Surprisingly enough I’ve end up taking most of my photos with a smartphone. I used to carry around a compact camera but even that felt meaningless after I discovered how sharp photos can a modern smartphone produce. Plus software like Lightroom makes it easy to enhance the quality of your pictures a lot. So since the phone is the one device I carry with me all the time I see no point of having yet another gadget with me. As for my DSLR it's eating dust in some shelve on my library, I rarely ever use it these days.
I’d love to get my hands sometime in the future on the 40 megapixel smartphone announced by Nokia.
even that felt meaningless after I discovered how sharp photos can a modern smartphone produce
Maybe, but I still find them inadequate and suspect that in a couple years a lot of people are going to look at their smartphone photos the same way modern people look at photos from the 1920s: http://www.marco.org/2012/07/01/the-camera-you-have-with-you.
I suspect most people will never look at their digital photos at full resolution, ever. We are already effectively throwing away image data from our existing photos. Surely that's a good sign that our pictures are good enough?
That's only because people started looking at pictures on screens instead of prints and screen technology has been stagnated for 10+ years.
Screens are finally catching up. A 4k screen has ~8MP of resolution. Modern bayer pattern sensors (1 color per pixel) in SLRs are at 24MP which is actually not a lot more resolution than 8MP at 3 colors per pixel and about the same data (8M*RGB=24M).
History repeats itself. The Kodak Instamatic both democratized photography and made it horrible, just like smartphones are now doing to a whole new generation.
Designed around Hubert Nerwin's drop-in, "foolproof" film cassette (a picture of which can be seen here), the Instamatic was both the true descendent of George Eastman's $1 box Brownie of c. 1900 and the transformative consumer camera of its own era. It sold seven and a half million cameras in its first two years and 50 million in the decade of the 1960s. It remains one of the most successful and profitable consumer products in the history of photography; it introduced baby-boomers to picture-taking.
(...)
It was actually an atrocious little camera, the Lomo of its day only without the quirky contriarian charm. The lens was horrible and the easy-to-load negative wasn't big enough. But it was meant to be cheap to buy and easy to use, and it was both those things in spades (the "Flashcube," like the film cartridge, was a stroke of genius in that respect—four small flashbulbs in an automatically rotating clear plastic box). The pictures, unfortunately, were an accurate reflection of what you saw through the minuscule, smeary viewfinder.
A commenter on the blog explains it in context:
I still curse the Kodak Instamatic.
I have restored, documented, digitized, and archived the many hundreds of photographs of my and my wife's families from the 1880s to the present. What was a treasure lode of memories and family histories collapsed, seemingly inspired by the song 'New York Mining Disaster 1941,' with the introduction of the hated Instamatic.
Within just a few years Kodak had convinced most of our family that photography was not a skill worth learning, and lousy, blurry, washed-out pictures were actually good.
Even my oldest brother, a U.S. Army intelligence agent in Europe during the Viet Nam era, reported that most of the agents preferred cheap plastic Polaroid cameras (purchased out of petty cash) as G2's government-issued Leicas were 'too hard to use.'
The result is a real dearth of documentary photographs from the early to mid 1960s until the advent of decent P&S cameras beginning around 1980. If it wasn't for the very few (three out of dozens) who owned Mamiya, Canon, and Pentax SLRs, our family would have very little from that period. On the other hand, it made the collecting and archiving effort a lot smaller than it otherwise might have been....
Hopefully one of the new trends (better smartphone cameras, mirrorless, Sony's wifi sensor+lense combos, etc) will deliver us from crappy smartphone pictures.
I was under the impression that going for a massive megapixel count like 40 on a tiny sensor like most smartphones have (iPhone 5's is about 4.5mm x 3.4mm -- miniscule) is entirely pointless because the pixels start getting much smaller than the airy disk[1].
"This gives a value for x of about 4 µm. In a digital camera, making the pixels of the image sensor smaller than this would not actually increase image resolution."
I have a need for a good point and shoot this week and I got a friend to loan me his Lumia 1020 -- the pictures have been amazing for a phone.
I haven't used my DSLR in a while -- mostly just using phones due to the convenience. The drop in quality historically is so huge though that I do on occasion consider carrying around the bulky DSLR (but I usually decide not to).
But with the 1020, for the first time, I feel like the gap has been made small enough (although still not small) where I've found this past week that I've never seriously wished to have brought my DSLR.
I'm still on contract, but I think I'll find it hard to go back to any other phone camera.
I don't think that is surprising. Smartphones of today are better than most compact cameras I have owned. I used to have a Canon G11 for taking pictures while travelling, but compared to even my older SLRs it produces mushy shots. It doesn't help to have lots of megapixels when most of those pixels are just noise anyway. The iPhone is good enough for these uses.
When I'm taking pictures, and not just shooting random stuff, I still use an SLR because it is just easier (for me) to get what I want from it. It doesn't really matter which SLR you use, they all produce good images, but the glass is important. I do postprocess my images. In fact I usually shoot with postprocessing in mind. But I never spend much time postprocessing. Typically a couple of minutes per image that I want to use.
I've tried some of the smaller cameras with decent optics that are on the market now, but they just don't feel right for me. They have all these great specs, but they don't feel like tools. They have the buttons in the wrong places and they weren't designed to be held with my hands. The camera just gets in the way of what I'm trying to do.
I don't think it is so much about image quality as it is about the tactile experience, efficiency and habit.
I take a ton of iPhone photos, but still I just bought another prime for my mirrorless camera (GH2). When taking photos of people it is still night-and-day difference between the two and bringing those photos to Lightroom always makes me smile compared with what Lightroom can do with iPhone photos. And 40 megapixel Nokia won't change that (lacking in lenses + dynamic range)
But don't get me wrong - I love that my phone is good enough for photography to have on me all the time.
I’d love to get my hands sometime in the future on the 40 megapixel smartphone announced by Nokia.