My gf doesn’t do smartphones, just has an old Nokia (think it might have WAP but that’s about it)
Only time she ever picks my iphone up is to use the camera.
Can you still buy dedicated cameras for (quite a lot) less than the price of a decent smartphone, and are they any good? Or is it all pro photographer level stuff or nothing now?
Suppose what I’m looking for is a simple point and clicker, roughly pocket sized (no big protruding lens or whatnot)
Yes.
Sony still do conusmer grade Cybershot cameras for like £100ish but I do not know if they are very god.
Your iphone’s do loads of post processing and over sampling with AI and shit.
Canon still do them as well.
The reason i know this is because my partner and i looked at getting our eldest one, but it was better to just get them a £130 phone with a good camera as it doubles as an audiobook reader and MP3/spotify player
It’s a dying market though - even though there’s some models still on sale, most haven’t been updated in two or three years.
I’ve just been looking to upgrade mine, and the model I’ve ended up going for is from 2019.
I bet if you do a bit of reading up about different models you’ll find loads on eBay (in the way that there were loads of film cameras there around the time digital cameras came out)
as @escutcheon says, there’s a lot of extra processing that phones do, so at the extreme end of things - particularly in low light - a phone might be better. But the flash on a compact will be better than a phone, and so’s the lens, and for daytime photos, a digital compact will just look better. There’s a weird softness on phone photos which everyone’s used to now, but as soon as you see a photo taken on something else, you spot it immediately
Alright, Cardi B.
Why don’t stand alone cameras have the same processing as on phones?
Smartphones have insanely powerful processor chips that you’re never going to get in a £100 point and shoot.
hardware, and bragging rights basically. google phones have insanely powerful processors onboard and AI processing tools developed to work on that hardware. that means that a phone, worth £600, will with it’s triple or quadruple sensors can al be smashed together to make the picture “better”, but more accurately over compensate for the small apertures.
this is why a phone will have like a 48MP sensor but still only put out a normal sized photo resolution, because they can build the sensors to over compensate. they have the power as well to invest in here because they need it to beat the compeition.
consumer point and shoots will give good results
Who knows - I read an article about it just the other day
Maybe it’s because there’s a lot more differentiation between phones based on their chips, and cameras don’t get the same attention there so that’s somewhere where they can cut costs? Maybe the likes of Samsung and the other phone makers can use their economies of scale to get the chips at much better prices than the camera makers could get them for?
Although there was this a few years back, which was an Android powered camera made by Samsung (before Samsung pulled out of the photography game)
Yeah I guess that all makes sense. You’d think Sony or Canon or someone would have at least looked to do that stuff at the higher end. I guess part of what makes high end smartphones viable is so many people upgrading every couple of years whereas people want to keep cameras for a lot longer.
I would imagine all that clever processing isn’t actually very much use if your job is to just take photographs using big lens-based equipment. At that point your skills have all been honed on doing that work (or not) via other systems so you want the purity of a digital capture that mimics a piece of flat film as much as possible.
Well, yeah - and there have been some camera “upgrades” which have just been where they’ve changed the chip and nothing else (the Canon G9X II and III are a case in point here), so perhaps there’s an element having something up your sleeve to put out a new model a few years later if there isn’t much going on in other areas of technology that are suitable
…but not Cardi B, eh?
I see…
Was literally just reading that the TV’s new iPhone has an ‘A16 bionic chip containing a 16-core Neural Engine capable of 17 trillion operations per second’
You’ll never sing that Sony Cybershot
How do they even calculate that high a number?
They must use an A17
I bought a Micro Four Thirds camera about 6 years ago. So not quite a compact, not quite an SLR, although you can change the lenses. I still use it loads. Like, I don’t carry it around every day but take it out with me a fair bit and it does fit a coat pocket. The photos is produces are amazing compared to my iPhone 13 and Google Pixel. Fairly clueless about photography, but guess you’ll always be hampered by the size of a lens you can fit on a phone, right? Stuff like Portrait Mode on a smartphone is great, but will always look fake to me.
But I guess this doesn’t really answer your question… I recently went through a bag of old tech and found 3 compact digital cameras that hadn’t been used in years. Offered them to our son’s school but they declined as they said they all just use their smartphones now.
I see lots of kids with digital cameras here as it’s very common to do gcse equivalent photography.