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.
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.