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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   2949 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 16, 2025

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For casual snapshots of groups of friends etc. phones are great.

To be honest, I mostly take photos of my kids, and sometimes of people climbing/skiing. Both situations can have challenging lighting and object that don't stop moving around. The phone software has been absolutely amazing at eliminating motion blur and/or underexposed images, something I've previously struggled with even at 1/120s. And yeah, I often miss having the tele lens, but I've gotten used to moving in to take the shot - or with having a shot of nice landscape that has some action in it.

Most importantly, the ergonomics of taking photos on a phone are shit tier compared to any halfway decent camera that has a viewfinder and where the body has been designed for the task of taking photos.

True. Getting a phone with a hardware shutter button is absolutely essential. The rest can't be helped, I think.

I've gone the other direction and bought a real camera a while ago. I got fed up with the overcooked processing phones do.

I know what you mean. The good thing is you can turn that off - either feature by feature, or all of it. Or use an alternative camera app if you want to set exposure and ISO yourself (and those apps aways only produce traditional stills), export un-edited stills from the short videos the main camera app takes before it starts AI-editing them, or tell it do AI-slopification by default but also always save RAW images. At least that's the state of the art on Google Phones.

Luckily there have been good lightweight mirrorless cameras on the market for over a decade.

I'm sure for many use-cases a modern mirrorless takes far superior pictures, especially when used by a experienced photographer. But the AI has been amazing for normies.

Getting a phone with a hardware shutter button is absolutely essential

The Volume Down button works for this on pretty much all recent phones.

I'm sure for many use-cases a modern mirrorless takes far superior pictures, especially when used by a experienced photographer. But the AI has been amazing for normies.

Image quality is largely a red herring. It's been plenty good enough for common uses for quite some time now.

The real difference is about the actual experience of taking photos and the range and types of photos you're able to take. A phone fundamentally has the same limitations as compact cameras do except with much worse user interface. It just isn't going to work for any small subjects that aren't right in front of you or anything distant.

Image quality is largely a red herring.

I disagree. I'd call full page images in an A4 photo book and 14"-20" framed pictures a "standard use case" for high quality photos. If I take my DSLR in medium-challenging lighting conditions, a large number of shots won't have the image quality to be printed at those dimensions. Sharpness/blurriness, insufficient exposure, ISO-noise, ect. will be a problem in a percentage of shots - and often, in the most interesting shots, of course.

I'd call full page images in an A4 photo book and 14"-20" framed pictures a "standard use case" for high quality photos.

That may be standard for some segment of hardcore photography enthusiasts but the actual standard for almost all people who take photos is computer / tablet / phone screens, meaning 2 - 4 MP. For that extremely common scenario phone image quality is most of the time perfectly fine (as evidenced by how many people are happy with it) and any issues are more due to forced overcooking by the phone algorithms.

I know a fair few photographers as well as being a hobbyist myself but I don't know a single person who's printed a large size photo in years. It's all viewed on screen.

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