overpriced now, but it does have a stylish look.
Micro Four Thirds lenses are usually cheaper and more lightweight.
If you're shooting fast-moving subjects like birds or Formula 1 racing, Canon and Nikon are the most popular choices. They offer a wide range high performance lenses designed for demanding situations.
> and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
Well, you don't need to teach photography to passerby, just to tell them to look there and push this button. It's not more complicated than on a phone, maybe even less. But it may look more intimidating to old a camera, it's true
Add a nice lens and there's no comparison.
However:
- The iPhone is always in my pocket (until I crack and buy a flip-phone)
- The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us
- The iPhone picture quality, though worse, is still fine
Looking back at travel and family pictures, it has been very much worth it for me to have a dedicated camera.